Yes I do believe they have holes, and I want to say that I genuinely appreciate your polite response and request. For example, I believe he said the question, "who created God?" was his strongest argument. However, this question doesn't seem to pose much of a problem for Christianity. I don't see why one must say that God was created by anyone or anything. Why must God have a creator? Things which begin to exist may need a creator, but why think God began to exist?
The question is more precisely phrased, "Why is there a god instead of no god?". If we ask "why is there a universe instead of no universe", a Christian would reply that god created it, regardless of whether the nature of time is such that the universe had a beginning or ever began to exist. I think you would agree that even if the universe were discovered to be eternal in both the past and the future, it might still make sense to say that god created it. Certainly we can conceive of the idea that god could have instead chosen to create nothing, and there would be no universe - only nothingness. Similarly, we can conceive of the idea that god could never have existed, and there would instead only be nothingness. It's fair then to ask why god does exist rather than doesn't exist.
So, why does god exist instead of not existing, in your view?
My recollection is that Dawkins sees this as not only an argument against the theistic one you described but against the existence of God himself, but maybe I am mistaken. As a response to a theistic argument I am less interested as I don't really make theistic arguments myself… though I imagine a theist could respond with, A: God exists out of necessity just as concepts and logic itself cannot really not exist… or B: It doesn't really make sense to ask why God exists rather than not exists as if he exists he is a necessary being. A necessary being exists necessarily… and therefore by definition it is impossible for such a being to not exist. Likewise it seems impossible for it not to be the case that 1+1=2 and it doesn't make sense to really ask why is it that 1+1 does not = 3? Regardless, if Dawkins only point is to give a response to a theistic argument I don't really care that much as I believe God is accessed primarily by personal experience rather than argument. However, it seems to me that he or at least many in popular culture see this as seriously undercutting faith in God which is not the case .
My point was to say that Richard Dawkins certainly thinks he has reasons which he explains as to why it is irrational to believe in God. Maybe you are right and he didn't think he has disproven God.
I have no idea what Richard Dawkins believes, outside of him being a verbal opponent to Christianity. I've never read his books. My understanding is he's what we would call a hard atheist, someone who believes in God's nonexistence, but I don't actually know because I've never read anything by him.
What I'm trying to say is that arguments against Christianity don't always take the form of actively trying to disprove God. There's also people saying that the burden of proof hasn't been met by those who would argue that God does exist. Those are two different arguments, and it's important to distinguish them.
I think that while I agree that evolution and genesis may have a hard time resolving,
No. No. No.
Not "hard time resolving." Impossible time resolving. It is impossible to resolve them. Genesis 1 is directly contradicted by:
1. Biology
2. Physics
3. Genesis 2
You cannot resolve the differences between them.
The only reason one would claim anything otherwise is because they've decided beforehand that everything the Bible says is correct automatically, which is a practice I have a big problem with because it's wrong and illogical and leads to contradictions like the above. It stems from intellectual laziness, the person is unwilling to challenge assertions out of a lack of willingness to confront the possibility that he is wrong.
that doesn't mean ultimately that Jesus Christ was not the son of God in the way described in the bible.
No, I didn't say it did. Genesis can be totally wrong in every way and it would not have any bearing on any other book of the Bible composed separately from it.
However, here's something we need to look at: What do you mean by "the son of God"?
Because nobody really knows what Jesus meant by "Son of God," or "Son of Man" for that matter. "Son of God" could mean any of a number of different things in the time period Jesus spoke of.
After all, long before evolutionary theory Augustine was interpreting Genesis nonliterary.
You mean "non-literally," right? If so, then you're not getting it.
Genesis contains two separate stories about the universe's creation. Both of them do not match the universe's creation. They are both incorrect.
Now this is fine in itself. There's no reason to expect people from antiquity to know how the world was created. They made up stories to explain what they couldn't.
The problem is people are approaching Genesis with the expectation that everything in it is true, because they decided beforehand that if it's written in the Bible it must be correct. THAT is the problem. When these people read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, they will read two separate creation myths about how the universe came to be that are not in accordance with how the universe actually came to be. If they continue along the belief that anything in the Bible must be true, they will then conclude:
1. The two creation stories in Genesis are not two separate stories, but one story that agrees with itself.
2. Genesis must describe how the universe was created.
Both of these conclusions are incorrect.
And expanding on conclusion #2, it doesn't matter whether or not you're advocating a literal or metaphorical interpretation. Neither of them work. A literal interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact. A metaphorical interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact, and also because it doesn't actually say how, exactly, Genesis 1 and 2 is supposed to be a metaphor for the creation of the universe.
People will make arguments that Genesis accurately describes our scientific understanding of how everything came to be, but those arguments are baseless because there's nothing in Genesis that describes our understanding of how everything came to be. It's a logical fallacy we call begging the question, in which people use the conclusion they're attempting to prove as evidence for itself, presuming it is true before actually proving it.
Most importantly, for God to have spoken through the bible it doesn't mean the bible is without all possible error.
What? No, that's precisely what it means. If the Bible is The Word of God, it would be without error and contradiction. If it has errors, it cannot be the Word of God unless God is in error. If it contradicts, it cannot be the Word of God unless God contradicts himself.
My recollection is that Dawkins sees this as not only an argument against the theistic one you described but against the existence of God himself, but maybe I am mistaken. As a response to a theistic argument I am less interested as I don't really make theistic arguments myself… though I imagine a theist could respond with, A: God exists out of necessity just as concepts and logic itself cannot really not exist… or B: It doesn't really make sense to ask why God exists rather than not exists as if he exists he is a necessary being. A necessary being exists necessarily… and therefore by definition it is impossible for such a being to not exist. Likewise it seems impossible for it not to be the case that 1+1=2 and it doesn't make sense to really ask why is it that 1+1 does not = 3? Regardless, if Dawkins only point is to give a response to a theistic argument I don't really care that much as I believe God is accessed primarily by personal experience rather than argument. However, it seems to me that he or at least many in popular culture see this as seriously undercutting faith in God which is not the case .
Can the Universe be a necessary entity which must exist, or does the universe require an external explanation, whereas God does not?
Many of the arguments for a common ancestor could very easily also be made for a common designer.
Actually, the strongest evidence of common ancestry is very difficult to reconcile with the theory of a common designer. When biologists perform cladistic analysis to determine which organisms are closest related, they group them by the physiological features they have in common. This, I suspect, is what you are referring to. However, what you may not realize is that biologists try to disregard the functional features of organisms, features which have a purpose in the organism's life. Take wings for example. Birds have wings, and bats have wings, but it would be erroneous to conclude that birds and bats are closely related. The problem for your common designer argument is that these are precisely the features it must appeal to. Designers design things towards a purpose. And in a sense, birds and bats do have a common designer, but it is not God, it is the process of natural selection applied to the necessities and peculiarities of an aerial lifestyle. That "common designer" has given them very similar functional features in spite of their not being related.
To determine what organisms are related to, biologists look at their nonfunctional and maladaptive features, features that are not the result of a design process like God or natural selection but instead were passed on genetically in spite of evolutionary changes. For a famous human example, we can tell that the members of the Habsburg dynasty are related because of their pronounced familial underbite; there's no other reason for them to have that feature, since it doesn't serve any purpose. In biology, we know that birds are descended from dinosaurs because of certain peculiarities in the shape of their hip bones that, again, have no reason to be there other than heredity. And how do we know that all vertebrates are descended from a common ancestor? It's not because they all have backbones; a common design process could have given animals of different clades backbones independently of each other, like it did with wings in the case of birds and bats. It's because every vertebrate has the same design mistake: a 180-degree twist in the nerves coming out of the brain that result in the left brain controlling the right side of the body and the right brain controlling the left side of the body. Yet again, there's no reason for this feature to be there. An independently-designed vertebrate could very easily have right-brain-right-body correspondence. But somehow, our common ancestor got this twist, and it passed it on to all succeeding generations.
And then there's the human species. It is very, very obvious to an anatomist that we evolved from quadrupeds rather than being designed a priori for a bipedal lifestyle. Our bodies preserve a number of quadruped features that do nothing for us or actively hinder us. We have vestigial tails. Our lower backs curve rather than being load-bearing vertical columns, leading to frequent injuries. Our respiratory passage has to bend to get from the lungs to the mouth, creating a choking hazard, which is only exacerbated by the fact that our larynx has moved up and our pharynx down to enable speech. Again, it is the mistakes that give us productive cladistic analysis, not the design features.
It stems from a misunderstanding of Thomistic doctrine. He was a medieval philosopher who claimed that if the universe had a beginning that it needed a cause as explanation for this beginning. He then went into great detail as to what properties such a cause must have had to create a finite universe. Dawkins on the other hand erroneously equates the universe having a cause to everything having a cause which is very much a straw-man. Aquinas would have no problem in thinking that eternal things having no cause. He only posited that things with beginnings necessitate a cause.
Aquinas' argument is by no means sound, but you're right that Dawkins has a habit of strawmanning it.
My point was to say that Richard Dawkins certainly thinks he has reasons which he explains as to why it is irrational to believe in God. Maybe you are right and he didn't think he has disproven God. However, we all know he is not just indifferent on the issue but thinks religion is an irrational idiotic thing to believe. This, in itself is a belief requiring justification. Why should I believe religion is irrational and idiotic? That is the view I am challenging in this post. Someone who just genuinely doesn't have a view on whether God exists isn't in the camp of Dawkins and we all know it. And it simply doesn't follow that just because I cannot prove God to you, or give you a convincing argument that God exists, that he doesn't.
The existence of God and the idiocy of religion are two separate topics for debate. One might argue that religion as humans practice it is a bad thing because of terrorism and authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism and so on, even if it turns out that God exists. Dawkins, in particular, dwells on that sort of religious idiocy a lot; it seems to be the source of his hostility far more than the comparatively abstract question of God's existence. So let's try to keep this distinction in mind.
You are right that your inability to prove God does not prove the nonexistence of God. You are also right that atheists have not disproven God, and most (including Dawkins) do not claim to have done so. Where you go wrong is in assuming that, in the absence of absolute disproof, there is no reason to prefer one position or the other, and you can reasonably decide to believe in God if you wish. Even without disproof, it is still irrational to believe in God. The existence of God is an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. You cannot consistently go around believing every extraordinary claim you hear; your head would explode. So to believe in the God claim while not believing in the claim of, say, an alien spacecraft crashing in Roswell in 1957, you have to be inconsistent. You have to privilege the former claim over the latter with no objective reason to do so. And that's irrational.
A: God exists out of necessity just as concepts and logic itself cannot really not exist… or B: It doesn't really make sense to ask why God exists rather than not exists as if he exists he is a necessary being. A necessary being exists necessarily… and therefore by definition it is impossible for such a being to not exist. Likewise it seems impossible for it not to be the case that 1+1=2 and it doesn't make sense to really ask why is it that 1+1 does not = 3?
Necessity isn't a property that some facts just randomly have. To be necessary, a proposition must follow absolutely and inescapably from the premises that obtain in its frame: you have to prove it. So it does make sense to ask why 1 + 1 = 2. Mathematical proofs of this fact exist, and if they didn't, we would not be justified in thinking that it is necessary. So to claim at the outset that God is necessary is equivalent to claiming that you have proof of God, without, y'know, actually having proof of God. It's circular reasoning.
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I've always found the question of who "really" has the burden of proof to be the problem with most of these kinds of arguments, to refute what Jay13x articulates on page 1. That is, both sides feel the "other side" needs to shoulder the burden of proof.
In my opinion, the person trying to do the convincing needs to shoulder the burden. As in, if the Christian is trying to convince the atheist, then it is the Christian's job to shoulder the burden. But, if the atheist is trying to change the Christian's mind, then it's the atheist that needs to shoulder then burden of proof.
If I tell you I think Vanilla Ice Cream is the best kind of Ice Cream -but have no proof- you telling me that most people used to like chocolate the most, and some don't like Ice Cream at all, isn't going to change my mind. Additionally, telling me that some people have never had ice cream and therefore don't like Vanilla the best, and -in fact- I was born without liking any kind of Ice Cream -again- these kinds of arguments aren't going to be convincing. My default understanding -with or without proof- would be Vanilla Ice Cream is the best kind of Ice Cream. If you wanted me to accept it's not I would want you to prove it to me, despite the fact I'm the one making an assertion.
It seems like people on both sides of the theist debate seem to feel they're position is the "default" position, because -for them- it IS. This is often why -I think- people -like Tromokratis1- seem to think the "other side" has weak arguments. Because the vast majority of the arguments are relying on this idea that the other side has to prove something.
I would agree that in a vacuum the side making the claim (the theist, not the agnostic atheist) would have to back that claim up. If belief worked like a formal philosophical debate, then the agnostic atheist would have a strong position. But, this would only be because the agnostic atheist needs to do less work. If the "fight" was between the theist and the 100% atheist (like it probably should be in a fair debate) nether side would really "win." Additionally -in my experience- belief doesn't work like a formal philosophical debate. Humans simply aren't wired that way.
If they are already believe something, and you want to change it, then YOU have to shoulder the burden of proof to be convincing.
However, often the best way to do this -again in my experience- is to undermined why they believe what they believe and show it's not a "good reason." But, that's often different for each person and takes effort. (BS is now -basically- undertaking this with Tromokratis1. You'll note BS is essentially the one shouldering the burden of proof to disprove misconceptions, even though -in the larger perspective- BS is the weak atheist.)
I had hoped that someone else (someone not a Christian, basically) would have responded to that =(
I mean, I gave you what I understand to be the cosmological answer. As I understand it, we don't know whether time began at the Big Bang, and as such, we don't know whether there was a "before the Big Bang."
Oh don't misunderstand. Didn't mean to be a slight against you or anything. I just wanted to talk with non-Christians here about how they reconcile the concept that "everything comes out of something" and the concept of the Big Bang.
"Everything comes out of something" is a concept that theists use to try to jumpstart ontological arguments for the existence of God. Atheists don't need to be committed to it. If we don't know what, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, then clearly we don't know that everything comes from something.
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Oh don't misunderstand. Didn't mean to be a slight against you or anything. I just wanted to talk with non-Christians here about how they reconcile the concept that "everything comes out of something" and the concept of the Big Bang.
The idea of a Ex nihilo universe can be scientifically explained by the zero-energy universe hypothesis, which essentially explores the possibility the universe is a quantum bubble in the Dirac sea.
On a more fundamental level, the idea "everything comes out of something" is a corollary of Causality (cause and effect). Since Causality itself is in scientific question because of Quantum Mechanics (most notably Bell's theorem and subsequent experimental tests) there really is no reason to hold that "everything comes out of something" is a fundamental truth. In fact, science is currently leaning in the direction that it's wrong.
We could go round and round about whether or not God or the Laws of Physics are eternal, but in both cases we have to assume Causality doesn't apply to SOMETHING.
Not "hard time resolving." Impossible time resolving. It is impossible to resolve them.
I do actually have sympathy with your view. Personally I think it is quite possible for some of the literal facts of the creation narrative to be wrong while the fundamental purpose of the story in God's mind to not be a literal account of the facts but a story about humanity which is sometimes allegorical. There are important considerations when thinking about this matter. We are not only dealing with a rational consideration of an ancient document. We are dealing with the consideration of the possible being of God. If God does exist perhaps, as the apostle Paul suggests, it wouldn't be fair (or maybe even impossible) to make the greatest good (experiential knowledge of Him) dependent upon one's ability to humanly reason. This would be worse than ultra capitalism, where all blessing would come not based on how moral or how humble one is, but based on one's intelligence.
However, here's something we need to look at: What do you mean by "the son of God"?
Because nobody really knows what Jesus meant by "Son of God," or "Son of Man" for that matter. "Son of God" could mean any of a number of different things in the time period Jesus spoke of.
I would contend that Jesus really makes clear what is necessary to follow and know about him. It's not really so much about interpreting the title, "son of God" (though there are a few ways which we can interpret it… he gives Old Testament quotations which can help us know what he meant where a "son of man" is mentioned "coming in the clouds")… but personally I was just using the term as shorthand for our purposes. Whatever it really meant isn't really that important as we have four books full of information of Jesus teaching as well as letters written by some of his early followers.
The problem is people are approaching Genesis with the expectation that everything in it is true, because they decided beforehand that if it's written in the Bible it must be correct. THAT is the problem.
We actually might be in agreement. I would say the problem is that people expect everything to be inerrant. However, I do believe the book to have the inspiration of God in it.
And expanding on conclusion #2, it doesn't matter whether or not you're advocating a literal or metaphorical interpretation. Neither of them work. A literal interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact. A metaphorical interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact, and also because it doesn't actually say how, exactly, Genesis 1 and 2 is supposed to be a metaphor for the creation of the universe.
I have a lot of sympathy with your view and I have many times wondered if this was a conclusive objection. However, I really do not think it is and let me explain why. The purpose of the bible could be not, as you have been told, that the bible is to be an inerrant infallible book. In fact, that would seem to make idolatry of the bible very difficult to avoid. The purpose could be a more humble approach where God communicates to us important things through the bible. These truths need not be discovered as a lawyer reasons from the law, these truths can be discovered in a more comprehensive fashion both thorough the bible and through the experience of the Holy Spirit, who is said to guide believers into all truth.
What? No, that's precisely what it means. If the Bible is The Word of God, it would be without error and contradiction. If it has errors, it cannot be the Word of God unless God is in error. If it contradicts, it cannot be the Word of God unless God contradicts himself.
I think it is actually quite more complex than that. Imagine I am a messenger of a King and he gives me a message to communicate to others. He may be totally fine with paraphrasing the message to the others… the goal may be to get the "gist" of the message, the fundamental content but not the exact words. I think you are actually ironically interpreting the bible more as a fundamentalist Christian would and fundamentalist Christians tend to see things such as interpreting the bible more in black and white and not recognizing that life has grey areas. There is no contradiction to say that God has spoken decisively through the bible and that it could contain errors. Just as if the messenger of the King got a few of the details wrong, yet he still communicated the most important parts clearly… he correctly got the "gist" of the message across, he would have communicated the message of his King successfully.
My recollection is that Dawkins sees this as not only an argument against the theistic one you described but against the existence of God himself, but maybe I am mistaken. As a response to a theistic argument I am less interested as I don't really make theistic arguments myself… though I imagine a theist could respond with, A: God exists out of necessity just as concepts and logic itself cannot really not exist… or B: It doesn't really make sense to ask why God exists rather than not exists as if he exists he is a necessary being. A necessary being exists necessarily… and therefore by definition it is impossible for such a being to not exist. Likewise it seems impossible for it not to be the case that 1+1=2 and it doesn't make sense to really ask why is it that 1+1 does not = 3? Regardless, if Dawkins only point is to give a response to a theistic argument I don't really care that much as I believe God is accessed primarily by personal experience rather than argument. However, it seems to me that he or at least many in popular culture see this as seriously undercutting faith in God which is not the case .
Can the Universe be a necessary entity which must exist, or does the universe require an external explanation, whereas God does not?
I don't know… I haven't really dealt with the Leibnitzian Cosmological argument much. However, Leibnitz, and I think rightly so, allowed for something to have an explanation without a cause. God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused. But really I don't think this is all that important as it has to do with one argument for the existence of God and therefore isn't a challenge to the existence of God.
Even without disproof, it is still irrational to believe in God. The existence of God is an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.
First, I would say that I am not sure the existence of God is all that extraordinary. The vast majority of the world's population believe in God or something like God… who are you to say it is so extraordinarily improbable that we must have extraordinary evidence? (I'm not saying a lot of people believe it therefore it is true… I am saying that your contention that God is extraordinarily improbable is not shared by most people and cannot just be taken as assumed)
You cannot consistently go around believing every extraordinary claim you hear; your head would explode. So to believe in the God claim while not believing in the claim of, say, an alien spacecraft crashing in Roswell in 1957, you have to be inconsistent. You have to privilege the former claim over the latter with no objective reason to do so. And that's irrational.
This is not true. I have many good reasons to prefer the existence of God over the Roswell spacecraft. First, I am confident that I have experienced the existence God at a spiritual level. I have had no such experience of spacecrafts. You may contend that this is not "objective," because it cannot be demonstrated to others. However, it is very possible to rationally believe something is true without being able to demonstrate it. Imagine that you are accused of a crime that you know you didn't commit. You were at home at the time. However, due to an extremely unlikely series of coincidences all the evidence points to you. Wouldn't you be rationally justified in believing that you did not commit the crime even though you are basing your belief on personal experience which cannot be demonstrated to others? If so you have accepted that we are rational to believe things based on experience even if this cannot be demonstrated to others. Likewise I believe in God based primarily on experience even though I cannot demonstrate it to others. You can't just assume it is irrational because I can't prove it.
I don't know… I haven't really dealt with the Leibnitzian Cosmological argument much. However, Leibnitz, and I think rightly so, allowed for something to have an explanation without a cause. God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused. But really I don't think this is all that important as it has to do with one argument for the existence of God and therefore isn't a challenge to the existence of God.
The argument that Dawkins is making is that it is foolish to keep adding to a chain of inexplicable explanations. If we accept that things need to have explanations, then we've dug ourselves a pretty deep hole by suggesting that god explains things. If it was hard to explain the universe, it's -really- hard to explain god. Dawkins' point is that, faced with this challenge of an inexplicable god, we're better to keep our hypothesis simple, and favor an explanation that does not raise more unanswerable questions. As long as we accept that things can be self-necessary, we might as well suspect that the universe is such a thing.
Obviously, this does not disprove god. But Dawkins never claims it does. If you're looking for this argument to disprove god, that's a problem on your end.
God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused.
You may also want to put some thought into just what constitutes an explanation. If you were in a math class, confronted with a theorem you didn't quite understand, and you asked the professor to explain -- would you be satisfied if he answered "because it's necessary?" It's a perfectly true answer; mathematical truths are necessary. But I don't expect such an answer would satisfy your desire for explanation, nor should it. When you ask for an explanation, you're asking why it's necessary.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
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It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I don't know… I haven't really dealt with the Leibnitzian Cosmological argument much. However, Leibnitz, and I think rightly so, allowed for something to have an explanation without a cause. God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused. But really I don't think this is all that important as it has to do with one argument for the existence of God and therefore isn't a challenge to the existence of God.
The argument that Dawkins is making is that it is foolish to keep adding to a chain of inexplicable explanations. If we accept that things need to have explanations, then we've dug ourselves a pretty deep hole by suggesting that god explains things. If it was hard to explain the universe, it's -really- hard to explain god. Dawkins' point is that, faced with this challenge of an inexplicable god, we're better to keep our hypothesis simple, and favor an explanation that does not raise more unanswerable questions. As long as we accept that things can be self-necessary, we might as well suspect that the universe is such a thing.
Obviously, this does not disprove god. But Dawkins never claims it does. If you're looking for this argument to disprove god, that's a problem on your end.
Here is what Dawkins argues…
On pages 157-8 of his book, (the God delusion) Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." It goes as follows:
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
Dawkins thinks this shows God "almost certainly does not exist." (his words)
One philosopher sums up well a response, "At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in Him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism."
God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused.
You may also want to put some thought into just what constitutes an explanation. If you were in a math class, confronted with a theorem you didn't quite understand, and you asked the professor to explain -- would you be satisfied if he answered "because it's necessary?" It's a perfectly true answer; mathematical truths are necessary. But I don't expect such an answer would satisfy your desire for explanation, nor should it. When you ask for an explanation, you're asking why it's necessary.
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
He is saying without a good explanation the answer is unsatisfying. (And I would go on to say "arbitrary" as well, but that's not what Crashing00 said.)
People like reasons for things. They don't like "Because I said so" as an answer.
On pages 157-8 of his book, (the God delusion) Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." It goes as follows:
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
Dawkins thinks this shows God "almost certainly does not exist." (his words)
One philosopher sums up well a response, "At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in Him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism."
Sure, so you need a bit more context from his book than the pared-down version of his pared-down bullet points. What he is talking about is the idea that very complicated things seem quite improbable - the universe is improbable, life is improbable, etc. And, he suggests, God is improbable. Faced with the suggestion of an apparently improbable thing, we are justified in concluding that it probably does not exist, unless we have some explanation for how that improbability is to be overcome.
Luckily, for life we have evolution that explains much of how its complexity could arise. In the case of the universe, we are not quite as well off, but we still have some decent ideas that offer some degree of explanation. In the case of god, however, we're pretty much stuck. The very nature of god as he is traditionally defined seems to defy any attempts to justify his existence. He cannot arise from simplicity like life, or from nothingness like the universe. So, facing that, we must conclude that god very likely does not exist. He is extremely improbable by his nature, and we have no way of explaining how that improbability can be overcome.
The full quote of his bullet point #3 makes this argument a bit clearer:
The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
He is not simply rejecting the argument from design and thereby concluding that god probably doesn't exist. Surely no one would be so foolish as to think that refuting one possible argument among accomplishes that. He's attempting to turn the argument from design around, and use it against the idea of god. He then notes that while life and the universe seem to have ways out of the argument from design, god does not. Note that this is not a proof that god does note exist, but rather an argument that we should regard that hypothesis as extremely unlikely, and prefer those explanations that seem to be both simpler and provide better explanatory power.
This all may have been a bit clearer if you had taken your quote directly from his book rather than an article which cleverly cuts out Dawkins' actual argument just because it doesn't happen to be in the first sentence of each bullet point.
I do actually have sympathy with your view. Personally I think it is quite possible for some of the literal facts of the creation narrative to be wrong while the fundamental purpose of the story in God's mind to not be a literal account of the facts but a story about humanity which is sometimes allegorical.
No, see, this is the problem I have with arguments like this. The only reason you're not arguing it is a literal account of creation is because we have achieved the scientific understanding to demonstrate it isn't, which means you understand that the Genesis stories are not factual accounts of creation.
Yet, you're still deciding that they're true. Why? Why do you believe that they are true? What is it in them that demonstrates them to be factual accounts of creation?
As for saying they're allegorically true, do you know what an allegory is? Like, not being condescending, but actual question: do you know what an allegory is? An allegory is a story in which the characters and events in the story are symbolic, and a message — whether that message be moral, political, philosophical, or religious — is conveyed through this medium. So when you say something is an allegory, you have to point out what the various characters and events in the story symbolize, and what meaning this conveys. That's what makes an allegory different from any other story.
So demonstrate how it's an allegory.
There are important considerations when thinking about this matter. We are not only dealing with a rational consideration of an ancient document. We are dealing with the consideration of the possible being of God.
What reason do we possibly have to think that this document has God's authority or authorship? There are numerous documents written about God. Why should we consider this Genesis, which is a collection of numerous oral traditions that were compiled into a document that was edited and redacted numerous times by numerous people over numerous timeline, civilizations, societies, and religious traditions to have divine authority?
If God does exist perhaps, as the apostle Paul suggests, it wouldn't be fair (or maybe even impossible) to make the greatest good (experiential knowledge of Him) dependent upon one's ability to humanly reason.
No, I'm not requiring God be within human understanding. I'm requiring statements about God to be logical. There's a big difference between the two.
I would contend that Jesus really makes clear what is necessary to follow and know about him.
Then you are very incorrect, because Jesus leaves vague just about everything about him. We have no idea, for instance, why Jesus died. We also have no idea who or what Jesus was.
It's not really so much about interpreting the title, "son of God" (though there are a few ways which we can interpret it… he gives Old Testament quotations which can help us know what he meant where a "son of man" is mentioned "coming in the clouds")… but personally I was just using the term as shorthand for our purposes. Whatever it really meant isn't really that important
Dude, listen to yourself. You start out by saying, "that doesn't mean ultimately that Jesus Christ was not the son of God in the way described in the bible," and then when I question you as to what, precisely, "son of God" means, you say you don't know. You then try to handwave that off as being irrelevant.
So basically, it doesn't seem like you know what "son of God" actually means, or how exactly the Bible described Jesus as being the son of God. But if that's the case, then how can you talk about Jesus Christ being the "son of God in the way described in the Bible," when you don't know what exactly that term means?
as we have four books full of information of Jesus teaching as well as letters written by some of his early followers.
You'll want to research historical Jesus study sometime. Not a single book in the New Testament was written by an eye-witness to Jesus' ministry, and only two sources (Paul and whoever composed what later came to be called the Gospel of Mark) are believed to have written within the first century. Put simply, we really don't know what in the Gospels is actually what Jesus said or did. Moreover, the Gospels contradict themselves all the time. Like, on really basic and important things, Jesus' origin. Things they definitely wouldn't contradict on if they were being dictated by a single entity who had one outlook on the matter.
We actually might be in agreement. I would say the problem is that people expect everything to be inerrant. However, I do believe the book to have the inspiration of God in it.
What does that even mean?
I have a lot of sympathy with your view and I have many times wondered if this was a conclusive objection. However, I really do not think it is and let me explain why. The purpose of the bible could be not, as you have been told, that the bible is to be an inerrant infallible book. In fact, that would seem to make idolatry of the bible very difficult to avoid.
Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. How is it idolatry to claim that God's word is infallible?
If the Bible is God's word, then the Bible must be infallible because God is infallible and the Bible is God's word. If the Bible is not infallible, then we have demonstrated that it cannot be God's word.
And if you're worried about idolatry, I think claiming something that isn't God's word is God's word brings you a lot closer to it than claiming something that is God's word is infallible.
The purpose could be a more humble approach where God communicates to us important things through the bible. These truths need not be discovered as a lawyer reasons from the law, these truths can be discovered in a more comprehensive fashion both thorough the bible and through the experience of the Holy Spirit, who is said to guide believers into all truth.
So then you would argue that the Holy Spirit says falsehoods, gets its facts mixed up, is inconsistent, is often historically wrong, and makes things up outright? The Bible does all of these things.
Again, demonstrate how, exactly, Genesis 1 and 2 (A) can be logically reconciled with each other, and (B) can be logically reconciled with our knowledge of physics and biology.
Don't just argue, "Well it's true because I was told by someone that it was." Demonstrate what this great truth of Genesis 1 and 2 is. Demonstrate HOW it is an account of the creation of the world.
These truths need not be discovered as a lawyer reasons from the law, these truths can be discovered in a more comprehensive fashion both thorough the bible and through the experience of the Holy Spirit, who is said to guide believers into all truth.
Then you believe the Holy Spirit to be downright inept at communication. Not only did the people you claim were inspired by the Holy Spirit totally get creation of the world wrong, but a bunch of scientists who apparently weren't inspired by the Holy Spirit managed to get it way more correct than the inspired people did.
Moreover, people throughout history, including the entire Christ movement up until modern times, totally bungled what the Holy Spirit was trying to tell them. Genesis 1 and 2 have existed since long before Jesus walked the Earth, and not until very recently has anyone in all of Christendom ever conceived of evolution or the Big Bang. Indeed, no one argued for evolution or the Big Bang until scientists proposed evolution and the Big Bang and these ideas gained scientific acceptance. Only then does the argument appear that Genesis 1 and 2 points to both of these concepts.
And indeed, said scientists continue to meet active opposition from those who are Christian to this day.
So what you believe is that the Holy Spirit is capable of failing wildly at communicating its messages. Needless to say, I don't agree with you.
Imagine I am a messenger of a King and he gives me a message to communicate to others. He may be totally fine with paraphrasing the message to the others… the goal may be to get the "gist" of the message, the fundamental content but not the exact words.
Demonstrate that Genesis 1 and 2 are true then.
I think you are actually ironically interpreting the bible more as a fundamentalist Christian would and fundamentalist Christians tend to see things such as interpreting the bible more in black and white and not recognizing that life has grey areas.
No, I believe that Genesis 1 through the first part of Genesis 2 is a creation story composed by a group of people who had no clue how the universe began and made up a creation myth to explain how it began. Just like every other creation myth.
I believe the remainder of Genesis 2 describes an entirely separate story from a separate oral tradition, and that these people also had no clue how the universe began, and thus made up a story to explain how it happened.
I don't agree that these stories are metaphorical or allegorical, because I don't believe that they were to the communities from which these traditions began. I believe that they were made to be explanations of how things actually happened.
And, needless to say, I believe those explanations were totally incorrect.
I think this because I have no reason to believe that an illiterate group of shepherds in antiquity understood the universe's creation to the extent that modern-day cosmologists do, or had even an inkling of what evolution was. And, indeed, all evidence demonstrates that they didn't, because there is not a single event at all in Genesis 1 or 2 that conforms to fact. Yes, they are telling a story about how God created everything, but that doesn't mean they are actually describing how God created everything, and it's very clear based on our scientific understanding of how the creation of the universe actually came to be that these people from antiquity didn't actually know.
Now, you seem to believe Genesis is an allegory about the creation of the world that was written by someone who knew how God created the world, and contains the truth of how the world was created. Can you demonstrate any backing for this belief?
There is no contradiction to say that God has spoken decisively through the bible and that it could contain errors.
Only if you believe that God's decisive word contains errors. If you believe that God is fallible, then no, that the Bible contains errors is not contradictory.
It would, however, call into conflict the notion of God being infallible, which I believe.
Just as if the messenger of the King got a few of the details wrong, yet he still communicated the most important parts clearly… he correctly got the "gist" of the message across, he would have communicated the message of his King successfully.
What gist of what message?
Let's ignore the rest of the Bible and just focus on Genesis 1 and 2. What message, and how is it conveyed truthfully? Actually demonstrate this.
First, I would say that I am not sure the existence of God is all that extraordinary. The vast majority of the world's population believe in God or something like God… who are you to say it is so extraordinarily improbable that we must have extraordinary evidence? (I'm not saying a lot of people believe it therefore it is true… I am saying that your contention that God is extraordinarily improbable is not shared by most people and cannot just be taken as assumed)
"Extraordinary" is not the same as "extraordinarily improbable". It means what it looks like it means: extra-ordinary. Outside the ordinary. Very few of this vast majority of the world's population who believe in God would say that God is an ordinary entity. He is unique. There is nothing else like him in our experience that we can compare him to. He ignores all the rules by which we understand the everyday world to function. We can't see him or hear him or detect him with any sort of scientific instrument.
You're right that truth is not a popularity contest, but the burden of proof is also not a popularity contest. If lots of people believe in God without evidence because lots of other people believe in God (also without evidence), that's just a big circular logic loop. It's meaningless to us. It certainly doesn't eliminate the need for extraordinary evidence.
This is not true. I have many good reasons to prefer the existence of God over the Roswell spacecraft. First, I am confident that I have experienced the existence God at a spiritual level. I have had no such experience of spacecrafts. You may contend that this is not "objective," because it cannot be demonstrated to others.
All experiences are ultimately subjective; that's not the problem per se. We build our picture of objective reality by seeing if other people all report the same experience under the same circumstances. Everybody who looks at the sun says that it's bright, and everybody who stands in the sun reports that it feels warmer than the shade, so we may conclude that the sun is objectively bright and hot.
But when we examine reports of spiritual experiences, we find no such consensus. People around the world report experiences that apparently confirm different and mutually incompatible religions. So this form of experience cannot be a reliable reflection of objective reality. Furthermore, the religions these experiences seem to confirm are overwhelmingly the religions the reporters already subscribe to, or at the very least the cultural contexts in which they have been brought up. East Asians have Buddhist experiences, Middle Easterners have Islamic experiences, Westerners have Christian experiences. This tells me that their memories of their experience are probably heavily modified by their own imaginations and interpretations.
Under these circumstances, it is irrational to be confident that a spiritual experience confirms a religious truth. It's like using a scientific instrument that keeps giving experimenters wildly different results and is obviously faulty, but deciding that the results it gives you must be completely accurate. So yes, you ought to doubt your own experience - not that you had it, but that it means what you think it does.
However, it is very possible to rationally believe something is true without being able to demonstrate it. Imagine that you are accused of a crime that you know you didn't commit. You were at home at the time. However, due to an extremely unlikely series of coincidences all the evidence points to you. Wouldn't you be rationally justified in believing that you did not commit the crime even though you are basing your belief on personal experience which cannot be demonstrated to others? If so you have accepted that we are rational to believe things based on experience even if this cannot be demonstrated to others. Likewise I believe in God based primarily on experience even though I cannot demonstrate it to others. You can't just assume it is irrational because I can't prove it.
There are a few problems with your analogy. First, "I didn't commit the crime" is not an extraordinary claim; people don't commit crimes all the time. It is so unextraordinary, in fact, that you actually have strict legal protections saying that the system must presume you to be innocent until you have been proven guilty. You are entirely free of the burden of proof. Second, you experienced your not-committing-a-crime through your normal everyday senses, not through a vague spiritual sense that is demonstrably unreliable. Third, you do not have bunches of other people reporting different and incompatible experiences of the same events. And fourth, like you say, it is "an extremely unlikely series of coincidences" if literally all the evidence points to you. More realistically, you will almost certainly be able to find other evidence that corroborates your own memories. It may or may not be probative in your trial, but the important thing here is that there is consistency between your memories and what you observe. You remember cooking dinner; there are the dirty dishes. And so on.
And if you truly cannot find any such evidence, then yeah, perhaps you should start to question some things - not necessarily that you are guilty, but maybe that Something Funny Is Going On Around Here. Because extremely unlikely series of coincidences are, well, extremely unlikely. Sometimes they do occur, but you should look for more likely explanations before you shrug and accept that that's what happened.
And that's pretty much where you stand with your spiritual experience. You're trying to use it as evidence for an extraordinary claim. You have no corroborating evidence beyond your experience. Your experience is unreliable by nature, and people are reporting experiences incompatible with yours. And yes, maybe it's just an extremely unlikely series of coincidences that all these people had false experiences but you, unique and special you, got the true one. Maybe that faulty instrument really does magically work for you. But the far more likely explanation is that your experience is no different and no more trustworthy than the experience of the Buddhist guy who thinks he caught a glimpse of Nirvana. It is possible to rationally believe propositions about objective reality based on unprovable experiences, but the rational response to this experience is to take it as a mere experience, and not reflective of the real world. Like we all do whenever we wake up from dreams.
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
I'm not impugning anyone's rationality; if anything, I'm saying Dawkins is a good deal more rational than you give him credit for. The declaration that God is necessary is not an explanation for God even if it's actually true, so when Dawkins says that postulating God increases rather than decreases the explanatory burden of the theist, pointing out God's necessity is not actually an answer to his objection.
(Since we're on the subject of necessary beings, here's a thought exercise: define a eunicorn to be a unicorn that necessarily exists. Do eunicorns exist? If so, then unicorns exist a fortiori.)
I greatly appreciate all of the responses, but please note everyone that I cannot respond to every point in detail as there has been so much content. If I missed some great point feel free to bring it up again, but it's not because I am avoiding it if that happens.
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
He is saying without a good explanation the answer is unsatisfying. (And I would go on to say "arbitrary" as well, but that's not what Crashing00 said.)
People like reasons for things. They don't like "Because I said so" as an answer.
I definitely never said, "Because I said so." To posit something as an explanation, you don't need to always posses an explanation for the explanation. This would make science impossible as science could never explain anything until they had absolutely every explanation for everything figured out. Actually though, this need for an explanation comes from Leibniz's argument for God… and he gives one… not that I think exactly like Leibniz. Personally I don't think it is necessary to be able to posses an explanation for every explanation for the reasons I gave.
On pages 157-8 of his book, (the God delusion) Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." It goes as follows:
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
Dawkins thinks this shows God "almost certainly does not exist." (his words)
One philosopher sums up well a response, "At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in Him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism."
Sure, so you need a bit more context from his book than the pared-down version of his pared-down bullet points. What he is talking about is the idea that very complicated things seem quite improbable - the universe is improbable, life is improbable, etc. And, he suggests, God is improbable. Faced with the suggestion of an apparently improbable thing, we are justified in concluding that it probably does not exist, unless we have some explanation for how that improbability is to be overcome.
Luckily, for life we have evolution that explains much of how its complexity could arise. In the case of the universe, we are not quite as well off, but we still have some decent ideas that offer some degree of explanation. In the case of god, however, we're pretty much stuck. The very nature of god as he is traditionally defined seems to defy any attempts to justify his existence. He cannot arise from simplicity like life, or from nothingness like the universe. So, facing that, we must conclude that god very likely does not exist. He is extremely improbable by his nature, and we have no way of explaining how that improbability can be overcome.
The full quote of his bullet point #3 makes this argument a bit clearer:
The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
He is not simply rejecting the argument from design and thereby concluding that god probably doesn't exist. Surely no one would be so foolish as to think that refuting one possible argument among accomplishes that. He's attempting to turn the argument from design around, and use it against the idea of god. He then notes that while life and the universe seem to have ways out of the argument from design, god does not. Note that this is not a proof that god does note exist, but rather an argument that we should regard that hypothesis as extremely unlikely, and prefer those explanations that seem to be both simpler and provide better explanatory power.
This all may have been a bit clearer if you had taken your quote directly from his book rather than an article which cleverly cuts out Dawkins' actual argument just because it doesn't happen to be in the first sentence of each bullet point.
I think I am going to need to grab the book again from the library when I get the chance to be able to quote it and discuss with you at that depth.
I do actually have sympathy with your view. Personally I think it is quite possible for some of the literal facts of the creation narrative to be wrong while the fundamental purpose of the story in God's mind to not be a literal account of the facts but a story about humanity which is sometimes allegorical.
No, see, this is the problem I have with arguments like this. The only reason you're not arguing it is a literal account of creation is because we have achieved the scientific understanding to demonstrate it isn't, which means you understand that the Genesis stories are not factual accounts of creation.
The reason I believe the bible to have the inspiration of God in it is because of the experience I have had of God. Personal experience doesn't necessitate public demonstration as it is by definition personal. I am not using that as an argument to prove God exists… however, it is a relevant consideration if you are accusing me of holding irrationality to a belief that the Bible was inspired by God.
Yet, you're still deciding that they're true. Why? Why do you believe that they are true? What is it in them that demonstrates them to be factual accounts of creation?
I actually don't think it is necessarily true that everything in Genesis is part of a factual account of creation. My faith in the bible is that it has been inspired by God… not that every single part is from God or is without error.
As for saying they're allegorically true, do you know what an allegory is? Like, not being condescending, but actual question: do you know what an allegory is? An allegory is a story in which the characters and events in the story are symbolic, and a message — whether that message be moral, political, philosophical, or religious — is conveyed through this medium. So when you say something is an allegory, you have to point out what the various characters and events in the story symbolize, and what meaning this conveys. That's what makes an allegory different from any other story.
So demonstrate how it's an allegory.
In addition to what I have already said, I think it is pretty well established that allegory does occur in the bible. Furthermore, many of the most important Christian theologians (long before modern science) held to allegorical interpretations of the bible. Certianly Augustine who wrote a whole book on the topic as well as Origen and many of the early Church Fathers. All of this was long before Darwin and modern science.
What reason do we possibly have to think that this document has God's authority or authorship? There are numerous documents written about God. Why should we consider this Genesis, which is a collection of numerous oral traditions that were compiled into a document that was edited and redacted numerous times by numerous people over numerous timeline, civilizations, societies, and religious traditions to have divine authority?
For believing in God and giving authority to the bible I don't think it is a matter of being able to argue for that. However, I think your objections, when looked at closer, aren't convincing. After all the bible says God has hidden the kingdom from the wise and prudent and revealed it to babes. After all, the bible itself claims that God said, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."
This was certainly long before modern science. Actually if you look at it rationally it makes perfect sense. However there is so much emotion involved when you tell them that God wont make heaven dependent upon human beings and their reasoning capabilities you would think you have committed the unpardonable sin of the modern world. Ultimately, it is a rational faith that I have, it is just something that appears irrational at first glance. How can you refute this God by the appearance of irrationality when the very scriptures say that is what God intended?
So basically, it doesn't seem like you know what "son of God" actually means, or how exactly the Bible described Jesus as being the son of God. But if that's the case, then how can you talk about Jesus Christ being the "son of God in the way described in the Bible," when you don't know what exactly that term means?
I just don't think its necessary to debate the term as Jesus makes it clear what he thinks is important to believe and do. If you want to know what the term specifically means, taken with the Gospels it definitely seems to mean the unique divine son of the living God.
Thats all I got for right now. Can't spend all day responding. I'll try to get some more of the main points when I get a chance.
I definitely never said, "Because I said so." To posit something as an explanation, you don't need to always posses an explanation for the explanation. This would make science impossible as science could never explain anything until they had absolutely every explanation for everything figured out. Actually though, this need for an explanation comes from Leibniz's argument for God… and he gives one… not that I think exactly like Leibniz. Personally I don't think it is necessary to be able to posses an explanation for every explanation for the reasons I gave.
The problem is that "God is necessary" is not just an explanation in need of an explanation; it's not an explanation at all. To say that something is necessary is to say that it exists in all possible worlds. So if you say, "God exists because he is necessary", what you're saying is that "God exists because he exists in all possible worlds", which when you pare it down to the relevant part is really just "God exists because he exists in this world", which of course is circular. It doesn't explain why he exists in this world; it just reasserts that he does. And since we don't have any explanation or evidence for why God should exist in all possible worlds, we don't have any reason to believe that he does exist in all possible worlds, which means we don't have any reason to believe that he exists in this one either.
In contrast, we can explain the fall of an apple with the force of gravity, and even if we can't explain the force of gravity, we have very good reasons to believe that it exists. You're right that science doesn't have to have explanations for everything, but it doesn't just make up explanations without evidentiary basis. If scientists don't know why something happens, they say that they don't know. They don't say, "Maybe a magical being does it, and maybe this magical being exists necessarily."
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My recollection is that Dawkins sees this as not only an argument against the theistic one you described but against the existence of God himself, but maybe I am mistaken. As a response to a theistic argument I am less interested as I don't really make theistic arguments myself… though I imagine a theist could respond with, A: God exists out of necessity just as concepts and logic itself cannot really not exist… or B: It doesn't really make sense to ask why God exists rather than not exists as if he exists he is a necessary being. A necessary being exists necessarily… and therefore by definition it is impossible for such a being to not exist. Likewise it seems impossible for it not to be the case that 1+1=2 and it doesn't make sense to really ask why is it that 1+1 does not = 3? Regardless, if Dawkins only point is to give a response to a theistic argument I don't really care that much as I believe God is accessed primarily by personal experience rather than argument. However, it seems to me that he or at least many in popular culture see this as seriously undercutting faith in God which is not the case .
What I'm trying to say is that arguments against Christianity don't always take the form of actively trying to disprove God. There's also people saying that the burden of proof hasn't been met by those who would argue that God does exist. Those are two different arguments, and it's important to distinguish them.
No. No. No.
Not "hard time resolving." Impossible time resolving. It is impossible to resolve them. Genesis 1 is directly contradicted by:
1. Biology
2. Physics
3. Genesis 2
You cannot resolve the differences between them.
The only reason one would claim anything otherwise is because they've decided beforehand that everything the Bible says is correct automatically, which is a practice I have a big problem with because it's wrong and illogical and leads to contradictions like the above. It stems from intellectual laziness, the person is unwilling to challenge assertions out of a lack of willingness to confront the possibility that he is wrong.
No, I didn't say it did. Genesis can be totally wrong in every way and it would not have any bearing on any other book of the Bible composed separately from it.
However, here's something we need to look at: What do you mean by "the son of God"?
Because nobody really knows what Jesus meant by "Son of God," or "Son of Man" for that matter. "Son of God" could mean any of a number of different things in the time period Jesus spoke of.
You mean "non-literally," right? If so, then you're not getting it.
Genesis contains two separate stories about the universe's creation. Both of them do not match the universe's creation. They are both incorrect.
Now this is fine in itself. There's no reason to expect people from antiquity to know how the world was created. They made up stories to explain what they couldn't.
The problem is people are approaching Genesis with the expectation that everything in it is true, because they decided beforehand that if it's written in the Bible it must be correct. THAT is the problem. When these people read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, they will read two separate creation myths about how the universe came to be that are not in accordance with how the universe actually came to be. If they continue along the belief that anything in the Bible must be true, they will then conclude:
1. The two creation stories in Genesis are not two separate stories, but one story that agrees with itself.
2. Genesis must describe how the universe was created.
Both of these conclusions are incorrect.
And expanding on conclusion #2, it doesn't matter whether or not you're advocating a literal or metaphorical interpretation. Neither of them work. A literal interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact. A metaphorical interpretation doesn't work because it contradicts scientific fact, and also because it doesn't actually say how, exactly, Genesis 1 and 2 is supposed to be a metaphor for the creation of the universe.
People will make arguments that Genesis accurately describes our scientific understanding of how everything came to be, but those arguments are baseless because there's nothing in Genesis that describes our understanding of how everything came to be. It's a logical fallacy we call begging the question, in which people use the conclusion they're attempting to prove as evidence for itself, presuming it is true before actually proving it.
What? No, that's precisely what it means. If the Bible is The Word of God, it would be without error and contradiction. If it has errors, it cannot be the Word of God unless God is in error. If it contradicts, it cannot be the Word of God unless God contradicts himself.
Can the Universe be a necessary entity which must exist, or does the universe require an external explanation, whereas God does not?
To determine what organisms are related to, biologists look at their nonfunctional and maladaptive features, features that are not the result of a design process like God or natural selection but instead were passed on genetically in spite of evolutionary changes. For a famous human example, we can tell that the members of the Habsburg dynasty are related because of their pronounced familial underbite; there's no other reason for them to have that feature, since it doesn't serve any purpose. In biology, we know that birds are descended from dinosaurs because of certain peculiarities in the shape of their hip bones that, again, have no reason to be there other than heredity. And how do we know that all vertebrates are descended from a common ancestor? It's not because they all have backbones; a common design process could have given animals of different clades backbones independently of each other, like it did with wings in the case of birds and bats. It's because every vertebrate has the same design mistake: a 180-degree twist in the nerves coming out of the brain that result in the left brain controlling the right side of the body and the right brain controlling the left side of the body. Yet again, there's no reason for this feature to be there. An independently-designed vertebrate could very easily have right-brain-right-body correspondence. But somehow, our common ancestor got this twist, and it passed it on to all succeeding generations.
And then there's the human species. It is very, very obvious to an anatomist that we evolved from quadrupeds rather than being designed a priori for a bipedal lifestyle. Our bodies preserve a number of quadruped features that do nothing for us or actively hinder us. We have vestigial tails. Our lower backs curve rather than being load-bearing vertical columns, leading to frequent injuries. Our respiratory passage has to bend to get from the lungs to the mouth, creating a choking hazard, which is only exacerbated by the fact that our larynx has moved up and our pharynx down to enable speech. Again, it is the mistakes that give us productive cladistic analysis, not the design features.
Aquinas' argument is by no means sound, but you're right that Dawkins has a habit of strawmanning it.
You are right that your inability to prove God does not prove the nonexistence of God. You are also right that atheists have not disproven God, and most (including Dawkins) do not claim to have done so. Where you go wrong is in assuming that, in the absence of absolute disproof, there is no reason to prefer one position or the other, and you can reasonably decide to believe in God if you wish. Even without disproof, it is still irrational to believe in God. The existence of God is an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. You cannot consistently go around believing every extraordinary claim you hear; your head would explode. So to believe in the God claim while not believing in the claim of, say, an alien spacecraft crashing in Roswell in 1957, you have to be inconsistent. You have to privilege the former claim over the latter with no objective reason to do so. And that's irrational.
Necessity isn't a property that some facts just randomly have. To be necessary, a proposition must follow absolutely and inescapably from the premises that obtain in its frame: you have to prove it. So it does make sense to ask why 1 + 1 = 2. Mathematical proofs of this fact exist, and if they didn't, we would not be justified in thinking that it is necessary. So to claim at the outset that God is necessary is equivalent to claiming that you have proof of God, without, y'know, actually having proof of God. It's circular reasoning.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
In my opinion, the person trying to do the convincing needs to shoulder the burden. As in, if the Christian is trying to convince the atheist, then it is the Christian's job to shoulder the burden. But, if the atheist is trying to change the Christian's mind, then it's the atheist that needs to shoulder then burden of proof.
If I tell you I think Vanilla Ice Cream is the best kind of Ice Cream -but have no proof- you telling me that most people used to like chocolate the most, and some don't like Ice Cream at all, isn't going to change my mind. Additionally, telling me that some people have never had ice cream and therefore don't like Vanilla the best, and -in fact- I was born without liking any kind of Ice Cream -again- these kinds of arguments aren't going to be convincing. My default understanding -with or without proof- would be Vanilla Ice Cream is the best kind of Ice Cream. If you wanted me to accept it's not I would want you to prove it to me, despite the fact I'm the one making an assertion.
It seems like people on both sides of the theist debate seem to feel they're position is the "default" position, because -for them- it IS. This is often why -I think- people -like Tromokratis1- seem to think the "other side" has weak arguments. Because the vast majority of the arguments are relying on this idea that the other side has to prove something.
I would agree that in a vacuum the side making the claim (the theist, not the agnostic atheist) would have to back that claim up. If belief worked like a formal philosophical debate, then the agnostic atheist would have a strong position. But, this would only be because the agnostic atheist needs to do less work. If the "fight" was between the theist and the 100% atheist (like it probably should be in a fair debate) nether side would really "win." Additionally -in my experience- belief doesn't work like a formal philosophical debate. Humans simply aren't wired that way.
If they are already believe something, and you want to change it, then YOU have to shoulder the burden of proof to be convincing.
However, often the best way to do this -again in my experience- is to undermined why they believe what they believe and show it's not a "good reason." But, that's often different for each person and takes effort.
(BS is now -basically- undertaking this with Tromokratis1. You'll note BS is essentially the one shouldering the burden of proof to disprove misconceptions, even though -in the larger perspective- BS is the weak atheist.)
Oh don't misunderstand. Didn't mean to be a slight against you or anything. I just wanted to talk with non-Christians here about how they reconcile the concept that "everything comes out of something" and the concept of the Big Bang.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
On a more fundamental level, the idea "everything comes out of something" is a corollary of Causality (cause and effect). Since Causality itself is in scientific question because of Quantum Mechanics (most notably Bell's theorem and subsequent experimental tests) there really is no reason to hold that "everything comes out of something" is a fundamental truth. In fact, science is currently leaning in the direction that it's wrong.
We could go round and round about whether or not God or the Laws of Physics are eternal, but in both cases we have to assume Causality doesn't apply to SOMETHING.
I would contend that Jesus really makes clear what is necessary to follow and know about him. It's not really so much about interpreting the title, "son of God" (though there are a few ways which we can interpret it… he gives Old Testament quotations which can help us know what he meant where a "son of man" is mentioned "coming in the clouds")… but personally I was just using the term as shorthand for our purposes. Whatever it really meant isn't really that important as we have four books full of information of Jesus teaching as well as letters written by some of his early followers.
We actually might be in agreement. I would say the problem is that people expect everything to be inerrant. However, I do believe the book to have the inspiration of God in it.
I have a lot of sympathy with your view and I have many times wondered if this was a conclusive objection. However, I really do not think it is and let me explain why. The purpose of the bible could be not, as you have been told, that the bible is to be an inerrant infallible book. In fact, that would seem to make idolatry of the bible very difficult to avoid. The purpose could be a more humble approach where God communicates to us important things through the bible. These truths need not be discovered as a lawyer reasons from the law, these truths can be discovered in a more comprehensive fashion both thorough the bible and through the experience of the Holy Spirit, who is said to guide believers into all truth.
I think it is actually quite more complex than that. Imagine I am a messenger of a King and he gives me a message to communicate to others. He may be totally fine with paraphrasing the message to the others… the goal may be to get the "gist" of the message, the fundamental content but not the exact words. I think you are actually ironically interpreting the bible more as a fundamentalist Christian would and fundamentalist Christians tend to see things such as interpreting the bible more in black and white and not recognizing that life has grey areas. There is no contradiction to say that God has spoken decisively through the bible and that it could contain errors. Just as if the messenger of the King got a few of the details wrong, yet he still communicated the most important parts clearly… he correctly got the "gist" of the message across, he would have communicated the message of his King successfully.
I don't know… I haven't really dealt with the Leibnitzian Cosmological argument much. However, Leibnitz, and I think rightly so, allowed for something to have an explanation without a cause. God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused. But really I don't think this is all that important as it has to do with one argument for the existence of God and therefore isn't a challenge to the existence of God.
First, I would say that I am not sure the existence of God is all that extraordinary. The vast majority of the world's population believe in God or something like God… who are you to say it is so extraordinarily improbable that we must have extraordinary evidence? (I'm not saying a lot of people believe it therefore it is true… I am saying that your contention that God is extraordinarily improbable is not shared by most people and cannot just be taken as assumed)
This is not true. I have many good reasons to prefer the existence of God over the Roswell spacecraft. First, I am confident that I have experienced the existence God at a spiritual level. I have had no such experience of spacecrafts. You may contend that this is not "objective," because it cannot be demonstrated to others. However, it is very possible to rationally believe something is true without being able to demonstrate it. Imagine that you are accused of a crime that you know you didn't commit. You were at home at the time. However, due to an extremely unlikely series of coincidences all the evidence points to you. Wouldn't you be rationally justified in believing that you did not commit the crime even though you are basing your belief on personal experience which cannot be demonstrated to others? If so you have accepted that we are rational to believe things based on experience even if this cannot be demonstrated to others. Likewise I believe in God based primarily on experience even though I cannot demonstrate it to others. You can't just assume it is irrational because I can't prove it.
The argument that Dawkins is making is that it is foolish to keep adding to a chain of inexplicable explanations. If we accept that things need to have explanations, then we've dug ourselves a pretty deep hole by suggesting that god explains things. If it was hard to explain the universe, it's -really- hard to explain god. Dawkins' point is that, faced with this challenge of an inexplicable god, we're better to keep our hypothesis simple, and favor an explanation that does not raise more unanswerable questions. As long as we accept that things can be self-necessary, we might as well suspect that the universe is such a thing.
Obviously, this does not disprove god. But Dawkins never claims it does. If you're looking for this argument to disprove god, that's a problem on your end.
You may also want to put some thought into just what constitutes an explanation. If you were in a math class, confronted with a theorem you didn't quite understand, and you asked the professor to explain -- would you be satisfied if he answered "because it's necessary?" It's a perfectly true answer; mathematical truths are necessary. But I don't expect such an answer would satisfy your desire for explanation, nor should it. When you ask for an explanation, you're asking why it's necessary.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Here is what Dawkins argues…
On pages 157-8 of his book, (the God delusion) Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." It goes as follows:
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
Dawkins thinks this shows God "almost certainly does not exist." (his words)
One philosopher sums up well a response, "At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in Him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism."
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
People like reasons for things. They don't like "Because I said so" as an answer.
Sure, so you need a bit more context from his book than the pared-down version of his pared-down bullet points. What he is talking about is the idea that very complicated things seem quite improbable - the universe is improbable, life is improbable, etc. And, he suggests, God is improbable. Faced with the suggestion of an apparently improbable thing, we are justified in concluding that it probably does not exist, unless we have some explanation for how that improbability is to be overcome.
Luckily, for life we have evolution that explains much of how its complexity could arise. In the case of the universe, we are not quite as well off, but we still have some decent ideas that offer some degree of explanation. In the case of god, however, we're pretty much stuck. The very nature of god as he is traditionally defined seems to defy any attempts to justify his existence. He cannot arise from simplicity like life, or from nothingness like the universe. So, facing that, we must conclude that god very likely does not exist. He is extremely improbable by his nature, and we have no way of explaining how that improbability can be overcome.
The full quote of his bullet point #3 makes this argument a bit clearer:
He is not simply rejecting the argument from design and thereby concluding that god probably doesn't exist. Surely no one would be so foolish as to think that refuting one possible argument among accomplishes that. He's attempting to turn the argument from design around, and use it against the idea of god. He then notes that while life and the universe seem to have ways out of the argument from design, god does not. Note that this is not a proof that god does note exist, but rather an argument that we should regard that hypothesis as extremely unlikely, and prefer those explanations that seem to be both simpler and provide better explanatory power.
This all may have been a bit clearer if you had taken your quote directly from his book rather than an article which cleverly cuts out Dawkins' actual argument just because it doesn't happen to be in the first sentence of each bullet point.
Yet, you're still deciding that they're true. Why? Why do you believe that they are true? What is it in them that demonstrates them to be factual accounts of creation?
As for saying they're allegorically true, do you know what an allegory is? Like, not being condescending, but actual question: do you know what an allegory is? An allegory is a story in which the characters and events in the story are symbolic, and a message — whether that message be moral, political, philosophical, or religious — is conveyed through this medium. So when you say something is an allegory, you have to point out what the various characters and events in the story symbolize, and what meaning this conveys. That's what makes an allegory different from any other story.
So demonstrate how it's an allegory.
What reason do we possibly have to think that this document has God's authority or authorship? There are numerous documents written about God. Why should we consider this Genesis, which is a collection of numerous oral traditions that were compiled into a document that was edited and redacted numerous times by numerous people over numerous timeline, civilizations, societies, and religious traditions to have divine authority?
No, I'm not requiring God be within human understanding. I'm requiring statements about God to be logical. There's a big difference between the two.
Then you are very incorrect, because Jesus leaves vague just about everything about him. We have no idea, for instance, why Jesus died. We also have no idea who or what Jesus was.
Dude, listen to yourself. You start out by saying, "that doesn't mean ultimately that Jesus Christ was not the son of God in the way described in the bible," and then when I question you as to what, precisely, "son of God" means, you say you don't know. You then try to handwave that off as being irrelevant.
So basically, it doesn't seem like you know what "son of God" actually means, or how exactly the Bible described Jesus as being the son of God. But if that's the case, then how can you talk about Jesus Christ being the "son of God in the way described in the Bible," when you don't know what exactly that term means?
You'll want to research historical Jesus study sometime. Not a single book in the New Testament was written by an eye-witness to Jesus' ministry, and only two sources (Paul and whoever composed what later came to be called the Gospel of Mark) are believed to have written within the first century. Put simply, we really don't know what in the Gospels is actually what Jesus said or did. Moreover, the Gospels contradict themselves all the time. Like, on really basic and important things, Jesus' origin. Things they definitely wouldn't contradict on if they were being dictated by a single entity who had one outlook on the matter.
What does that even mean?
Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. How is it idolatry to claim that God's word is infallible?
If the Bible is God's word, then the Bible must be infallible because God is infallible and the Bible is God's word. If the Bible is not infallible, then we have demonstrated that it cannot be God's word.
And if you're worried about idolatry, I think claiming something that isn't God's word is God's word brings you a lot closer to it than claiming something that is God's word is infallible.
So then you would argue that the Holy Spirit says falsehoods, gets its facts mixed up, is inconsistent, is often historically wrong, and makes things up outright? The Bible does all of these things.
Again, demonstrate how, exactly, Genesis 1 and 2 (A) can be logically reconciled with each other, and (B) can be logically reconciled with our knowledge of physics and biology.
Don't just argue, "Well it's true because I was told by someone that it was." Demonstrate what this great truth of Genesis 1 and 2 is. Demonstrate HOW it is an account of the creation of the world.
Then you believe the Holy Spirit to be downright inept at communication. Not only did the people you claim were inspired by the Holy Spirit totally get creation of the world wrong, but a bunch of scientists who apparently weren't inspired by the Holy Spirit managed to get it way more correct than the inspired people did.
Moreover, people throughout history, including the entire Christ movement up until modern times, totally bungled what the Holy Spirit was trying to tell them. Genesis 1 and 2 have existed since long before Jesus walked the Earth, and not until very recently has anyone in all of Christendom ever conceived of evolution or the Big Bang. Indeed, no one argued for evolution or the Big Bang until scientists proposed evolution and the Big Bang and these ideas gained scientific acceptance. Only then does the argument appear that Genesis 1 and 2 points to both of these concepts.
And indeed, said scientists continue to meet active opposition from those who are Christian to this day.
So what you believe is that the Holy Spirit is capable of failing wildly at communicating its messages. Needless to say, I don't agree with you.
Demonstrate that Genesis 1 and 2 are true then.
No, I believe that Genesis 1 through the first part of Genesis 2 is a creation story composed by a group of people who had no clue how the universe began and made up a creation myth to explain how it began. Just like every other creation myth.
I believe the remainder of Genesis 2 describes an entirely separate story from a separate oral tradition, and that these people also had no clue how the universe began, and thus made up a story to explain how it happened.
I don't agree that these stories are metaphorical or allegorical, because I don't believe that they were to the communities from which these traditions began. I believe that they were made to be explanations of how things actually happened.
And, needless to say, I believe those explanations were totally incorrect.
I think this because I have no reason to believe that an illiterate group of shepherds in antiquity understood the universe's creation to the extent that modern-day cosmologists do, or had even an inkling of what evolution was. And, indeed, all evidence demonstrates that they didn't, because there is not a single event at all in Genesis 1 or 2 that conforms to fact. Yes, they are telling a story about how God created everything, but that doesn't mean they are actually describing how God created everything, and it's very clear based on our scientific understanding of how the creation of the universe actually came to be that these people from antiquity didn't actually know.
Now, you seem to believe Genesis is an allegory about the creation of the world that was written by someone who knew how God created the world, and contains the truth of how the world was created. Can you demonstrate any backing for this belief?
Only if you believe that God's decisive word contains errors. If you believe that God is fallible, then no, that the Bible contains errors is not contradictory.
It would, however, call into conflict the notion of God being infallible, which I believe.
What gist of what message?
Let's ignore the rest of the Bible and just focus on Genesis 1 and 2. What message, and how is it conveyed truthfully? Actually demonstrate this.
You're right that truth is not a popularity contest, but the burden of proof is also not a popularity contest. If lots of people believe in God without evidence because lots of other people believe in God (also without evidence), that's just a big circular logic loop. It's meaningless to us. It certainly doesn't eliminate the need for extraordinary evidence.
All experiences are ultimately subjective; that's not the problem per se. We build our picture of objective reality by seeing if other people all report the same experience under the same circumstances. Everybody who looks at the sun says that it's bright, and everybody who stands in the sun reports that it feels warmer than the shade, so we may conclude that the sun is objectively bright and hot.
But when we examine reports of spiritual experiences, we find no such consensus. People around the world report experiences that apparently confirm different and mutually incompatible religions. So this form of experience cannot be a reliable reflection of objective reality. Furthermore, the religions these experiences seem to confirm are overwhelmingly the religions the reporters already subscribe to, or at the very least the cultural contexts in which they have been brought up. East Asians have Buddhist experiences, Middle Easterners have Islamic experiences, Westerners have Christian experiences. This tells me that their memories of their experience are probably heavily modified by their own imaginations and interpretations.
Under these circumstances, it is irrational to be confident that a spiritual experience confirms a religious truth. It's like using a scientific instrument that keeps giving experimenters wildly different results and is obviously faulty, but deciding that the results it gives you must be completely accurate. So yes, you ought to doubt your own experience - not that you had it, but that it means what you think it does.
There are a few problems with your analogy. First, "I didn't commit the crime" is not an extraordinary claim; people don't commit crimes all the time. It is so unextraordinary, in fact, that you actually have strict legal protections saying that the system must presume you to be innocent until you have been proven guilty. You are entirely free of the burden of proof. Second, you experienced your not-committing-a-crime through your normal everyday senses, not through a vague spiritual sense that is demonstrably unreliable. Third, you do not have bunches of other people reporting different and incompatible experiences of the same events. And fourth, like you say, it is "an extremely unlikely series of coincidences" if literally all the evidence points to you. More realistically, you will almost certainly be able to find other evidence that corroborates your own memories. It may or may not be probative in your trial, but the important thing here is that there is consistency between your memories and what you observe. You remember cooking dinner; there are the dirty dishes. And so on.
And if you truly cannot find any such evidence, then yeah, perhaps you should start to question some things - not necessarily that you are guilty, but maybe that Something Funny Is Going On Around Here. Because extremely unlikely series of coincidences are, well, extremely unlikely. Sometimes they do occur, but you should look for more likely explanations before you shrug and accept that that's what happened.
And that's pretty much where you stand with your spiritual experience. You're trying to use it as evidence for an extraordinary claim. You have no corroborating evidence beyond your experience. Your experience is unreliable by nature, and people are reporting experiences incompatible with yours. And yes, maybe it's just an extremely unlikely series of coincidences that all these people had false experiences but you, unique and special you, got the true one. Maybe that faulty instrument really does magically work for you. But the far more likely explanation is that your experience is no different and no more trustworthy than the experience of the Buddhist guy who thinks he caught a glimpse of Nirvana. It is possible to rationally believe propositions about objective reality based on unprovable experiences, but the rational response to this experience is to take it as a mere experience, and not reflective of the real world. Like we all do whenever we wake up from dreams.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I feel all left out.
I'm not impugning anyone's rationality; if anything, I'm saying Dawkins is a good deal more rational than you give him credit for. The declaration that God is necessary is not an explanation for God even if it's actually true, so when Dawkins says that postulating God increases rather than decreases the explanatory burden of the theist, pointing out God's necessity is not actually an answer to his objection.
(Since we're on the subject of necessary beings, here's a thought exercise: define a eunicorn to be a unicorn that necessarily exists. Do eunicorns exist? If so, then unicorns exist a fortiori.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I definitely never said, "Because I said so." To posit something as an explanation, you don't need to always posses an explanation for the explanation. This would make science impossible as science could never explain anything until they had absolutely every explanation for everything figured out. Actually though, this need for an explanation comes from Leibniz's argument for God… and he gives one… not that I think exactly like Leibniz. Personally I don't think it is necessary to be able to posses an explanation for every explanation for the reasons I gave.
I think I am going to need to grab the book again from the library when I get the chance to be able to quote it and discuss with you at that depth.
The reason I believe the bible to have the inspiration of God in it is because of the experience I have had of God. Personal experience doesn't necessitate public demonstration as it is by definition personal. I am not using that as an argument to prove God exists… however, it is a relevant consideration if you are accusing me of holding irrationality to a belief that the Bible was inspired by God.
I actually don't think it is necessarily true that everything in Genesis is part of a factual account of creation. My faith in the bible is that it has been inspired by God… not that every single part is from God or is without error.
In addition to what I have already said, I think it is pretty well established that allegory does occur in the bible. Furthermore, many of the most important Christian theologians (long before modern science) held to allegorical interpretations of the bible. Certianly Augustine who wrote a whole book on the topic as well as Origen and many of the early Church Fathers. All of this was long before Darwin and modern science.
For believing in God and giving authority to the bible I don't think it is a matter of being able to argue for that. However, I think your objections, when looked at closer, aren't convincing. After all the bible says God has hidden the kingdom from the wise and prudent and revealed it to babes. After all, the bible itself claims that God said, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."
This was certainly long before modern science. Actually if you look at it rationally it makes perfect sense. However there is so much emotion involved when you tell them that God wont make heaven dependent upon human beings and their reasoning capabilities you would think you have committed the unpardonable sin of the modern world. Ultimately, it is a rational faith that I have, it is just something that appears irrational at first glance. How can you refute this God by the appearance of irrationality when the very scriptures say that is what God intended?
I just don't think its necessary to debate the term as Jesus makes it clear what he thinks is important to believe and do. If you want to know what the term specifically means, taken with the Gospels it definitely seems to mean the unique divine son of the living God.
Thats all I got for right now. Can't spend all day responding. I'll try to get some more of the main points when I get a chance.
In contrast, we can explain the fall of an apple with the force of gravity, and even if we can't explain the force of gravity, we have very good reasons to believe that it exists. You're right that science doesn't have to have explanations for everything, but it doesn't just make up explanations without evidentiary basis. If scientists don't know why something happens, they say that they don't know. They don't say, "Maybe a magical being does it, and maybe this magical being exists necessarily."
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.