Why do some people find it hard to believe in God? Part 2

[notfluffyatall]

I don't think we've quite finished yet

Ooh very Daily Mail that one - drama, smut and retribution.

Hello, just caught up with this thread!

Yes, Deuteronomy is a bit 'conservative' I suppose. It's a v. complex book compiled over a very long time, and the finished version we have in the Bible is v. much the manifesto of a reform movement to eradicate idolatry. 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart...' is the keynote of the book. I guess that all those laws that we think of as odd would have been seen as ways of loving God and avioding idolatry.

The thing this thread has made me think, the thing I've said all along, is that your worldview / whatever you want to call it is pretty much going to determine how you see things. So for me, the scientific-materialist thing is no more 'rational' than belief in God. So whatever it is that makes us believe or not believe, I suspect it's not intellectual at all - it's not that religion is all 'fluffy' and emotional and that scientific-materialism is 'rational' or 'intelligent' - the things that make us believe (or not) are much more complex and inter-connected than that. Oh well...have a good pancake day, everyone!

HH,
You are doing it again. You are comparing the relative merits of competing viewpoints as if they are equally valid. Science is evidence based, I think that you actually do agree with that. What you believe in is not based on evidence but on subjective intuition, I think you agree with that as well. That means that the scientific viewpoint is more rational than the religious viewpoint. I don't see how you can argue with that unless you are redefining rationality. Saying that rationality has no bearing on a person's world view, for myself at least, is frankly insulting. It maybe true for your viewpoint but do not tar everyone else with that brush. What you seem to be saying is that I am right because I know I am right. History is littered with people who thought like that - but we are lucky - we have science that enables us to establish facts independently of our intuition.
I'll leave it to the others to froth about your defence of Deuteronomy - the fact that you are prepared to do this is quite disturbing. In reality the bible is a collection of texts cobbled together with no overall narrative - it is people with a religious agenda who seek to project meaning on to it whilst ignoring the wierd stuff.

So whatever it is that makes us believe or not believe, I suspect it's not intellectual at all

I suspect you are correct on that point. But this doesn't fit with your ideas about 'rationality'. Science is rational and intellectually honest - its a completely different thing, it doesn't stand or fall by whether people 'believe' in it or not.

HH - lol at "Yes, Deuteronomy is a bit 'conservative' I suppose."

And I guess you'd be including chopping off a woman's hand for accidentally touching a man's privates while trying to split up a fight between her husband and another man as just one of those important messages that "we think of as odd".

I agree that what you are essentially saying is that "I'm right because I know I'm right" - I don't think you can argue with that really.

(It's BR here by the way, got fed up with lame festive name change!)

ElBurro, exactly.

HH,
Just to add that I think that the predisposition to hold a religious belief is a behaviour that has evolved along with our species, as you sort of imply. In our evolutionary history, holding religious beliefs will have aided our ability to survive and/or procreate and therefore a predisposition for them became a selected trait. That is why there are (and have been) so many similar but slightly different religions over the course of humankind - all very similar but with a slightly different cultural element. All about explaining, formalising rites of passage (birth, death, marriage/partnership etc.). That we have this predisposition says nothing about the existence of a god (or gods).

HH - good to have you back btw, the thread was very quiet without you

Yes, its great when a dying thread resurrects itslf, isn't it?

ElB, the thing we keep butting headsd over is this: I'm not talking about science, I'm talking about scientific materialism, which is different. No. 1 is evidence based, yadda yadda yadda, as you said. No. 2 is a philosophy and as such can be evaluated as a thought-system / worldview / call it what you will. If you don't believe me, read some Descartes, or a book about the Enlightenment, and you'll see that the people who laid the foundations for what you sre saying are not scientitsts, they're philosophers. If we don't get that clear, the we will get precisely nowhere.

Deuteronomy is most likely to be at least 2600 years old, so if it resembled the type of thing that liberal-minded 21st c. westerners are likely to say, I'd be a teensy-wensy bit susipicious of its provenance! There's a strong case (with reference to other case laws from the Ancient Near East) that the 'case laws' such as the ones mentioned are 'compressed stories' - i.e, describing something that actually happened. Don't know how relevant that is but hey!

I am not going to get into a debate about different philosophys or recommend books that you should read - although I could think of a few. The title of the thread defines the subject matter and I think the contribution that I have made explains very clearly why it would be difficult for me to believe in God.

My understanding of the current part of the thread, is that you keep repeating that a religious world view is as valid as any other world view. I do not share this realtivist view so IMO it is not - for the reasons stated above that, unsurprisingly, you have not attempted to answer. I agree, it is pointless to continue when the goalposts keep moving - or as some would put it - you perform a semantic dance to avoid answering a difficult question.

On Deuteronomy, in your first response I think you attempted to convince us that the book was a part of God's message to humankind. In your second message, you seem to be telling us that we cannot take it all that seriously because it was written by some bloke a long time ago.

Sorry ElB, I have lost the thread of what you're saying. If you can re-state your objections, I'll try and answer them. The thing is, you are espousing a philosophy, not science as such, so this whole epic saga of a thread is already a debate about different philosophies! If you don't agree with that, then there's probably v. little I can say.

As for Deut, and the whole Bible, well tbh, yes it was written a very long time ago and therefore we shouldn't be surprised to find stuff in there which is completely different to our 21st c. modern western ways of thinking, but otoh in amongst the case laws which we'd get arrested in the UK for trying to enforce there's a really strong message which says 'Love God with al your heart, soul and strength.' The bits that we like / can relate to / understand are mingled in with bits that we find offensive / repugnant / weird. The 'Golden Rule' is stated most clearly in Leviticus, a book most liberal-minded people love to hate. This is why I think that one good way of approaching the weird stuff is to say that possibly, back in the 7th c. BCE or whenever, these ways of living that seem crazy to us now would have been seen as ways of loving God and neighbour, by living within a clearly defined religious code / community.

OK then, I'll repost some of what you ignored, choosing instead to head off on a tangent about philospophy. Incidently, just because Descartes or whoever wrote something once, doesn't mean that it is true, or even has anything to say about the world today.

'You are comparing the relative merits of competing viewpoints as if they are equally valid. Science is evidence based, I think that you actually do agree with that. What you believe in is not based on evidence but on subjective intuition, I think you agree with that as well. That means that the scientific viewpoint is more rational than the religious viewpoint. I don't see how you can argue with that unless you are redefining rationality.'

I would add here that what you say is that all viewpoints / philosophys are subjective so they are of equal merit. I do not agree.

But the bible says itself that god doesn't change but how do you reconcile a god who is murderous and angry to loving and omnibenevolent? From outside of Christianity it seems the religion changes vastly along with the development of the homosapien specie. Which suggests to an outsider that it is a human construct. And the further along we get the more apologetical acrobatics are needed to swallow it.

Not to mention, a god who appears differently according to geographical location, in some places being multiple beings and in some places entirely absent from the prevailing spiritual culture.

Hello again .

I wasn't deliberately ignoring your point, ElB - in fact my response was to what you wrote, so I'll make it a bit more explicit:

You said: "OK then, I'll repost some of what you ignored, choosing instead to head off on a tangent about philospophy. Incidently, just because Descartes or whoever wrote something once, doesn't mean that it is true, or even has anything to say about the world today."

To which I reply: without the Enlightenment, the world would be completely different today. Descartes is almost impossible to over-estimate in terms of his significance for the way we think. I understand that you probably haven't studied philosophy, and you might not find it very interesting, but that doesn't mean that you're not affected by it.

You said: ''You are comparing the relative merits of competing viewpoints as if they are equally valid. Science is evidence based, I think that you actually do agree with that. What you believe in is not based on evidence but on subjective intuition, I think you agree with that as well. That means that the scientific viewpoint is more rational than the religious viewpoint. I don't see how you can argue with that unless you are redefining rationality.''

To whih I reply: As I said, there is a huge difference between science and scientific materialism. Scientific materialsm says that the only way we can know anthing is if it can be proven using the scientific methods. David Hume, another Enlightenment philosopher, said this. It's not the only philosophy of science, there are others; but it is the one which has been repeated on this thread. So that's what I mean when I say that this is already a debate about different philosophies. Again, you might not find that very interesting, but it is true that what you are doing on this thread is philosophy, not science.

You said: "I would add here that what you say is that all viewpoints / philosophys are subjective so they are of equal merit. I do not agree."

To which I reply: Go on, explain...?

HeadinHands, the way I make sense of it is to say that God is revealed progressively through the Bible, then most fully in Jesus, and that what we have in the Bible is a record of the jorney of that faith.

Grimma, I think there's truth in all religions. what do you mean by 'absent' in some cultures? If you mean western Europe today, I'd refer you to the cultural affects of the Enlightenment...

Scientific materialsm says that the only way we can know anthing is if it can be proven using the scientific methods.

I think quite a few of us on this thread have already rejected the strict 'scientific materialist' stance. e.g history is a valid 'way of knowing'.

'You said: "I would add here that what you say is that all viewpoints / philosophys are subjective so they are of equal merit. I do not agree."

My answer to this is that there is a difference between evidence based approaches and philosophies which have no existence outside of the human mind.

Well tbh Grimma, what 'history' is, is another can of worms! Trying to reconstruct the past 'as it actually happened' is something that many historians believe to be impossible. But anyway, that's another story...

The thing with evidence, as I see it, is that it needs to be interpreted. And the way of interpreting it is to situate it within paradigms. So, someone upthread said that for them, evolution makes God less feasible because it demonstrates that people aren't special....well, that's one way of interpreting the evidence, but it's not the only way. A Christian could look at the process of evolution and see it as the unfolding work of God.

I think that the paradigm / frame of reference / meta-narrative etc therefore is really important, because we have to do something with evidence. What we believe about the world gives us those paradigms. Which is why you can't escape philosophy / theology if you want to talk about God.

I believe that the 'way that we think' has nothing to do with Descartes or any other philosopher. We are just animals, conditioned by our evolutionary environment, to behave and think in certain ways.

If you do not believe this, just read the chapter in Freakonomics 2 where it gives a discription of a controlled experiment using apes. In this experiment the apes display remarkably human like behaviour including price discrimination, theft and prostitution. This is not very surprising from an evolutionary point of view as we are so closely related, but will come as a blow for all who believe in human exceptionalism. We are not so special - why should we be?

One manifestation of our evolutionary past this is the predisposition to religious belief - despite there being no logical reason for it. This thread clearly demonstrates this facet of our behaviour.

"the way I make sense of it is to say that God is revealed progressively through the Bible, then most fully in Jesus, and that what we have in the Bible is a record of the jorney of that faith."

To a logical mind it seems impossible that one can ascribe totally opposite qualities to something, something that is claimed to be all knowing/loving etc and yet he sounds like a bloke recovering from a serious personality disorder. Imagine I was telling you about my neighbour and I said he was angry and vengeful but also extremely loving and full of forgiveness. It wouldn't add up would it? Very forgiving but also very vengeful? How can they both be true?

ElB, have you seen 'The Devil Wears Prada'? There's a scene when the magazine editor (can't remember her name) analyses what the PA is wearing and shows her that, howeve much she wants to disassociate herself from the world of fashion, she is nonetheless affected by it. You can think that you are not affected by any other thinker, but bth that is not possible unless you live on a desert island. Even then... Surely your evolutionary idea of humanity would lead you to the conclusion that we are social animals, therefore deeply affected by each other, and by the currents of thought in our societies....?

As for apes being like humans, well tbh, that doesn't surprise me. The Christian view of what it means to be human is that we are creatures, made by God to 'bear God's image' (i.e. resemble God) - yet because of our sinfulness (for which 'the Fall' is the metaphor) we often don't, i.e. we are creaturely, so the apes thing you cited makes perfect sense.... It's through Jesus that we our own humanity is restored, and set free to 'live to the full' - i.e. fulfi our potential as people to know God and to resemble God.

(Do you see what I've done with your evidence there? I've situated it within my Christian paradigm? That's why the paradigm thing is so important to recognise...)

'Which is why you can't escape philosophy / theology if you want to talk about God.'

But if you don't believe in God - with one bound, you're free!
You can then still talk about 'god' - how the idea may have arisen and evolved etc but you really don't have to worry much about theology. As to philosophy - well that's hard to escape entirely because some of it is just stating the bleeding obvious but some of it is Just Made Up Stuff.

HH, In your world humans are both animals just like any other species and special beings made in gods image at the same time. I'm getting confused.

I did see what you did but if you can remember the discussion we had about Occams razor, you will see why your explanation is the least probable of the two.

One day, I think that if you are honest the relativist view that you hold is insustainable. Some explanations are more likely than others because they have evidence to support them and a consistent theory. In your world any explanation is equally valid as they represent a different philosophical approach. I am glad I don't live in a world where that is actually true.

Grimma, do you not get what I'm saying about paradigms?

HH - You believe god made us fully human and we didn't evolve?