A Few Clarifications about “Why I Believe”
Continued from last two entries…
Up to this point, I’ve not really delved into specific proofs of any particular God or gods. I’ve not committed to monotheism (or any particular stripe of it) or polytheism (or any of its many stripes). That group of entries will follow at some point. It is important that it is understood that alone, it is quite possible that none of these reasons are sufficient in themselves to merit belief in God. My only reason for explaining my multiplicity of reasons is that I think the cumulative argument for God/s is better than the cumulative argument against God/s.
Now, understand another thing. To this point, I have argued only what I perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be philosophical and scientific arguments about the existence of God. The reason I began with these is because I think it is a foundational principle of any rational belief to be grounded in some kind of philosophical and scientific base. It is not enough to simply say, "I believe in God because I know He exists," at least when it comes to be understood by those who don’t acknowledge anything not immediately perceptible. There must be some correlation between faith and knowledge, and between spiritual awareness and rational thinking, if we are to avoid a great many misconceptions and harmful beliefs about the world we live in. Any number of variations of faith in a God/gods/nature are spawned from a view that focuses too heavily on one aspect at the exclusion of the others.
Personally, I have as big a problem with people who blindly believe without any good reason at all and will accept anything they receive from someone they think knows more than them about "the spiritual," as I do with an atheist. To my way of thinking, to quote Tom Cruise’s character from A Few Good Men, "It doesn’t matter what I believe, it only matters what I can prove." There are different methods of acquiring proof and different standards for accepting it. I’m not going to debate those. Instead, I’ve endeavored to show that belief in God CAN be rationally defensible. In that spirit, my defense need not be unassailable or clearly correct, it need only be reasonably defensible. I believe I’ve shown so far that it is. There are weaknesses in my position, from the opposing view, just as there are weaknesses in other positions, from my point of view. My only desire in posting this is to demonstrate that both options are worthy of study and meditation. We do ourselves a disservice if we ever lose sight of our opposition’s critique of our beliefs.
I confess to you now that I feel like I’m moving from areas where in modern culture belief in God is at a disadvantage, to areas where belief in a God is far more preferable. Modern culture has sold us a bill of goods that says if something cannot be empirically proved, it is indefensible, ruling out God as a matter of fact, on the basis of no proof, or the infamous "argument from ignorance." No where in the defenses I presented to this point have I played the "mystery that cannot be explained" card. I have made probability arguments. This is important, because after the entry that follows this, I will switch gears to more existential arguments, to more rationalistic arguments, from more empirical arguments. In the empirical realm, if the theist argues the matter to a draw, he will carry the day in the others and so win the figurative war. Empirical reasoning cannot account for things like love, justice, and emotion in general without committing fallacies and countermanding thousands of years of human experience (or itself). Theism, in my opinion, will demonstrate a more realistic picture of the psychological and emotional life of human beings than all competing worldviews. Existentially, there are many good reasons to prefer theism (and specifically inside that realm, Christian Theism) over the other options. But I’ll get to that. Before we get to existential reasons for the existence of God, a few more empirically slanted arguments.
Continued, next entry
RRing….I really liked this entry. I dig the non judgemental, open minded approach you took…leaves room for healthy opinion and debate. I agree with alot that you’ve written here, but I also have my own theories as well. Are we talking of “A” God—in a religious archetypical sense, or “God” in a less formal, spiritual sense? Excellent entry…very thought provoking. Nice reading you. Cy.
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It’s kinda funny…talking about proving the existence of God and all…all those people in bibical days, OT and NT, saw allll the miracles..literally saw God at work and saw Him in flesh, Jesus…yet so many still didn’t believe. I don’t think you can prove God to people..we can only share what we know to be true and pray they open their hearts to what God wants to show them. good writing tho 🙂
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RYN: When I get back from vacation I’ll do an entry on why I despise ID. For now I’ll just point out that all scientific theories answer a question of “How?”. All ID does is say if we can’t explain how it must be designed. It is a god of the gaps argument. Plus it nevers explains anything about the designer which would be required. It is just christo-facism disguising itself.
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“all those people in bibical days, OT and NT, saw allll the miracles..literally saw God at work and saw Him in flesh, Jesus…” Either that or they made up myths and stories about it, like every other culture in that time period. Which do you think is really more likely?
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Either that or they made up myths and stories about it, like every other culture in that time period. Which do you think is really more likely? An Atheist you really took the time to come all the way to my diary as well..lol. i have my faith, but maybe you should do just as much research on why the bible IS true just as much as you do trying to disprove it..maybe you would have yourself…
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a better and more rounded argument.
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Serentiy – Is that the best answer you can give? Question my knowledge of the Bible? The question was, if every other culture of the time invented their own particular brand of myths and stories of gods and miracles, why should we not assume that the Jewish people did the same thing? Storytelling is a part of being human – biblical authors not excluded.
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Yet you seem to think that the particular stories of a particular group(s) of people are actually true but the particular stories of other particular groups (sumerians, babylonians, greeks, romans, etc.) are just that – stories. Why should we believe that the Jews and Christians of the time actually saw miracles but not any other group?
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After being away for a while, I’ve come back to read the notes and I think the right answer to the “everyone has a story, and they are all wrong” is to point out a faulty assumption in the statement. There is no reason to assume that all of them are wrong, any more than there is a reason to assume one or more of them are right. It’s possible that one of the answers could very well be right.
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I’d suggest a more logic based approach of analyzing the various claims made by the different groups based on certain defeaters. For example, any religion that relies on drugs for the rites is less likely to be true than one that doesn’t rely on drugs. I would also look at the truth claims of the various claims and test from there. At that point, I believe that all belief structures pan out.
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The key is to not automatically validate or invalidate any religion or belief based simply on a preconception about the belief, but rather use a uniform method to break down all beliefs such as they are, and make choices based on the claims and beliefs on their own merits. Blindly accepting or rejecting claims doesn’t foster rationality, and it doesn’t foster intelligent conversation.
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Why would a religion that relies on drugs during rites be less likely to be right? A) the drugs that people had then were in a natural state, as g0d created them, right? B) My impression was that lots of religions believe(d) that if a human sees g0d directly, he will be incinerated on the spot. Maybe drugs were g0d’s way of providing humans with a better way to percieve him/it without
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being incinerated. Maybe any religion that does NOT use drugs in its rites is necessarily wrong.
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The trouble with making up rules to judge all religions by is that the rules will just about exactly reflect the structure and assumptions in which you were raised, and would therefore not get you anywhere closer to knowing which, if any of them, are right. For me, I kind of look at religion like it’s that game from sesame street– one of these things is not like the others, three of these
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are kind of the same, etc? Is there a religion out there that doesn’t follow the same patterns as other religions? For example, I remember one sociology-history-of-religion teacher mentioning that many religions start out as being revelatory but of those religions, as time passes, they become more structured and dogmatic.
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For example, in early Christianity, there was no formal priesthood. Anyone who wanted to offer communion, offered it. People (like Paul) who felt a call just went out and started preaching. Things don’t happen like that today. If you didn’t go to a seminary– through the accepted process– you’re a lone nut to the vast majority of Christians out there.
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Mormons are like that too. They started out with pretty much open season on revelation, but then they started saying that women couldn’t have real revelations from g0d and then that a man could only hear from g0d about something that g0d had given him responsibility for through the church hierarchy.
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So it seems to me that if you find a religion that avoids all these commonalities among religions made by humans, then perhaps you might– just might– have one that wasn’t started and run by humans all these years.
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Which doesn’t really prove that g0d is a sensible concept or that there is one, but it at least means that this one religion might be from a different source than others or might perhaps be in possession of greater truth or might actually keep up with the promises of other religions not to change with the times because it has the one eternal truth, etc.
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To me, the similarities between world religions only confirm that there IS a uniform set of right and wrong. In Biblical Israel, pluralism existed, and yet people were willing to acknowledge the God of the Israelites as a God (if not THE God). In that place and time, people were sifting claims and making choices about ultimate reality, just as now.
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The only difference now is that the concepts “truth” and “deity” are under fire from naturalistic philosophy which has problems with all such abstractions. It is simpler to say that abstractions are all relative than to try and process the claims. As Huxley noted, if religion (namely Christianity) goes by the wayside, life is meaningless and people are free to do as they wish.
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