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Philosophy/religion

Join our Philosophy forum to discuss religion and spirituality.

To the believers...

307 replies

PedroPonyLikesCrisps · 29/01/2013 23:17

How does one justify to themselves belief in a supernatural being with literally no hard evidence? This is something I just don't understand. Without the assumption of a god or gods, we are able to explain pretty much everything in the Universe and even those yet-to-be-answered questions are being gradually chipped away at without any need for a deity.

So what makes people believe in a god? Is it fear, conditioning, laziness? Theories of the supernatural were our first attempts at understanding the world (big yellow disc moves across the sky, don't know what it is, maybe a god carries it around up there). You could say they were humankind's first attempt at scientific reasoning. But we've moved on from these archaic theories now and we can explain all these things we couldn't before, yet for some reason, religions live on and people continue to think that some guy lives upstairs and watches over us even though there's no rational way to argue his existence.

Do Christians think Muslims are insane for their differing beliefs? Does anyone still believe in the Greek or Roman gods anymore? Do the religious find Scientology to be just another religion or does anyone else see the the words 'cult' and 'religion' are pretty much interchangable?

Discuss!!

OP posts:
headinhands · 02/02/2013 21:55

You say you listen to him. So he communicates back to you? Why does he communicate conflicting messages to other theists?

niminypiminy · 02/02/2013 22:11

I don't know. I'm not saying i've got all the right answers. I try to listen carefully. I try to live my life in the light of that listening. Some of the time, hell, most of the time, I don't 'hear' anything in particular, or indeed anything at all. But when I do, it changes everything.

IndigoBarbie · 02/02/2013 23:17

Where for art thou, Pedro? How does one justify to themselves belief in a supernatural being with literally no hard evidence?
A supernatural being, huh? How about we are all supernatural beings, placed into bodies - and therefore, no evidence is required, as we just know deep in our hearts? :)
No matter what we are, who we are or where we are - we are all coming here by the same manner, and all leaving here at some point too. Remembering that, and knowing that we are all made of the same stuff (whether we choose to display it or not), can go such a long way. Instead of seeing the seeming differences due to skin colour, beliefs of whatever, rich or poor, fat or slim etc etc etc
For all the experiences I've had of these 'supernatural' beings (the ones without a physical body at the moment), I could never ever prove it to anyone, and nor should I have to. We are quite possibly experiencing our own 'realities' anyway, so what's real for me might not necessarily be real or believable to anyone else. It doesn't shake me though, live and let live, just the way you are ;) With love xxx

cloutiedumpling · 03/02/2013 00:43

Niminy - I don't know much about people who have actively turned away from God. Is that different from people who have wandered away from God? How does that fit with the parable of the lost sheep?

headinhands · 03/02/2013 10:06

Sorry Indigo but I need a bit more than your say so before I can believe what you say. 'Feeling it in your heart' is nice for you but I don't have such feelings. And if I accept your claim on the strength of your emotions about it I then have to accept other people who feel strongly about their beliefs and it all gets a bit silly and meaningless doesn't it.

IndigoBarbie · 03/02/2013 11:55

In all honesty, my take on this is that we each come to earth with one thing: ourselves. Our own bodies. What better mechanism can you use to discern what is good or bad in your life?
Ever had the heebie jeebies when you looked at someone? Why would that be then? This is the strength of emotions part, what you 'feel' in your heart. Or whereever else in your body you get your intuitive hunches or knowings from.

Headinhands - Is it just that you don't believe anything anyone else says when it comes to this stuff, or is it more of a 'have to have concrete and scientific proof' kind of thing? Yes of course you need a bit more than my say so, because my 'say so' is for me only. How could it ever be for anyone else? I could never prove any of my own experiences to anyone else, but I can tell people about them. That is all. I don't expect for anyone to believe anything I say, at all. Nor am I am here to convince anyone that what I say is 'right', that would just be crazy.
Yes, and as you say - it really is a bit pointless - I only post up here to offer some of my experiences in my life, just as others do theirs. I am not here to argue with anyone. It does get a bit wearing getting bashed online and thankfully not too much on here ;), but that's just how it is. :)

headinhands · 03/02/2013 12:15

I didn't mean you sharing was pointless, I meant if I accept what people suggest based on the strength of their emotion. I then have to accept all the impassioned views put forth of which many are diametrically opposed. I find being here thought provoking at times and I like that. I'm guessing most of us here like that too which is why we come back for more of the same 'ol same 'ol.

I don't hold much stock with this gut reaction thing. You only have to read the news to see it's not a reliable phenomenon. I'm guessing supposed gut reactions to people are more an interplay of memories/subtle prejudices rather than anything pre-loaded into our brains.

CoteDAzur · 03/02/2013 18:56

Thread has moved on, but I'd like to respond to a few things:

ethelb - re "@cote 100% rational? Never smoked? Never had unprotected sex?Never fantasised about spending your life with somone? Never drank too much? Never eaten more than you need?"

"Risky" doesn't equal "irrational". None of the above are evidence of an irrational person.

People have different Risk Preferences and they rationally perform their own Risk-Benefit Analyses. I did quite a few things you would maybe think of as very risky (mountaineering, windsurfing, bungee jumping) but those were decisions I took rationally and after performing safety checks and considering risks vs the pleasure/benefits I expected out of them.

The opposite of acting rationally is acting without due thought, purely on an emotional level or "just because".

TheFallenNinja · 03/02/2013 18:57

Discuss!! Don't you mean counter argue your position?

Yawn

CoteDAzur · 03/02/2013 19:23

niminypiminy - re "Your thoughts about Bach are very interesting. But that is not a scientific answer to the question"

I wasn't trying to give you a scientific answer re "Why is Bach's music is so good?" but pointing out that there are interesting paths of inquiry as to why some people (ex: those with Asperger's Syndrome) find it incredibly good and others don't. I actually said in the post you reply to that science may not have all the answers now but there is no reason to believe that it won't one day soon.

And I am saying that because you said "science is just no good at addressing certain kinds of questions, such as 'why is Bach a musical genius - and how did he write, why did he write such amazing music?'"

"I believe because of my experience of God, not because I was convinced by argument. (Although it would be impossible for me to believe in something I couldn't also give reasoned assent to.)"

What is your reasoning, then? Please share.

"It seems to me that experience does pose a problem in these kinds of discussions, because it is impossible to gainsay."

Experience is great. I'd love to hear about it and it could possibly be convincing, as well. But not the kind of "experience" that goes "... and then I felt God's love in my heart".

"If I say that I have experience of God, there are four possibilities: I am mistaken, or I am mad, or I am lying, or I am telling the truth."

There is at least one other possibility: You are telling the truth and you are mistaken. That is, you think you had a divine experience but it was just your brain playing tricks on you.

This is more common than you would think and it does not mean that you are mad. I recently read a book called My Stroke Of Insight, written by a brain scientist who survived a stroke, who tells in meticulous detail how it felt to have parts of her brain shut down. It all starts with an incredibly powerful experience of peace and love, and being one with the universe. Happiness, and a feeling of being touched by God.

I am not saying you had a stroke, obviously. Just pointing out that people have transient "experiences" in their heads that feel very real but aren't actually caused by a deity.

"And what are we to say about all the accounts people have left us of their encounters with God?"

Which people? And which "encounters"?

niminypiminy · 03/02/2013 20:40

Phew, Cote, thqat's a bit of a monster post for me to answer. I'll do my best.

  1. Science is really not going to have all the answers - not any time soon, and not ever. Science just isn't interested in certain kinds of questions, and it doesn't have the right tools to answer them. It's really not dissing science to say that there are other ways of investigating and seeking to know the world which are equally good at helping us to understand the human condition.
  1. Having read a great deal I came to the conclusion that the evidence came down in favour of the truth of the resurrection. There are various books that were important in that journey, among them Rowan Williams's Tokens of Trust, which discusses the elements of the Nicene creed in a way that is accessible and informed by immense scholarship, worn very lightly.
  1. I think I'd like to know what kind of experience you might find convincing. I hope you do underhand that I do not want to share some of the most profound moments of my life with a stranger on the Internet who might simply subject them to scorn and derision.
  1. I might be telling the truth, and I might be mistaken. That's true. But I might not -- and you cannot, in your position, say with any authority whether I am mistaken. As DandyDan said in a post you appear to have missed, since I am my body, how would God communicate with me except through my brain? The explanation that I may have had a stroke would not rule out God having spoken to me. It is not either/or but both/and. How might you know that 'transient experiences' people have inside their heads are not caused by a deity?
  1. You might start with the writings of the Desert Fathers, the Confession of st Augustine, and The Revelation of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. Then you could move on to The Seventh Mountain by Thomas Merton, and The Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux, and The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum. Then you will have scratched the surface of the spiritual classics.
niminypiminy · 03/02/2013 20:43

Ps. Sorry for typos - the damn auto-correct yet again

CoteDAzur · 03/02/2013 21:58
  1. I disagree, and you are miswording the issue. Science isn't interested in questions. People are interested in questions, and science is the name we have for the method we have to find out the answers. Not any particular science, perhaps, but the scientific method - formulate hypothesis, carry out experiments, observe results, see if they agree with hypothesis.

Which "other ways of investigating" are you referring to? I'm curious. (Navel-gazing not being a way of investigating, I hope we both agree)

  1. What evidence is this that convinced you Jesus was resurrected? (Or are you saying that you are convinced everyone will be resurrected after death?)
  1. If you don't feel like sharing your God "experience", why are you talking about it?
  1. So we agree - your "experience" can very well be just in your head and not a real communication with a deity. And I'm not sure what you mean by "since I am my body, how would God communicate with me except through my brain?", especially without knowing what kind of communication we are talking about. A feeling of love and peace? A thundering voice in your head actually talking to you?
  1. Let's be clear about one thing - I am not about to read 10 books because you count them off on a post. If you would like to say something, please write it in a post.
headinhands · 03/02/2013 23:06

If you need to read 10 books to make something palatable why didn't god stick them on the end of the bible?

niminypiminy · 03/02/2013 23:42

Don't have mental energy to take on all that tonight, but you did ask 'which people, which encounters' so I gave you a few examples of people who have left us their accounts of their encounters with God. A few, of very many indeed. You may not want to read them, and that's up to you. Your loss, because you might learn something.

HeadinHands, I thought we had already established that God did not write the Bible.

headinhands · 04/02/2013 04:22

Ah sorry, when you said you believed in the ressurection I thought you meant ^the* resurrection. You mean a general life after death thing? Why would you believe that?

sieglinde · 04/02/2013 09:57

to headinhands - because He knew you probably wouldn't be arsed to read them? Grin

I'm not a fundamentalist, so I don't think the NT for instance contains all truth; it doesn't contain any number of truths, but that doens't make it untrue.

Actually both science and religious truth evolve; people come to greater/different understandings, often involving some deletions of the past. So - say - Story of a Soul does contain some ideas not expressed fully in the NT, just as quantum doesn't entirely sync with relativity. That's all fine; it's as it should be. Human beings are made to seek, to search.

CoteDAzur · 04/02/2013 10:17

niminy - I actually read a lot and always have. But I am not about to read ten books about some strangers' feelings about their preferred deity.

I asked "what encounters?" and thought you would be able to say "This guy saw God move a mountain and had a conversation with him" or whatever. Not "Go read these ten books". That is not really an acceptable answer for any question, because I'm asking you and if you know the answer, surely you can summarise it in a few sentences rather than me spending the next six months reading those books.

"Your loss, because you might learn something."

I'm all for learning, and honestly, you will not meet many people who read as much as I do on diverse subjects such as quantum physics, astronomy, biology, etc because I love to learn.

I'm just a bit sceptical as to what sort of real knowledge (as opposed to author's opinion and feelings) I will get from dedicating the next 6 months of my life reading these many books about these people's thoughts on spirituality.

headinhands · 04/02/2013 10:33

to headinhands - because He knew you probably wouldn't be arsed to read them?

I used to be a Christian and still have quite a few bibles kicking about. I can even recite all the names of the books of the OT and the NT in order and know quite a few verses off by heart. Do I pass? :)

I'm not sure that the scientific community works the same way as the religious one? I don't think the scientific one makes claims without any evidence even when evidence runs to the contrary. It's not a comparison that means anything. You may as well compare it to the world of cooking? And which religious community are you referring too? It's not like all the religions of the world are in one accord and work together to improve on theories?

niminypiminy · 04/02/2013 11:00

I know this is a bit pedantic, but I only listed 6 titles. This suggests to me that you are not reading my posts very carefully. The books I suggested are first person accounts of lives spent encountering God. You would find, were you to read them, that the people who wrote them met God in all sorts of ways: though visions and revelations, through the scriptures, in the silence of prayer, in worship, in encounters with other people. God speaks to us in many different ways. 'This guy saw God move a mountain and had a conversation with him' is only one.

I agree that, in a shorthand way, I personalised science (that is, I talked as if science was a person rather than a collection of practices, which is a better description science is more than scientific method, indeed, much science doesn't use scientific method at all theoretical physics for example).

Science (or scientific method, if you like) is good at answering questions about what the world is like, but it is not good at answering second-order questions about the significance of what it finds out. The idea that it could do this was termed the 'naturalistic fallacy' by the philosopher GE Moore. This could be summarised as 'you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is''. To do this, you need other methods of inquiry -- philosophy, the arts and humanities, social sciences, even, dare I say it, theology.

I came to believe Jesus rose from the dead because I can't see that any other explanation makes sense of what came after. The other possibilities are that the disciples hid the body and then told lies (why would they dedicate their lives, living in poverty and danger, courting exclusion from their community and even death, for something they knew was a lie?), or that they saw a vision and mistook it for reality (but why did so many people have this vision, not all at once, but in singly or in small groups, without knowing that he had appeared to other people?). When all the other explanations have been discounted as impossible, what remains must be the truth -- however improbable it seems.

As the Nicene Creed says, 'I look for the resurrection of the dead': I hope for it.

Experiences of God don't come very often. They might be very fleeting: a moment of awareness of his presence, the knowledge that you are loved, a brief vision of light in a time of great darkness. You might have only one in an entire lifetime in a recent programme Sister Wendy Beckett said that she had had only one but that experience is life-changing.

I suspect that what you mean by 'real knowledge' is something like 'empirical evidence'. But there are so many things that you cannot have 'real knowledge' about. You cannot have real knowledge of numbers, or abstractions like beauty or justice, you cannot have real knowledge of love, you cannot have real knowledge of hope, and you cannot have real knowledge of God -- if that is all you mean by 'real knowlege'. That seems to me to be an unnecessarily restrictive account of what it might mean to have knowledge of something, one which surely prevents you from knowing anything about the deepest questions of human life.

niminypiminy · 04/02/2013 11:12

HeadinHands of course scientists make claims without any evidence, and when the evidence runs the other way. What is the evidence for wormholes, or string theory? The evidence is often contradictory, and sometimes the theories are too.

The history of science, if it is anything, is the history of wrong ideas. We cannot know that what appear today to be unalterable, self-evident truths, such as the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection will not in the future be found to be completely erroneous.

As Sieglinde said, scientific ideas have evolved, changed and developed in the light of developments in knowledge. So have many religions. (See what I did? Just as 'science' is not one thing, nor is 'religion'.) In particular, Christian theology has been profoundly shaped by biblical criticism and textual scholarship. One of the difference between them, however, is that scientist are generally not interested in the history of their discipline, whereas Christians of most persuasions are committed to a critical dialogue with their own history.

headinhands · 04/02/2013 11:30

When all the other explanations have been discounted as impossible, what remains must be the truth -- however improbable it seems.

What about people of other faiths who faced death rather than relinquish their beliefs?
Many people witnessed Muhammed splitting the moon, how have you decided that was myth but that the resurrection actually happened?

niminypiminy · 04/02/2013 11:35

I haven't decided it was a myth, since I really haven't thought about it. I don't hold a brief to speak on behalf of 'religion' religions are so different and I really don't know enough about any other religion to speak about it, apart from saying, as I did above, that all religions have glimpses of the truth of God but that for me Christianity sees more of the truth. I believe the resurrection happened: that is what I said, no more, no less.

headinhands · 04/02/2013 11:39

niminy I'm confused how you believe that Jesus came back from the dead based on the scriptures but at the same time are able to decide that when Jesus claimed he was the only way to god that he didn't mean it, or didn't say it or whatever? Can you explain this seeming inconsistency in your approach to the bible?

niminypiminy · 04/02/2013 11:41

Have I ever said that I didn't think that Jesus didn't say or mean that he was the only way to God?

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