Questions about God.

[moejuck]

I thank all of you for your debate. I essentialy have come to the conclusion that I can no more explain my faith than anyone else could explain what love is, or jealousy. Faith implies beleiving in something for which there is not complete evidence. Evidence can take me to a certain point, but from there I must use faith to get the rest of the way. I do beleive I have experienced God in my life in many ways, and that evidence is enough for me. I could chalk it up to my belief mechanism, but I still think that is just another word for Faith. Maybe everyone is trying to fill a void in their life which should be filled by God, but they choose other things sometimes. Maybe the atheists fill this void with science and philosophy. I know that I don’t have all the answers, and I never will. As GS replies “I don’t know is an acceptable answer”,
and I will agree with him. I don’t know everything there is to know about God, the origins of God, the Bible, or faith. I do know that I do have faith in God, and I beleive I am right. I see no harm to myself in having this position. I can still pursue intellectual things while having a belief in God. I know the arguments for and against God will never cease, but I do know that I am convinced for sure on which side I stand. Thanks again for your input, and feel free to continue the discussion as I will definitely continue to question what I beleive and try to find more and more evidence that supports my position.

[GodlessSkeptic]

Sorry Polycarp.I did not reply to your last post because a)I did not find a lot to disagree with and B)It seemed like you were asnwering specific questions that Moejuck asked from your own theistic perspective and I did not want to barge in arguing for the sake of arguing(or appearing to do such).

*Originally posted by Polycarp *
**1. Ontological proofs of god do nothing more than demonstrate that if you chose the right axioms and use the right definition of god, you can write a logical syllogism that proves that your axioms imply your definition. They do not imply anything about the Universe as we know it nor about the God who is alleged to have created it and with Whom we are supposed to enter into a relationship of faith and love.

**

Sounds right to me.

**2. GS is quite correct about pattern-seeking, and I’d extend that to purpose-seeking. We require to know why kindly old Aunt Tillie died of an agonzing cancer, and why Heather, full of youth and promise, vivacious and loving, was killed by a drunken driver. We want to know whether the people sinned, or their parents, who were killed by the volcanic eruption in Colombia or Indonesia. And William James posited a “will to believe” that affects some people, me among them.

I believe it is possible to weigh the evidence, reasonably objectively, taking into account psychological urges of this sourt and how they may influence one’s conclusions.

**

Again, nothing explicitly stated that I would take issue with or contend.

**3. Personal experience is not a part of what GS evaluates.

**

Just a note here:It depends on whether the claim is an extraordinary claim or an ordinary claim.If you tell me that you work as a particle physicist I would not require you to provide empirical verification of this(however if subsequent postings showed a demonstrable ignorance of physics then I might suspect you were not being forthright) because whether this claqim was true or not would have no bearing on my observation and understanding of the universe.
If you tell me that “Ideas are the primary stuff of the universe and matter is only an illusion” or “The earth is flat” then I am going to require evidence which I can scrutinise which supports your claim.

** But there are literally thousands of examples of people who aver that they have had a direct experience of God. Such claims need to be evaluated with strong skepticism – my own included. But people with the capacity to logically and skeptically evaluate such experiences who nonetheless claim to have had them, and that their self-examination leads then to believe that the experience was a “valid” one – i.e., not self-delusion, deserve to have that claim taken seriously. It will not be “proof” to anyone except the experiencer – but it nonetheless constitutes a form of evidence.

**

To be sure.“Personal revelation” is indeed a form of evidence and I do not dispute it’s validity to the one who believes s/he has experienced such.It is just that, from an outsider’s viewpoint I must aknowledge that there are rational explanations for such personal experiences and I cannot dismiss these other explanations simply because the person offering them as evidence seems likeable, sane or honest enough.Occam’s razor applies.

**4. The fallacious “law of the excluded middle” is nowhere more evident than in discussions of the Bible. From King Arthur to Alexander the Great to Charlemagne to the Trojan War, there are dozens of historical topics known largely from legend but nonetheless with a firm historical core underlying them. The excesses of the legends do not discredit the historical substructure.

**

Agreed but I will note that we do not know whether a historical King Arthur existed.We can reasonably conclude that he was at least based upon an actual king or kings but we have, as yet no way to confirm this and the same can be said of Jesus Christ.

I would also add the converse to what you stated that the historical substructure does not substantiate the excesses of legends.

**With the cardinal exception of Thomas, the rejected books not included in the Bible are rightly rejected as pious frauds having little or nothing to do with the facts known to the First and Second Century scholars who rejected them. While no Biblical book is a masterpoiece of objective reportage – and was never intended to be – they stand on relatively firmer ground. But all Scripture is polemic – intended to induce and strengthen faith, and uses literary genre and tropes to make its point. To discount them for not being objective history is to reject Desirée or Hawaii because they are not non-fiction history, rather than learning about Napoleonic France and Sweden and the Hawaiian Islands from their reasonably well-targeted depictions of the times.

**

I would largely agree except to note that I do not reject what one might call “truths” or “truisms” or “life lessons” that may be found in many religions(such as The Golden rule, or notions/ideals about humility, self-sacrifice, and the like) simply because I do not assent to the existential claim that God exists(as a self-aware, independent entity).

**5. People talking about “prophecy” perpetually miss the point to prophecy itself. It was never intended as soothsaying; what it was, was men claiming to proclaim the word and will of God to their fellow men. Implicit in this was often the extrapolation of a trend and its consequences – “If you keep pointing fingers like that, sooner or later somebody’s eye is gonna get poked out! ;))” More closely, “repent and turn back to the Lord, lest these dire consequences befall you.” Only in that sense, and in the occasional actual predictive prophecy (such as the actual Emmanuel story), intended to validate the message to doubters, was it a foretelling of the future.

**

Again, I think we largely agree here.I suspect that you might give a bit more credence to the common notion of prophecy as prediction of events than I but this may be me reading into what you are saying.

**6. Faith is trust. If I have faith in you, I know you as a person whose word I can trust. If I have faith in God, I know that I can trust in Him. “Dogmas of faith” are something of a misnomer – they’re attempts to describe the God in whom one can have faith (trust).

**

My simple answer to this is “Trust is trust”.I DO trust certain people at times though I have no empirical proof that they will act as I hope and suspect they will but even this trust is based on observation and experiment.
Faith is not something I can relate to though since becoming a skeptic.