Oh man, you are evil!!!
A:
Maybe our language needs a word other than “irrational” – one that would still accurately describe that which does not follow from strict rational analysis, but not bear a negative connotation about the character of the proponent of the idea.
B:
As to “faith” in logic/reason/empirical observation/science… well, I would say that it’s more like “trust” therein. Trust that these have earned, BTW. I can predict with great confidence what will be the effect of dropping this computer on its edge no matter how many protective spells I cast on it.
C:
Insofar as the OP – well, I already view the Bible as mostly an extended allegory, that makes its points partly through use of some anecdotes from the lives of some people that did exist, anecdotes which surely were heavily embellished.
Anyway most stories in the scriptures of world religions would still be as significant and didactic as straight fiction.
Now, if the whole (or most) of a particular scriptural construct is proven right 100%… heck it’s not so much a question of fear, it’s a question of who am I to reject reality…
If some events from the Judaeo-Christian Bible were proven factual… but so were some events of the Mahabharatta, the Koran/Hadith, the life of Buddha, etc., things would hardly change.
But you know who I’d really fear in case of disproof of the major world religions? All those fundamnedentalist types who argue that the only source for morality is the direct dictate of a punishment-dealing God. Because I think those are the ones who would go gonzo berserk on the rest of us if we took away their lake-o’-fire fear factor.
dalovin’ , nice thread.
I have recently started identifying as a Christian, albeit more of an Agnostic with pretty strong Christian leanings. In general, I would have to say that such a device would do nothing to change my basic belief structure.
Allow me to explain; for me, the miracles are the very least important part of what the Bible has to teach us. That they are true would indeed be pretty nifty, but ultimately irrelevant. To look at this another way, my emerging Christianity has nothing to do with miracles (either ones that I believe supposedly happened, or that I have seen IRL) and everything to do with the way that these stories nurture me spiritually.
The story of God coming to us as a small and helpless child, of light entering the world is what seems important to me. The message of love and acceptance are what matter.
The rest is just special effects, cool enough but irrelevant to the story and the lessons therein.
Actually, Czarcasm and DJ, one of the irrational fears I have as a Christian is in the possibility of the real existence of the Divine Weasel. He seems improbable on the basis of the evidence, though – whatever evidence you wanna use. 
Proving that Jesus was just another human being wouldn’t afect my faith. Of course, I’m Jewish.
I believe in evolution, the Big Bang, and that the universe has age somewhere in the billions.
I view some of Bible as parable(Adam and Eve are a fine example. God is everywhere and sees everything. But, He’s somewhere else and not looking while their eating the fruit.). Some is genealogical and historical record. eg-There was a king named Ahab. He let his other head do the thinking for him. Disaster and political scandal followed.
Some of the Bible is contradictory. You have different people, in different times and places, taking divine dictation. They may make errors or stick in their own agenda.(I believe the many laws of Leviticus were written by Jewish elders to prevent assimilation into Helenic culture). Other parts appear contradictory in the same way Zen koans do. Sometimes the best way to express something is in a bizzare and confusing fashion ("Do dogs meditate?" "I am that I am. Did you make the sun to shine or the wind to blow?")
Further, I don't believe that a miracle has to be obvious. If God can perceive the entirety of time and space at once, chaos would be no hindrance. By doing small things and changing key points, massive changes could be made. Thus, while huge Cecil B DeMille miracles would prove the existance of God, the lack of miracle wouldn't disprove His existence.
"When you do things right, people will wonder if you even exist." God, the Alpha and the Omega to Bender, the kleptomaniac robot-Futurama.
That episode of futurama keeps getting quoted. I loved the episode. My favorite quote was:
BENDER: I was a god for a while!
GOD: Yes, I saw. It was going very well until everybody died.
That episode really is clever. For those who haven’t seen it, this degenerate alchoholic robot somehow ends up trapped floating through space. He gets ready to settle in for millions of years of coasting, when he hits an asteroid field. One of the rocks he hits deposits a tribe of these tiny creatures on his body, and they immediately begin to worship this great big thing (the robot) that they don’t really understand. It goes downhill from there.
It is a great setup. Truly, we are the little creatures floating on a rock. We don’t quite understand what reality is. Many of us rock dwelling creatures worship something based on flawed reasoning. We lack understanding of the greater Universe and how we fit in. I am really not doing the episode justice with my words. It is quite clever and thought provoking. Check it out if you get the chance.
Another quote I really like is when Bender first meets god. He says something like “How do you know that your not just a computer that collided with god?” See the line of thought? Even if there does end up being a powerful being actively guiding human affairs, how do we know that there isn’t another more powerful being above him? While god may claim to be perfect - he may not even understand himself. Fun to think about.
I seem to remember reading a story where this universe ended up being designed by god to figure out how he himself came to be. So he creates humans hoping they will eventually figure out how to create (or become) his equal! He wants to understand the process required to create him, so he gives us such a thirst for knowledge. It was a neat idea.
Am I rambling yet? I do love it when sci-fi tackles the religious issues. “Contact” is a good example and so is "Caclulating God".
DaLovin’ Dj
Are you saying that people are incapable of changing their minds in the face of evidence? That strikes me as a rather unusual claim.
There certainly are people who will not give up certain beliefs, despite all evidence to the contrary. However, a sweeping claim such as the one you made strikes me as being difficult to justify.
I am not saying everybody to the same extent but in general it is my experience that we are much less rational than we like to think and we are much more slaves of our perceptions and past history than we like to think. How can you explain that a bunch of people who are seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, when the whole thing is proven to be a sham in front of their very eyes, refuse to believe it was a sham and continue to believe?
How many people even on this board have substantially changed their point of view on anything of any consequence? How many passionate liberals have changed their minds by seeing evidence presented to them? How many conservatives? How many religious people? How many pro-Arabs? How many pro_ Israel? I do not remember a single case here.
Creationists believe in creation in spite of any evidence to the contrary. If X amount of evidence will not convince them, then 10X is not going to do it either.
What we believe is determined by reason only to a very small extent. Culture, age, gender, etc have much stronger bearings.
As an atheist, if everything in the bible was proven to be true by the time viewer, of course I would believe in god. But I would be exactly like Czarcasm : absolutely terrified that such an all-powerful but totally wicked, cruel and unreliable being actually exists. For if the bible was litterally true (or even most of it), then the god described in it would be, in my book, closer to what most people would call the devil (the concept of hell in itself is enough for that, but a lot of biblic accounts don’t give a very pleasant view of this being, IMO).
Apart from that, I’m not sure why people assume that the OP basically told “If you had proofs that no god exists, would you still believe”. I mean if the time viewer proved Jesus never existed or was something really different from what is described in the book. But assuming that the viewer would show that Jesus actually existed, said most of what he’s supposed to have said, and appeared as an exceptionnaly charismatic guy, I’m not sure why people wouldn’t be able to believe in god, even though nothing supernatural happened. After all, there has been (and there still are) many prophets who never were ressurected, nor changed water in wine, and plenty of people willing to believe them.
And how did you come to that conclusion? (I think I can predict the direction in which you’re going, but nonetheless, I’d like to know your reasons behind your conclusion. I think it’s only fair that we determine how thorough a critic’s research was.)
Well I, for one, did not want to believe in the truth of the Bible, but the evidence eventually forced me to change my position.
I’m hardly alone in that regard. I have friends and acquaintances who likewise changed their minds, and history records many others (C.S. Lewis, Frank Morison, Sir William Ramsey, Dr. Simon Greenleaf and Josh McDowell, to name a few) whose testimonies say that they were compelled to change their minds after attempting to refute the book.
I know it’s a kind of “me too” post, but I wholeheartly agree with sailor (not the first time I do, by the way). I’m pretty convinced that our beliefs are most often much more related to our “feelings” (whatever could be the origin of these feelings) than to our thoughts, to our “heart” than to our brain. Very often, we mostly use the latter organ to justify, back, explain what we’re already convinced of, not to determine what we should believe.
For us to redefine our beliefs would means in most case to change our whole view of the world, and it wouldn’t be an easy task. By the way, I’m quite fascinated by the fact that through a different way to perceive the world, people seem to actually live in very different worlds, even when they live in the same culture (not even comparing a westerner with a tribeman in Burma). It’s even obvious for very trivial issues, when you pay attention to it. And, again I find this totally fascinating. But it should be another thread.
Sorry, but I’m a little fed up at the moment with arguments about religion so I’m unwilling to engage in a new one. Very briefly, I would answer : because the bible contains many examples of god ordering or doing things which are totally unfair or arbitrary by human current moral standarts. I think they’re quite easy to find by merely reading the OT, for instance. Czarcasm gave some examples of it. How fair and good can be to order your “people” to slaughter a whole other people (young virgins excepted for a reason one could try to guess) or to make all the firstborn child to die to convince someone (the pharaoh), especially since the bible says that god himself hardened the pharaoh heart in order that he wouldn’t be convinced?
But more basically the mere concept of hell or any eternal punishment of any kind seems to me totally contradictory with a concept of an all-loving god.
That said, I don’t intend to enter in an argument about that at the moment. I just stated my reasons.
I am no longer an aynrandlover and have changed my conception of morality and governmental influence drastically since I began posting. I am well on the way to becoming what I think is liberal, though I’m going to hold off on that pending some further investigation.
I wonder why you even bother posting if you believe these boards serve no purpose. I, for one, could do without that opinion. Some day I hope to be as correct as you are to say that nothing more will change my opinions on anything. Until then, see you in GD.
<waves>Hello! - it was as a result of observing and participating in the debates on these very boards that I concluded my (quite strongly held) position of Biblical Literalism was untenable.
On the one hand, we have conservative Christians who are unabashedly evidentialist–they believe because of the “empty tomb”; if it could be demonstrated to their satisfication that the tomb was never empty, they would cease to believe in Christianity. An atheist may argue that there is already enough evidence to conclude that the tomb was never empty (or more likely, that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that it was empty); nonetheless, an atheist of a naturalistic bent and an evidentialist Christian would at first glance seem to at least have enough in common to have an intelligible argument. (There are other conservative Christians, who believe in the actual resurrection of Jesus and an empty tomb, who reject evidentialism in favor of fideistic or “presuppositionalist” apologetics.) It is of course perfectly valid of conservative evidentialist Christians to maintain that they would still be some sort of theists even if Christianity was disproved to them; the questions of the truth of Christianity and of the existence of a God being distinct.
Then we have certain types of theism which are not susceptible to evidentiary disproof–a belief in a “higher power” or in some sort of “spirituality”; “God is love”; “God is in all of us”–pantheism, New Age religious beliefs, many Unitarians, probably classical Deism as well. Obviously a diverse lot, but the point is that none of them are necessarily making claims that could in principle be disproved by access to more scientific or historic evidence; hence the oft-expressed idea that religions are a matter purely of “faith”, not of evidence. (They may also be a matter of logical deduction or philosophical argument, as in the case of Deism, and there may be an element of subjective experience–“I felt God in my heart”.)
But then we have these curious in-between Christians. It seems that this school will argue that the evidence (the testimony of the Gospels and so on) indicates that something happened (i.e., the Resurrection). But, when presented with a hypothetical thought experiment in which they are furnished with evidence that would flatly refute the core belief of Christianity, they just re-define the terms again.
It seems to me there is something a little “unfair” about this. Both Polycarp and dreamer turn the question around and ask the atheists “What if you went back in time/viewed the past and actually saw Jesus risen from the grave, conversing with his disciples, and ascending to heaven?” (On re-reading dreamer’s post, possibly I’m misreading her position. Perhaps she is merely saying she would continue to be a non-Christian theist of some sort, but not a believer in the Christ-hood of Jesus of Nazareth or in the Triune God of Christianity.) Fair enough, perhaps–atheists ought to be convinced by convincing evidence. But it seems to me this position is saying “If the evidence is in our favor, we’ll accept it and expect others to do so, but if the evidence is not in our favor, well, this is a matter of faith and of spiritual things, not of mere evidence, and no one else has any right to expect us to change our beliefs on mere evidence”.
The conservative Christian position at least in theory would accept the evidence either way, a position which, as Joe_Cool points out, could arguably be said to go all the way back to Paul. The opposite end of the spectrum seems consistent in saying these are questions which are not settled by evidence, which merits a certain respect. But this middle position seems somewhat hypocritical to me. It wants to have it both ways. “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” “I know that God is love and we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves, which is more important than whether or not the mythology of any specific religion is true.” “If Christ has been raised, this is indeed evidence that our preaching and faith are true and good, but if Christ hasn’t been raised, we still have faith in him anyway.”
But most of us aren’t saying “I know with 100% certainty that there is no God”. We’re just saying “We haven’t seen any convincing evidence that there is a God”. This does not take “faith” in the sense it’s being used here at all.
I agree completely here. If Jesus isn’t who he said he is, than I have no use for him. I do believe it to be hypocritical to try to ride both sides of the fence. If he hasn’t been raised, then he was just a man, and just a man can’t fill the position required by my faith. I view the miracles and prophecy in the bible, not as cool stuff to marvel over, but as demonstrations of the authority of the speaker. Joe Blow on the street can’t turn water into wine, can’t heal the lame or the blind, and can’t raise himself from the dead. Therefore, I don’t accept him as a spiritual (and therefore supernatural) authority. Jesus, on the other hand (and the prophets speaking about him), I believe speaks with divine authority, evidenced by the signs he gave. So if they weren’t real, then God (and therefore Jesus) isn’t who he claims to be, and my faith as it now is, is useless.
I am not religious so it’s not like I would to change my mind about anything but when I see people who are religious I see they believe in things for which they have no evidence or even evidence to the contrary. If the time machine showed more evidence to the contrary i am sure a few would change their minds but I am also sure many would dismiss that evidence just like they dismiss a lot of other evidence.
I am not saying nobody would change their mind about anything. Of course we change our minds. What I am trying to say is this:
- Some people are more objective than others but, in general, we are all more subject to perception and less subject to reason than we like to think.
- If and when we do change our minds about things it is because we were open about that topic and ready for the new view. Very often the fact that we change is a confirmation, not a refutation, of the previous point. As we age, as our bodies and hormones change, as we are affected by experiences on the emotional (and not the rational) level, so do our perceptions change which leads to our “reason” seeing things differently.
- I am not saying this describes all the people all the time. I am saying this describes most of the people most of the time and to the greatest extent.
I think our ideas and beliefs work at different levels. We have a level where we are aware of our ideas and we can maybe change them to a certain extent. But there is an underlying level, which, for lack of a better word, I will call the level of beliefs, which is the foundation upon which our ideas rest and this level is quite hidden from us and we are not aware of it. It is formed by our lifetime experience, especially when we are young, and underlies everything in our lives.
It is conditioned by culture, experience, genes, hormones, etc. As we are formed, that underlying layer is built which conditions how we see and perceive and interpret the world.
For example: when people join cults, to them it may seem “reasonable” but outsiders can see psychological reasons underlying. To me the idea that anyone could join a religion because he was convinced by the evidence is just silly, and yet millions have done just that. Most cases I know the person was open and looking for something they felt was missing. But I can tell you, the chances of someone convincing me by reasoning to join any religion are infinitesimally low.
I know an American guy who lives an Europe and hates America like the worst in Al Qaeda. If you talk to him he will “reason” his reasons with you, but to me it is evident this guy has issues with himself. Except he cannot see this, he only sees his “reasons”.
To draw a parallel: We are aware of our bodies as the essential part of ourselves. It affects our moods and our views. Yet there is an underlying layer of which we are not aware. If I were to ask any of you “why are you making so many platelets today?” you would have no answer as you are not even aware that this is going on. And yet all this activity is what underlies your body’s ability to function and the brain’s capacity to think.
That men change their views, attitudes and opinion with age is well demonstrated empirically. Some women are so affected by their monthly hormone cycles that it would be difficult even for them to say when they are being objective. The truth is no one of us is entirely objective and we perceive the world through a filter of which we are not even aware of.
I am probably more aware of the cultural conditioning because I grew up simultaneously in and between two cultures. I see my friends on both sides and understand their views but I am so aware of their lack of understanding of the other side and no amount of reasoning in the world is going to change that.
At any rate and getting back to the OP. My experience is that in terms of religion most people believe what they want to believe and evidence is not going to change that. When you present a creationist with evidence of fossils, he does not question his beliefs, rather he looks for “reasons” to refute the new evidence.
As I said in my previous post, how do you explain a large group of adults believing they are witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary? And how do you explain that after it is uncovered before their very eyes they would continue to hold their beliefs and not the evidence which they just saw?
Exposes have been done on those churches which perform miracles etc and yet people continue to believe. We humans are much more unreasonable than we may think. If people were indeed more subject to reason than to perception, there would be a lot less conflict in the world. Try to get the Palestinians to reason with the Israelis and see how far you get. Or President Bush with Ben Laden.
And I will finish with a quote I happen to like:
Sensible men are all of the same religion.
“And pray tell, what is that?” enquired the prince.
Sensible men never tell.
Disraeli
MEBuckner: Masterly summary of the various positions taken. I’d have to say that I believe based on “the evidence” – but that I do not restrict that evidence totally to the idea of the Bible – and as such, I’d be inclined to examine the situation in light of the various possibilities. [As I pointed out, it’s never an all-or-nothing situation: We have confirmation from Assyrian records, for example, that the Assyrians took Samaria and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel; there’s excellent non-Christian evidence that Quirinius (“Cyrenius”) did in fact serve as governor of Syria (though not at the probable date of Christ’s birth). On the other hand, nobody gives a sweet potato whether Psalm 90 was written by the Moses of Exodus or some other guy named Moishe who was called ‘the man of God’ too. Any stance in between “it’s all literally true” and “almost all of it is false” is logically supportable – though the first takes an inordinate amount of explaining away of contrary data and scientific theory.]
Effectively I’d have to say that for the conservative Christians, well, it’s their problem. If DJ’s hypothetical time viewer shows me Yeshua bar Mariam as someone who teaches and behaves towards others effectively as depicted in the Gospels, then I’d believe in Him as the guy God sent, regardless of how or if his supposed miracles actually happened.
In short, my faith is bolstered by, but not founded on, the Bible.
Joe Cool:
I take your point, and laud you and MEB for appositely alluding to I Corinthians 15. However, may I make the suggestion that the authority may be present without the demonstrations. Acts notes a couple of people who were, or were claimed to be, non-Christian miracle workers with whom the apostles came into conflict. Can I ask that you reread my earlier post relative to the Resurrection, not with the view that I’m putting down orthodox physical raising, but trying to show what Paul was talking about and the other possibilities for what might have happened (including Spong’s very rationalistic explanation, which I know is not your cup of tea) – and comment on it, perhaps with Jersey’s thoughts as well?