However, just as in Christianity there are some must haves. When I went to Hebrew school over 50 years ago no one tried to pretend that the Flood and the Creation story really happened. Our history book started with Abram. However if Abraham is a myth there is no Covenant, and with no Covenant the basis of Judaism kind of falls apart. On the other hand if the Davidic empire did not exist, there is no big problem, except politically in some cases.
Of course Abraham is a myth! And that’s a very good thing from a Jewish point of view!
“Myth” is not the same as “hoax”, but many people pretend that there’s no difference. A myth is a story that stands for something very important in your life. A hoax, on the other hand, is not valuable - except to its perpetrator.
The total historical inaccuracy of the Abraham story is beside the point. It’s not being admitted as evidence in court. We don’t have triplicate signed copies of the covenant between God and Abraham. Sarah was obviously not over 90 when her first child was born. And so on … BUT… The story is part of the foundation of what it means to be Jewish. The obvious fact that things never happened in the way it describes is irrelevant to its foundational status.
Well, one supposes with Moses the prose is pro-woeses
Disposed to grow noses Pinocchio-sly
Some knows-it-all schmoeses exposes, opposes
But those us God choses did all goeses free.
You supposes that Moses did lead you to roses.
If so, you supposes erroneously.
Thoughts on the supposed conflict between the need for faith and the possibility of proof:
Even if it were possible to definitively prove the existence of God (and I don’t think it is, at least not without begging the question, but some people apparently do), there would still be elements of religion that require faith.
Sometimes faith is required, not to overcome intellectual doubts, but to overcome intuition or emotion or imagination or fears. An example might be the faith it takes to get on an airplane when you can’t imagine how a thing that big can stay up in the air. And this might relate to Hellestal’s earlier post: what do you do when you have rational proof or evidence that contradicts your subjective feelings?
There are many things that have been scientifically proven that I, personally, take on faith, because I haven’t had direct experience of the observations they’re based on, and/or I haven’t taken the time and intellectual effort to work through the evidence and arguments.
One of the things that fascinates me about the proofs offered is that the person offering tends to expect them to be convincing to non-believers in spite of really basic, fundamental flaws. For example, “Everything requires a cause, therefore something must have caused everything else to exist, and what caused everything is God”. It fails at the basic logic level; if everything requires a cause then so does God, and if God doesn’t then the axiom the argument is based on isn’t true in the first place. And it fails to establish any connection between the thing that caused other things that happened and the proof-offerer’s religion; it really only supports a claim for belief in God if you’re a strict Deist, because “God” as meant by the Bible, Torah, Koran, or whatever does a lot more than just cause the universe, and the proof doesn’t show anything about that. It’s not just someone offering a proof instead of saying ‘faith’, it’s that the proof really just doesn’t work for what they want it to in multiple fundamental ways.
Religious belief comes in a lot of flavors.
The dichotomy between faith and scientific knowledge is not one that a lot of religious believers have really put a lot of thought into. It’s great that you know Christians with a strong science background who have what the Jesuits might call an examined belief, and have intellectually separated the concept of their God from the scientific method of examining the physical universe, but that is not a chartacteristic of most religious people, which means most people.
To most people, the sum total of things they believe to be true are Things That Are True. For a typical believer, “God is real,” “Jesus rose on the third day,” or “I will be reincarnated in accordance with my karma, until I achieve moksha” are things that are simply true. They belong in the hopper with “Cats have whiskers,” “Steak tastes better than dirt,” and “If you add positive numbers together you get bigger numbers,” and a zillion other things.
Where “Jesus is my Saviour” is different from “Ice is cold” is that it serves as a marker of personal identity and social belonging. Believing in Jesus is a huge sociopolitical element of the way a person relates with the world, to an extent that believing “horses are mammals” does not. The believer is thus presented with a problem, in that religious beliefs are unprovable and upon examination are inconsistent with observed facts - a problem other types of beliefs generally do not present (though they sometimes do.)
A believer needs a coping strategy to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the fact that, say, literal belief in the Bible is inconsistent with many other observable facts. As you have noted, some people will dismiss the literalness of the Bible. Other options include simply ignoring some elements of the text, or adopting the position of “The hell with it, it’s faith.” But yet another is to refuse to accept the contradiction; this, the industry for “proving” religious texts to be true.
It is impossible to overstate how emotionally important this can be. The person trying to prove to you that the Red Sea was parted by Moses despite the fact that there isn’t even any evidence the Jews were in Egypt in the first place isn’t doing this because he’s stupid; in fact, it would be much easier if he WAS stupid, because he’d be ignorant of the facts that makes the story kind of ridiculous. He’s trying to resolve it because the truth of the Bible is emotionally impossible for him to abandon, but the inherent reliability of science and fact is equally hard to ignore.
This sort of behavior is common in people with conflicting beliefs. How many times have you met a parent who refused to believe that their child did something horrible no matter how proven it is? Some will adopt a faith approach; my kid did not do that, and that’s all there is to it. Others, though, will try to spin the facts, reinterpret them, dig for contradicting evidence, because their emotional response and their understanding of the need for factual explanation are in unresolvable conflict.
That’s because “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” People repeat arguments that they’ve heard elsewhere, but (1) sometimes they get the arguments wrong, leaving out key qualifications. (2) They’re unaware of the history of objections to those arguments. and (3) They think the arguments prove more than they do.
The example you give is an oversimplification of one of Thomas Aquinas’s arguments. And, it is argued here, he didn’t consider them “proofs.”
Speaking of Aquinas, it appears that he also raised the OP’s objection:
Aquinas’s response:
There are two obvious answers to this question.
One, EVANGELICAL Christians, yes I am shouting, believe that people who do not believe and practice pretty much exactly the way they do will suffer eternal torment and hence it is an absolute necessity of their faith that they convert as many unbelievers as possible, as an act of the most urgent charity.
Evangelicals represent a minority of Christians worldwide, although a majority in some areas. The majority of Christians do not believe this, or at least have a nuanced view, and hence are not proselytizers.
Two, the context of usual argument in this modern world is the scientific method, very broadly speaking. This is a new development in history. Evangelicals have had to confront the abyss between their literalist reading of the Bible plus imperative to ‘go and make disciples’ and the modern reliance on peer-reviewed double blind studies. The result is comically sad to say the least.
But, this is simply not a dilemma to the majority of Christians, by which I mean Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox. They don’t feel the two realms need to be reconciled as they exist on separate planes, as it were. There is no attempt to scientifically prove God exists or biblical events happened exactly as described.
The religious discourse in the USA is dominated by a specific, crude, loud, proudly ignorant cultural strain of evangelical Christian, but it is not the whole of the story.
“I believe in baseball” can mean different things.
It can mean “In my opinion, baseball is a worthwhile activity, and I frequently participate in it myself”.
Or it can mean “In my opinion, there exists a game called baseball”.
The first meaning is fair enough, but the second meaning is either trivial or foolish, depending on whether such a game exists. “Believing in” something’s (or someone’s) existence is always either trivial or foolish.
I believe I’ll have another drink.
Exactly.
“The consensus of modern scholars is that the Bible does not give an accurate account of the origins of Israel.[27] There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula shows almost no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE, and even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy.[28] Such elements as could be fitted into the 2nd millennium could equally belong to the 1st, and are consistent with a 1st millennium BCE writer trying to set an old story in Egypt.[29] So while a few scholars, notably Kenneth Kitchen and James K. Hoffmeier, continue to discuss the historicity, or at least plausibility, of the story, arguing that the Egyptian records have been lost or suppressed or that the fleeing Israelites left no archaeological trace or that the large numbers are mistranslated, the majority have abandoned the investigation as “a fruitless pursuit”.[30][31]”
Pretty much everything before King Ahaz is legend*. But some of the debunkers go too far. It is a fact that Egypt conquered that area now called Israel. Every time Egypt conquered a land, they took slaves- thousands of slaves. So, even tho they didnt specify Jewish slaves (later, after the exodus they did) it goes against all reason that somehow the worshippers of a obscure monotheistic deity were excluded. And sure, some of them could have escaped during the turmoil that occurred in Egypt during that period and brought new and interesting civilized ways of warfare with them. Even wiki says “*A historical Moses associated with a small group may have been later generalised into the savior of Israel,…” *. Obviously the numbers associated with the Exodus are myth, however.
*Yes, there was a David, but other than him founding a "House of David’ that is about all we know of him, other than from the OT, and most of the early bits are recounting legend… based upon some fact, but we dont know what is fact.
Sure.
However, scientific method has no capability to address the supernatural.
Anything said about God clearly does not come from science.
I think we need to look in places other than “proof” of anything about the supernatural to figure out how to get along. All it does is promote a conflict.
That’s because the scientific method actually discourages making shit up.
I don’t think bowing down to nonsense(or even just pretending to bow down) just to avoid a “conflict” serves anyone in the long run. The basic flaw in how woo “addresses the supernatural” is that a consensus isn’t even needed to make woosters happy. I’m sorry, but I’ve got enough on the table working with the real world without having to worry about stepping on the toes of untold number of different people and their untold number of different fantasy worlds.
Please don’t insult other posters in any way. If you want to debate then debate
No warning issued.
I haven’t read the whole topic so this may be redundant, but the answer seems obvious to me. Humans are inherently curious and wish to explore their surroundings. One of the ways they do this is by testing their presuppositions. I believe whole-heartedly that water is necessary for life, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want proof of that.
I think your problem is a typical atheist problem in which you have discovered the ‘truth’ and therefore everyone else is just acting in bad faith. That’s not really the situation at all. Religious believers are acting in good faith. They are strong in their convictions, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t test their own presuppositions or deny reason. They want proof of their assertions just as much as you do. They may value faith and most people do value faith to some degree–being a trusting person is generally a mark of someone who doesn’t practice much deceit themselves. At the same time, wanting more concrete proof is perfectly natural. Just as doubt is a normal part of the human condition. When my physics professor tells me about special relativity, I may have faith that he’s right, but I also have doubts. Seeking proof doesn’t mean I don’t believe in physics or that I have no faith in my professor. It merely seeks confirmation of those assertions even though I believe them to be true.
Sorry. I will be more respectful.
Disregarding your misunderstanding of atheism and its supposed problems, when your physics professor tells you about special relativity and you(for whatever reason) have doubts, what is stopping you from looking further into the subject and learning about special relativity? The trouble with “learning” about ghosties and goulies and gods is that there is no actual consensus on who, what and/or where they are-its all just a bunch of conflicting opinions.
I don’t understand your issue here. Are you saying that if there isn’t consensus on a valid way to research a problem then I’m wasting my time? That seems rather self-defeating. If Aristotle didn’t challenge Plato despite there not being consensus, we’d still be talking about forms (although who knows? Maybe we should be.) When presented with multiple opinions, even those without clear answers or even clear ways to find the answers, we can still look further into the problem and attempt to invent ways to approach them. The transcendent is certainly problematic because by its nature it defys physicalist methods of proof. This doesn’t mean that it either doesn’t exist or definitionally is unable to be known. It means that we have to use non-physicalist methods to attempt to arrive at the truth of any propositions regarding it.