Hi there all. I thought I’d ask a simple question for my first post.
Is there any evidence for a ‘religious’ God outside of the bible? Or other works based on it. By ‘religious’ I mean a Christian God, Jesus, the usually meant idea of God (I use this reference as it is was I was brought up with so have some small idea of; not to disparage anyone else’s faith or ideas).
I’m not referring to a ‘creator of the universe’ God.
I exclude any reference to the bible because as far as I can see any belief in a ‘religious’ God comes from what is written in it. Asked why anyone should believe what is written in the bible the answer seems to be that “it is the word of God”. A rather circular argument.
So there may or may not be 100% provable references to historical figures such as Pilate and others, and to social systems and geographical places and such but none of this is proof that Jesus=God and he died for me and all that.
I guess what I’m saying is that as far as I can see any and all reference to a ‘religious’ God and thus Christianity (as I understand it) is ultimately based on what is in the bible (and how that is interpreted - which is something else of course).
Again as far as I can see the ‘religious’ parts of the bible (as opposed to the verifiable ‘historical’ parts) have to be believed as an act of faith - that the bible is the word of God, rather than because there is any proof.
Some people (not me!) argue on philosophical grounds: the universe must be at least as great as its parts. Since mankind is capable of love, creativity, mercy, justice, wisdom, self-awareness, etc., so the universe must also be capable of these attributes.
A short, brisk leap brings you to the conclusion that these attributes are personalized in the gods…
Philosophers have been trying to prove God’s existence for thousands of years, without success. (Something with contradictory characteristics **cannot **exist.) So a belief in God must be based on faith, not reason.
First, if “prove” means to demonstrate with mathematical certainty, then most theists would agree that God’s existence cannot be proven. The reason for this is because mathematical certainty deals only with the abstract, and the existence of God (or anything else) is a matter of concrete, real existence.
Mathematical certainty is based on certain axioms or postulates that must be assumed in order to get a necessary conclusion. But if God’s existence must be assumed in order to be proven, then the conclusion that God exists is only based on the assumption that He exists, in which case it is not really a proof at all. That is what was mentioned earlier, and we came to an agreement on that.
Mathematical certainty is deductive in nature. It argues from given premises. But one cannot validly conclude what is not already implied in the premise(s). In this case one would have to assume God exists in the premise in order to validly infer this in the conclusion. But this begs the question.
Second, if by “prove,” however, we mean “give adequate evidence for” or “provide good reasons for,” then it would seem to follow that one can prove the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Indeed, many apologists have offered such proofs and people have become Christians after reading their writings, as well as the countless testamonies given by those who are believers in God.
The term “Deism” is generally used to refer to belief in a god-type entity which created the universe but which is not active in its creation, save perhaps through events occurring as a result of the startup creation activity. The idea of a clockmaker whose clock runs because he was a good craftsman, not because he’s constantly tinkering with it, may be a fair analogy. (I use the singular because I have never heard anyone posit a multiplicity of deist-style deities; I suppose polydeism would be as much a possibility as monodeism.)
“Theism” in the broad sense refers to a God or gods who is/are active in his/her/its/their creation – the “religious” god. I get the impresion that the OP is trying to make this distinction without having the vocabulary at hand.
FWIW, we have a plethora of evidence suggestive of the hand of God at work in the world – but most if not all of it can also be explained by self-delusion, scam artistry, coincidental and synchronistic occurrences, the Jamesian “will to believe,” the formation of legend (urban or otherwise), and related social and psychological phenomena.
For example, there is absolutely no question that Jeanne d’Arc did lead the French Dauphinist forces to victory over the English for a substantial period in the early 1400s, and that she claimed to have been called to the task and guided, including strategically and tactically, by angelic voices.
There are living people who claim to have experienced apparitions of the Virgin Mary (conveying messages from God) at Fatima and Medjugorje.
Many Christians, including myself, have had conversion experiences that had every mark of being a personal mystical theophany.
Scripture (which was ruled out in the OP but requires reference) is replete with phenomena claimed to have been divine interventions – “miracles” in the popular sense of the term.
Anyone who cares to do so can take any one of these and demonstrate in inordinate detail how it could have been ___, where the blank is filled in with an item from the list of potential “natural” explanations above.
It is, I think, interesting to note that Paul, who was the most ruthlessly logical thinker among the early Christian leaders when he chose to be (much of his work is non-rational, dealing with matters spiritual or moral in terms appropriate to discussing them rather than in logic), asserts that Christians are saved exclusively by the grace of God, and that faith itself is not something that people do but His gift to them, what He equips them with to accept that grace on a personal level and begin the interior transforming process of conversion/sanctification.
The sense here, I believe, is that God is, even on a strict reading of Christian doctrine, not willing to have His existence taken as a matter of demonstrable proof, on the same plane with proving that an antipion or a platypus exists, but rather that it be taken as a matter of faith, which is something that He gives as and when He chooses.
(There are parts of Romans that would seem to indicate the reverse, but in these Paul is speaking to the supposed universal knowledge of moral standards, which for him were God’s creation, existing independently of the people who hold them. I therefore am drawing a distinction between metaphysical knowledge of God and ethical knowledge of His [moral] will.)
What does “mathematical certainty” have do do with the existence of God? If he showed up in my house tonight, that would be adequate enough “proof” for me, and there would be nothing “mathematical” about it.
Pardon me, I’m not a mathematician. Can you explain how 1+1=2 is “abstract”?
Really. Can you expand upon this please?
And, I must ask – is this just a “cut and paste” from somewhere else, or do you really know what you’re saying here…
Just a quick hijack-personal question-Did you previously believe in God when you had your experience (theophany)?
Here’s where my mind is at: I’m wondering if non-believers convert after experiencing God, in addition I’m wondering if God only appears to the non-believer (or the believer).
I suspect that if we could recognise God when he showed up, we’d probably say, “Thanks, but we’re doing fine without you.” And then kill him. Or make him work at MacDonalds, which is the same thing.
If He did show up, I would ask him to write a nice concise new handbook on what he expects of us.
Obviously that fumbled, rough, first draught of a thing we call ‘The Bible’ isn’t helping us very much.
I suppose it depends on what standard of “proof” you feel comfortable with. To some, a water stain that vaguely resembles classical paintings of the Virgin Mary is “proof” that God exists. To others, an instance where somebody recovers from a disease after being prayed over is “proof” that God exists. To others, the existence of a particularly nice sunset is “proof” that God exists.
As for me, I’m gonna need to see at least two form of ID…
I’m afraid Barry that all we may have to go on is a burial cloth and a cup he Jesus drank out of. Proof of ownership is going to be even trickier than locating said items…
Mathematics can become concrete when applied to anything though. I can’t think of a science that is more absolute and concrete as mathematics, but yet you’re stating it only deals with the abstract, yet the existence of God is a matter of concrete, real existence.
No more so than the Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s or other religions have for theirs.
I doubt that. If anyone picks up an apologists book to read, chances are they were believers to begin with. An atheist picking up the same book, will find the evidence and proof as unconvincing as before. Christians can claim they were atheists before being converted, but I think their numbers are as highly exaggerated as the biblical stories they tell. There probably is a larger number of believers gone apostate; at least I’ve read from a good number of ex-believers, including preachers who have given up the faith. So what Christian proofs are convincing to you?
Good question. Libertarian would, I think, give a better answer for your analytical purposes than I.
There were three key experiences in what happened to me – meeting and coming to love my “son” – the young man we took in in his late teens with transforming effects each had on the emotional life of the other was the third, and not applicable to your question, but something in which I see God’s Providential Hand at work, so I personally count it as a part of the process. From the strict POV of dealing with your quetion, though, I want to mention it and discount it.
My first experience was in my mid-teens. I’d come to be somewhat skeptical of the pabulum of the Methodist Sunday School, but like a good kid in the early Sixties, I was at church on a Sunday morning. And, sitting alone in the church balcony, I said a variation on “the Agnostic’s Prayer”: “O God, if there is a god, give me some evidence that you exist, if you really do.” And I felt a sense of inner certainty that had not been there before, and moments after, the service began a hymn that seemed to serve as confirmation that that sense of certainty was “the real thing.”
Now, for both this and the second event (which I’ll describe a couple of paragraphs down from here), our friend Badchad has done a scathing skeptical analysis – with which, from an objective perspective, I agree. This was not an objective proof, and any number of interior self-delusive or coincidental phenomena could be adduced to refute it. It was a subjective proof – one that satisfied my need at the time.
And I’m fairly sure that that’s how He operates – even if you concede the literal truth of the Gospel narratives (as opposed to the conclusions they draw about Jesus from the events narrated), it does not prove anything but that He was a man with unique powers and abilities who taught a particular POV about God. Confirmation is by faith and not by objective, demonstrable, reproducible proof in strict inductive-logic steps, or by a series of syllogisms from universally-accepted axioms. Even if Lib’s modal-logic proof works (and I’m not the symbolic-logic buff who could confirm or disprove it), it doesn’t demonstrate that “G()” is identical to YHWH or the Father of whom Jesus taught. The love of my little “honorary grandson” when I fully expected to die childless and alone is for me sufficient proof of God’s goodness – but I’d be hard put to show that in an airtight series of logical propositions!
Okay, now the second event. This is probably the one that most thoroughly shaped my thinking. I was, thanks to the first event, reasonably well convinced of the existence of God – as an intellectual proposition. However, I was what somebody has termed a confirmed apatheist – “if God will just leave me alone, I’ll be glad to return the favor.” My wife Barb and I attended church on Sunday mornings, and enrolled in a theology-by-extension course taught from a church-related university through our church, with a scholarly clergyman acting as mentor for the course (syllabus and text produced by the university; he facilitated their seminar-style study rather than “teaching” in the strict lecture sense).
For me this was an intellectual exercise – I was interested in Biblical criticism and systematic theology in exactly the same way as I was interested in paleontology or astrophysics – a body of knowledge worth learning for its own sake, not as access to God or evidence of His will for the world but as a compartmentalized intellectual discipline.
And at that point something odd happened. We were “doing” the Holy Spirit, with particular reference to the charismatic phenomena attributed to His doing in 1 Corinthians, and schploinggg! something happened. Whereas before my “belief in God” had been “intellectual assent to the proposition that He exists,” I encountered Him as a Presence who loved me as an individual and called me into a relationship with Him. I was to put my hope and trust in Him, in His goodness and lovingkindness towards me – and towards all men. And that is in essence what I have been teaching ever since.
“Belief” is usually used around here to mean “non-rational assent to a ‘religious’ proposition.” Physicists “believe” in neutrinos as the necessary component to resolve propositions in atomic physics, of which cloud-chamber tracks provide some confirmatory evidence, in much this sense. But “belief” in the Scriptural sense is something quite different – the assurance of God as a Person (Three Persons in the Christian understanding) who is of such powers and in such an attitude towards the believer that the latter can place their full trust in Him, in much the sense that one might risk one’s life in reliance upon the person holding the safety line – that that person has the skills and strength, and the goodness of character, that one can trust him/her utterly with one’s life. In such a case, you believe in that person – you literally trust him/her with your life. And it’s in that sense that the Christian “believes in” God. Not as an intellectual assent to His existence, but in placing full trust in Him.
All this is to make a point I often find needs making – the distinction between “faith” or “belief” in the Christian-religious sense and the normal-dialogue use of the term. I believe in kangaroos in the sense that I’ve seen pictures and accounts of Australia and see no reason to doubt in their existence, but I don’t have any faith in them as a matter of a personal relationship whereby kangaroos “save” me from any fate.
So yes, I “believed” in God in the intellectual assent sense before my second experience, the real “conversion experience” of the three. But I did not “believe in Him” in the strict religious sense of placing my faith and trust in Him in a personal relationship.
Sorry for the essay in response to a yes-or-no question. But that’s Great Debates for you!
Those for whom logic is the only way to progress an argument may find it difficult to take on board your comments, Polycarp. I do think though that this approach goes a long way towards explaining why some people will accept the existence of God, with what they would consider good reason, but without necessarily receiving a systematic “proof”.
question for my first post.