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.
So how do you tell which parts are false? Is it just Genesis? What about Exudos? The whole pentutarch? The whole old testiment? Is there a single line you can point to and say "THIS one is the literal word of god?"
You can see how absurd your argument is, right? If we (a) don't know which parts of the bible are true, and (b)might face endless hell if we don't work it out, and (c) the book is full of tricks for the "wise", then - inescapably - god is a giant dick.
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."
Ignoring, for a moment, the utter stupidity of these lines, this is the same bible that we have no idea which parts are the word of god, right? Sooooooooo....why would we accept this bit?
(Also, it's an utterly circular argument - we know the bible is true because we can rationally determine that it is true by using an argument from the bible that says you can't use rationality to determine if things are true.)
This was certainly long before modern science. Actually if you look at it rationally it makes perfect sense.
The part about how god is a jerk and will make sure we can't use wisdom to find the answers to things makes rational sense? Do you even know what the word rational means?
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 your utterly irrational faith is rational because the scriptures say that irrational things are rational? I mean, is this your line of argument?
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.
I feel like you seem to assume people reason as such, "the universe needed a cause, therefore God is a necessary being." However, the cosmological argument, for example, states that the properties necessary to be the cause of the universe are XYZ, and, interestingly XYZ are the traditional properties of God. A necessary being isn't even really one of the properties that must be deduced to say that that the thing that created the universe seems to be God… I am confused as to all the focus on this one traditional property of God.
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."
This is such a parody of an argument and not connected to the truth about what I believe and certainly not Christian philosophers. No one is saying to believe in God for no reason. There are many good reasons for things which cannot be publicly proven.
However, the cosmological argument, for example, states that the properties necessary to be the cause of the universe are XYZ, and, interestingly XYZ are the traditional properties of God.
That's an extremely generous reading of the cosmological argument in two different ways. First, we don't know what the properties necessary to be the cause of the universe are, and the cosmological argument is utterly unconvincing in its attempt to establish them. Second, the properties that the cosmological argument purports to establish are not the traditional properties of God: it says nothing about omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, or indeed (in most formulations) any sort of sentience at all. Aquinas infamously ends his cosmological argument by concluding the existence of an uncaused cause, and then simply saying, "this we understand to be God". The Kalām argument is little better.
I am focused on the claim of necessity because that's the claim you made. I am more than willing to discuss these other properties as well. But for the record, even if the cosmological argument were completely sound and proved that God existed, it would still not prove that God is necessary, because it uses the the universe's existence as a premise , and that is contingent. Imagine you find the famous watch on the beach, and deduce the existence of a watchmaker. Is the watchmaker necessary? Of course not. He's necessary given the existence of the watch, but is is possible for there to be no watch and no watchmaker. You can't explain the existence of the watchmaker in the metaphysical sense by saying, "He has to exist because of the watch". That's only an explanation in the epistemic sense: it's how you know that he exists.
This is such a parody of an argument and not connected to the truth about what I believe and certainly not Christian philosophers. No one is saying to believe in God for no reason. There are many good reasons for things which cannot be publicly proven.
You have, in this thread, speculated that maybe God exists necessarily as an "explanation" for his existence, without providing any proof of this necessity. And you have already read my take on your allegedly good reasons for believing. I do not feel I am being unfair to you in summarizing your position as I have.
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.
What does that even mean? "Inspired by God"? What does that mean? Define, exactly, what that means. When you say the Bible, or any book, is inspired by God, what does that say about that thing? What properties does an "inspired by God" thing have?
Because when it's pointed out to you that your "inspired by God" book is often both contradictory and factually wrong, your response seems to be, "Well there's nothing about something inspired by God that means it has to be without error."
So either you believe that God often errs, or you believe God's ability to communicate often errs, but either way you seem to acknowledge the Bible often errs. But if that's the case, from whence does this supposed authority you are arguing the Bible has come from?
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.
What about any part of Genesis?
Have you actually read Genesis 1 and 2? Honestly, have you? Because there is nothing in Genesis that matches anything we would consider factual about the creation of the world.
In addition to what I have already said,
Which is nothing.
I think it is pretty well established that allegory does occur in the bible.
Ok, just so you know, it is transparent that you are trying to dodge the question. It's obvious. You are not fooling anyone.
Stop dodging the question. You have claimed the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are allegories for the creation of the world. Demonstrate this. Show how it's an allegory. Point out the symbols and what they symbolize, and how this accurately conveys the scientific truths of modern biology and cosmology.
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.
You are in a dispute over precisely that. I am disputing it. So yes, it is a matter of whether or not you can argue that.
And your repeated evasiveness towards any attempt to get you to address your own arguments does not indicate you can.
However, I think your objections, when looked at closer, aren't convincing.
And I think that's hypocritical coming from someone who refuses to actually put forth arguments.
Ultimately, it is a rational faith that I have, it is just something that appears irrational at first glance.
It appears irrational because you have not made rational arguments. Which is strange, isn't it, for someone who claims rationality in his faith?
Or is your argument for you being correct like your argument for the Bible being correct, in that it doesn't have to be factual to be correct?
Quote from Verbal »
(Also, it's an utterly circular argument - we know the bible is true because we can rationally determine that it is true by using an argument from the bible that says you can't use rationality to determine if things are true.)
Well, actually, that's not a circular argument. It's an outright contradictory argument.
But either way, Tromokratis1 is arguing that he is right, and if he is demonstrated to be factually incorrect, it doesn't matter because he doesn't have to be factually correct in order to be right.
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.
I think you are misunderstanding my points. I was saying,
1. The possibility that God exists is not all that extraordinary… and to assume so while arguing against God is to assume the conclusion in the argument (a circular argument)
2. It is rational to believe something based on experience even if you cant prove it.
#2 was where the innocent of a crime example came in, not #1.
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.
I would say my experience of God does certainly come through the senses… at least partly. However, why should we take a spiritual sense as inherently unreliable? Just because people disagree on it? I've explored buddhism myself and other religions and there was never an experience comparable to what I found in Jesus.
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.
Likewise I find much other corroborative evidence that my experience was from God. I have had many experiences and they actually corroborate the experience of God described in the bible quite well about the Holy Spirit living in believers.
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.
I have questioned my faith and I do so every day. Despite being an obsessive Descartes like questioner, I find I still do believe my experience was from God. How can you possibly say I am being irrational as you don't have access to my experience?
Maybe that faulty instrument really does magically work for you.
Disagreement doesn't prove falsity or unreliability. In fact, certainly, if Christianity is true, sin would have epistemic consequences distancing people from God and truth causing the kind of confusion present with religious experience.
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.
Ironically you have no way of proving that you are not in a dream right now. How can you then rationally consider anything you experience real? You must just go based on your experience… and I must say I think you are quite rational to take the world around you as real. Likewise, I can be rational to take the experience of God as real even if I am unable to prove its reality. After investigating your response in detail, I don't believe there remains any very good objection against believing in God based on experience.
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.
What does that even mean? "Inspired by God"? What does that mean? Define, exactly, what that means. When you say the Bible, or any book, is inspired by God, what does that say about that thing? What properties does an "inspired by God" thing have?
Much like the messenger of the King example it carries the message of God in it.
Because when it's pointed out to you that your "inspired by God" book is often both contradictory and factually wrong, your response seems to be, "Well there's nothing about something inspired by God that means it has to be without error."
So either you believe that God often errs, or you believe God's ability to communicate often errs, but either way you seem to acknowledge the Bible often errs. But if that's the case, from whence does this supposed authority you are arguing the Bible has come from?
This isn't true. If I were to tell you, as my messenger, a story, for example, and you were to retell it to an audience of people, you wouldn't need to word-for-word repeat the message. All you would need to do is to get what was important to me across. This could be the "point" of the story, the "gist" of the story.
Have you actually read Genesis 1 and 2? Honestly, have you? Because there is nothing in Genesis that matches anything we would consider factual about the creation of the world.
Yes I have definitely read it. Actually the creation from nothing seems quite like the creation of the universe at the big bang.
Ok, just so you know, it is transparent that you are trying to dodge the question. It's obvious. You are not fooling anyone.
I'm actually using logic and reason and not dodging anything.
Stop dodging the question. You have claimed the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are allegories for the creation of the world. Demonstrate this. Show how it's an allegory. Point out the symbols and what they symbolize, and how this accurately conveys the scientific truths of modern biology and cosmology.
Feel free to quote my stating Gen. 1 and 2 are allegories of the creation of the world. I said allegory undeniably exists in the bible (I can give examples if you would like), but I never said Gen 1 and 2 were. I think those are part of a narrative that has the purpose of saying that God created everything there is by his power.
And your repeated evasiveness towards any attempt to get you to address your own arguments does not indicate you can.
You aren't even giving me a chance. It is interesting that you accuse me of evading reason yet you are accusing me personally. I would rather deal with the arguments than attack people.
Much like the messenger of the King example it carries the message of God in it.
And what is the message of Genesis 1 and 2?
This isn't true. If I were to tell you, as my messenger, a story, for example, and you were to retell it to an audience of people, you wouldn't need to word-for-word repeat the message. All you would need to do is to get what was important to me across. This could be the "point" of the story, the "gist" of the story.
So if the messenger is prone to making stuff up, contradicting himself, getting things outright wrong, and obfuscating the point, how is the messenger authoritative? That's the opposite of authoritative. That's an unreliable messenger.
Yes I have definitely read it. Actually the creation from nothing seems quite like the creation of the universe at the big bang.
No, of course it doesn't.
Quote from Genesis 1 »
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
That doesn't sound anything like cosmology.
So once again, justify any reason we should regard this as true or authoritative. If you want to say it's an allegory, by all means, please make the case that it is.
I'm actually using logic and reason and not dodging anything.
Of course you are. I will ask yet again, where is this great allegory that Genesis is supposed to be?
Stop dodging the question. You have claimed the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are allegories for the creation of the world. Demonstrate this. Show how it's an allegory. Point out the symbols and what they symbolize, and how this accurately conveys the scientific truths of modern biology and cosmology.
Feel free to quote my stating Gen. 1 and 2 are allegories of the creation of the world. I said allegory undeniably exists in the bible (I can give examples if you would like), but I never said Gen 1 and 2 were.
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.
Ok, so point out the allegories.
I think those are part of a narrative that has the purpose of saying that God created everything there is by his power.
Except that's not what an allegory is.
An allegory is a story in which the characters and plot are symbolic of other things. Every element in an allegory is meant to symbolize a concept in order to convey a message. It's not just a story made to convey a message, it's not the same thing as a myth. In an allegory, all characters and events are symbols.
So where is the allegory in Genesis 1 and 2? Or would you care to retract the statement that they're to be interpreted allegorically?
You aren't even giving me a chance.
I have repeatedly requested you to justify your opinions, and you have repeatedly not done so. In what possible way is this not giving you a chance?
It is interesting that you accuse me of evading reason yet you are accusing me personally.
Yes, I am accusing you of refusing to answer questions. Which is a factual statement.
I would rather deal with the arguments than attack people.
Really? Because I seem to be the one who's pulling teeth trying to get you to talk about the statements you've made whereas you refuse to defend them.
1. The possibility that God exists is not all that extraordinary.
I would have to disagree, I think that a giving a being properties that include the creation of the universe and everything in it is extraordinary. If true it would alter everything we know. It's even more extraordinary if you include properties like omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, since having all of those properties at the same time isn't logically possible.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
and to assume so while arguing against God is to assume the conclusion in the argument (a circular argument)
By this logic, wouldn't the opposite be true as well? I don't see how you can say this but then conclude that you can assume that god isn't extraordinary.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
2. It is rational to believe something based on experience even if you cant prove it.
That depends on the type of experience and what you're trying to prove, doesn't it? For you, you're trying to say that your spiritual experience with your god proves that your god exists. So you have to go back to the point BlinkingSpirit made earlier and address it, which you have not done:
Quote from BlinkingSpirit »
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.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I would say my experience of God does certainly come through the senses… at least partly. However, why should we take a spiritual sense as inherently unreliable? Just because people disagree on it? I've explored buddhism myself and other religions and there was never an experience comparable to what I found in Jesus.
Do you think that you are the only one who has had an experience like that with Jesus or do you suppose their might be other people who follow different religions and believe in different gods that may have just as strong an experience with their respective god(s)?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Likewise I find much other corroborative evidence that my experience was from God. I have had many experiences and they actually corroborate the experience of God described in the bible quite well about the Holy Spirit living in believers.
Again, do you think followers outside of your particular brand of Christianity are capable of having such an experience with a different god/religion? Do you think that perhaps there might be Hindus, Buddhists, etc. that may report similar experiences among themselves? That is to say, Hindus may have all experience Kali as a blue, female, with 4-6 arms, etc.?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I have questioned my faith and I do so every day. Despite being an obsessive Descartes like questioner, I find I still do believe my experience was from God. How can you possibly say I am being irrational as you don't have access to my experience?
Well, by this logic you are going to open the flood gates. If your experiences count as rational, then so does everyone else. Basically, if anyone had an experience with their respective god - then it's rational to believe that those gods exist as well. After all, how can you possibly say that Kali, Loki, Thor, Krishna, etc. are irrational since you don't have access to their believer's experiences?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Ironically you have no way of proving that you are not in a dream right now. How can you then rationally consider anything you experience real? You must just go based on your experience… and I must say I think you are quite rational to take the world around you as real. Likewise, I can be rational to take the experience of God as real even if I am unable to prove its reality. After investigating your response in detail, I don't believe there remains any very good objection against believing in God based on experience.
1. The possibility that God exists is not all that extraordinary… and to assume so while arguing against God is to assume the conclusion in the argument (a circular argument)
To grant that a claim is extraordinary is not at all the same as assuming that it is false. The claim that the speed of light is constant for all observers no matter their frame of reference is an extraordinary one. Einstein accepted this, shouldered the burden of proof, and met it definitively. This is not circular reasoning; in fact, demanding evidence for claims is as far from circular reasoning as you can get. It is how science works. You make a claim, you provide evidence for it. You don't try to shirk that responsibility by saying, "My claim isn't that extraordinary, so I don't really need to give you evidence, do I?" Especially when I have already told you why, yes, your claim really is extraordinary.
2. It is rational to believe something based on experience even if you cant prove it.
#2 was where the innocent of a crime example came in, not #1.
I understood that. You need to understand that showing one unprovable experience ought to be believed does not establish that every unprovable experience ought to be believed. Not all experiences are equal, and there are many differences between the crime experience and the God experience which make the God experience less credible, the first among them being that the God experience is extraordinary and the crime experience is ordinary. So like I said, "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." Understand?
I would say my experience of God does certainly come through the senses… at least partly. However, why should we take a spiritual sense as inherently unreliable? Just because people disagree on it? I've explored buddhism myself and other religions and there was never an experience comparable to what I found in Jesus.
You are not the only person having and reporting religious experiences. I said, "People around the world report experiences that apparently confirm different and mutually incompatible religions"; I did not say that you have experiences that confirm different religions. Buddhists can explore Jesus just as you have explored Buddhism... but find the Buddha where you found Jesus. They are doing the same thing, having the same type of experience, and reporting different results. That is clear evidence of unreliability. And the one way in which the Jesus-experiencers and the Buddhist-experiencers consistently differ is that the Jesus-experiencers were raised in Christian environments and the Buddhist-experiencers were raised in Buddhist environments. That is clear evidence that this unreliability is culturally informed.
Likewise I find much other corroborative evidence that my experience was from God. I have had many experiences and they actually corroborate the experience of God described in the bible quite well about the Holy Spirit living in believers.
Likewise, a Buddhist religious experience is "corroborated" by the sutras telling the experiencer what freedom from desire and the dissolution of self feel like. And the sutras are contradictory evidence for your experience, just as the Bible is contradictory evidence for the Buddhist experience.
Religious texts are not independent corroboration. They are an integral part of the cultural feedback loop.
How can you possibly say I am being irrational as you don't have access to my experience?
But I do have access to your experience. We are communicating about it. If this is not sufficient access for me to evaluate the rationality of your experience, then you certainly cannot have sufficient access to other people's religious experiences to evaluate your own experience as more convincing than theirs. Maybe the Buddhist religious experience would blow yours out of the water if you could compare them. Or maybe not. You don't know. And if you don't know this, it is irrational to trust one reported experience over another.
In fact, certainly, if Christianity is true, sin would have epistemic consequences distancing people from God and truth causing the kind of confusion present with religious experience.
First, this is circular reasoning: it relies on the hypothesis that Christianity is true. If Christianity is false, your experience is simply unreliable (and false). You cannot assume the truth of Christianity in order to establish the reliability of evidence purportedly for the truth of Christianity.
Second, even granting for the sake of argument that sin does modulate religious experience in some way, it is arrogant and un-Copernican of you in the extreme to assume that your experience is more reliable because are less sinful than any of the five billion people on the planet who are not Christian. A scientist always assumes that he is an average observer, not a privileged one, and gives equal weight to the reported observations of others. So ask yourself what you ought to believe if you are an average sinner, and about half of the people reporting religious experiences are less sinful than you - or, to be a good Christian about it, if everyone on Earth including you is equally steeped in sin. Setting aside the uncomfortable fact that you're claiming moral superiority than a ton of people, it's simply vastly improbable that that all the less-sinful and therefore more-reliable experiences would happen to cluster in Europe and the Americas where Christianity is dominant, while all the more-sinful and therefore less-reliable experiences would happen to cluster in the parts of the world where other religions are dominant. And you have no reason to prefer this theory over the theory of, say, a Muslim who says that all the less-sinful and more-reliable experiences cluster in Islamic territory, and Christian experiences are of the more-sinful and less-reliable variety. The far more parsimonious explanation for the distribution of religious experiences is there isn't any of this improbable clustering; religious experiences are simply subjective and culturally informed.
Ironically you have no way of proving that you are not in a dream right now. How can you then rationally consider anything you experience real? You must just go based on your experience… and I must say I think you are quite rational to take the world around you as real. Likewise, I can be rational to take the experience of God as real even if I am unable to prove its reality.
I anticipated and addressed this objection: "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."
1. The possibility that God exists is not all that extraordinary.
I would have to disagree, I think that a giving a being properties that include the creation of the universe and everything in it is extraordinary. If true it would alter everything we know. It's even more extraordinary if you include properties like omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, since having all of those properties at the same time isn't logically possible.
I think, "extraordinary" here must mean "extraordinarily improbable." For if the being in question is extraordinary but not extraordinarily improbable, I don't see why the evidence must be so undeniably obvious if the being in question isn't improbable to exist. And I don't think theres a way you can show God is extraordinarily improbable. And the incompatibility of the properties of God you mentioned are actually not as much of a problem since the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed that there is no logical contradiction between Gods omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, provided God has a morally sufficient reason to permit wrong in the world.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
and to assume so while arguing against God is to assume the conclusion in the argument (a circular argument)
By this logic, wouldn't the opposite be true as well? I don't see how you can say this but then conclude that you can assume that god isn't extraordinary.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
2. It is rational to believe something based on experience even if you cant prove it.
That depends on the type of experience and what you're trying to prove, doesn't it? For you, you're trying to say that your spiritual experience with your god proves that your god exists. So you have to go back to the point BlinkingSpirit made earlier and address it, which you have not done:
Quote from BlinkingSpirit »
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.
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I did actually address this already by saying that the lack of consensus does not show that the experience of God is not had by some. Lack of consensus exists about many things but that doesn't mean that everyone is wrong.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I would say my experience of God does certainly come through the senses… at least partly. However, why should we take a spiritual sense as inherently unreliable? Just because people disagree on it? I've explored buddhism myself and other religions and there was never an experience comparable to what I found in Jesus.
Do you think that you are the only one who has had an experience like that with Jesus or do you suppose their might be other people who follow different religions and believe in different gods that may have just as strong an experience with their respective god(s)?[/quote]
I do believe other people think they have had experience of God in other religions. However, I just think they are mistaken. I have actually been a buddhist myself and believed to have experiences during that time. However, as I look back on it, was nothing compared to what I have experienced now. It is like seeing a shadow vs. the real thing.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Likewise I find much other corroborative evidence that my experience was from God. I have had many experiences and they actually corroborate the experience of God described in the bible quite well about the Holy Spirit living in believers.
Again, do you think followers outside of your particular brand of Christianity are capable of having such an experience with a different god/religion? Do you think that perhaps there might be Hindus, Buddhists, etc. that may report similar experiences among themselves? That is to say, Hindus may have all experience Kali as a blue, female, with 4-6 arms, etc.?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I have questioned my faith and I do so every day. Despite being an obsessive Descartes like questioner, I find I still do believe my experience was from God. How can you possibly say I am being irrational as you don't have access to my experience?
Well, by this logic you are going to open the flood gates. If your experiences count as rational, then so does everyone else. Basically, if anyone had an experience with their respective god - then it's rational to believe that those gods exist as well. After all, how can you possibly say that Kali, Loki, Thor, Krishna, etc. are irrational since you don't have access to their believer's experiences? [/quote]
I think it makes more sense to say that one of us are wrong. I am not saying that you must take me to be rational to believe based on my experience of God. However, I am also saying that you cannot just judge from the outside and say I could not be rational. You have to attack the truth of Christianity rather than my experience to show I am unjustified in faith. It is an irrational position, in my view, to think that I could not have experienced God simply because other people have believed themselves to experience a different God.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Ironically you have no way of proving that you are not in a dream right now. How can you then rationally consider anything you experience real? You must just go based on your experience… and I must say I think you are quite rational to take the world around you as real. Likewise, I can be rational to take the experience of God as real even if I am unable to prove its reality. After investigating your response in detail, I don't believe there remains any very good objection against believing in God based on experience.
Okay, what is the standard for knowledge?[/quote]
I am not sure what you are asking exactly as this is quite a complicated philosophical topic. I think a better question would be to ask what constitutes rational and justified belief. To answer that people have written many philosophical treatises, (I tend to agree with a lot of what Alvin Plantinga writes in his books on the topic) but I would say experience is definitely one avenue to justified belief.
Theres definitely some important points about how God created everything but if it is the final work of the bible that is ultimately the message of God you have to look at it as only a part of that larger message. A better question would be, "what is the point of the book of Genesis," or "how does that fit into the biblical narrative?"
All it shows is that the messenger is fallible. The important points getting across is what matters and the theological points about God are reiterated a hundred times. In fact, even in ancient history it is well established that authors had the freedom to change the backdrop of a story to suit their narrative purposes… not that this is my main point. If the purpose of God in the bible is to teach us about the nature of God and the way to salvation, how is the exact number of years Israel was in exile related? How is the existence of Sodom all that important? Clearly those stories had "morals…" a "moral of the story" which remains untouched regardless of their literal truth value.
If you want to say it's an allegory, by all means, please make the case that it is.
You are mistaken about my view. I believe Genesis is to be looked at as a whole and there may be parts that aren't either allegory or accurate cosmology.
Certainly Paul took the OT as having allegory, (Galatians 4:24) and Jesus tells clearly allegorical stories, (Mark 4:14-20) but there are OT references to allegory directly. The beasts in the book of Daniel are directly called allegories of nations and kings. (see Daniel 7) People are given names with clearly allegorical significance, for example, Jacob is named "Israel."
But honestly highroller I am loosing the motivation to have a discussion with someone will accuse me personally and want to have a contentious argument. Fruitful discussion requires mutual charity when looking at the other person's views. It doesn't feel like you are interested in having a fruitful discussion so much as a contentions argument, so I don't see the benefit of continuing this. Hadn't replied to everything you said yet as I need to grab some lunch after spending an hour responding to people today already.
Theres definitely some important points about how God created everything
What important points about how God created everything?
but if it is the final work of the bible that is ultimately the message of God you have to look at it as only a part of that larger message. A better question would be, "what is the point of the book of Genesis," or "how does that fit into the biblical narrative?"
No, I find the relevant question to be: Why do you think Genesis has the authority of God behind it?
What is the reason you think it has the authority of God behind it? Is it because of something in Genesis, or is it because you declared from the start that the Bible has the authority of God?
All it shows is that the messenger is fallible.
Is God fallible? No. Therefore God's words cannot be fallible, because they come from God, who is infallible.
What you're basically saying is that we have a messenger that distorts, forgets, reinterprets, has a limited understanding of, and takes profound liberties with the message it's supposed to deliver, such that it only occasionally intersects with the truth. That's not an authoritative document. If you have to be vigilant about whether a document is telling you something that's true or false, if you routinely call into doubt whether you should accept what it says, it is by definition not authoritative, because that's not what authoritative means.
So I return to the question: What, precisely, privileges the Bible? What makes this book special over any other human writing ever?
The important points getting across is what matters and the theological points about God are reiterated a hundred times.
And what important points are those, exactly?
If the purpose of God in the bible is to teach us about the nature of God and the way to salvation, how is the exact number of years Israel was in exile related? How is the existence of Sodom all that important? Clearly those stories had "morals…" a "moral of the story" which remains untouched regardless of their literal truth value.
I mean, I think The Lord of the Rings has some great morals in it, about heroism and perseverance in the face of adversity. Is The Lord of the Rings divine inspired? Does it contain the Word of God?
You are mistaken about my view. I believe Genesis is to be looked at as a whole and there may be parts that aren't either allegory or accurate cosmology.
This is something I want to clarify here: Are you arguing that Genesis 1 and 2 may be wrong or are wrong with regards to cosmology?
See that's the thing that started this line of conversation. You wrote, "I think that while I agree that evolution and genesis may have a hard time resolving," and I replied that Genesis and evolution cannot be resolved, because Genesis contradicts evolution. Neither Creation story in Genesis is compatible with scientific facts.
So do you acknowledge that the creation myths of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are completely scientifically wrong? If not, demonstrate in what way they are not.
It doesn't feel like you are interested in having a fruitful discussion so much as a contentions argument
I am trying to get you to give a straight answer. It's not been easy in the slightest.
God Highroller I really wonder how you factor in the fact that physics just very recently discovered that the first three words in Genesis is in fact true. The three IBM scientist who completely by accident discovered the background radiation received Noble prizes for there discoveries and lo and behold this anti science wholly refuted Genesis account makes the same assertion what 3000 - 3500 years ago?
The first three words of Genesis are "In the beginning". How is that even something that can be 'true'? That's not an assertion, it's a prepositional phrase.
God Highroller I really wonder how you factor in the fact that physics just very recently discovered that the first three words in Genesis is in fact true. The three IBM scientist who completely by accident discovered the background radiation received Noble prizes for there discoveries and lo and behold this anti science wholly refuted Genesis account makes the same assertion what 3000 - 3500 years ago?
How do you explain that?
In Hebrew, the first three words of Genesis translate to "In-the-beginning God created". This is not the same assertion made by science.
If, as I suspect, you mean to say simply that both science and Genesis assert the universe has a beginning, this is correct. However, this assertion is hardly unique to Genesis. Every other religious tradition has a creation story too. Nor is it at all difficult to explain. People always and everywhere have been asking questions about their origins, and religions always and everywhere have been attempting to answer them. But simply making up a story to answer the question is not impressive. Impressive would be if Genesis got the same answer as science. And it emphatically doesn't.
Genesis says that God created the earth, covered in waters, before he created light. Science has discovered that light came into being about a picosecond after the Big Bang as the electromagnetic force separated from the weak nuclear force (way before baryonogenesis had formed any matter whatsoever), the earth condensed from space dust around nine billion years later, and liquid water began to precipitate out of the atmosphere maybe a few hundred million years after that as the planet cooled.
Genesis says that God created the atmosphere by separating the water in the ocean from the water above the sky, then created dry land by raising it out of the ocean. Science has discovered that the land came first, then the atmosphere, then liquid water - and, of course, that there is no "water above the sky", only vacuum.
Genesis says God created plants before the sun and moon and stars, that the sun and moon are both "great lights", and that the stars are different than the sun. Science has discovered that the sun is a star, the moon is not a star and does not shed light of its own, and all of them are much, much older than plants - and older than the oceans, and (except in the moon's case) older than the earth itself.
Genesis says that God created fish, sea monsters, and birds before land animals. Science has discovered that fish do predate land animals, but birds don't, and in fact are descended from them. And to the extent that "sea monsters" really exist, they are whales, which likewise are descended from land animals.
And of course Genesis says that this all happened over seven days. Science has discovered that it took 13.8 billion years.
So if I were you, I would not be so ****ing smug about the predictive accuracy of Genesis.
To further build on Blinking Spirit's post, we have a second creation story in Genesis that not only also contradicts science, but contradicts Genesis 1 as well.
In Genesis 2:4-25, we receive a second account of creation that is nothing like the first. In this account, God creates heaven and earth in a single day. After creating heaven and earth, God proceeds to create life.
God makes man first. And I don't mean man as in humankind, I mean man as in male human, man, Adam. Just the man, no woman. God then creates Eden, and plants it with "every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food." After that, God creates "every beast of the field and every fowl of the air." Then God creates woman from a rib of Adam.
So yeah. Not only is it absurd to argue that Genesis predicted the origin of Creation, but it's also very problematic to say that Genesis has any sort of unified message on the subject.
God Highroller I really wonder how you factor in the fact that physics just very recently discovered that the first three words in Genesis is in fact true.
"In the beginning"?
The three IBM scientist who completely by accident discovered the background radiation received Noble prizes for there discoveries and lo and behold this anti science wholly refuted Genesis account makes the same assertion what 3000 - 3500 years ago?
How do you explain that?
What? That the universe had a beginning? Everyone has speculated on the universe's beginning. Every creation myth ever is about the universe's beginning. We even have a term, "Creation myths," for them, because they're so ubiquitous.
What you should try to explain is why neither of the creation accounts in Genesis — creation accounts that supposedly are inspired by the infallible divine being who created the universe — get the creation of the world right.
1. True belief comes from faith, and trying to remove faith via logic is a seriously uphill battle.
2. Christian belief is like water, taking the unique shape of every believer or vessel if you will. Every Christian you talk to has their own interpretation of the religion, meaning that a convincing argument to one might completely miss with another.
3. In part that ever changing belief is an argument against it in and of itself. All Christians seem to believe that their interpretation is correct (not to mention the MANY non-Christian religious folks). The reality in many cases seems to be that they interpret God/religion to fit their needs or their biases.
I think, "extraordinary" here must mean "extraordinarily improbable." For if the being in question is extraordinary but not extraordinarily improbable, I don't see why the evidence must be so undeniably obvious if the being in question isn't improbable to exist. And I don't think theres a way you can show God is extraordinarily improbable. And the incompatibility of the properties of God you mentioned are actually not as much of a problem since the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed that there is no logical contradiction between Gods omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, provided God has a morally sufficient reason to permit wrong in the world.
Plantinga, I will grant you has dealt with the logical problem of evil & suffering pretty well. However, Plantinga's free will defense only really deals with moral evil and not with natural evil (disease, natural disasters, etc.). It should also be noted that Plantinga does not present any evidence or try to present any plausibility to his arguments either, not that this is a problem as far as the logical aspect is concerned.
However, I'm going to use Rowe's argument for the evidential problem of evil:
1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Rowe uses an example to explain this; a lighting strike causes a forest fire which traps and burns a fawn. This causes the fawn to suffer for several days in agony before finally dying.
2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Perhaps god could use it's omnipotence to allow the fawn to escape or at least prevent it from suffering in agony.
3.(Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
Past that, there are other problems with having all of these properties as well. Can an all-knowing, all-powerful, god know what it is going to do in the future and if so, can it use it's omnipotence to change it? Can an omnipotent god create a task in which it can't complete? What about using omnipotence to overcome the time paradox? Can god use his omniscience to know exactly what I will do tomorrow? If so, how can free will exist?
What about god's free will? Can an omnibenevolent being choose to do evil? If not, is anything god chooses to do praiseworthy?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I did actually address this already by saying that the lack of consensus does not show that the experience of God is not had by some. Lack of consensus exists about many things but that doesn't mean that everyone is wrong.
Doesn't show that everyone is right either though.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I think it makes more sense to say that one of us are wrong.
Yes, but how do we decide which of you is wrong? What if all of you are wrong?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I am not saying that you must take me to be rational to believe based on my experience of God. However, I am also saying that you cannot just judge from the outside and say I could not be rational. You have to attack the truth of Christianity rather than my experience to show I am unjustified in faith. It is an irrational position, in my view, to think that I could not have experienced God simply because other people have believed themselves to experience a different God.
Rationality is being reasonable based on facts and reason. You are reasoning that your experience is evidence of this particular god. However, if you want to go this route, then we have to give the same consideration to other religious claims of differing gods. If only one (and we don't know which one) or maybe none of you are correct, then how can this sort of reasoning be rational?
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I am not sure what you are asking exactly as this is quite a complicated philosophical topic. I think a better question would be to ask what constitutes rational and justified belief. To answer that people have written many philosophical treatises, (I tend to agree with a lot of what Alvin Plantinga writes in his books on the topic) but I would say experience is definitely one avenue to justified belief.
Right, let's go with that. What do you, in your personal opinion, consider to be the standard for what constitutes as knowledge (that is, rational and justified belief)? I don't think you define knowledge in such a way that we can't know anything, so I want to know what you think the standard should be.
I think, "extraordinary" here must mean "extraordinarily improbable." For if the being in question is extraordinary but not extraordinarily improbable, I don't see why the evidence must be so undeniably obvious if the being in question isn't improbable to exist. And I don't think theres a way you can show God is extraordinarily improbable. And the incompatibility of the properties of God you mentioned are actually not as much of a problem since the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed that there is no logical contradiction between Gods omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, provided God has a morally sufficient reason to permit wrong in the world.
Plantinga, I will grant you has dealt with the logical problem of evil & suffering pretty well. However, Plantinga's free will defense only really deals with moral evil and not with natural evil (disease, natural disasters, etc.).
Here is something Plantinga says about natural evil that I think makes sense, "On the one hand, it is conceivable that some natural evils and some persons are so related that the persons would have produced less moral good if the evils had been absent." The natural world and the pain and suffering it causes definitely seems to come into contact with human free choices. The two are not wholly independent of each other. I may learn, from the existence of natural evil, to be humbled. There are things which are important and yet wholly outside of man's control… such as some natural evils. Imagine my free choice to live in Chicago rather than Florida due to the lack of hurricanes (natural evil) in Chicago. In doing this, however, I am choosing cold and difficult winters. And living in Chicago definitely affects my life and it may cause it to look very different than I lived in Flordia. There may also be all sorts of other consequences that I am missing.
However, I'm going to use Rowe's argument for the evidential problem of evil:
1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Rowe uses an example to explain this; a lighting strike causes a forest fire which traps and burns a fawn. This causes the fawn to suffer for several days in agony before finally dying.
2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Perhaps god could use it's omnipotence to allow the fawn to escape or at least prevent it from suffering in agony.
3.(Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
I would disagree with #1. You definitely seem to accept that there are some instances where God cannot prevent suffering without losing a greater good (as you find Plantinga's refutation of the logical problem of evil reasonable). And it seems to me that we are definitely not even close to being in an epistemic position to say that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for permitting XYZ.
I think the fawn example is a good objection to God having a reason for allowing that, but after considering it more, I don't think it is actually all that convincing. Perhaps part of the reason things like that happen is because God has created a world ordered by natural laws and those laws acting out eventually cause something like this. Or perhaps the existence of a world where an animal would never die alone would make it appear that humans are so great causing arrogance. It is also interesting to me that pain is the greatest tool to avoid death and sickness, so ultimately the pain mechanism was designed for a good purpose. Another possibility is that the spiritual realm and physical realm are not wholly independent, meaning that human sin throws off the course of nature. (just one of the many possibilities I have given) Are we really in a place to say that none of these possibilities could be actual? I don't see how.
Past that, there are other problems with having all of these properties as well. Can an all-knowing, all-powerful, god know what it is going to do in the future and if so, can it use it's omnipotence to change it?
Can an omnipotent god create a task in which it can't complete? What about using omnipotence to overcome the time paradox? Can god use his omniscience to know exactly what I will do tomorrow? If so, how can free will exist?
What about god's free will? Can an omnibenevolent being choose to do evil? If not, is anything god chooses to do praiseworthy?
I don't find these to be persuasive objections and I think they all rely on one logical flaw. It is like saying, if God is all powerful, why can't he make a "square-circle?" It is an attempt to say, God is supposed to be able to do anything… and here is a thing, why can't God do it? However, the problem is that a "square-circle" is not a thing at all. It is not a coherent concept. It is just a trick of language because the words seem to combine correctly, but actually they signify nothing. It is like asking a perfect mathematician to add the number 10 to Barack Obama. If he says he couldn't do it, that doesn't mean he isn't a perfect mathematician, it means you have given him a math equation to solve that makes no sense and isn't an equation at all.
The same goes for God seeing the actual literal future (meaning that it will be in fact the future), and then deciding to change it. For if he decided to change it, it wouldn't be the future he would see in the first place. So it is the scenario that doesn't make sense. It is the same logical flaw that goes for the other alleged problems with God that you mentioned.
Doesn't show that everyone is right either though.
Of course. I hope I didn't sound like I thought it did.
Yes, but how do we decide which of you is wrong? What if all of you are wrong?
It may be that spiritually exploring oneself is the only way to come to some knowledge about the matter. We could certainly be all wrong but I don't think that is society's job (as a whole) to decide either way.
Rationality is being reasonable based on facts and reason. You are reasoning that your experience is evidence of this particular god. However, if you want to go this route, then we have to give the same consideration to other religious claims of differing gods. If only one (and we don't know which one) or maybe none of you are correct, then how can this sort of reasoning be rational?
There are many beliefs we hold based on experience rather than a process of reasoning. Such as basic beliefs (philosophical first-principles cannot be proven) as well as things like love. I'm not sure it is necessary to do this (as it isn't necessary to love a bunch of women to know you are truly in love with your wife) have really considered other religious beliefs. I was an atheist for a few years and also a buddhist and seeker, reading many religious and philosophical books such as the Koran and the works of Plato.
Right, let's go with that. What do you, in your personal opinion, consider to be the standard for what constitutes as knowledge (that is, rational and justified belief)? I don't think you define knowledge in such a way that we can't know anything, so I want to know what you think the standard should be.
I think that if by knowledge you mean complete certainty I don't think we have any knowledge. I think we have beliefs that are justified or unjustified. I am not a professional philosopher but I think I've defended why Christian belief could be justified decently. I think we can come to justified belief in a number of ways, both by experience and reasoning. However that doesn't mean that we never question or can never give up those beliefs. Plantinga describes "defeaters" which are things which can be such strong evidence that it is necessary to give up a certain belief and I would agree that such things exist.
I'm going to detract a little bit off topic here for a moment, mainly because I feel I should be straight forward with you.
That being said, I don't have any interest in answering the question of whether or not God exists. For me, I've debated that question for over a decade now and honestly the debate forum is full of hundreds of threads and thousands of posts dedicated to that topic. I think I debated that topic for so long because some part of me wanted affirmation to my own position and I wanted to see what the other side of the arguments were. After all, maybe I was missing something. Certainly I wanted to be right and honestly I don't regret debating that question. I think it's helped me to grow intellectually. However, it seems that all of those debates follow similar arguments and patterns and I just don't have any interest in debating it further because I don't see anything productive coming from debating that question anymore. That's just my personal feelings on the matter and by no means am I saying that anyone else should feel the same.
Still, I'm not sure exactly when my interest in that question waned and to be honest for a while I thought I was just burnt out and I quit posting here thinking that maybe I just needed a break. However, as I've been studying philosophy more and pondered a bit about why I quit posting it just sort of gradually hit me.
The question of whether or not God exists is more of an individual question we have to ask and answer ourselves and there's just no magical argument that I can make to a theist that is going to change their mind in a debate. The same is true for myself as well. I can't just choose to just magically believe that 2+2=5 in the same sense that a theist or an atheist can't just chose to magically believe that God exists or doesn't exist.
Instead, what I find to be much more interesting question(s) is what derives from whether or not a God exists. Questions like how did we get here? Where do morals come from? What does religion mean to people? What does God mean to their believers? What is omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, etc.?
So after having said all that, I feel as though I've come face to face with a slight dilemma and I'm not sure if I should continue to post in this thread or make another. The dilemma is that I feel as though this thread is more focused to answering the question of whether or not god exists, which is perfectly fine, but I don't have any interest in debating that question. So I suppose I'll leave that up to you, because I'm purposefully going to move away from that question to discuss what I view as more interesting questions and they are most likely going to muddy the waters of this thread.
If you're okay with that, I'll continue to post here in this thread. If you're not, no harm done, this will be my final post in this thread and I'll make another thread to discuss the questions I'd like to explore.
So I guess my question to you is, are you okay with that? Shall we muddy the waters here and discuss these questions?
Here is something Plantinga says about natural evil that I think makes sense, "On the one hand, it is conceivable that some natural evils and some persons are so related that the persons would have produced less moral good if the evils had been absent." The natural world and the pain and suffering it causes definitely seems to come into contact with human free choices. The two are not wholly independent of each other. I may learn, from the existence of natural evil, to be humbled. There are things which are important and yet wholly outside of man's control… such as some natural evils. Imagine my free choice to live in Chicago rather than Florida due to the lack of hurricanes (natural evil) in Chicago. In doing this, however, I am choosing cold and difficult winters. And living in Chicago definitely affects my life and it may cause it to look very different than I lived in Flordia. There may also be all sorts of other consequences that I am missing.
The thing that Platinga is missing here is that pain and suffering have been around longer than human existence. In other words, evil is far older than human existence. I'll get back to this down below, but for now I don't think Plantinga has sufficiently rebutted the evidential problem of evil.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
I would disagree with #1.
Rowe figured that if there was going to be any objection, it was going to be with premise 1.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
You definitely seem to accept that there are some instances where God cannot prevent suffering without losing a greater good (as you find Plantinga's refutation of the logical problem of evil reasonable).
Of course, for example if someone got cancer, they will suffer and die. However, with treatment they will still suffer but they live. So while their might be some suffering there, the suffering leads to a greater good.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
And it seems to me that we are definitely not even close to being in an epistemic position to say that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for permitting XYZ. I think the fawn example is a good objection to God having a reason for allowing that, but after considering it more, I don't think it is actually all that convincing.
Right but in order to say this, you'd have to concede that there has never been any instance of pointless suffering in the entire history of sentience on earth and/or if there is sentience on other planets, the entire universe. Rowe chose the example of the burning fawn deliberately in order to make this point. I don't honestly think that you want to concede on this point, but if you are, I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Perhaps part of the reason things like that happen is because God has created a world ordered by natural laws and those laws acting out eventually cause something like this.
I agree with that sentiment by itself, however, I don't think that makes sense when taken together with premise 2.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
Or perhaps the existence of a world where an animal would never die alone would make it appear that humans are so great causing arrogance.
Right but that wasn't the point Rowe was making and not the point that I'm trying to raise here either. I accept that there might be a need for death and suffering for some greater good - for example, a lion might kill a wildebeest (evil) in order to feed itself and it's pride (the greater good).
The point that Rowe is getting at is the pointless suffering. The burning fawn is just suffering pointlessly. It's family and the fawn don't have high enough cognitive function to build moral character, virtues, or even understand morality.
Quote from Tromokratis1 »
It is also interesting to me that pain is the greatest tool to avoid death and sickness, so ultimately the pain mechanism was designed for a good purpose.
Right and I do agree in general with this, but again when taken with premise 2, it doesn't really make any sense. The pain and suffering the fawn goes through before dying isn't going to help it avoid death or sickness.
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Another possibility is that the spiritual realm and physical realm are not wholly independent, meaning that human sin throws off the course of nature. (just one of the many possibilities I have given) Are we really in a place to say that none of these possibilities could be actual? I don't see how.
Rowe's example is designed to not include human sin. The fawn is alone in the mountains away from any humans and even if I gave you this point, suppose we use the same example but with an animal that predates human existence, what then?
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I don't find these to be persuasive objections and I think they all rely on one logical flaw. It is like saying, if God is all powerful, why can't he make a "square-circle?" It is an attempt to say, God is supposed to be able to do anything… and here is a thing, why can't God do it? However, the problem is that a "square-circle" is not a thing at all. It is not a coherent concept. It is just a trick of language because the words seem to combine correctly, but actually they signify nothing. It is like asking a perfect mathematician to add the number 10 to Barack Obama. If he says he couldn't do it, that doesn't mean he isn't a perfect mathematician, it means you have given him a math equation to solve that makes no sense and isn't an equation at all.
The same goes for God seeing the actual literal future (meaning that it will be in fact the future), and then deciding to change it. For if he decided to change it, it wouldn't be the future he would see in the first place. So it is the scenario that doesn't make sense. It is the same logical flaw that goes for the other alleged problems with God that you mentioned.
Well, I understand what you are saying here and I think that's a fair point to at least some of these objections, but not all of them. So I think then we have to redefine what omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence mean, before moving on. So now I'm asking you, what do these words mean? How should we define them in order to proceed?
However, I don't think this point works in regards to these points:
1. Can god use his omniscience to know exactly what I will do tomorrow?
1a. If so, how can free will exist?
However, I do concede that perhaps a better working definition of omniscience might be in order before answering 1. and depending on what that definition is, we may or may not proceed to question 1a.
I'll also further concede that perhaps we may even need to define exactly what we mean by free will, though I really don't think it's all that important to really get a debate about what free will means for our purposes here. So far, I am going on the assumption and basic definition that free will is the ability to choose an action, thought, belief, etc. willfully without any type of hindrance.
But let's not put the cart before the horse and start with defining what omniscience means.
I'm going to reorganize and reword my last point in that quote to make it a little more clear;
2. Can an omnibenevolent being choose to do evil?
2a. If not, does God have freewill?
2b. If not, is anything god chooses to do praiseworthy?
Like above, I do concede that perhaps a better working definition of omnibenevolence might be in order before answering 1. and depending on what that definition is, we may or may not proceed to question 2a.
However, question 2b., I think is very relevant here because you seem to agree with Plantinga's free will defense. One of the arguments that Plantinga makes for why we couldn't have a world without evil is that it would make humans no different than robots in the sense that a robot doing something good isn't doing anything that is praiseworthy - it's not choosing to do that good, it's just programed to do it. Similarly, if humans were designed without the capacity to commit evil and only did good, then nothing that humans did that is good is praiseworthy - that is they are simply doing what they were designed to do, just like the robot. If God can't choose to do anything evil or is incapable of evil and can only do good, then God isn't any better than the robot or a human that has no capacity to do evil and therefore, anything good that God does is not praiseworthy.
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Of course. I hope I didn't sound like I thought it did.
It didn't, I just wanted to make sure that this was clear for everyone, including other people who might be following this conversation.
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It may be that spiritually exploring oneself is the only way to come to some knowledge about the matter. We could certainly be all wrong but I don't think that is society's job (as a whole) to decide either way.
Right, but I'm asking how can we objectively decide which of you (if anyone) is right? Certainly, we can subjectively decide anything we want - but what about objectively?
If everything is equal in regards to how you each feel subjectively about each of your Gods, experienced the same thing with respect to each of your Gods, and all of your reasons for believing in each of your gods, how can someone who is undecided on which (if any) God, is objectively the correct God? I don't really think you can, so I don't think that picking one god over another god that has the same equal grounds as all the others can be more rational than the other. If all things are equal, then all beliefs in differing gods with regards to personal experience must be equally rational or equally irrational.
So I think you are left with two choices here, you have to concede that all personal experiences with regards to a God are equally valid as evidence for the existence of all of these gods and belief in each of them is rational - no matter how God is defined or you have to concede that all personal experiences with regards to a God are equally not valid for the existence of all of these gods and that making a decision on which one to believe in based on personal experience is irrational.
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There are many beliefs we hold based on experience rather than a process of reasoning. Such as basic beliefs (philosophical first-principles cannot be proven) as well as things like love. I'm not sure it is necessary to do this (as it isn't necessary to love a bunch of women to know you are truly in love with your wife) have really considered other religious beliefs. I was an atheist for a few years and also a buddhist and seeker, reading many religious and philosophical books such as the Koran and the works of Plato.
Right, but I think Blinking Spirit addressed this pretty well already in a couple of posts.
I'll add my thoughts here as well though, I find myself agreeing with him, not all experiences are equal and I think that each of us can experience the same thing and have very different thoughts and feelings about the experience.
Suppose, You and I have the exact same experience, you conclude that this experience is divine and is definitive proof that the God you believe in is real, while I decide that the experience doesn't prove any God's existence because it was likely just a hallucination.
Perhaps Blinking Spirit also has the exact same experience and was atheist at first, but now is unsure and has decided that the experience has left him more open to the idea of God's existence but not quite enough to fully believe it was actually God and not a hallucination.
Perhaps Bakgat also has the exact same experience and was atheist at first but decides that the experience is divine and decides that there must be a God out there, but is unsure which God it was that he experienced.
Perhaps Highroller also has the exact same experience and is theist, but decides that perhaps this was a different God than the one he believes in and converts and now worships this particular God.
Perhaps Verbal also has the exact same experience and is also theist as well and decides that this experience wasn't actually the same God he believes in, but some other malevolent spirit meant to shake his beliefs in his God.
In a sense, it's no different than if all of us watched a movie, read a book, saw a play, an action etc. and all had different thoughts, opinions, and feelings about what it is that we experienced while experiencing it. So then if this is the case, how can this be reliable from an objective point of view about reality? If we all experienced the same thing, yet think differently about the experience, form different opinions about the experience, and have different feelings about the experience, why shouldn't we just brush these off as just merely subjective experiences and not objective truths about reality as Blinking Spirit pointed out?
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I think that if by knowledge you mean complete certainty I don't think we have any knowledge. I think we have beliefs that are justified or unjustified. I am not a professional philosopher but I think I've defended why Christian belief could be justified decently. I think we can come to justified belief in a number of ways, both by experience and reasoning. However that doesn't mean that we never question or can never give up those beliefs. Plantinga describes "defeaters" which are things which can be such strong evidence that it is necessary to give up a certain belief and I would agree that such things exist.
Well I don't believe we can have complete certainty about anything, so we agree there - but what I was saying there is that we should go ahead with how you defined knowledge - as rational and justified belief rather than just typing all of that out all the time. In other words, from here on, in regards to my question in that quote, let the definition of knowledge be rational and justified belief.
So then with that in mind, what do you in your opinion consider the standard for knowledge should be?
Certainly, I agree with what you are saying here and I'm not a professional philosopher either and I consider myself a novice with regards to philosophy and I still have so much more to learn.
However, I don't think that all experiences and reasons are equal with regards to knowledge, so we should have a standard for what constitutes as knowledge. For example, let's suppose I just have an experience and I conclude that my experience was such that there was no other way than to conclude that my experience was divine in nature. In this experience, God spoke to me and told me tomorrow the world is going to end. Is it rational to believe that the world will end tomorrow? After all, I had an experience you couldn't possibly know - because you didn't experience it, only I experienced it and I firmly believe that my experience was divine and the words spoken to me were truthful. Is it rational for me to believe that tomorrow the world is going to end?
I'm going to detract a little bit off topic here for a moment, mainly because I feel I should be straight forward with you…
Foxblade, thank you for the thoughtful response. I do think you are a very intelligent and polite person and it is a pleasure to discuss with you. I am not sure what exactly you are getting at when you say you wouldn't prefer discussing the existence of God. I just want to know to be more understanding of what you would prefer. It does seem you are interested in discussing relevant things related to the existence of God. Since I am not completely understanding what you would like in this matter I'm just going to have to go ahead and discuss and if I say something you aren't comfortable with, you will have to let me know. Perhaps it is ok if the question of the existence of God is referenced sometimes as we are definitely discussing God and faith. If it helps, I personally don't believe I can convince someone to believe in God, and I don't really espouse the arguments for God for that reason. I believe ultimately either something in a person that he/she was born with, or God himself, would need to be the reasons someone believes. However, I do certainly believe that belief in God is rationally justified and I am willing to defend that.
I decided I wont quote everything you said and be obsessive about responding to every little point (I as well know what it is to get burnt out on these discussions). This can lead to bickering about every little thing and the thread getting so complicated we both give up. I did read everything you wrote and I will do my best to respond to your main points. If I miss something, please forgive me and bring it up again next time.
Right but in order to say this, you'd have to concede that there has never been any instance of pointless suffering in the entire history of sentience on earth and/or if there is sentience on other planets, the entire universe.
I think this was a great response. However, if you think about it, it seems to me that we are both in a similar boat here. As I had said, it seems to me that we are definitely not even close to being in an epistemic position to say that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for permitting XYZ. It seems if we take the possibility of my experiencing God out of the equation we are on equal footing. For you, to show that God couldn't have a morally sufficient reason for something, must assume there couldn't possibly be a reason for XYZ in the mind of God. (something which seems almost impossible to say given the fact that you are dealing with a being that literally knows everything… and I will address your fawn example in a moment) Me, I must say that there is a reason that I cannot see currently for suffering which seems to have no reason such as a fawn burning. (though I do intend to give possible reasons)
So ultimately we are both in a difficult epistemic position, and, therefore, it seems silly to me to come to a conclusion about one or the other (whether or not God could have reasons or whether there is pointless suffering) based on speculating about the possible reasons or pointlessness of suffering in the world. The wise position in this matter (all other things being equal) would be agnosticism. I'm not recommending people be agnostics, but if the existence of suffering were the only thing we were going by, given what I have said above, it seems to me that we should be agnostics about the matter.
I will address your burning fawn example, but I don't think ultimately it is of that great significance either way for the reasons mentioned above. Provided I give you possible reasons why it might have a purpose, I have done more than enough to totally take the wind out of the objection. I don't pretend to be in such an epistemic position to be able to know what is God's purpose in everything that he allows, (and personally I feel the objection has almost no weight in itself for that reason) but I don't think it is obvious that such a thing couldn't have God's allowance for a reason.
It seems to me your objection is as such: A fawn burning alone in the woods (perhaps even before humans were around) could have no purpose in God's (benevolent) mind.
I will sketch some possible answers with the full knowledge that as long as it as plausible that God could possibly have a reason for this (even if my answers are all wrong… not that I think they are) then that is what counts.
Perhaps God saw evolution as the best process whereby to create mankind. Perhaps only this process of man's being created (perhaps as the bible says, "from the dust") would lead man to humility and would leave the existence of God sufficiently hidden. (I do believe that God hides himself… see Pascal on this if you are interested in philosophy) Perhaps animal suffering is a necessary part of evolution. Perhaps you will say, if no one is around, what harm is it for God to protect one fawn from suffering? There are a couple responses. If no one is around, how do you know He didn't? This is God after-all.
Hey Foxblade, I will respond to the rest of what you said (and more on this topic), but there is so much to say that I can't do it all now. It probably makes sense to wait for me to finish before you respond again. Cheers!
The burden on god is much higher than needing to have a reason for any particular instance of suffering. In order for god to fit his definition, he has to select and create the world with minimal net suffering out of all possible worlds. This means that there cannot be even a single moment across all of time and space where any being could have felt even the tiniest fraction less pain or anguish without there being a negative trade-off, and furthermore, that any instance of suffering must yield the largest possible return in any greater-good trade off.
Looking at the fawn is too small of a view. God could have instead created a universe with no fawns, no fires, no pain, no evolution. A universe totally alien to our own. So we must believe that not even one of this unfathomable number of possible universes comes out any better than our own.
Seems a bit unlikely. Extremely unlikely, in fact. So, we should regard the nature of our universe and our existence, which seems extremely unlikely to be optimal in this regard, as extremely strong evidence (though not proof) against the existence of god.
I do find it kind of interesting that most of the arguments tend to only apply when looking at it strictly from Christianity/monotheistic religions typically. Not really wanting to dive into the debate forum, but it's interesting to read people's responses on the subject, and it kind of prompted my five cents on the thing.
So how do you tell which parts are false? Is it just Genesis? What about Exudos? The whole pentutarch? The whole old testiment? Is there a single line you can point to and say "THIS one is the literal word of god?"
You can see how absurd your argument is, right? If we (a) don't know which parts of the bible are true, and (b)might face endless hell if we don't work it out, and (c) the book is full of tricks for the "wise", then - inescapably - god is a giant dick.
Ignoring, for a moment, the utter stupidity of these lines, this is the same bible that we have no idea which parts are the word of god, right? Sooooooooo....why would we accept this bit?
(Also, it's an utterly circular argument - we know the bible is true because we can rationally determine that it is true by using an argument from the bible that says you can't use rationality to determine if things are true.)
The part about how god is a jerk and will make sure we can't use wisdom to find the answers to things makes rational sense? Do you even know what the word rational means?
So your utterly irrational faith is rational because the scriptures say that irrational things are rational? I mean, is this your line of argument?
I feel like you seem to assume people reason as such, "the universe needed a cause, therefore God is a necessary being." However, the cosmological argument, for example, states that the properties necessary to be the cause of the universe are XYZ, and, interestingly XYZ are the traditional properties of God. A necessary being isn't even really one of the properties that must be deduced to say that that the thing that created the universe seems to be God… I am confused as to all the focus on this one traditional property of God.
This is such a parody of an argument and not connected to the truth about what I believe and certainly not Christian philosophers. No one is saying to believe in God for no reason. There are many good reasons for things which cannot be publicly proven.
I am focused on the claim of necessity because that's the claim you made. I am more than willing to discuss these other properties as well. But for the record, even if the cosmological argument were completely sound and proved that God existed, it would still not prove that God is necessary, because it uses the the universe's existence as a premise , and that is contingent. Imagine you find the famous watch on the beach, and deduce the existence of a watchmaker. Is the watchmaker necessary? Of course not. He's necessary given the existence of the watch, but is is possible for there to be no watch and no watchmaker. You can't explain the existence of the watchmaker in the metaphysical sense by saying, "He has to exist because of the watch". That's only an explanation in the epistemic sense: it's how you know that he exists.
You have, in this thread, speculated that maybe God exists necessarily as an "explanation" for his existence, without providing any proof of this necessity. And you have already read my take on your allegedly good reasons for believing. I do not feel I am being unfair to you in summarizing your position as I have.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Because when it's pointed out to you that your "inspired by God" book is often both contradictory and factually wrong, your response seems to be, "Well there's nothing about something inspired by God that means it has to be without error."
So either you believe that God often errs, or you believe God's ability to communicate often errs, but either way you seem to acknowledge the Bible often errs. But if that's the case, from whence does this supposed authority you are arguing the Bible has come from?
What about any part of Genesis?
Have you actually read Genesis 1 and 2? Honestly, have you? Because there is nothing in Genesis that matches anything we would consider factual about the creation of the world.
Which is nothing.
Ok, just so you know, it is transparent that you are trying to dodge the question. It's obvious. You are not fooling anyone.
Stop dodging the question. You have claimed the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are allegories for the creation of the world. Demonstrate this. Show how it's an allegory. Point out the symbols and what they symbolize, and how this accurately conveys the scientific truths of modern biology and cosmology.
You are in a dispute over precisely that. I am disputing it. So yes, it is a matter of whether or not you can argue that.
And your repeated evasiveness towards any attempt to get you to address your own arguments does not indicate you can.
And I think that's hypocritical coming from someone who refuses to actually put forth arguments.
It appears irrational because you have not made rational arguments. Which is strange, isn't it, for someone who claims rationality in his faith?
Or is your argument for you being correct like your argument for the Bible being correct, in that it doesn't have to be factual to be correct?
Well, actually, that's not a circular argument. It's an outright contradictory argument.
But either way, Tromokratis1 is arguing that he is right, and if he is demonstrated to be factually incorrect, it doesn't matter because he doesn't have to be factually correct in order to be right.
I think you are misunderstanding my points. I was saying,
1. The possibility that God exists is not all that extraordinary… and to assume so while arguing against God is to assume the conclusion in the argument (a circular argument)
2. It is rational to believe something based on experience even if you cant prove it.
#2 was where the innocent of a crime example came in, not #1.
I would say my experience of God does certainly come through the senses… at least partly. However, why should we take a spiritual sense as inherently unreliable? Just because people disagree on it? I've explored buddhism myself and other religions and there was never an experience comparable to what I found in Jesus.
Likewise I find much other corroborative evidence that my experience was from God. I have had many experiences and they actually corroborate the experience of God described in the bible quite well about the Holy Spirit living in believers.
I have questioned my faith and I do so every day. Despite being an obsessive Descartes like questioner, I find I still do believe my experience was from God. How can you possibly say I am being irrational as you don't have access to my experience?
Disagreement doesn't prove falsity or unreliability. In fact, certainly, if Christianity is true, sin would have epistemic consequences distancing people from God and truth causing the kind of confusion present with religious experience.
Ironically you have no way of proving that you are not in a dream right now. How can you then rationally consider anything you experience real? You must just go based on your experience… and I must say I think you are quite rational to take the world around you as real. Likewise, I can be rational to take the experience of God as real even if I am unable to prove its reality. After investigating your response in detail, I don't believe there remains any very good objection against believing in God based on experience.
Much like the messenger of the King example it carries the message of God in it.
This isn't true. If I were to tell you, as my messenger, a story, for example, and you were to retell it to an audience of people, you wouldn't need to word-for-word repeat the message. All you would need to do is to get what was important to me across. This could be the "point" of the story, the "gist" of the story.
Yes I have definitely read it. Actually the creation from nothing seems quite like the creation of the universe at the big bang.
I'm actually using logic and reason and not dodging anything.
Feel free to quote my stating Gen. 1 and 2 are allegories of the creation of the world. I said allegory undeniably exists in the bible (I can give examples if you would like), but I never said Gen 1 and 2 were. I think those are part of a narrative that has the purpose of saying that God created everything there is by his power.
You aren't even giving me a chance. It is interesting that you accuse me of evading reason yet you are accusing me personally. I would rather deal with the arguments than attack people.
So if the messenger is prone to making stuff up, contradicting himself, getting things outright wrong, and obfuscating the point, how is the messenger authoritative? That's the opposite of authoritative. That's an unreliable messenger.
No, of course it doesn't.
That doesn't sound anything like cosmology.
So once again, justify any reason we should regard this as true or authoritative. If you want to say it's an allegory, by all means, please make the case that it is.
Of course you are. I will ask yet again, where is this great allegory that Genesis is supposed to be?
Ok, so point out the allegories.
Except that's not what an allegory is.
An allegory is a story in which the characters and plot are symbolic of other things. Every element in an allegory is meant to symbolize a concept in order to convey a message. It's not just a story made to convey a message, it's not the same thing as a myth. In an allegory, all characters and events are symbols.
So where is the allegory in Genesis 1 and 2? Or would you care to retract the statement that they're to be interpreted allegorically?
I have repeatedly requested you to justify your opinions, and you have repeatedly not done so. In what possible way is this not giving you a chance?
Yes, I am accusing you of refusing to answer questions. Which is a factual statement.
Really? Because I seem to be the one who's pulling teeth trying to get you to talk about the statements you've made whereas you refuse to defend them.
I would have to disagree, I think that a giving a being properties that include the creation of the universe and everything in it is extraordinary. If true it would alter everything we know. It's even more extraordinary if you include properties like omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, since having all of those properties at the same time isn't logically possible.
By this logic, wouldn't the opposite be true as well? I don't see how you can say this but then conclude that you can assume that god isn't extraordinary.
That depends on the type of experience and what you're trying to prove, doesn't it? For you, you're trying to say that your spiritual experience with your god proves that your god exists. So you have to go back to the point BlinkingSpirit made earlier and address it, which you have not done:
Do you think that you are the only one who has had an experience like that with Jesus or do you suppose their might be other people who follow different religions and believe in different gods that may have just as strong an experience with their respective god(s)?
Again, do you think followers outside of your particular brand of Christianity are capable of having such an experience with a different god/religion? Do you think that perhaps there might be Hindus, Buddhists, etc. that may report similar experiences among themselves? That is to say, Hindus may have all experience Kali as a blue, female, with 4-6 arms, etc.?
Well, by this logic you are going to open the flood gates. If your experiences count as rational, then so does everyone else. Basically, if anyone had an experience with their respective god - then it's rational to believe that those gods exist as well. After all, how can you possibly say that Kali, Loki, Thor, Krishna, etc. are irrational since you don't have access to their believer's experiences?
Okay, what is the standard for knowledge?
I understood that. You need to understand that showing one unprovable experience ought to be believed does not establish that every unprovable experience ought to be believed. Not all experiences are equal, and there are many differences between the crime experience and the God experience which make the God experience less credible, the first among them being that the God experience is extraordinary and the crime experience is ordinary. So like I said, "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." Understand?
You are not the only person having and reporting religious experiences. I said, "People around the world report experiences that apparently confirm different and mutually incompatible religions"; I did not say that you have experiences that confirm different religions. Buddhists can explore Jesus just as you have explored Buddhism... but find the Buddha where you found Jesus. They are doing the same thing, having the same type of experience, and reporting different results. That is clear evidence of unreliability. And the one way in which the Jesus-experiencers and the Buddhist-experiencers consistently differ is that the Jesus-experiencers were raised in Christian environments and the Buddhist-experiencers were raised in Buddhist environments. That is clear evidence that this unreliability is culturally informed.
Likewise, a Buddhist religious experience is "corroborated" by the sutras telling the experiencer what freedom from desire and the dissolution of self feel like. And the sutras are contradictory evidence for your experience, just as the Bible is contradictory evidence for the Buddhist experience.
Religious texts are not independent corroboration. They are an integral part of the cultural feedback loop.
But I do have access to your experience. We are communicating about it. If this is not sufficient access for me to evaluate the rationality of your experience, then you certainly cannot have sufficient access to other people's religious experiences to evaluate your own experience as more convincing than theirs. Maybe the Buddhist religious experience would blow yours out of the water if you could compare them. Or maybe not. You don't know. And if you don't know this, it is irrational to trust one reported experience over another.
It doesn't prove falsity. It definitely proves unreliability.
First, this is circular reasoning: it relies on the hypothesis that Christianity is true. If Christianity is false, your experience is simply unreliable (and false). You cannot assume the truth of Christianity in order to establish the reliability of evidence purportedly for the truth of Christianity.
Second, even granting for the sake of argument that sin does modulate religious experience in some way, it is arrogant and un-Copernican of you in the extreme to assume that your experience is more reliable because are less sinful than any of the five billion people on the planet who are not Christian. A scientist always assumes that he is an average observer, not a privileged one, and gives equal weight to the reported observations of others. So ask yourself what you ought to believe if you are an average sinner, and about half of the people reporting religious experiences are less sinful than you - or, to be a good Christian about it, if everyone on Earth including you is equally steeped in sin. Setting aside the uncomfortable fact that you're claiming moral superiority than a ton of people, it's simply vastly improbable that that all the less-sinful and therefore more-reliable experiences would happen to cluster in Europe and the Americas where Christianity is dominant, while all the more-sinful and therefore less-reliable experiences would happen to cluster in the parts of the world where other religions are dominant. And you have no reason to prefer this theory over the theory of, say, a Muslim who says that all the less-sinful and more-reliable experiences cluster in Islamic territory, and Christian experiences are of the more-sinful and less-reliable variety. The far more parsimonious explanation for the distribution of religious experiences is there isn't any of this improbable clustering; religious experiences are simply subjective and culturally informed.
I anticipated and addressed this objection: "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."
I've had to repeat myself too often in this post to take this claim seriously.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I think, "extraordinary" here must mean "extraordinarily improbable." For if the being in question is extraordinary but not extraordinarily improbable, I don't see why the evidence must be so undeniably obvious if the being in question isn't improbable to exist. And I don't think theres a way you can show God is extraordinarily improbable. And the incompatibility of the properties of God you mentioned are actually not as much of a problem since the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed that there is no logical contradiction between Gods omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, provided God has a morally sufficient reason to permit wrong in the world.
By this logic, wouldn't the opposite be true as well? I don't see how you can say this but then conclude that you can assume that god isn't extraordinary.
That depends on the type of experience and what you're trying to prove, doesn't it? For you, you're trying to say that your spiritual experience with your god proves that your god exists. So you have to go back to the point BlinkingSpirit made earlier and address it, which you have not done:
[/quote]
I did actually address this already by saying that the lack of consensus does not show that the experience of God is not had by some. Lack of consensus exists about many things but that doesn't mean that everyone is wrong.
Do you think that you are the only one who has had an experience like that with Jesus or do you suppose their might be other people who follow different religions and believe in different gods that may have just as strong an experience with their respective god(s)?[/quote]
I do believe other people think they have had experience of God in other religions. However, I just think they are mistaken. I have actually been a buddhist myself and believed to have experiences during that time. However, as I look back on it, was nothing compared to what I have experienced now. It is like seeing a shadow vs. the real thing.
Again, do you think followers outside of your particular brand of Christianity are capable of having such an experience with a different god/religion? Do you think that perhaps there might be Hindus, Buddhists, etc. that may report similar experiences among themselves? That is to say, Hindus may have all experience Kali as a blue, female, with 4-6 arms, etc.?
Well, by this logic you are going to open the flood gates. If your experiences count as rational, then so does everyone else. Basically, if anyone had an experience with their respective god - then it's rational to believe that those gods exist as well. After all, how can you possibly say that Kali, Loki, Thor, Krishna, etc. are irrational since you don't have access to their believer's experiences? [/quote]
I think it makes more sense to say that one of us are wrong. I am not saying that you must take me to be rational to believe based on my experience of God. However, I am also saying that you cannot just judge from the outside and say I could not be rational. You have to attack the truth of Christianity rather than my experience to show I am unjustified in faith. It is an irrational position, in my view, to think that I could not have experienced God simply because other people have believed themselves to experience a different God.
Okay, what is the standard for knowledge?[/quote]
I am not sure what you are asking exactly as this is quite a complicated philosophical topic. I think a better question would be to ask what constitutes rational and justified belief. To answer that people have written many philosophical treatises, (I tend to agree with a lot of what Alvin Plantinga writes in his books on the topic) but I would say experience is definitely one avenue to justified belief.
Theres definitely some important points about how God created everything but if it is the final work of the bible that is ultimately the message of God you have to look at it as only a part of that larger message. A better question would be, "what is the point of the book of Genesis," or "how does that fit into the biblical narrative?"
So if the messenger is prone to making stuff up, contradicting himself, getting things outright wrong, and obfuscating the point, how is the messenger authoritative? That's the opposite of authoritative. That's an unreliable messenger.
All it shows is that the messenger is fallible. The important points getting across is what matters and the theological points about God are reiterated a hundred times. In fact, even in ancient history it is well established that authors had the freedom to change the backdrop of a story to suit their narrative purposes… not that this is my main point. If the purpose of God in the bible is to teach us about the nature of God and the way to salvation, how is the exact number of years Israel was in exile related? How is the existence of Sodom all that important? Clearly those stories had "morals…" a "moral of the story" which remains untouched regardless of their literal truth value.
You are mistaken about my view. I believe Genesis is to be looked at as a whole and there may be parts that aren't either allegory or accurate cosmology.
Ok, so point out the allegories.
Certainly Paul took the OT as having allegory, (Galatians 4:24) and Jesus tells clearly allegorical stories, (Mark 4:14-20) but there are OT references to allegory directly. The beasts in the book of Daniel are directly called allegories of nations and kings. (see Daniel 7) People are given names with clearly allegorical significance, for example, Jacob is named "Israel."
But honestly highroller I am loosing the motivation to have a discussion with someone will accuse me personally and want to have a contentious argument. Fruitful discussion requires mutual charity when looking at the other person's views. It doesn't feel like you are interested in having a fruitful discussion so much as a contentions argument, so I don't see the benefit of continuing this. Hadn't replied to everything you said yet as I need to grab some lunch after spending an hour responding to people today already.
No, I find the relevant question to be: Why do you think Genesis has the authority of God behind it?
What is the reason you think it has the authority of God behind it? Is it because of something in Genesis, or is it because you declared from the start that the Bible has the authority of God?
Is God fallible? No. Therefore God's words cannot be fallible, because they come from God, who is infallible.
What you're basically saying is that we have a messenger that distorts, forgets, reinterprets, has a limited understanding of, and takes profound liberties with the message it's supposed to deliver, such that it only occasionally intersects with the truth. That's not an authoritative document. If you have to be vigilant about whether a document is telling you something that's true or false, if you routinely call into doubt whether you should accept what it says, it is by definition not authoritative, because that's not what authoritative means.
So I return to the question: What, precisely, privileges the Bible? What makes this book special over any other human writing ever?
And what important points are those, exactly?
I mean, I think The Lord of the Rings has some great morals in it, about heroism and perseverance in the face of adversity. Is The Lord of the Rings divine inspired? Does it contain the Word of God?
This is something I want to clarify here: Are you arguing that Genesis 1 and 2 may be wrong or are wrong with regards to cosmology?
See that's the thing that started this line of conversation. You wrote, "I think that while I agree that evolution and genesis may have a hard time resolving," and I replied that Genesis and evolution cannot be resolved, because Genesis contradicts evolution. Neither Creation story in Genesis is compatible with scientific facts.
So do you acknowledge that the creation myths of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are completely scientifically wrong? If not, demonstrate in what way they are not.
I am trying to get you to give a straight answer. It's not been easy in the slightest.
How do you explain that?
If, as I suspect, you mean to say simply that both science and Genesis assert the universe has a beginning, this is correct. However, this assertion is hardly unique to Genesis. Every other religious tradition has a creation story too. Nor is it at all difficult to explain. People always and everywhere have been asking questions about their origins, and religions always and everywhere have been attempting to answer them. But simply making up a story to answer the question is not impressive. Impressive would be if Genesis got the same answer as science. And it emphatically doesn't.
Genesis says that God created the earth, covered in waters, before he created light. Science has discovered that light came into being about a picosecond after the Big Bang as the electromagnetic force separated from the weak nuclear force (way before baryonogenesis had formed any matter whatsoever), the earth condensed from space dust around nine billion years later, and liquid water began to precipitate out of the atmosphere maybe a few hundred million years after that as the planet cooled.
Genesis says that God created the atmosphere by separating the water in the ocean from the water above the sky, then created dry land by raising it out of the ocean. Science has discovered that the land came first, then the atmosphere, then liquid water - and, of course, that there is no "water above the sky", only vacuum.
Genesis says God created plants before the sun and moon and stars, that the sun and moon are both "great lights", and that the stars are different than the sun. Science has discovered that the sun is a star, the moon is not a star and does not shed light of its own, and all of them are much, much older than plants - and older than the oceans, and (except in the moon's case) older than the earth itself.
Genesis says that God created fish, sea monsters, and birds before land animals. Science has discovered that fish do predate land animals, but birds don't, and in fact are descended from them. And to the extent that "sea monsters" really exist, they are whales, which likewise are descended from land animals.
And of course Genesis says that this all happened over seven days. Science has discovered that it took 13.8 billion years.
So if I were you, I would not be so ****ing smug about the predictive accuracy of Genesis.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
In Genesis 2:4-25, we receive a second account of creation that is nothing like the first. In this account, God creates heaven and earth in a single day. After creating heaven and earth, God proceeds to create life.
God makes man first. And I don't mean man as in humankind, I mean man as in male human, man, Adam. Just the man, no woman. God then creates Eden, and plants it with "every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food." After that, God creates "every beast of the field and every fowl of the air." Then God creates woman from a rib of Adam.
So yeah. Not only is it absurd to argue that Genesis predicted the origin of Creation, but it's also very problematic to say that Genesis has any sort of unified message on the subject.
"In the beginning"?
What? That the universe had a beginning? Everyone has speculated on the universe's beginning. Every creation myth ever is about the universe's beginning. We even have a term, "Creation myths," for them, because they're so ubiquitous.
What you should try to explain is why neither of the creation accounts in Genesis — creation accounts that supposedly are inspired by the infallible divine being who created the universe — get the creation of the world right.
Or even agree with one another.
2. Christian belief is like water, taking the unique shape of every believer or vessel if you will. Every Christian you talk to has their own interpretation of the religion, meaning that a convincing argument to one might completely miss with another.
3. In part that ever changing belief is an argument against it in and of itself. All Christians seem to believe that their interpretation is correct (not to mention the MANY non-Christian religious folks). The reality in many cases seems to be that they interpret God/religion to fit their needs or their biases.
Plantinga, I will grant you has dealt with the logical problem of evil & suffering pretty well. However, Plantinga's free will defense only really deals with moral evil and not with natural evil (disease, natural disasters, etc.). It should also be noted that Plantinga does not present any evidence or try to present any plausibility to his arguments either, not that this is a problem as far as the logical aspect is concerned.
However, I'm going to use Rowe's argument for the evidential problem of evil:
1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Rowe uses an example to explain this; a lighting strike causes a forest fire which traps and burns a fawn. This causes the fawn to suffer for several days in agony before finally dying.
2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Perhaps god could use it's omnipotence to allow the fawn to escape or at least prevent it from suffering in agony.
3.(Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
Past that, there are other problems with having all of these properties as well. Can an all-knowing, all-powerful, god know what it is going to do in the future and if so, can it use it's omnipotence to change it? Can an omnipotent god create a task in which it can't complete? What about using omnipotence to overcome the time paradox? Can god use his omniscience to know exactly what I will do tomorrow? If so, how can free will exist?
What about god's free will? Can an omnibenevolent being choose to do evil? If not, is anything god chooses to do praiseworthy?
Doesn't show that everyone is right either though.
Yes, but how do we decide which of you is wrong? What if all of you are wrong?
Rationality is being reasonable based on facts and reason. You are reasoning that your experience is evidence of this particular god. However, if you want to go this route, then we have to give the same consideration to other religious claims of differing gods. If only one (and we don't know which one) or maybe none of you are correct, then how can this sort of reasoning be rational?
Right, let's go with that. What do you, in your personal opinion, consider to be the standard for what constitutes as knowledge (that is, rational and justified belief)? I don't think you define knowledge in such a way that we can't know anything, so I want to know what you think the standard should be.
Here is something Plantinga says about natural evil that I think makes sense, "On the one hand, it is conceivable that some natural evils and some persons are so related that the persons would have produced less moral good if the evils had been absent." The natural world and the pain and suffering it causes definitely seems to come into contact with human free choices. The two are not wholly independent of each other. I may learn, from the existence of natural evil, to be humbled. There are things which are important and yet wholly outside of man's control… such as some natural evils. Imagine my free choice to live in Chicago rather than Florida due to the lack of hurricanes (natural evil) in Chicago. In doing this, however, I am choosing cold and difficult winters. And living in Chicago definitely affects my life and it may cause it to look very different than I lived in Flordia. There may also be all sorts of other consequences that I am missing.
I would disagree with #1. You definitely seem to accept that there are some instances where God cannot prevent suffering without losing a greater good (as you find Plantinga's refutation of the logical problem of evil reasonable). And it seems to me that we are definitely not even close to being in an epistemic position to say that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for permitting XYZ.
I think the fawn example is a good objection to God having a reason for allowing that, but after considering it more, I don't think it is actually all that convincing. Perhaps part of the reason things like that happen is because God has created a world ordered by natural laws and those laws acting out eventually cause something like this. Or perhaps the existence of a world where an animal would never die alone would make it appear that humans are so great causing arrogance. It is also interesting to me that pain is the greatest tool to avoid death and sickness, so ultimately the pain mechanism was designed for a good purpose. Another possibility is that the spiritual realm and physical realm are not wholly independent, meaning that human sin throws off the course of nature. (just one of the many possibilities I have given) Are we really in a place to say that none of these possibilities could be actual? I don't see how.
I don't find these to be persuasive objections and I think they all rely on one logical flaw. It is like saying, if God is all powerful, why can't he make a "square-circle?" It is an attempt to say, God is supposed to be able to do anything… and here is a thing, why can't God do it? However, the problem is that a "square-circle" is not a thing at all. It is not a coherent concept. It is just a trick of language because the words seem to combine correctly, but actually they signify nothing. It is like asking a perfect mathematician to add the number 10 to Barack Obama. If he says he couldn't do it, that doesn't mean he isn't a perfect mathematician, it means you have given him a math equation to solve that makes no sense and isn't an equation at all.
The same goes for God seeing the actual literal future (meaning that it will be in fact the future), and then deciding to change it. For if he decided to change it, it wouldn't be the future he would see in the first place. So it is the scenario that doesn't make sense. It is the same logical flaw that goes for the other alleged problems with God that you mentioned.
Of course. I hope I didn't sound like I thought it did.
It may be that spiritually exploring oneself is the only way to come to some knowledge about the matter. We could certainly be all wrong but I don't think that is society's job (as a whole) to decide either way.
There are many beliefs we hold based on experience rather than a process of reasoning. Such as basic beliefs (philosophical first-principles cannot be proven) as well as things like love. I'm not sure it is necessary to do this (as it isn't necessary to love a bunch of women to know you are truly in love with your wife) have really considered other religious beliefs. I was an atheist for a few years and also a buddhist and seeker, reading many religious and philosophical books such as the Koran and the works of Plato.
I think that if by knowledge you mean complete certainty I don't think we have any knowledge. I think we have beliefs that are justified or unjustified. I am not a professional philosopher but I think I've defended why Christian belief could be justified decently. I think we can come to justified belief in a number of ways, both by experience and reasoning. However that doesn't mean that we never question or can never give up those beliefs. Plantinga describes "defeaters" which are things which can be such strong evidence that it is necessary to give up a certain belief and I would agree that such things exist.
That being said, I don't have any interest in answering the question of whether or not God exists. For me, I've debated that question for over a decade now and honestly the debate forum is full of hundreds of threads and thousands of posts dedicated to that topic. I think I debated that topic for so long because some part of me wanted affirmation to my own position and I wanted to see what the other side of the arguments were. After all, maybe I was missing something. Certainly I wanted to be right and honestly I don't regret debating that question. I think it's helped me to grow intellectually. However, it seems that all of those debates follow similar arguments and patterns and I just don't have any interest in debating it further because I don't see anything productive coming from debating that question anymore. That's just my personal feelings on the matter and by no means am I saying that anyone else should feel the same.
Still, I'm not sure exactly when my interest in that question waned and to be honest for a while I thought I was just burnt out and I quit posting here thinking that maybe I just needed a break. However, as I've been studying philosophy more and pondered a bit about why I quit posting it just sort of gradually hit me.
The question of whether or not God exists is more of an individual question we have to ask and answer ourselves and there's just no magical argument that I can make to a theist that is going to change their mind in a debate. The same is true for myself as well. I can't just choose to just magically believe that 2+2=5 in the same sense that a theist or an atheist can't just chose to magically believe that God exists or doesn't exist.
Instead, what I find to be much more interesting question(s) is what derives from whether or not a God exists. Questions like how did we get here? Where do morals come from? What does religion mean to people? What does God mean to their believers? What is omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, etc.?
So after having said all that, I feel as though I've come face to face with a slight dilemma and I'm not sure if I should continue to post in this thread or make another. The dilemma is that I feel as though this thread is more focused to answering the question of whether or not god exists, which is perfectly fine, but I don't have any interest in debating that question. So I suppose I'll leave that up to you, because I'm purposefully going to move away from that question to discuss what I view as more interesting questions and they are most likely going to muddy the waters of this thread.
If you're okay with that, I'll continue to post here in this thread. If you're not, no harm done, this will be my final post in this thread and I'll make another thread to discuss the questions I'd like to explore.
So I guess my question to you is, are you okay with that? Shall we muddy the waters here and discuss these questions?
The thing that Platinga is missing here is that pain and suffering have been around longer than human existence. In other words, evil is far older than human existence. I'll get back to this down below, but for now I don't think Plantinga has sufficiently rebutted the evidential problem of evil.
Rowe figured that if there was going to be any objection, it was going to be with premise 1.
Of course, for example if someone got cancer, they will suffer and die. However, with treatment they will still suffer but they live. So while their might be some suffering there, the suffering leads to a greater good.
Right but in order to say this, you'd have to concede that there has never been any instance of pointless suffering in the entire history of sentience on earth and/or if there is sentience on other planets, the entire universe. Rowe chose the example of the burning fawn deliberately in order to make this point. I don't honestly think that you want to concede on this point, but if you are, I'm going to have to disagree with you.
I agree with that sentiment by itself, however, I don't think that makes sense when taken together with premise 2.
Right but that wasn't the point Rowe was making and not the point that I'm trying to raise here either. I accept that there might be a need for death and suffering for some greater good - for example, a lion might kill a wildebeest (evil) in order to feed itself and it's pride (the greater good).
The point that Rowe is getting at is the pointless suffering. The burning fawn is just suffering pointlessly. It's family and the fawn don't have high enough cognitive function to build moral character, virtues, or even understand morality.
Right and I do agree in general with this, but again when taken with premise 2, it doesn't really make any sense. The pain and suffering the fawn goes through before dying isn't going to help it avoid death or sickness.
Rowe's example is designed to not include human sin. The fawn is alone in the mountains away from any humans and even if I gave you this point, suppose we use the same example but with an animal that predates human existence, what then?
Well, I understand what you are saying here and I think that's a fair point to at least some of these objections, but not all of them. So I think then we have to redefine what omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence mean, before moving on. So now I'm asking you, what do these words mean? How should we define them in order to proceed?
However, I don't think this point works in regards to these points:
1. Can god use his omniscience to know exactly what I will do tomorrow?
1a. If so, how can free will exist?
However, I do concede that perhaps a better working definition of omniscience might be in order before answering 1. and depending on what that definition is, we may or may not proceed to question 1a.
I'll also further concede that perhaps we may even need to define exactly what we mean by free will, though I really don't think it's all that important to really get a debate about what free will means for our purposes here. So far, I am going on the assumption and basic definition that free will is the ability to choose an action, thought, belief, etc. willfully without any type of hindrance.
But let's not put the cart before the horse and start with defining what omniscience means.
I'm going to reorganize and reword my last point in that quote to make it a little more clear;
2. Can an omnibenevolent being choose to do evil?
2a. If not, does God have freewill?
2b. If not, is anything god chooses to do praiseworthy?
Like above, I do concede that perhaps a better working definition of omnibenevolence might be in order before answering 1. and depending on what that definition is, we may or may not proceed to question 2a.
However, question 2b., I think is very relevant here because you seem to agree with Plantinga's free will defense. One of the arguments that Plantinga makes for why we couldn't have a world without evil is that it would make humans no different than robots in the sense that a robot doing something good isn't doing anything that is praiseworthy - it's not choosing to do that good, it's just programed to do it. Similarly, if humans were designed without the capacity to commit evil and only did good, then nothing that humans did that is good is praiseworthy - that is they are simply doing what they were designed to do, just like the robot. If God can't choose to do anything evil or is incapable of evil and can only do good, then God isn't any better than the robot or a human that has no capacity to do evil and therefore, anything good that God does is not praiseworthy.
It didn't, I just wanted to make sure that this was clear for everyone, including other people who might be following this conversation.
Right, but I'm asking how can we objectively decide which of you (if anyone) is right? Certainly, we can subjectively decide anything we want - but what about objectively?
If everything is equal in regards to how you each feel subjectively about each of your Gods, experienced the same thing with respect to each of your Gods, and all of your reasons for believing in each of your gods, how can someone who is undecided on which (if any) God, is objectively the correct God? I don't really think you can, so I don't think that picking one god over another god that has the same equal grounds as all the others can be more rational than the other. If all things are equal, then all beliefs in differing gods with regards to personal experience must be equally rational or equally irrational.
So I think you are left with two choices here, you have to concede that all personal experiences with regards to a God are equally valid as evidence for the existence of all of these gods and belief in each of them is rational - no matter how God is defined or you have to concede that all personal experiences with regards to a God are equally not valid for the existence of all of these gods and that making a decision on which one to believe in based on personal experience is irrational.
Right, but I think Blinking Spirit addressed this pretty well already in a couple of posts.
I'll add my thoughts here as well though, I find myself agreeing with him, not all experiences are equal and I think that each of us can experience the same thing and have very different thoughts and feelings about the experience.
Suppose, You and I have the exact same experience, you conclude that this experience is divine and is definitive proof that the God you believe in is real, while I decide that the experience doesn't prove any God's existence because it was likely just a hallucination.
Perhaps Blinking Spirit also has the exact same experience and was atheist at first, but now is unsure and has decided that the experience has left him more open to the idea of God's existence but not quite enough to fully believe it was actually God and not a hallucination.
Perhaps Bakgat also has the exact same experience and was atheist at first but decides that the experience is divine and decides that there must be a God out there, but is unsure which God it was that he experienced.
Perhaps Highroller also has the exact same experience and is theist, but decides that perhaps this was a different God than the one he believes in and converts and now worships this particular God.
Perhaps Verbal also has the exact same experience and is also theist as well and decides that this experience wasn't actually the same God he believes in, but some other malevolent spirit meant to shake his beliefs in his God.
In a sense, it's no different than if all of us watched a movie, read a book, saw a play, an action etc. and all had different thoughts, opinions, and feelings about what it is that we experienced while experiencing it. So then if this is the case, how can this be reliable from an objective point of view about reality? If we all experienced the same thing, yet think differently about the experience, form different opinions about the experience, and have different feelings about the experience, why shouldn't we just brush these off as just merely subjective experiences and not objective truths about reality as Blinking Spirit pointed out?
Well I don't believe we can have complete certainty about anything, so we agree there - but what I was saying there is that we should go ahead with how you defined knowledge - as rational and justified belief rather than just typing all of that out all the time. In other words, from here on, in regards to my question in that quote, let the definition of knowledge be rational and justified belief.
So then with that in mind, what do you in your opinion consider the standard for knowledge should be?
Certainly, I agree with what you are saying here and I'm not a professional philosopher either and I consider myself a novice with regards to philosophy and I still have so much more to learn.
However, I don't think that all experiences and reasons are equal with regards to knowledge, so we should have a standard for what constitutes as knowledge. For example, let's suppose I just have an experience and I conclude that my experience was such that there was no other way than to conclude that my experience was divine in nature. In this experience, God spoke to me and told me tomorrow the world is going to end. Is it rational to believe that the world will end tomorrow? After all, I had an experience you couldn't possibly know - because you didn't experience it, only I experienced it and I firmly believe that my experience was divine and the words spoken to me were truthful. Is it rational for me to believe that tomorrow the world is going to end?
Foxblade, thank you for the thoughtful response. I do think you are a very intelligent and polite person and it is a pleasure to discuss with you. I am not sure what exactly you are getting at when you say you wouldn't prefer discussing the existence of God. I just want to know to be more understanding of what you would prefer. It does seem you are interested in discussing relevant things related to the existence of God. Since I am not completely understanding what you would like in this matter I'm just going to have to go ahead and discuss and if I say something you aren't comfortable with, you will have to let me know. Perhaps it is ok if the question of the existence of God is referenced sometimes as we are definitely discussing God and faith. If it helps, I personally don't believe I can convince someone to believe in God, and I don't really espouse the arguments for God for that reason. I believe ultimately either something in a person that he/she was born with, or God himself, would need to be the reasons someone believes. However, I do certainly believe that belief in God is rationally justified and I am willing to defend that.
I decided I wont quote everything you said and be obsessive about responding to every little point (I as well know what it is to get burnt out on these discussions). This can lead to bickering about every little thing and the thread getting so complicated we both give up. I did read everything you wrote and I will do my best to respond to your main points. If I miss something, please forgive me and bring it up again next time.
I think this was a great response. However, if you think about it, it seems to me that we are both in a similar boat here. As I had said, it seems to me that we are definitely not even close to being in an epistemic position to say that God couldn't have morally sufficient reasons for permitting XYZ. It seems if we take the possibility of my experiencing God out of the equation we are on equal footing. For you, to show that God couldn't have a morally sufficient reason for something, must assume there couldn't possibly be a reason for XYZ in the mind of God. (something which seems almost impossible to say given the fact that you are dealing with a being that literally knows everything… and I will address your fawn example in a moment) Me, I must say that there is a reason that I cannot see currently for suffering which seems to have no reason such as a fawn burning. (though I do intend to give possible reasons)
So ultimately we are both in a difficult epistemic position, and, therefore, it seems silly to me to come to a conclusion about one or the other (whether or not God could have reasons or whether there is pointless suffering) based on speculating about the possible reasons or pointlessness of suffering in the world. The wise position in this matter (all other things being equal) would be agnosticism. I'm not recommending people be agnostics, but if the existence of suffering were the only thing we were going by, given what I have said above, it seems to me that we should be agnostics about the matter.
I will address your burning fawn example, but I don't think ultimately it is of that great significance either way for the reasons mentioned above. Provided I give you possible reasons why it might have a purpose, I have done more than enough to totally take the wind out of the objection. I don't pretend to be in such an epistemic position to be able to know what is God's purpose in everything that he allows, (and personally I feel the objection has almost no weight in itself for that reason) but I don't think it is obvious that such a thing couldn't have God's allowance for a reason.
It seems to me your objection is as such: A fawn burning alone in the woods (perhaps even before humans were around) could have no purpose in God's (benevolent) mind.
I will sketch some possible answers with the full knowledge that as long as it as plausible that God could possibly have a reason for this (even if my answers are all wrong… not that I think they are) then that is what counts.
Perhaps God saw evolution as the best process whereby to create mankind. Perhaps only this process of man's being created (perhaps as the bible says, "from the dust") would lead man to humility and would leave the existence of God sufficiently hidden. (I do believe that God hides himself… see Pascal on this if you are interested in philosophy) Perhaps animal suffering is a necessary part of evolution. Perhaps you will say, if no one is around, what harm is it for God to protect one fawn from suffering? There are a couple responses. If no one is around, how do you know He didn't? This is God after-all.
Hey Foxblade, I will respond to the rest of what you said (and more on this topic), but there is so much to say that I can't do it all now. It probably makes sense to wait for me to finish before you respond again. Cheers!
Looking at the fawn is too small of a view. God could have instead created a universe with no fawns, no fires, no pain, no evolution. A universe totally alien to our own. So we must believe that not even one of this unfathomable number of possible universes comes out any better than our own.
Seems a bit unlikely. Extremely unlikely, in fact. So, we should regard the nature of our universe and our existence, which seems extremely unlikely to be optimal in this regard, as extremely strong evidence (though not proof) against the existence of god.