Question for Christians: How do we know God loves us?

No I’m not willing to concede that. I’ll concede that we should be aware of the line between, what we believe or think, and what we know.IMO that means spiritual beliefs should be proviisional. It becomes the particular tool some people use for personal discovery. If others don’t prefer that tool that’s fine. People who are too positive they are privy to the truth about things for which there is no conclusive evidence bother me, no matter which side of the argument they’re on.

I’m not saying that logic and reason don’t apply at all We can use logic and reason to refine our belief systems and I certainly believe all scientific evidence needs to be included. I’m saying it’s wisdom to be aware of what we don’t have knowledge of and it’s logical to factor that in. Logic IMO needs some certainty in it’s values to be truly logical. When too many unknowns enter in it becomes harder to call it logic.
In this case the divine perspective of an assumed diety is unknown and atheists are trying to argue the logic of the human perspective. It doesn’t work and it ain’t logic.

I find many religious beliefs fly in the face of available evidence or are contradictory within their own doctrine or dogma. The question of God’s love is not one of them. I understand any person looking at human suffereing and concluding “there is no God, or if there is he doesn’t care”. However, when it comes down to the *logic * of it, if we are honest, we must admit that we cannot see our linear time, limited knowledge, mortal physical world, from the perspective of a supposed eternal, omnipotent,omniscient benevolant being. That being the case there can’t be a strictly logical argument about God’s love.

I’m not claiming any spiritual argument about purpose is superior. I’m claiming just what you said. There are no logical derivable answers. Believer and non believer must both choose a concept that works best for them until experience brings them new or refined concepts they are willing to consider.
I don’t think you can have a logical discussion about God’s love without considering purpose.

In my opinion there’s nothing to get off. This argument doesn’t relate much to the way I live my day to day life and relate to the people I interact with. It’s merely an intellectual exercise. Far fetched is also a matter of opinion and perspective as well. From my viewpoint I can offer possibilities until I’m blue in the face and none of them will be accepted as even close to logical or reasonable even when I admit, I’m just offering a “what if” possibility. I then conclude that it is the atheists who are so emotionally attached to their arguments and how superior their logic has to be that they will cry Illogical no matter what I say.
It works both ways my friend. That’s why I’ve tried to reduce the argument in this thread.

I just can’t agree with how you’re defining logic here. I don’t have to explain everything to believe in God’s love. I don’t have to know God’s purpose, or my own, to go forward and act in the best way I know how.
IMO you’re judging from tha wrong perspective and that cannot be called logical by any definition I’m aware of.

No they’re not. The characteristics given to God create a totally different perspective that we have to try and imagine since we don’t have that perspective. They are arguing human suffering from the human perspective. You can’t mix the two and call ot logic. It isn’t. I gave a very basic example that demonstrates the principle clearly enough.

I understand what you’re saying and I see the reasoning behind it. I’m not saying that is illogical. I’m saying calling an alternative viewpoint illogical is not logical when you consider and acknowledge the unknowns.

What is implied is what 9thfloor said in the other thread here

I find this to be a false statement.

There are scenarios such as the RPG tongue in cheek one in that thread that offer alternative possibilities concerning human suffering. Nothing has to be proved or explained completely.

Remember I’m only talking about very particular cases of suffering. There would be plenty of suffering still even if God loves us, since we’d still make our own mistakes. If I eat too much and get a bellyache, I can’t yell that God hates us! But tri-omniness does not excuse actions that directly indicate problems. An ant may not understand why we’re destroying its home. We might be just doing it out of spite, or we might be building a hospital. But it is correct in knowing we don’t care, at the very best.

My only point is that you must also consider the lack of an answer as an answer. if you assume a purpose, you are pretty much assuming some type of god. I wonder if there is a koan where the answer to “what is the purpose of life” is uncontrollable laughter, or farting, or worse?

First of all, I agree that this is not about how you live your life, or how I live mine. Neither of us seem to want to oppress anyone based on our beliefs. But offering possibilities, which is good, is different from the evaluation of those possibilities.
It works both ways my friend. That’s why I’ve tried to reduce the argument in this thread.

You can indeed believe with neither logic nor explanation. You can live your life the same way. You can live your life well without logic, especially if you were brought up right. Many people have excellent moral intuition, and do the right thing without reasoning it out. Many people do the wrong thing by logical arguments short circuited by bad upbringing.

First, since we are humans limited by our human understanding, anything we say about god is limited to our human reference. Anything we reason about god is also. If you say that we cannot say God can’t do something or feel something because we are limited, you can’t say he can or does do or feel something for the same reason. God’s love would be at best an analogy for something we can’t understand.

Second, saying that explanation A explains something better than explanation B does not imply that B is illogical - it just says A is better.

Third, I agree that unanswered questions do not necessarily mean something is illogical. We have them for all sorts of things. But the problem isn’t that a real question is unanswered, it is that people don’t like the answer. The proposition is:

A God who loves us wouldn’t kill people (and that’s directly, not let people be killed) for no reason. God appears to do exactly this. The response then are:

  • God doesn’t exist
  • God does not love us
  • God loves us, but in a way we don’t understand and which bears little relationship to what we mean by love.
  • God has a purpose he won’t tell us.

Now, if yo believe in the fourth alternative, you have to come up with at least a semi-plausible purpose for the deaths of babies. In some cases you can. For instance, I have no problem with God allowing people to be murdered, because I think there is a good free will argument behind it. But saying you take alternative four only because you don’t like the other three doesn’t work.

I’m going to respond selectively to try and save space , not out of disrespect or to avoid answering anything. If there’s something I miss responding to that you’d like me to address please point it out.

Why must I? I chose “I don’t know” only because it seemed anything I might suggest would be dismissed as nonsense. I don’t call that a discussion where the other party is really listening and trying to understand. I have a model that explains enough for me and I’m willing to keep exploring to discover the rest.

Agreed. We can find models that help but and I think like anything else, if we actively seek understanding we will begin to understand. Like consciousness and our emotions, true knowledge is limited.

I’m okay with that too. I’m don’t believe in God as a separate all powerful being from us. I am more likely to think that the traditional Christian God presented in that way is simply one tool used to approach transcendent experiences we can’t explain.

That’s true. Or saying You prefer A and I prefer B is okay as well. I was addressing something specifically called logical, that IMO is not.

I’ll agree with that but I doubt we mean the same thing.

I don’t agree that those are the only alternatives. Insisting that they are IMO is where the logic disappears.

I’d like to clarify this because I think it’s insufficient and I missed the edit window.

When I’m consistently told that the scenarios or possibilities I posit are nonsense or illogical and the people saying that throw up their hands in a “no point talking to this guy” with a hint of ridicule, or something more overt, my conclusion is similar to theirs. No point talking to them or trying to explain. I’ve tried to answer but “they don’t like the answer” as you put it, so their emotional reaction {IMO} is to dismiss it as illogical.

My choice at that point is to refrain from long attempts at explaining that will be summarily dismissed and poked fun at. Not interested. What I find is that several atheists on this board seem to assume that since they don’t believe in the superstitious myth of religion then their arguments must be more logical, must make more sense, than anybody with spiritual beliefs. I guess I understand that as a naturally occurring phenomenon. When I see something that I consider illogical being passed of as logic rather than an opinion I just gotta challenge it.

All things being equal, all things aren’t. If one side presents a point of view that uses logic, reason and evidence to come to a conclusion and another side use less(or even none) of the same, the first side is more logical than the second, without exception. It’s not a point of others not liking your conclusion, it’s more a point of not liking how you haphazardly reached your conclusion. If there is no chain of evidence and logic, the conclusion that is reached is incomplete and stands a good chance of being wrong.

I feel compelled to point out that, in the RPG scenario, the reason that the god or gods of the scenario don’t stop suffering is because they don’t really care about those who are suffering, and are actually taking enjoyment from their misery. It is not an scenario in which it would be true to say “God loves us”, for the definition of “us” being discussed in this thread, if the definition of “love” is even close to what people usually understand it to be.

This board lacks much of the protection for religious notions that is present in the everyday world, so I can understand your reluctance to put forth an alternate speculative scenario, especially if it is drawn out or complicated. However, even if you don’t want to spell out the whole scenario, it should still be possible to extract out and soundbyte the reason within the scenario that the suffering of innocents does not contradict the statement “God Loves Us”.

Speaking of soundbytes:

If you’re going to argue ‘false dillema’, it really helps to provide an example or two of possibilities that exist but are not covered by the list of options presented. Just saying “I think there are other alternatives” but not saying what they are is unconvincing argument.
Oh, and I don’t think that it’s logical to refrain from drawing conclusions based on available evidence. Suspension of disbelief is good for watching movies and so forth, but it’s not logical. So, any system of belief system that requires you to ignore aspects of reality, or, worse, inconsistencies in the belief system, is not as logical as a belief system that does not require you to ignore problems and inconsistencies.

Fair enough. Though I admit I’m surprised as I thought the idea was quite reasonable and I used enough weasel words like “might” and “potentially” to make it palatable to pretty much anyone.

In spite of your unwillingness to go along with me on this, I’d really like to think it’s possible for one guess to be more useful than another. I mean, imagine I’m holding up a glass full of clear fluid and ask two people to take a wild shot at what the fluid might be. The first person says, “Water?” The second person says, “I think it’s the essence of vaporized molybdenum that has been compressed into a clear fluid by extraordinary atmospheric conditions and unusual physical properties which happen to occur exclusively inside that glass for a reason I don’t understand.” Now while it is true that, from a distance, neither person can say with 100% certainty that their guess is the right one… I’d like to think one of them sounds more reasonable.

Well obviously Voyager intentionally omitted the compelling option that:
“God has a perfectly good explanation but it’s so far outside the limits of human understanding that it’s really quite irrelevant in any discussion interested in providing an answer that could be meaningful or useful to humans like us and, even if I wanted to include an approximation of that reason, I can’t because it can’t even be described with any language or logical process that could exist within the confines of human understanding.”

…or, if you’re into the Brevity Thing™, that can be shortened to the ever so satisfying “Mysterious Ways.”

I’m wondering why this thread is about Christians. Don’t all religions teach their followers are chosen people? Even the Aztecs, with human sacrifice, assured the gathered crowd that they were the favorites.

Now usually “I don’t know” is what I mean. And that’s true here also for the strict sense of know. However, my best guess is that there is no reason, not that there is an unknowable one.

Those are the choices I could think of late on a Friday night, and represent the ones I’ve seen as responses. I’d be happy to hear others I didn’t think of.

I hope you don’t think I’m poking fun. I also don’t believe all arguments for religion are illogical. I’m the guy who went through Liberal’s 80 step proofs. Wrong is different from illogical.

I also don’t assume anything. I can just try to construct arguments for me explicitly and for others sometimes based on what they say. As a programmer I take my own jumbled ideas and reduce them to code all the time. It’s something I’m good at.
So, either there is a non-logical argument (perfectly fine) or I’m missing your logical argument. Could you put it in a step by step format - no funny symbols required. Programming also has taught me that I’m wrong all the time!

I thought I covered that in Option 4 - though that said doesn’t want to tell us, rather than can’t tell us. I was kind of assuming God can do anything. I suppose God as an incompetent world builder is another option, though. The world is kind of like the Windows 95 of planets.

The major piece of religious instruction I gave to my kids is that all religious explanations eventually get to 'it’s a mystery." So, I’m with you.

Except this isn’t about evidence because we start by assuming God is, and we know there is no objective evidence for God. We can probably say there is no objective evidence for love either. We might say logic and reason are involved, but if we can’t agree on what is logical and what isn’t then we’ve reached and an impasse.
You don’t get to call dibs on logic.

“We know there is no objective evidence for God.”? We do? Gee, I’m glad that question for the ages has been taken care of. BTW, I never claimed to call dibs on what is and isn’t logic-that has already been hashed out by greater women and men than me. There are set definitions for Aristotelian logic, formal logic, variable logic, mathematical logic and even fuzzy logic, but I’ll be damned if I can find a definition for logic that includes making a conclusion based on nothing but a feeling without benefit of any evidence whatsoever.

Was “We know” too strong? Am I mistaken in thinking it is generally accepted here that there is no objective evidence for God?

Yes there are set definitions for logic but that doesn’t prevent folk from insisting their arguments are logical when they are not does it? When two parties disagree and both think their argument is logical while the others isn’t , that’s an impasse right?

Just to be sure we’re talking about the same thing, I’m speaking specifically of the arguments in this thread. Since the subject matter is God and love, am I wrong in saying we have no objective evidence for or even clear definitions for those? If that is the case how do we then proceed with defining what is or isn’t a logical argument about those subjects?

If you’re presenting the avatar as a real and separate being from the player I understand you’re thinking here. I’m not trying to tell you how to construct your proposed scenario but in my mind I saw the player as the real being {soul, spirit, whatever} and the avatar as just a temporary representation of that player. In that case God loves us, the players, and sees the avatars for what they really are.
That’s the perspective thing I was trying to express earlier. If we assume God *is *,we can’t then argue suffering from the avatar’s pov and call that argument logical.

I’m glad this board lacks that protection and my reluctance has nothing to do with that. At some point I want to get the impression that other posters are considering what I’m saying rather than starting from a pre disposed temperament and opinion that judges it faulty under the “religious” label from the get go.
One of the things I enjoy is trying to clarify my thoughts into a coherent form of communication but this subject matter is very tricky and emotions play a role. I know I am not always good at the communication part and my experience is that at times any intelligent person can cling to a concept for emotional reasons. That includes atheists and believers. When that happens it’s probably break time.

OKay…Hopefully I just did that above. Here’s another. If an actor or actress agrees to take on the role of a suffering innocent does that indicate the producer /director doesn’t love him or her?

To further clarify, my position concerning the OP. One of the reasons I didn’t enter the thread right away was because I thought the answer was obvious.
"We don’t** know** God loves us. We feel God loves us or we believe God loves us. The reason I did enter was the idea that human suffering and evil is some undeniably logical argument against the existence of God or God’s love is false. It isn’t. It’s the assumed logic and undeserved surety of that particular argument I am addressing.

I know. I didn’t expect to convince anybody so I was saving time.
but for the exercise;

God’s love and purpose are available to us but requires the will, and a process of effort and growth through experience, to realize and fully comprehend.

I agree. That only helps clarify my argument. Atheists are suspending their disbelief to even entertain the question in the OP and then insisting that their argument is logical. Are you saying it can’t be?

A belief system that is spiritually based does not have to ignore aspects of reality. Instead it seeks to explore them, and that is not illogical.

If it was generally assumed that there was no objective evidence for God, why would the question keep popping up in this forum? Some say there is no evidence, some say there is evidence, and some ask what the evidence is of those that say it exists. This thread is an offshoot of that last category.

reasonable yes, necessarily better ,…no.

I do to. You weren’t talking any guess, but a very specific guess. IMO since we don’t know if God is or not there’s no saying which guess is better.

I did go back and read your statement through a couple of times and I appreciate the wording. IMO each person must find their own path to learning and growth and the one that suits you may not be the one that suits me. That means the particular guess that leads to further understanding for you may not be the one that is useful for me. It’s also a matter of timing. My beliefs are much different now than they were 20 years ago. It’s not for me to say where someone else ought to be in their personal growth process. I can only interact with them where they are and where I am. IMO the problem is that too many people don’t identify their guess as a guess. Being too sure of something, especially in this subject matter is detrimental to growth. It’s much harder to keep exploring if you close your eyes.

Because objective evidence is not required for belief.

Some might say the complexity of our world is objective evidence. Perhaps I should have qualified it by saying there is no scientific objective evidence, or something along those lines. It eventually comes down to someone’s feelings about things which is why I phrased it the way I did.

Noooo, I don’t think so. It seems to me that some atheists are saying that, using common rules of logic and evidence that can be found in standard text books, their conclusions are more solid that those of the other side, and are still willing to ask what evidence there is and what logic is being followed by those that say that there is a God and that if she/he/it exists how do we know this entity loves us. It is dishonest to say that nobody can agree on common definitions of evidence and logic-what is happening is that the opposing side in this is refusing to acknowledge these definitions in attempt to “equalize” the argument.