First, I have to applaud the posts of WV_Woman and JThunder on the first page here, because they seem to me to be saying things that I would feel I needed to if they had not done so first.
Apos and others, it’s important to grasp that my faith, and that of several others who have posted here as believers, is not equivalent to “intellectual adherence to an unfalsifiable hypothesis” but rather “confidence in the bona fides of an entity with whom we have had experiential contact” – faith in the sense of trust, as in “I have faith in the good intentions of Mars Horizon, Jodi, gobear, Gaudere, Libertarian, xenophon, pldennison” and a large number of other people here whom I have come to know and count as friends. I don’t “believe in” God in the sense that one “believes in” the law of gravity as a useful explanation of terrestrial and celestial phenomena; rather, I believe in God because I know and trust Him – or, at least, my perceptions of an entity apparently possessed of great capabilities and limitless love, Who for His own reasons has chosen to care about me.
I concede that (1) I could be self-deluded about that experience, (2) I could be misled by a trickster entity of some sort, (3) I may be attributing to that entity characteristics from my own upbringing and experience that are not really His.
My refutation of the first objection is that the results of following Him have been, if negative in terms of secular success, extremely positive in terms of self-fulfillment, and that not exclusively in some abstract religious sense, but implying better interrelationships with people, a much better feeling about both myself and my fellow man, the filling of gaps in my life with romance, marital love, and a family… And the interesting thing about why I feel this could not be self-delusion is that the results I mention stem from things that not only did I not want but which would be positively rejected by the former me.
I cannot refute the second objection. But this merely substitutes an evil or amoral deity-figure for a beneficial one, hence failing to respond to our “Is there something that would make you stop thinking there is a god?” topic, or substitutes a truly improbable hypothesis, such as Bob-the-practical-joker-alien who is possessed of not only skills approximating miracle-working but also telepathy, uncanny prognosticative abilities, and a few other highly unlikely talents, and who has sustained this joke without getting caught for at least thirty centuries now. IMHO (and I’m well aware of the objections), a god on the general order of those advanced by modern theology is less improbable than Bob.
I am perfectly well aware that in presuming from my impressions of the entity that He is in some way to be identified with the Christian Trinity I am in fact feeding in my own presuppositions. However, it’s my distinct impression that that was His self-identification, and that He did not delimit Himself as some of his followers do.
It might also be pointed out that the accounts of those who have had such experiences are traditionally colored by their social and cultural baggage but do seem to have some irreducible matters in common, which would testify to the accuracy of those common experiences (unless they too can be explained away, a possible hypothesis but not one I particularly enjoy exploring, because attempting to examine the limits of human thought using human thinking is a fool’s game).
Further, I can suggest that nothing in my experience leads me to require myself to buy into the dogmata and conceptual apparatus of evangelical conservative Christianity, and that one can read that collection of history, theological speculation, apocalyptic, prophetic discourse, myth, legend, wisdom literature, love poetry, praise poetry, and much else with the sort of critical intelligence one might bring to a similar collection of, say, Tamil literature. Yes, it does speak of the God I believe in; no, it is not the be-all and end-all of knowledge of Him, nor is it to be taken credulously and more-or-less literally.
Like a few others here (points in the direction of Phobos-set;)) I find a great deal of sense in the works of John Shelby Spong; unlike him, I do not see the necessity of drawing the Tillichian distinction between a ground-of-being entity and an active-in-the-real-world God, because I believe that the God that does exist acts largely through pre-planned phenomena in the world He created and through the people He called to be His own within it (which does not necessarily have any equation with those who call themselves Christian; gobear, for example, is a good man whose ethical code leads him to do much as Christ commanded on the “horizontal” human-to-human level).
So to eliminate my belief in the God I believe in, I would have to have proof that not only were my experiences and the results from them in error, but also that nobody has ever had any valid such experience. To eliminate the possibility of belief in any god whatsoever, someone would have to demonstrate to me that it is logically impossible for the universe or anything in it to have any teleological basis – and I think that is not possible.
