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

[notfluffyatall]

I don't think we've quite finished yet

I don't mean to sound patronising Grimma, but is it that complicated? Most people I speak to in RL seem to have some general sense of what I'm talking about....! (Maybe they're just polite)

Anyway, you might like to know that, inspired by this thread, I'm reading a book called 'Religion and Science' by Ian Barbour, a very interesting and fair overview of historical landmarks and contemporary issues (sorry, can't link). He talks about the relationship between religion and science as being either one of conflict, independence, dialogue or integration, depending on your philosophical / theological perspective. I think I'm basically somewhere between the 'independence' and the 'dialogue' persuasions (i.e. religion and science are saying different things in different spheres of life, but there are fruitful points of interesting dialogue between them). Do you understand that, or am I talking gibberish again?

My point is that you expressed amazement at the way that there is a "high degree of agreement" between different books of the Bible. But given the way that the stories in the Old Testament accreted over time it's far from surprising that there are such correlations. It's like being amazed that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader included some of the same characters from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

As I understand it the only contemporaneous texts that include anything similar to the sentiment expressed in John 3:16 are already in the Bible (or were at some point in the Bible before someone decided that that particular gospel was no longer canon).

So, on the one hand, is the literal interpretation of John 3:16 as saying that Jesus is the actual son of God. On the other, one possible interpretation of it being a metaphor where Jesus is entirely mortal albeit one especially favoured by God.

The only source of confirmation that the Bible really did mean that Jesus was the literal son of God is, er, the Bible. There are no other contemporaneous documents that back that up, are there? Everything else from that time and that place would either be talking about the Jewish Yahweh or the collection of Roman Gods and Goddesses.

"religion and science are saying different things in different spheres of life"

This I get. e.g. Religion says virgins can have babies 2000 years before IVF and chicken basters were even thought of and that dead people can become undead. Also that water can be turned into wine at the wave of the magic-mans hand. Bushes will spontaneously combust and angels appear from them. Science says this is categorically incorrect.

"but there are fruitful points of interesting dialogue between them"

See above. No there isn't.

Holo - no, its not that complicated, I get what you mean. However, I don't understand the huge leap you take to get to 'the truth emerging ...That God is there is the whole of life...' etc. Its like pulling a rabbit out of a (rather battered) hat. And then people basing their lives on some interpretation of these old texts.

On the science and religion - the 'independence' part sounds something like Gould's Non Overlapping Magisteria concept, is that the sort of thing you mean?. The wiki gives a brief description and criticism - while I love some of Gould's writings, I'm mostly with the critics on this one.

As to dialog... science can inform religion (by providing reality checks, at very least) but I'm at something of a loss to think what of value religion has to say to science (Ethicists certainly have something to say to scientists but that is not the same thing as 'religion')

"but I'm at something of a loss to think what of value religion has to say to science "
It depends on what people mean when they are talking about 'religion'.

"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)"

Meh, I reckon you could get the same experience with some class 'a' drugs.

I wouldn't call that 'religion' myself. Isn't that describing an aspect of human nature which gives rise to behaviours such as religiosity on the one hand and scientific questing on the other?

I wouldn't call it religion either, Grimma. It is human nature. We can have that sense of wonder and awe etc without gods. That is what Einstein was getting at. He didn't believe in personal gods.

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

But it's this notion that that can be only be achieved through being in the "grace of god" that I find so nauseating. Earlier in the last thread I was called arrogant for so firmly stating my views. Yet the religious talk as if we're to be pitied, or ridiculed even because we can't experience this awe and wonder. It's implied that we are lacking in our very selves and that if only we could open our minds we would 'get it'.

I just ask them to please understand that asking me to do that is like asking me to become a heroin addict, I liken the euphoria and delusion that occurs in this 'grace of god' malarky is like the rush of heroin. I have no intention of becoming a junky, to heroin or a god.

I also like this quote (apologies for quote overdosing)
"?Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.?
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"

I think Sagan and Einstein use the words spiritual and religion differently to how they are usually used.

I'm a big fan of Carl, I just don't do 'spiritual' though, it's brain activity that gives us these feelings.

Oh come on now, Notfluffy! When have I talked with pity? I certainly haven't intended that - one of the limitations of internet communication is that we can't hear each others' tones of voice!

So many things to respond to....where to start?

Grimma, I haven't read Gould but am interested in learning more about this whole issue of the relationship between science and relgion, so will read up. I was thinking earlier that it comes own to, IMO, the queston of how we can know anything. Notfluffy states that there is no relationship between science and religion - I'm interested in scratching beneath the surface at statement and asking what kind of epistemology (theory of how we know) is behind it. If we say that we can only know empirically, then we are drawing a certain-sized circumference around what may be known. So, for example, on the last thread, you said that 'there is no why', because that's outside of the circumference you've drawn. It therefore becomes either irrelevant, or nonsensical, or simply uninteresting. But still unanswerable, for whatever reason.

If we say, as I do, that empirical knowledge is wonderful, life-saving, endlessly fascinating etc, but not the only way of knowing, then that circumference gets bigger. Or maybe we start to see overlapping circles of knowledge that make life interesting! Do you see what I mean?

As for the idea of science and religion being independent of each other, well, Immanuel Kant's yer man for that idea. Dialogue between the two - David Tracy, Rahner, Pannenberg, all have interesting things to say on the subject. The Christian theologian Alister MCGrath is writing lots on it, but I haven't read any of his books yet - he is on my list!

Heresiarch: The Bible! Your Narnia analogy: you're right in terms of intertextuality, but with the obvious difference that the Narnia books were composed as a deliberate whole by the same person, in the same language, in the same relatively short space of time (same decade? Not sure) whilst he was living in the same place and therefore with exactly the same cultural perspective. OTOH the Bible writers wrote piecemeal over centuries, in different countries, different languages, different cultural perspectives...so the question of what binds these texts together is much more complex. You could take a humanist view and say it's an entirely human project, or you could take a biblically literalist view and say tat God wrote it all, or you coulld say (as I do) that christianity is all about incarnation - God making Godself known through humans, and the Bible is incarnational in that sense.

As for the words of Jesus - are you suggesting that if I were to tell you about lots of other 1st and 2nd century texts that say that Jesus is the son of God, you'd believe? No, I thought not! The gospels make it clear that they are writing so that their readers might believe - there are no empirical data that 'prove' Jesus is the son of God, it is a response of faith / trust (so Jn 3:16) - even if you could go back 2000 years and do a DNA test, you wouldn't be able to find out if Jesus is the son of God! Because it's a different type of knowledge (see above). Which is ultimately where the historical parallels reach the limit of their usefulness, tbh - I'm with the theologian Paul Ricouer who says that you have to go through the business of putting the Bible in its proper historical context to avoid the mindless proof-texting and misreadings that abound, but ultimately it's an act of faith. One person I read a while ago likened it to a book of dance routines - you can read all about dance routines, be quite knowledgeable in fact, but if you never do any dancing, do you really know what dancing is? (Back to types of knowledge there).

Let's at least admit that this is way more complex and interesting than simply saying that science and religion are intrinsically at loggerheads. There is nothing within science itself that demands that it should be so. I agree that scientific materialism (e.g. David Hume) is at loggerheads with religion, but that's a philosophical dispute, not a scientific one. We are arguing philosophically here, not scientifically!

Blimey, that as long!

And last thing - miracles! Notfluffy, the definition of a miracle is that it is outside of the laws of science - so again, if you think that we can only know empirically, then yes, it is a nonsense. If you draw your circumference a bit bigger, though...

"If we say, as I do, that empirical knowledge is wonderful, life-saving, endlessly fascinating etc, but not the only way of knowing, then that circumference gets bigger. Or maybe we start to see overlapping circles of knowledge that make life interesting! Do you see what I mean?"

I'm afraid I don't really. I can see how you can try and draw the circle bigger by using 'I think', 'I feel', 'I infer' - but not 'I know'. It just doesn't work unless you are using the word 'know' in a completely different sense, in which case it becomes a pointless allegory.

There's a link here to an interview with the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, who is also the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Rees is an atheist and an eminent scientist but he is clearly also not anti-religion. He also says very clearly that he doesn't have any truck with the idea that there is an innate conflict between science and religion. He says that, like science and music, they are doing very different things.

There are so many interesting conversations to have about belief and unbelief. It just seems so limiting that it gets stuck on the 'war' of science and religion.

At base, as HolofernesesHead rightly says, that 'war' is about a philosophical question as to whether there can be different kinds of truths. Some scientists think that only inductive science can produce truths and that inductive science can and should produce truths about everything. Others think that there are many different ways of getting at truth through art, or music, or philosophy, or history, or inductive science ... or religion. That seems to me to lead to a much richer, and more complexly true account of the universe and everything that is in it than science alone.

I stand by my assertion that there are no contemporaneous texts regarding Jesus that are not already in the Bible (or were in the Bible and were later excised). 1st and 2nd century texts are not contemporaneous with Jesus' life, are they? But that's nit-pickery.

My central point is this: You realise that it cannot be proven that Jesus is the son of God so you take that particular assertion of the Bible as literally true on faith. You do the same with other passages that happen to confirm your beliefs. Those bits of the Bible don't need re-interpretation of too much contextualising because you have faith that they are accurate reportage.

But if you're going to do that then, frankly, why waste so much time on hermeneutics and apologetics? You're going to believe what you choose to believe anyway. Anything you discover through your forensic examination of the context of the Bible is going to be seen through the distorting lens of your faith. You're not going to accept anything other than stuff that supports your beliefs. Passages in the Bible that speak against your existing beliefs (eg, the bits that show God as spiteful, amoral and/or downright nasty) will be discounted, viewed merely as a side-effect of societal context, or re-interpreted as a metaphor for something else.

It's all "Oh look, if we assume that these social constructs of the time will be influencing the story telling of the age in those ways, and so then interpret this metaphorical passage as really meaning that, it tells us that God's real, Jesus is his literal son and it was all predicted in the Torah! Wowsers!"

What's the point? What do you hope to discover that your faith doesn't already tell you?

Gah! Change "re-interpretation of too much contextualising" to "re-interpretation or too much contextualising"

I don't think there need be any conflict between science and religion - they are simply two different things.

With religion, you either take that leap of faith or you don't. The existence of god(s) isn't ever going to be provable. Science is concerned with what is provable so it's pointless applying it to god's existence or otherwise.

The problems seem to come when, for example, creationists confuse the two. Or religious people use the bible as 'scientific proof' for beliefs that cause them to act in an antisocial way.

Which of course isn't to say that anything which isn't science-based is worthless or pointless, otherwise you'd be saying that children should only do science-based subjects at school rather than history, art, languages, literature etc, which would patently be ridiculous.

Heresiarch There are quite a lot of historical events particularly from antiquity that have very little textual evidence to support them, because many fewer things were recorded at the time, and because so much of the historical record is lost. There are even more things that happened that have left no record, because no one wrote anything about them -- this doesn't mean that they didn't happen. Many things that we know about antiquity we only know of because they are referred to in texts written much later than the event.

The accounts of four different gospels and the documents of the early church (the Pauline and other letters) provide quite a good level of evidence for Jesus's existence. There is a lot historical scholarship of Jesus.

Historians spend a huge amount of time doing contextual analysis, hermenutics and so on, because they need to interpret the evidence they have got. And historical interpretations change -- and different historians will weigh the textual evidence in different ways.

It's true that, since I believe that God is everything that is good, and that nothing about him can be not good, I do find those bits of the Bible that show him doing things I can't see can be good (destroying the cities of the plain, as I was reading this morning) are challenging. And I need to weigh the evidence of textual scholarship (which suggests that the process of composition of Genesis was long with many, many revisions and incorporations of both earlier and later material) and hermeneutics (which sees the Bible as a story about human encounters with and understanding of God) with my own experience of God in my life.

In the end one seeks a rich understanding of the difficult bits of the Bible which can hold together 'what it meant then' and 'what it means now'. But you can't have that rich understanding if you insist as I think you are doing that it must mean the same thing all the time or it is not true.

I don't think I am saying that the Bible must mean the same thing for all time. But I'll admit that this discussion has ranged over so many different areas that I might be leading myself down a blind alley

I accept that it is unwise to read the Bible as literally true from start to finish. And I certainly accept that both its content and its interpretation has changed much over the centuries. It's a collection of stories composed by humans, for humans, to attempt to explain what was at the time inexplicable and to feed the human desires for justice and hope against the cold and unfeeling reality of the universe. Over the years and the repeated re-tellings, those stories have become distorted and wildly exaggerated - Jesus didn't feed fifty people, oh no, it was five hundred people! No, five thousand people!!!

The Bible's big enough and contradictory enough to be able to be used to support views as disparate as those of the Bishop of Canterbury and the Westboro Baptist Church. The idea that you can obtain any coherent kind of truth or moral structure from something that ambiguous and rambling is absurd. To then go on deep-mining expeditions armed with contextual pickaxes and contemporaneous shovels with the aim of demonstrating that, actually, it does say anything useful or dependable about God or anything else is intellectually dishonest.

Hermeneutics/apologetics etc strikes me as akin to what Andrew Lang said about the unwise using statistics ...as a drunk man uses lamp-posts; for support rather than for illumination. It's all "I believe certain things about God and I believe them on faith. But if I read the Bible in just the right way, oh look! It confirms everything that I already believe! Quelle surprise!"

Why bother? What does all these hours of Bible study and contextual analysis and textual scholarship actually tell you that is worth paying attention to? Your beliefs are based on faith, not textual evidence. If you can ignore the "difficult" bits sufficiently that they do not affect your faith then you're picking and choosing which bits are important and which bits aren't. If you're doing that, why pay any attention to any of it?

HolofernesesHead, of all the documents listed how many of them have been dated at the time of the events of the Bible have occured?

niminypiminy, With the exception of a few fragments in the prophets, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes, and every part was subject to revision by later authors.

heresiarch - yes.

I suppose it must be easier for Muslims who (if I've got this right) believe the Koran was dictated to Mohammed by Allah, and has been passed down word for word since. Though even there there seems to be reinterpretations by some to fit better with current mores. I don't know enough about it though - was wondering how they came to have their belief that Jesus was a prophet but not the son of God - some part of the NT story but not the (for christians) crucial aspects of the Resurrection, divinity and also presumably any of the Pauline and other apostolic teachings.