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

[notfluffyatall]

I don't think we've quite finished yet

Holo - if you google 'science' or 'scientific method' I think the first couple of entries will tell you what you need to know. You'll get a pretty straight answer, upon which most of the scientific community would broadly agree.

Oh, that's a shame. I'm not incapable of Googling but I am much more intereste in hearing what other people think! Have a good weekend everyone!

Holo - I'm sure you're not incapable of googling But that's the point, you're unlikely to find huge areas of interesting discussion about what the scientific method IS - it's just a starting point to finding things out.

Yup, Bobbin's right. Scientists tend to be philosophically orthodox (however personally eccentric.)

You probably wouldn't get a significantly different answer from a scientist who is also a Christian.

Oh, I might have a wee Google then! I must say, I'd given these issues little thought before this thread, I haven't come to it with pre-prepared answers, so it's good for me to think through how my faith relates to stuff. I'm not a trained philosopher (but enjoy dipping my toes in!) but for my own sense of integrity, want to think faith through the best that I can.

Talking of which, I'm still pondering the 'intercessory prayer' question, Grimma...which I also haven't got a pre-prepared answer up my sleeve for, tbh. I will ruminate!

I think Heresiarch might also have been referring to my posts -- which, I think, sound like they have been misunderstood.

"you're unlikely to find huge areas of interesting discussion about what the scientific method IS" -- I think you would if you were looking at journals in philosophy of science.

As I understand it, from my husband who has a degree in natural sciences and a Phd in philosophy of science, most lab scientists have very little idea of the philosophical underpinnings of what they do, and even less of the debates around them.

I want to come back to my earlier question, however. How can we prove that Charles Darwin existed?

Oooh, a PhD in the philosophy of science! How very cool! What did he work on?

Have you all heard about the discussion on the 23rd Feb in Oxford between
Dawkins, Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury and eminent academic theologian) and Sir Anthony Kenny (truly excellent agnostic philosopher, and, I think, retired chancellor or vice-chancellor of Oxford)? It's on 'The Nature of Human Beings and the the Question of their Ultimate Origin.' Atm it's fully booked, but I want to get on the waiting list for tickets (which are £5). Anyone else interested / able to come, if we can get tickets? Hopefully there will be a transcipt of the event, or a publication of some sort that comes out of it.

Grimma you have the patience of a saint, lol.

I can only liken trying to reason with a theist to hitting my head off of a very solid brick wall.

"we'd as well be 2 threads back in time for all the chance they'll change their minds" Tim Minchin

Holo. Do you realise how massively irrational your position is? Has nothing that has been discussed make you think "shit, they're right!" ?

I don't want a big long reply full of questions about what irrational means or what right means etc etc. Just a plain answer, in English

Notfluffy, I think both HH and I have been trying to say in our different ways that rationality doesn't exclusively belong to science. We have both been saying that you can be rational and religious. We have both been saying that science can be right about some things and Christianity can be right about some things. Sometimes they can both be right, in different ways, about the same thing.

I can't put it more plainly than that. I've got good reason to trust my experience, which tells me that God is a reality. I'm not trying to get you to change your mind. If you don't want to believe, that's fine. It's your loss.

I'm listening to what you say. But I'm not convinced by your arguments. If you really want me to abandon my faith, you'll have to come up with better ones. Simply saying that my faith is irrational is not the best way to get me to rethink it.

HH: I'd love to come to that, but though I'm not very far from Oxford, it's well nigh impossible for me to get to, alas. But if you do get to go it would be great to hear your thoughts about it.

He worked on naturalised epistemology, which is a theory of knowledge which is consistent with, and indeed identical with scientific method.

NF, in plain English, no, I haven't been convinced by anything on this thread.

As I see it, we've got to the point of everyone agreeing that science is good.

As I see it, that means that some people think that science sets the limits of all what all true knowledge is, and /or how true knowledge can be found.

I disagree that science sets the limits of all knowledge, whilst continuing to say that science is a good thing.

Christianity believes that God is, by definition, beyond science - so whatever rules work within science, do not, cannot logically apply to God.

This is only a problem if you think that science must limit all truth.

Which I don't.

So for me, science is no reason not to believe in God.

For me, the 'science is the only truth' worldview is much less convincing or interesting or attractive, or even rational, than affirming the goodness of science whilst seeing it as part of a bigger truth by which God may be known.

That's clear, isn't it?

This thread has altered my position somewhat

How so?

I bought The God Delusion today so I'll read it in the next week or so.

It has confirmed to me that a theist, no matter how amenable, can be reasoned with when it comes to their sky daddy

Anyway, I'm off to the pub to watch the rugby! I hope the mighty Scots are victorious and crush the English, like Hitchens and the average theist if you'll excuse the analogy. Lol

Bugger, meant can't be reasoned with.

Just catching up with this thread, which seems to have diverted into lots of detail which is meaningless to anyone who doesn't start from a position of faith.

I think I have to agree with notfluffy, and repeat what I said many pages back in the first thread: there is no way an atheist and a believer are ever going to convince each other to change their minds. The existence of god can never be proven or disproven, it is all just a question of faith, so this sort of debate always goes in circles.

Going back a bit, to the issue of internal logic/consistency of Christianity. Yes, of course it has internal consistency (some of the time - there is also a lot of self-contradictory stuff due to different interpretations of the bible etc) but the same could be said of any religion or other belief system.

Holofernes, would it help you to understand how atheists see Christianity if you imagine yourself, a Christian, picking up a book of Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist theology, or a manual on astrology, or a homeopathic reference book and reading them with an open mind. I think you would find that all those things would be perfectly consistent and logical within their own frames of reference.

But if you come to them from the starting point of not accepting their main articles of faith (in Allah/Mohamed, the Hindu pantheon, Buddhist scriptures, the idea that celestial bodies influence individual lives or that water has memory etc), then they are worthless except in terms of understanding whatever cultural influence those particular belief-sets have had in the ancient or modern world. They don't have anything relevant to say to you on how the world should be interpreted or how you should live your life.

All the complicated theological debates going on in Christianity are just as meaningless to me as the same things going on in, say, Buddhism, would be to you. Nothing more than hot air and paper. If you take away the foundation they are built on - faith in a particular God - they fall down like a house of cards.

And just because traditionally a large number of people in a particular country (eg the UK) have held one particular set of beliefs, I don't think that necessarily means that those beliefs should be accorded a particular privilege in terms of influence on politics, education, scientific research etc.

Hi, Exexpat! [waves] Hope youenjoy the rugby, NF!

Right - to your points, Exex:

Yousay: "Holofernes, would it help you to understand how atheists see Christianity if you imagine yourself, a Christian, picking up a book of Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist theology, or a manual on astrology, or a homeopathic reference book and reading them with an open mind. I think you would find that all those things would be perfectly consistent and logical within their own frames of reference."

Yes - so far so good!

"But if you come to them from the starting point of not accepting their main articles of faith (in Allah/Mohamed, the Hindu pantheon, Buddhist scriptures, the idea that celestial bodies influence individual lives or that water has memory etc), then they are worthless except in terms of understanding whatever cultural influence those particular belief-sets have had in the ancient or modern world. They don't have anything relevant to say to you on how the world should be interpreted or how you should live your life."

Hmm---what I would say to that is that I beileve that there is truth in all religions, but (as a Christian) that truth is most fully revealed in Jesus. So no, they are by no means useless. I'm involved in inter-faith stuff and love talking and learning with people of the other faiths. I find that people from other faith traditions often have things to say that are highly relevant to how I live my life!

"All the complicated theological debates going on in Christianity are just as meaningless to me as the same things going on in, say, Buddhism, would be to you. Nothing more than hot air and paper. If you take away the foundation they are built on - faith in a particular God - they fall down like a house of cards."

Hmm---I don't know a great deal about Buddhism, so can't comment on that specifically. But I am a thinking person, and can apply my mind to issues which have as their foundations things that are very different to my foundational beliefs. I've travelled a lot, and learnt how to see life from all sorts of perspectives, so I can enter into (for example) how the logic of church leaders in conservative evangelical Christian South Korea works, against its background of Confucionism and conservative evanglicalism. I am neither Confucian nor conservative evangelical, but I can follow the logic of those who are, and see how it ends up with a cetain model of leadership (not one that I am comfortable with - but which I do understand). You sound intelligent enough to follow logic you disagree with...it's more often a case of whether one is interested enough to enter into the thought-world of the other, not whether one is able.

"faith in a particular God..." This was my 'lightbulb' moment earlier when I was reading ch. 3 of the God Delusion (which I'd love to discuss) - Dawkins seems to take 'belief' to mean 'assent', whereas the New Testament Greek word 'pistis' which can mean 'belief', means trust much more often (I could say much more about this if you like). So it is much more about personal response than mental assent. Do you see? The Hebrew words are even more relational - there is no concept of 'believing in God' as a process of abstract mental assent at the time the OT was written. This changes the nature of the discussion. If you treat somehing that is relational as though it is cognitive, you've fundamentally misunderstood its nature.

How would you respond to that?

Sorry, just wanted to add, NF, is it that you can't follow my logic, or that you think it's flawed, or that you can't relate it to the world? Not sure how I am being illogical, tbh...

Holo - there are lots of points I'd like to get back to you on when I have more time, but re your question 'how can you prove that Darwin existed', this just leads down the alley of 'how can anyone prove anything exists' - which is another discussion altogether as far as I can see!

I think your point about the different meanings of the word belief is hair-splitting a bit. Surely you cannot trust/have faith in something/someone without first believing (or assuming) that it exists?

I am not a theologian or historian, but I would expect that at the time the old testament was written, belief in a God(s) was assumed, and that is the foundation for belief/trust in the Judaeo-Christian God of the OT. Not believing that there was a god was probably not a familiar concept at that time, but in the 21st century it is.

So these days if someone says they believe in God it could be used in either sense - thinking that a god exists, or trusting in that god - or most likely both at the same time, though I suppose some people might believe that there is a god but not have a very high opinion of him. It is not likely to mean that someone trusts in a god that they actually think does not exist.

Yes, of course I am 'intelligent enough' to be able to follow other people's logic even if I disagree with it. I just don't attach the same value to the conclusions it leads to.

I have spent much of my adult life outside the UK, and have studied and/or observed various religions, including several branches of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. I found them sometimes interesting on an intellectual level, and studying them helped me understand some things about the history and culture of the places I was living, but I didn't have to share any of their basic assumptions to do that.

And from my perspective, the beliefs of a shaman in rural Taiwan are just as valid and interesting as the beliefs of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and equally irrelevant to me, since as far as I am concerned they are equally unsubstantiated. There are of course many, many more volumes of learned theological discourse to back up the official doctrines of the Church of England than the traditional rituals of an animistic temple in the mountains somewhere, but the weight of numbers doesn't give one set of beliefs any more validity than the other, as far as I am concerned.

That's really interesting about your time spent abroad, Exex. It sounds really interesting.

Your post does raise the question for me: what substantiates belief? And how, and why? (This sounds a bit like a question from an undergraduate Philosophy exam paper! Sorry if it is a bit scary). But it is somewhat unavoidable if your post is to hold intellectual water.

I'll be back in a while to say something about faith / trust / belief...

"Your post does raise the question for me: what substantiates belief? And how, and why? "

Bit too broad a question really to be useful, surely? Pretty much anything can provide substance for somebody believing something.

For example, picking the petals off a daisy and ending the rhyme with 'He Loves Me" might substantiate a young girl's belief that a love affair holds promise.

Okay, the thought re. faith / trust / belief struck me while I was reading the gospel according to Dawkins - on p.131 of the paperback GD he says that belief in God is an arbitrary thing for God to ask of us - 'iwhy.....do e so readiy accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? Isn't it just as ilkely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility?'

Well, leaving aside the questions of divine reward and universalism there (which he doesn't mention, very oddly ), it seems that the point is that belief is a somewhat odd and artificial response to the divine, and that those lovely virtues he suggests are likely to be nearer to the heart of the posited God than 'belief.'

So this is why the distinction between trust and 'belief' is important, I think. If you can live with the parental imagery for a moment, we all, as parents, want our dc to trust us - I'm witing something atm about the sociologist / pyschologist Erik Erikson who described the central feature of early years development as 'basic tust' vs 'basic mistrust'. 'Basic trust', he says, is essential to a sense of being 'all right', and all learning and development starts there - if for any reason things are not as the should be, the baby / toddler learns 'basic mistrust'. He's still v. much used in educational pyschology etc.

So, if all that is true on a human scale, and trust is essential for growth, development and knowledge, then if you can think in terms of a posited God (as Dawkins does to make his rhetorical point) then we can only relate to God the Father from the basis of 'basic trust.' We might go on to ask tricky questions, we might explore meanings - but without that trust, no knowledge / growth / life is possible. Which is, maybe, why trust is so central to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

.....and all of this is one of the long list of reasons why I think that whichever God Dawkins wants us to be de-deluded about, it is not the Judeo-Christian one! I am seriously starting to doubt the value of saying anything about 'God', without being specific about which God you're talking about...

Okay, to be specific - why are the Taiwanese shaman's and the dear Archbishop's (Gawd bless 'im) thoughts equally unsubstantiated?