I wasn’t sure if I should respond to your latest post. You’re clearly very bright and probably will rip apart all my arguements and make me look foolish ;). But then again, nothing ventured nothing gained, so here I go.
For me anyway, this isn’t necessary. However, so sort of evidence is required. If people who believe and pray to God could somehow show that their belief could change the outcome of events, then that would be good evidence.
There may be an explanation for many miraculous occurence. I, however, am only asking for one miraculous occurance that can’t. I haven’t seen evidence for this yet.
I agree this attitude is a mistaken one for these types of inquiries. You have to be open to the possiblity, but you also are obligated to look for a reasonable explanation.
I don’t like this, but it might be the case. If it is, I have to side with those who say that God’s existance is very unlikely. It is entirely possible that reason can’t be used to show God’s existance. However, reason has a good track record at finding out things about the universe. God is connected to the universe in some way. There should be, therefore some evidence of his existance. There isn’t. This isn’t proof of his non-existance, but it is puzzeling if he does exist. It is as expected if he doesn’t exist.
Another problem with this attitude (belief is required to experience what you believe in) is that it can used to justify a belief in anything. Invisible Pink Unicorns included, as they seem quite popular on this board. It is circular; however, God, or whatever, may chose to operate in this fashion. I don’t think he must operate this way.
Once again, not enough time for a lengthy post, but I wanted to briefly respond to a couple of recent things:
GLWasteful, regarding the three links I posted, you said:
What does this mean? I’m missing something here. Are you seeing the articles in a different language when you click on them somehow? They show up in English to me. Please clarify.
You also said:
I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of where and how I’ve seen the articles I’ve seen. Here is a partial list that I’ve come up with as I’ve thought about it some more:
Charisma
“The Church Around the World” Church Insert (doubt you can find that in the library, but you never know)
Various missions newsletters from different organizations over the years
There was a magazine called People of Destiny from the
1980s that I thinkoccasionally had articles of this sort
Similarly, there was a newspaper called “The Forerunner” published in the 1980s that I think had several articles of this sort as well
Biggest source: direct eyewitness accounts from speakers in church who’ve been overseas over the past 2 decades
Possibly various Youth With a Mission publications
I’m sorry this is so sketchy, but please realize I never intended to keep an inventory of all this stuff to convince a group of atheists on a website someday! I just read it, found it encouraging and interesting, and eventually threw away the mags. I may have some of the magazines I just mentioned in boxes at my parents house that I might can find.
I will try to think of others, and will attempt some online research as well which would be a lot easier.
As for reading the article you linked to GL, I scanned it briefly but haven’t had a chance to really read it in depth yet. Why, does it disprove one of the Charisma stories or something? (I’ll try to read it more later this weekend).
Brief comments:
Polycarp: regarding your feelings on Charisma, are you saying that bad reporting in one instance means throw out everything Charisma has ever reported on? If you go by that, you should stop listening to virtually the entire mass media. They have all been guilty of shoddy and poor reporting at times.
And for those of you who think a Christian site it biased – well lets just lay that argument to rest. Of course they’re biased! They come at things from a Christian world view. Do you think that having a bias means that you are incapable of reporting truthful facts?
Okay, I wish I had time for more but I don’t. Maybe later this weekend. GL, I’m not going anywhere, so even if it’s a while before I find a substatial amount of sources for you and others to check out, I hope to be able to find them as time goes on.
PS - I just recalled this one, and it’s admittedly a small one, but the biography I mentioned before contains accounts of some physical healings as part of the story. The novel is “No Compromise: The Life Story of Keith Green” and can be ordered from http://www.lastdaysministries.org
Let us put aside for the moment that this would demonstrate at least the existence of a genie or at best a pantheistic god, but not the existence of God, and assume that one attribute of God might be that He changes the outcome of events in the sense that you’re likely driving at, namely, some interference in causality. Though I have personal evidence, empirical in nature, that He at least influences events, it is not His primary attribute, since His purpose is that we love Him. I, for one, am not moved to love someone because of his magical powers, but because of whatever qualities he might have that engender love.
The time line is linear. It progresses forward only. Given event A that is followed by event B, whatever you might say about the infinite universal event set {S} that might have followed from A, one and only one event in fact did follow from A. In other words, one and only one arbitrary event E of the set {S} will ever occur in a given moment of time. Two things do not happen at once at the same space-time coordinate unless you postulate multiple existences.
Therefore, by what criterion will you establish that event B of {S} was not caused by God, but event C of {S} would have been? Woulda coulda shoulda. Will improbability be your criterion? Not likely, since improbable events happen every day. Besides, that distinction seems arbitrary since you might reasonably argue that God Himself established cause and effect on a Newtonian scale, which is our local scale. That would make the mundane events equally miraculous with the extraordinary events. That is, perhaps every event is a miracle, since every event occurs in the space-time cone. Science (or reason) might have discovered cause and effect, but that does not imply that cause and effect was born on the day that science declared its discovery.
I do not mean this offensively, but it seems like you are asking for exactly what you condemn: a gap that you can ascribe to God.
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I don’t mean to presume to speak on your behalf, but I believe you might have meant, “I have not personally seen evidence of a scientific nature for this yet.” After all, you have plenty of anecdotal evidence, born of the empiricism of others. Of course, science insists on repeatability. And that is likely what you’re looking for, a laboratory experiment where you can mix chemical A with chemical B and get chemical C when you expected chemical D.
But miracles (true miracles) are in our own subjective interpretation of events, and not in the events themselves. The argument can reasonably be made that God would have been a shoddy Creator indeed were you unable to reproduce your chemical experiment. Therefore, evidence for God’s existence might be found in the emergence of predictability on our local scale from the wave peaks in the scale of quantum chaos.
You might wish you could devise some test which, resulting in A would mean God exists, whereas resulting in B would mean that He doesn’t. But because God is Spirit and therefore dwells in the heart of man (by “heart” we mean “essential core”), no test can be devised that is universal in nature. That is, every test for God must be subjective. His existence can be discerned only by your heart. Nothing but your personal experience can demostrate His existence. And unless your cells die as you read this sentence, your personal experience is an open set. You cannot know what is around the corner of the time line.
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And if you find your reasonable explanation, what will you have proved vis-a-vis God? How does the discovery of a “reasonable explanation” preclude His existence? Must God be unreasonable?
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With respect to A: It can be argued that there is a fifty percent likelyhood.
With respect to B: Deductive reason cannot prove the existence of anything (because of rules of tautology). But many of us have inductive proof, satisfactory to us, that God exists.
With respect to C: It might reasonably be argued that God’s connection to the universe is with those who believe in Him. (Why should he bother with those who don’t unless He is a bully?) But you might not like that because the existence of believers then would constitute proof of His existence.
With respect to D: Yes indeed, and that’s the beauty of it. You may believe in anything (or nothing) as you wish. Why is that beautiful? Because it makes you a free moral agent. Just like Him.
You raise your missing limb as an assertion in a debate, even though you know that your decision makes it fair game for discussion. Some will shy away from the topic of your missing leg as taboo, indeed ascribing to you an attribute that will surely disgust you — that of a pity seeker. But seeking pity is to be done on MPSIMS, not here. Therefore, you did not present your leg as an argumentum ad misericordiam, but as a condition upon which you would believe that God exists.
If God were in your leg, I could understand your point. But God is not in our legs; He is in our hearts. (And no, I don’t mean “a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood”[sup]1[/sup]; rather, I mean “the essential or most vital part of something”[sup]1[/sup].)
Would you be equally grateful whether your leg were restored by a physician or by God? If so, then why do you not blame the physician who also has not restored your leg? Why do you not blame medical science for not having discovered a method to restore your limb before you lost it? Perhaps you do not blame God for the loss of your leg. After all, there would be a paradox were you to blame that which you do not believe exists.
And yet, if he restored your leg, you would believe that He exists. It stands to reason that if God exists, then He knows that He exists. Therefore, your intellectual acknowledgement that He exists might not, from His Reference Frame, matter. The Spirit is undamaged by a lost or broken leg; but the Spirit is murdered by a cold or hardened heart. And the heart is all that matters. Stephen Hawking would be no greater a man could he stand up and walk. It could be argued that a greater miracle would be for God to restore the heart of a man rather than his leg, though He will do nothing at all without explicit consent.
God is the consumate Libertarian: He does not govern us without our consent.
“God is the consumate Libertarian: He does not govern us without our consent.”
Does that mean that if Libertarians win national office, that they would consign all those who don’t believe in them to life in jail? (the Earthly version of Hell)
Lib, a forced choice is not a real choice. If I hold a gun to your head and tell you,“Give me your wallet or I will blow your brains out-It’s your choice!”, would you think that it was a real choice? Your god supposedly created a place of eternal torment and suffering(surely a punnishment that far outweighs any sin that an imperfect mortal can come up with), then has the gall to tell us(indirectly through the words of other imperfect mortals) that we can either choose to worship him in just the right manner(choose from the thousands of ways given by those SAME imperfect mortals-good luck!) or suffer eternal torment without hope of parole, thus negating the supposed purpose of being imprisoned-to teach us a lesson that so we might better our lives.
At least Hannibal Lechter would talk directly to you before he ripped you apart.
FoG: This is also one of the problems I have with Christianity (see my post on the first page of this thread). Although one of the aspects of the Judeo/Christian god that I have gathered is that of being unknowable, this seems to defy all logic and mercy.
To me, the most important things Jesus said were: do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and, love thy neighbor as thyself. The Jesus personification, which is supposedly part of a trinity that is one god, urges us to be merciful to our neighbors, while his father would deny that same mercy to his earthly children.
So, my take on Christianity is to try (in my imperfect way) to go by those two things Jesus said, and ignore most of the rest of it.
I consider myself to be agnostic because of this, among other things.
Then again, not all atheists don’t want to believe in God.
**
Aha, but you forget that ice cream has no bones.
**
Including historical methodologies which come to the conclusion that the holocaust never happened?
Well, I think this is the same sort of offensive stuff we get from fundies all the time. Look, plenty of people are atheists because we searched for God, we desperately wanted to find God, and oftentimes we felt that our lives depended on finding Him, but we couldn’t find him, and we were dragged, kicking and screaming, to atheism.
How many times must we explain that to you people? I mean, what colossal arrogance to tell us that if only we bothered to look, we would find God staring us in the face!
Well, Fog, you’re the expert on why Christianity is better than all other religions, so why don’t you tell us?
People have asked you to explain the logic of Christianity, and all you’ve been able to do is essentially reiterate the statements which people asked you to explain. You have also essentially admitted that Christianity makes little sense, because God is beyond our understanding.
Since you ask us to examine the logic of Hinduism and Islam, why don’t you explain to us how any religion could possibly be less logical than your Christianity?
You mean that atheists can’t experience these radical changes in their lives?
**
In that case, you’ve changed the parameters of the discussion- my question was predicated on the idea that a perfect God wouldn’t screw up and create imperfect people. Now, however, you state that that is, in fact, what your deity did.
**
But this is just a wordgame. You can’t “choose” to survive jumping off the ESB- all you can do is choose to try.
Anyway, your whole explanation makes a hash of the problem of evil. Your deity won’t let us survive a fall from the ESB, he won’t create a situation in which we can succeed in being sinless- but he will let us kill each other?
**
And this is different from secular humanism how?
**
But again, this is nonsense. If your reasoning is correct, then it should also be the case that creating a situation in which everyone rejects you is also inconsistent with free will, and yet you claim that your deity created just such a situation.
How is my free will dependent on what other people decide in their hearts? If I were the only person your deity ever created, would I have free will, or do I need other people to exist, unbeknownst to me, possibly on other planets, who will choose the opposite of what I choose?
**
But this is a straw man. The question isn’t about your deity destroying people before they have a chance to reject him; it’s about choosing, of all those people whom he could create, those who would give him such tsuris.
Why didn’t your deity create Sherlock Holmes, or Darth Vader?
**
Well, this is just getting bizarre. You’re saying that your deity isn’t really omniscient, but just has all possible information ready at his fingertips in case he wants to check it out?
Well, Hannibal Lechter, meticulous as he is, might likely not pin on me some god that I don’t know. I challenge you to show where I have said anything remotely resembling what you have attributed to me.
Ben
You’re absolutely right.
If you put bones in it, ice cream has bones.
Any epistemology is valid. That includes an historical epistemology. People, on the other hand, can twist any epistemology to their ends. Reason is no exception.
Libertarian:
Everything you said with regard to my post makes sense. I think I’ve come to the essenstial nature of the impass. We are working from different sets of assumptions. You assume that the spirit of God exist as the essential nature of every person. There is no way I can refute that. I assume that science and reason can be used to find out the truth about people and the universe. There is no way (I don’t think) you can refute that. Neither of us can supply satifactory evidence to the other that our assumptions are correct. The problem is that if my assumptions don’t sit on firmer ground than yours, is my way of knowing any better than yours? I reluctantly forced to admit that it is not. I can only offer as a meek response that science and reason are more practical in this world, but you could respond that your philosophy will be more useful in the long run because it gets you in to heaven.
I suspect that you have gone over this before. BTW, the asumptions that I listed are probably only two of many we don’t share. Of course, this begs the question. If there are an infinite number of belief systems, all equally valid, how can anyone bring themselves to believe in any of them?
Both your intellect and your character are exemplary. You stand as an example to me and to everyone here. A person who is willing to explore will find whatever he seeks. A person who will respect others will command respect for himself.
One axiom that we likely do not share is that the atoms are not real. I see the universe as a probability field. Its purpose is to serve as an amoral context, like a mis-en-scène, within which we act out our moral play. I believe that what is real is the Spirit, i.e., the Living and Eternal Love.
As to how we come to believe what we believe, we can do no better than examine our own experience, since our consciousness is a closed reference frame — that is, you can experience no one else’s consciousness and no one else can experience yours — and then decide what epistemologies are practical toward what purpose we are practicing. I agree with you that reason and science best serve the purpose of examining the universe. But Love is the only epistemology that will serve the purpose of examining the Spirit.
I have been a silent and absorbed witness of the conversation between Dr. Lao and Libertarian. Please do not flame me too hard if I should have remained silent; I would like to address you a few thoughts.
Libertarian
You responded to Dr. Lao’s statement:
by saying:
I think this depends on what we mean by “freedom to believe.”
If it means “choose to believe despite absence of evidence”, I can’t personally believe anything. If I choose to believe something in the absence of sufficient information, it is no different than the choice of an inanimate dice.
When there is sufficient evidence, one cannot choose not to believe the conclusion; it would be like saying that one is free to be irrational. I don’t think honest atheists or agnostics choose to be irrational. I think they don’t believe because they really don’t see enough evidence. Refusing to believe in the absence of evidence is, I think, the only thing one can do that doesn’t imply intellectual suicide.
I think what actually makes us free moral agents is the freedom to act on what we believe. I am not free to believe something if it follows undoubtedly from the evidence; but I am free to act against it.
[Dr. Lao]
The level of honesty you display in your search for truth humbles me. It was said that you can only find truth with logic, if you have already found truth without it. Knowing full well that my opinion is of very little importance, I would like to say that I believe you are well on your way.
Oh, I agree with you completely. The evidence either way is always there. The meaningful choice that we make is twofold: (1) what exactly it is that we will search for, e.g. the attributes of God; and (2) whether the evidence we have found in our search is sufficient.
By the way, I agree with you about Dr. Lao. You and he both are fine contributors to the web’s best message board.
Thank you for the kind words :). I usually make an effort to understand why I disagree with someone. The reason why I do this goes back to an article I read in The Humanist called Why People Believe in God: An Empirical Study on a Deep Questionby Michael Shermer ( http://humanist.net/publications/humanist/nov-dec-99-humanist.html will take to a summary of the article and others in the nov/dec 99 issue of The Humanist, the full article isn’t online, unfortunately). One of the most interesting discoveries made by the researcher was that people most often gave very practical reasons for their belief in God, but gave mostly emotional reason for why they believed others believed in God. Atheists were the most likely to ascribe emotional reasons to others’ reasons for belief in God. I realized, and the article pointed this out, that this is a common response to people who disagree with you (in the article an example of a conservative thinking: I need to be able to freely buy a gun to protect my family, but that liberal wants to inact gun control because he is a bleeding-heart, knee-jerker who doesn’t understand the issue). When you think about it, there is a lot of truth there. Believing this falacy probably makes us feel more secure in our beliefs, but its clearly not right. Nearly everybody who speaks out on an issue has given it a great deal of thought, and that must be respected. And now, just as a right-back-at-ya, your intellectual clarity as well as your patience and respect for others make your posts a welcome addition to any discussion.
That’s correct. I believe what we can experience with our senses, either directly or indirectly, is as real as anything can be. That is why, perhaps, I get frustrated when people insist that God cannot be experienced in that way. To me, it is like saying he isn’t real, or he is less than real (whatever that means).
I would agree with this. However, I hope, as I think many others do, that we (by which I mean everybody) can come to some sort of consensus of belief. I think it is safe to say that most people feel more secure in their beliefs when others share them. Science is the ultimate consensus builder. I agree that our minds are closed moral reference frames, but there are many ways in which we are not closed off from others. We share the ability to observe, reason, and communicate. Using these abilities people can use science to come to a collective understanding about things. I’d like to stress that this collective understanding only makes people feel that it is more correct due to some aspect of human nature that makes us seek a consensus. I don’t think I’m ready to strike out on my own and find a philosphy that is entrierly my own, as you have done. Right now I’m searching for something that I can share with others, and hoping it works for me as well. Along these lines, science is effective.
I’m not convinced of that yet. I’m hoping that science is capable of finding something of the spirit you describe. That is to say, if it exists, science would find it.
Sometimes your short enigmatic statements can be frustrating. Other times, like this, they can be quite enlightening. Some may think this statement is a typo. You used the plural “go” instead of the singular “goes” when describing what God will do. I think, however, you are trying to say God is within us and around us, so the plural designation is appropriate. Am I right?
It’s apparently a reference to my comment in Lib’s Begging the Question thread, where I attempt to show that reason is a valid epistemology without using reason. (I note that, as of yet, no one has been able to disprove my argument. ) Currently it is often used to say essentially “well, if we’re not using reason to debate, we may as well just spout nonsense.” I just think the phrase is amusing; I first heard it as the punchline for a rather involved nonsensical joke.
) Currently it is often used to say essentially “well, if we’re not using reason to debate, we may as well just spout nonsense.” I just think the phrase is amusing; I first heard it as the punchline for a rather involved nonsensical joke.