Who cares what any of them believed? The fact that somebody thinks that gods talk to him is not proof that gods talk to him. That’s the point, and it’s a relatively simple one.
ITR champion
Thanks for the link to Letter from Birmingham Jail. I remember reading it in high school and being very moved by it. 30+ year later it’s even better because I understand more.
As much as I admire the mind and heart of the person who wrote that it stills adds zero weight to any argument for the existance of God. The same goes for the former slave ship captain. I admire Gandhi and have read an account of God speaking to him in prison. Althnough he would always believe that what he heard was the voice of God he had the wisdom to understand it was only his opinion and he never expected anything from anyone else in the way of belief. What we might call a powerful spiritual experience and/or spiritual insight may hold weight for the individual on a subjective level. The individual must decide what such an experience means to them and how it affects their future choices. It’s their right and probably unavoidable. Who knows if their interpretation and the actions that follow are partly right or completely wrong? They probably don’t know themselves.
That kind of of personal subjective thing is not evidence.
Over the past few weeks you’ve been arguing for the *logic *of Christian doctrine. Christianity and most other religions can only be internally logical by starting from some assumed premise. Maybe several. If you put Christian doctrine on the same level with everything else I don’t see, and haven’t seen how it can be logical without those assumptions.
I don’t mean that as a put down but a simple observation of fact. I think the wisest and most honest thing believers can do is admit they belief is largely faith in things without evidense. The crux of Chritain doctrine;
Jesus died and rose again to conquer the sins of mankind {no nitpicking please}
the Bible is the word of God, or even that God is, are matters of faith. There is little logic involved no matter what Christian scholars say or how much time they put into creating an argument they claim is logical.
This isn’t faith based on nothing, but it is faith. IMHO that kind of honesty, which is a 1st cousin to the truth, is a better approach from which various belief systems can communicate.
You do not understand me, I am saying Newton was just using his beliefs and you are excepting that his beliefs are the truth, One can believe a person and still doubt or disagree with another. Many people change beliefs if they find some thing or some one who makes more sense to them.
One puts their belief in what a person teaches or tells them about someting or some one. belief is not fact and a lot depends on who or what we belive in, it is not proof of a God. People tend to believe who or what appeals to them.Newton expressed what he wanted to believe.
Monavis
wow! the logic and reasoning throughout this thread, the thrust and parry of statement and rebuttal! i will not try and join the fray as i’m unarmed, but i have one question for the non-believers (as i am a Catholic Christian), if not God at the beginnning as the creator than what? which is more likely, that an all powerful being exists–one that we in all probability couldn’t understand with our limited abilities–creating everything, or that the stuff just existed and life just happened? i realize this isn’t evidence, there are no provable facts. and consider “pascal’s wager”; blaise pascal argued that if reason cannot be trusted, it is a better “bet” to believe in God than not to do so.
The latter (stuff just existed and life just happened) is more likely. We know that the latter is true, adding an intelligent being to set it off adds more complexity (for instance, who created that being? How/why does he have the power to create stuff?) and so is less likely to be true. More importantly, other possibilities like that “The whole universe is a dream by some guy in another universe with entirely different rules” for instance, are just as likely once you start speculating beyond what we can observe. There’s an infinite number of explanations for how the universe came to be created if you’re not bound to observable reality. Why choose any one of those infinite possibilities as more likely when there’s no more evidence on its side than any other?
Nothing most likely. What else would there be before something, than nothing ? And saying “God did it” explains nothing anyway, because where did God come from ?
The second. An “all powerful” being is logically impossible. and we have zero evidence for any sort of God, or that a god is even possible. And then God is such an obvious human ego fantasy; there’s no reason to consider it anything else. And on top of that there’s the historical record of religion’s nearly relentless wrongness.
“God” is one of the least likely, least plausible ideas ever conceived. It is the apex of stupidity.
That was discredited long, long ago. To just point out the most obvious flaw, how do you know you picked the RIGHT One, True God ? Or for another, how do you know that such a cynical “wager” won’t offend God ?
As Der pointed out, what if God is offended by the bet? What if god is an omnipotent being whose only rule for entering into heaven is to never bet on his existance?
I’m always amazed that even the most rock ribbed theists can’t see that Pacal’s Wager is riddled with fallacies.
you either miss the point or choose to disregard it; God is beyond our attempts to understand using logic and reasoning, these are human tools. accepting God’s existence , yes this is callled faith, leads to the understanding that questions such as where did he come from are pointless as they arise from our limited intellect.
and i propose that not believing in God is the apex of stupidity, equal perhaps to believing that something came from nothing
as to the right one, God will let me know at the end how close i was, every religious tradition shares the common denominator of faith–it is better to believe in God than not
It’s not true that every religion asserts this, or even that every religion is based on theistic worship (there are religions with no gods), but even if it were true that every religion asserted that “it is better to believe in God than not,” that would not give the statement any more necessary truth value. Assertion does not become proof if lots of people assert it.
Most religions once averred that the sun and the moon were gods and it was the better part of valor to sacrifice to them. So what?
I missed the Pascal’s Wager part.
Consider that humanity’s lot on Earth did not improve until a surge of deism and non-doctrinal reason (AKA the Age of Reason) created modern government and modern economics. The Jewish/Christian God’s tenets are rules that are impractical and have not been shown to lead to more moral living (for instance, in terms of people living satisfied lives that don’t interfere with others abilities to live satisfied lives), nor is there any reason to think that they actually would. If anything, there’s more evidence that Christian doctrine, followed to the letter, would pretty well be life in Hell for all concerned.
Some branches of Gnosticism, a faith which was created parallel to and later suppressed by Christianity, believed that the Christian God and Jesus were respectively the God of Evil and Destruction and his minion on Earth.
Who is to say, in light of all of this, that the Gnostics weren’t the ones who were right? Pascal’s wager presumes that trusting to God is a good thing because God is good. What evidence is there for His goodness besides his own sayso? If the idea is that you get into Heaven by practicing the faith of Christianity, shouldn’t you be pretty certain that the actual place you’re bound for isn’t Hell?
A proper Pascal’s wager would be that you should be certain to live as morally as you can, insomuch as morality can be proven to be something where as many people on the planet can live long satisfied lives. That requires objective research and trial and error. If you’re going to assume that there’s a deity over all of us who loves and cares for us, the best bet is to love and care for the rest of mankind as best you can–which means doing real work–and not by following some eternal rules set down millenia ago by some dude who has shown no proof to have any actual skill at suggesting rules that work in the real world.
Faith is just a form of self delusion.
You are the one who is claiming that you can’t understand God via logic and reason; that you have to use faith. In other words, you have to turn off your intelligence; you have to be deliberately stupid. That’s not much of an argument for believing in God being smart.
Why ? Faith is madness; the denial of reality and reason. Why is it better to be insane ?
Religion is worthless at best, and generally destructive. It’s empty; it has no basis in fact, just the assertions of believers, and it leads nowhere.
So, asking an atheist how stuff got here is a valid question but asking a theist how God got here isn’t? Atheists don’t ask how God got here because we actually expect you to have an answer, we do it to show you that not knowing all of the answers does not mean that “God did it” and to show you that if we have to know how the first stuff got here, then by your own standards you should have to tell us how God got here.
You don’t know what God/gods exist. He/they may punish you for choosing to believe (as if that’s possible) as a safety net. He may reward atheists for not believing due to lack of evidence and having the integrity to not claim we’re believers out of fear of punishment from an unjust god. Pascals wager doesn’t work on many levels.
as i initially wrote and freely admit, i am unarmed. however this state doesn’t render me defenseless. all of you wrote pointed replies, they don’t change my belief though, and i certainly would have been surprised if your lack of belief changed based on my tired arguments. minds far greater than mine and i suspect yours have debated this for thousands of years. theologians, augustine and anslem for example, considered by many amoung humanities greatest thinkers, have concluded there is a God. all people are given the gift of faith, but as with any gift it can be used or rejected. peace.
I do not think anyone is trying to change your belief, just that you do not make any argument for them to believe as you do. I have asked this question many times of clergy etc. and get no reply. Who created the place for God to be? If God is a being He requires a place to exist. One doper said that God was too big to have a place, so if God is no-place or nowhere that would make Him non-existent.
Monavis
You might try looking up medical history.
Up until the 19th century, you were probably more likely to die because of the state of medical knowledge and procedure than if you’d simply crawled off and let your body work its own magic. Leonardo da Vinci and hundreds and thousands of other great minds all worked in perfecting medical knowledge and yet their results amounted to pretty much nothing because they didn’t verify evidence for anything.
The classical model of science (pre-scientific method) seems to have lasted until the 1800s in mainland Europe.
And many great minds have concluded that there is no god. Which do you believe?
Did you actually read and understand the replies to your statement, or did you dismiss them out of hand because they went against what you believe? If your statement included reasons you believe, and arguments against them exist, how do you answer them?
Based on logic and common sense and the continual growth of knowledge through science, it appears that the “stuff just existed” concept is the way to go.
My point exactly. Humans invented religion. There’s nothing “divine” about it; in reality, it’s nothing more than a massive con game.
Throughout history, the vast majority of religious traditions were based on the concept of “it is better to believe in God as we preach it, because we’ll kill you otherwise”.
And blind faith like that is also referred to as buying a pig in a poke.