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

[notfluffyatall]

I don't think we've quite finished yet

This is such a great thread! I am enjoying the fact that it's making me think more about my faith - so thank you everyone for your contributions (and for humouring me! )

Hi Zideq! The texts I mentioned range from being much older than the Bible (e.g. Egyptian papyri), to contemporary with the Bible (e.g. Assyrian treaty documents, Cyrus Cylinder, Clement of Rome's letters, probably the Didache athough the dating for that is disputed) to later than the Bible (lots of stuff! E.g. Epistle t oDiognetus, Justin Martyr, martyr acts etc). So the oldest texts give us a sense of what the literatures of the Bible arose out of, the contemporary stuff tell us what else was being written, and the post-biblical writings tell us how the christian message was received). Have you been to the British Museum? It's fab!!! We are so lucky to have it in the UK.

As a point of order , re biblical texts not being contemporaneous with events described: most mainstream academic theologians think Judges and the Samuel-Kings David story were written within living memory. NT written from 50 - 110ish CE.

Heresiarch - reading is a two-way street. You read the Bible through the lens of scepiticism / whatever, I read it troug hthe lens of the Christian tradition. My Christian tradition is concerned with moving towards the best possible understanding of the Bible, hence all the historical parallels, learning Hebrew and Greek etc etc etc. I hasten to add, not many Christians can do this, through time constraints etc, so they trust the work of theologians - in early CHristianity the big question re. the Bible was 'whom do you trust to read this thing correctly?' But yes, eventually you have to say, for example, Matthew 18:20 talks about 'wheverever two or three are gathered, there I am in the midst of them.' The Jewish Mishnah gives some fascinating insights into what is being claimed of Jesus in this verse, but ultimately, if we have never known the presence of Jesus in Christian comunity, have we understood the verse? You can read recipes until you know them off by heart, without ever tasting the food - but the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is 'taste and see that the Lord is good.' Again, as I said earlier, it is a question of epistemology - how do we know what we know? What different types of knowledge exisit?

The other thing, Heresiarch, is that you are as formed by your epistemological tradition as I am by mine - there is no such thing as a 'neutral reading of the Bible, or anything else for that matter. It sounds as if you expect that the Bibble should be 'pristine', 100% scientifically proven and historically neutral (which is a fallacy in itself! Read Richard Rorty / Quentin Skinner on this)...what do you think?

Grimma, my Muslim friends find the Bible maddening for that reason.

You read the Bible through the lens of scepiticism / whatever, I read it troug hthe lens of the Christian tradition.

Having done some of each in my time, I'm bound to say I find the first to be clear flat glass.

And I find the latter endlessly enriching, deepening, life-changing, challenging, wise, truth-giving, etc...! So if experience is the arbiter of truth, we are equal! (Reminds me of that thing on Harry Hill's TV burp...'there's only one way to find out...FIGHT!!!!')

So if experience is the arbiter of truth

ah, well there's a big if!

The answers to questions of faith are subjective. One person's 'truth' may be another persons delusion. We're on much firmer ground with the objective truths of science. Once you understand the truth that a rainbow is caused by water droplets diffracting polychromatic light, do you still need the 'truth' that God is reminding us he's not going to do genocide by flooding again?

My point exactly Grimma!

This thread, if it's 'about' anything, is about how we know, and what we know. The subjective / objective dichotomy is attractive, I grant you that, but how far does it get us? Okay, you can explain to me how a rainbow occurs in the sky - is that all there is to say about rainbows? You can explain to me how a baby is born - is that all there is to say about childbirth?

Surely the bible can be inspiring / enjoyable / enlightening in the way that any literary work can - you find the pieces that have meaning for you.

Even if you aren't a believer there may be fun to be had in working out why certain passages were written and how they might apply to everyday life. And there's undoubtedly the historical / sociological interest of course.

But what it will never ever do is prove once and for all the existence of a Christian God.

Which kind of raises the question of if there were to be modern day scientific proof that God exists, what would that constitute? A booming voice from the clouds, which goes through the bible verse by verse going 'THAT'S what I meant by that bit there, you buffoons!'

rainbows? well, for sure we can wonder why we subjectively find them aesthetically pleasing. It might even turn out there's an objective answer to that if we delve far enough though.

childbirth? obviously far more to it than the mechanics (though we may find that more than we'd like to acknowledge is down to oxytocin )

"This thread, if it's 'about' anything, is about how we know, and what we know. The subjective / objective dichotomy is attractive, I grant you that, but how far does it get us? Okay, you can explain to me how a rainbow occurs in the sky - is that all there is to say about rainbows? You can explain to me how a baby is born - is that all there is to say about childbirth?"

'All there is to say' - of course not. It depends what you want to know about or achieve by talking about it.

If I were to make up a lovely story about elves flying up in the sky with their paintboxes to make rainbows that's what it would be, a story. Which might have literary merit (or not!) - I might get good marks for it in an English class, but probably not a science class.

Okay - let's take the thing we probably all have in common, childbirth. A woman with no medical training gives birth. Does she know what childbirth is?

You've lost me a bit here I'm afraid

I absolutely don't expect the Bible to be 100% pristine. As I said, I know that it's all stories and myths, large parts of which are based on oral tradition.

To use your recipe analogy, I look at a recipe book and see a recipe book. It's obvious that many of the recipes are based on older recipes (as many of the stories in the Bible are based on myths from older religions), and it's clear that some of them were written by people who never actually tried them out because if you did you'd end up with something completely unusable. The recipe simply wouldn't work as it doesn't make sense. Maybe a few of the recipes are ok but I don't use that fact to inform me too much about the book as a whole.

By contrast, I see what you ("you" in the general sense of someone who puts huge amounts of effort into Biblical study) are doing as closer to looking at the recipe book with the expectation of finding how to bake a cake. So where there's a recipe for cake you go "Wow, look at that! This must be a good recipe book because it's got cake!"

Where there's a recipe for beef wellington, you say "Well, if you take it in the context of when this recipe was written, I'm sure that they really meant that you should use jam rather than beef, and to change the plain flour in the pastry to self-raising to make a sponge, and wow! Look at that! It's a cake! What a fantastic recipe book! Everything in it is cake!"

And where there's a recipe for mud stew with added eyeballs, you say "Well, this is a really difficult recipe to understand. It doesn't seem to make cake at all. Perhaps if I work at it more, and understand the difference between what the recipe meant when it was written compared to now, I'll be able to understand where I'm going wrong and end up with a nice cake."

TL;DR - I read the Bible as it is. A collection of myths. You read the Bible in the sure expectation that it will tell you something that matches your preconceived ideas about God and, surprise surprise, that's what you find.

..and after all that, I'm now hungry for cake. Albeit in a literal rather than metaphorical sense

I like the analogy Heresiarch

If it's any consolation (probably not) I have just baked a cake - it's bloody awful and I now have indigestion!

Okay, Bobbin, I'll try again! let's suppose, as a thought experiment, that a woman with no medical training becomse pregnant, and gives birth. Does she, in any sense, know what childbirth is?

Heresi, do you think that people such a myself make the Bible say what we want it to say? I can see that would be such an easy get-pit clause! Believe me, academic theologians and church people IME do deal with what is there, and sometimes come to the conclusion that, for example, 1 Timothy can't really be read from a feminist viewpoint with integrity. What we can do from there is to talk about the cultural, socio-histrical factors behind the gender issues in 1 Timothy, and how it's been understood down the ages, and how we can read it now with integrity both to the text and to our own cultural perspective.

"Okay, Bobbin, I'll try again! let's suppose, as a thought experiment, that a woman with no medical training becomse pregnant, and gives birth. Does she, in any sense, know what childbirth is? "

Er, yes?

She knows what her experience of childbirth was from her senses. She knows it in a way no male obstetrician ever can.

Totally off topic but distracted by the 'which MNer looks most like their usename' and I sincerely hope its not HolofernesesHead! [shudder]

OK, so how do you take 1 Timothy and make a cake from its recipe for poo on burnt toast read it to provide anything approaching integrity? Or rationalise God's appalling treatment of Mary?
(">Boom< Sorry love, you're pregnant now. What, you thought you had free will? Oh, you crack me up! Seriously though, when your son grows up you'll watch him be tortured to death just so I can make a frankly confusing point about how merciful I am. Toodles!")

OK, child fed... I've a personal anecdote about different types of truth.

On a few occasions I've been woken from sleep by DH calling my name. Very clear, unmistakably his voice. On the first occasion I shot up only to find that he had been deeply asleep and had not called me. And he was mightily pissed off to be woken by me!

What's the 'truth' here? Did I hear his voice? An external observer would say, no. No sound waves emitted from his mouth. I'd have to say yes. Something fired in my brain exactly simulating the experience of hearing DH saying my name. (auditory hallucinations are not an unusual phenomenon).

It seems to me that religious experience is the latter type of 'truth'. God exists in the space between a believer's ears.

On a similar note. I was watching Derren Brown, maybe about a year ago. He was doing a series about debunking all sorts of woo stuff. Anyway, this one week, he was following what was effectively a 'ghost buster', this guy went to people's houses and got rid of their ghost/s.

It was not surprising at all that the house he visited to bust the particular ghost had a woman who had called to have the ghost removed was a bit gothy. She had dyed black hair (despite being about 50), tattooes of crosses and skulls, wore a lot of purple velvet, her house had gothic type candles, skulls, there were witchy type symbolic things etc. She may well have heard noises or whatever had made her think "I know, it's a ghost!" but she was preconditioned to think just that. In the very same situation I would be wondering if my plumbing was playing up or I had mice in my walls.

Mm. How would my anecdote have turned out if, instead of 'hearing' my DH, my brain had manufactured my dear departed Dad's voice instead? (a) if I was a 'gothy' type (b) still a christian (c) current me - I'd have thought 'well he's still alive in my head' )

I wonder if something that is underlying this debate is different conceptions of what it means to believe in something?

I think for Grimma, Notfluffy, Heresiarch and so on, believe probably means something like: "To have confidence in or be convinced of the actual existence or occurrence of a thing."

That comes from the full version of the Oxford English Dictionary. But it is actually no 7 in their list of meanings of the word believe (and they are listed in chronological order, so the first one is the oldest -- though all the meanings of a word is still current, oldest doesn't mean obsolete).

No 1 in their list describes more closely the way I use believe, and certainly describes what I mean when I say I believe the creed every Sunday: "To have confidence or faith in, and consequently to rely on or trust to, a person or (Theol.) a god or the name of a god."

This isn't simply splitting hairs. I believe, in the sense of 'have confidence or trust in' all sorts of things that I can't prove have an actual existence: calculus; love; the second law of thermodynamics; electronic money; truth.

To use 'believe in' in sense no 7 of God is what philosophers call a category error. It's using reasoning appropriate to one area of knowledge on another for which it is not adequate.

Of course there can't be empirical proof of God. But I trust and have confidence in him. It's a vastly different conception of what it means to believe -- but it is one that in practice we use all the time. "I believe in you" doesn't mean I have confidence you exist. It means "I trust and have confidence in you". And that's what I mean when I say I believe in God.

sorry, meant 'all the meanings of the word are current'

Not quite that simple a difference. I used to believe in God in exactly the sense you mean - I'd call that 'having faith in God'. However, it's impossible to do that if you don't believe (in the other sense) that God exists. Its a prerequisite.

It would be possible to believe God exists and not have faith in God; furthermore, it would be possible to have irrefutable proof that a God existed and still not have faith in that entity. Quite a lot of the replies on this thread have been of the 'well if there is a god he must be a bastard' variety.

That's true re. faith, Grimma. Interesting that your odd moment with your dh happened at a 'liminal' moment, between sleeping and being awake.

There must be space for different types of knowledge, surely? To say that we can only know empirically just sounds ridiculously, pointlessly self-limiting to me. (And would make a nonsense out of statements like 'I have known suffering and I have known joy.')

NF, have you ever met any bona fide biblical scholars? They are the most conservative (in the scholarly sense) people I have come across - claims are undersold rather than inflated, hypotheses regarding texts are tested to within an inch of their lives, peer-reviewing is scrupulous and there is a real reluctance - almost a phobia - of letting belief dictate how you interpret any biblical text. Honestly, trust me on this! It's a shame that the same carefulness so often doesn't make its way into the pulpit.

You asked how I'd handle 1 Tim - I will answer that if you like, I do have a methodology, but right now, I must get on and do some work!