javelin,

I’m not offended at all; but I do find your assertions to be foundationalist in nature and they seem to me to reduce ‘knowledge’ to rational empirical data (which is ironic considering that good emiricists are about as post-foundationalist as modernists come in regards to the ability of reason to necessarily order the world) For instance you say “No one has intimate knowledge of God” and “Having knowledge suggests having irrefutable proof” I find both of those statements to be false in their singularity of the concept of knowledge.

For instance I would say that I in fact do have “knowledge” of God which has come from long years spent in prayer and worship. It certainly cannot be “proved” to be knowledge in the sense which you seem to imply is true knowledge, but there are many different ways that we know things, not all of them, indeed none of them, are provable from a position of pure reason or rationality apart from the subjective interpretive individual.

Though I would of course agree with you, as would any good orthodox Christian, that “God is unknowable in his essence” as the old phrase goes. But part of the Christian narrative is that one of the primary ways we know God is by Jesus crucified and resurrected, now experienced in the Spirit. I understand that none of these are ways of knowing which you seem to imply are needed to justify faith, but with Kierkegaard I would argue that there is only the “leap of faith.” Faith and “reason” are incommensurate.

Does any of that make sense for you or am I just prattling on? Why is it that you feel belief must be justified by unassailable proof?

Sarah, I would suggest that Christians act as though the existence of God were a matter of assured knowledge simply because this is the sort of faith or belief that requires embodiment if it is to have any integrity at all. That embodiment, moreover, is unlikely to remain purely personal. We are a naturally social species, so faith becomes embodied not merely in individual behaviour but in corporate behaviour: religious, social and political practices.

By that point, however, we have got a long way from the original intuition by faith that God is rather than isn’t. Arguably, the New Testament is the story of how Israel recovered that original intuition, as a community, under the extreme conditions of the ‘wrath’ of God, manifested in the form of Roman occupation and imminent war. Paul argues in Romans, I think, that the survival of the descendants of Abraham hung on the seminal pistis - belief, faith, or better faithfulness - of Jesus, who demonstrated quite concretely that the people could genuinely trust the notion or story of the Creator God that they had allowed to shape their corporate existence ever since Abraham decided to listen to that voice in his head that said he could make a difference. The story of Gethsemane shows that even for Jesus it was by no means an easy thing to translate faith into commensurate action.

So I think you’re right. It is simply belief that lies at the bottom of this whole thing, but there appears to be something about the nature of human existence that makes belief in God for some, perhaps for most, inescapable - for all our rationalism, humanity remains captivated by the idea of something beyond our knowledge and power and wisdom, beyond our material existence, beyond the corruptibility and decay of the world. There is then the question, of course, of why this story of faith rather than another one. But for now, I would almost characterize the ‘Christian’ calling as being precisely to give communal embodiment to the believed story of a God who makes new his creation through love.

There have been a couple of recent discussions initiated by Jacob that may be relevant to this topic;

Faith and evidence
The Irony of Theological Realism, or, The Realist’s Dilemma

No offense taken here.

I agree that belief in God requires faith, and also that God’s existence can be neither proven nor disproven.

I believe in God, but don’t claim to be able to prove anything about God.

Peace to you.

I applaud all of this denial. You cannot base faith on belief. Belief must be proven. Had I not proven that Satan existed than I surly would be an atheist today. The tribulations I endured studying and practicing the occult proved to me beyond any doubt that Satan truly exists. This evaluation led me to then assume God must also. And He does.

God doesn’t expose himself like Satan does. He makes you work very hard to find him. If you do the work then you can provide yourself with the proof that you need to believe. It is then that belief becomes Certainty.

God’s existence can be proven in an empirically disprovable way (one of the main requirements for a scientific theory). To date, it has not been disproven. Hear me out:

This is text book Aristotle:

Humans understand concepts which are wholly immaterial. (What color is tomorrow? obviously concepts are immaterial, and they must exist in order for us to undertsand them).

When we understand we are interacting with a concept in an active way. An actor on an immaterial “object” (eg the concept of tomorrow, love, or a tree) must be itself immaterial.

We know this relationship is active because there is nothing about the shape or color or size of an object that forces us to understand its nature. There is nothing about the arbitrary collection of squiggles on this page that your brain is passively being caused to understand.

So humans must have an immaterial aspect in order to have the capacity for abstraction that we empirically have been shown to have.

No animal has ever been shown to have the ability to think about tomorrow, or to utilize language in a way that isn’t tied to cause and effect relationships.

Where did our souls come from? There can be no immaterial effect without an immaterial cause just as there are no physical effects without physical causes.

That immaterial Cause is God.

Furthermore, how can there be information in Dinosaur DNA? Humans didn’t put information there as they might put information on a peice of paper or a sign. If there is no information, how is it that we can understand DNA? There must be information, because we can abstract the information, and it must have come from an immaterial source, ie God.

Again with Dinosaurs, how can we know that a dinosaurs heart was a pump except if there were a concept of a pump? We wouldn’t be able to figure out the use of a heart unless there were some immaterial aspect to the heart that allowed us to understand it. We could only describe it materially, not teleologically or by name or use, without the benefit of immaterial aspects to objects.

Belief in a God is based on Faith. And the Bible indicates rewards for unquestioning faith (like a child) and penalties for lack of it (not entering the kingdom of God unless you believe like a child, for example). And it probably started as something like trying to propitiate the sun or natural fertility in winter, so that it returned in spring to provide food.

I realised in mid-teenage that faith was based upon nothing but itself, that science explained nature satisfactorily (despite gaps in knowledge that I just admit without filling the gaps with a god) without needing supernatural beings, and that religious beliefs were no different to those of ancient beliefs in gods and goddesses.

When I first had doubts about my faith - I was a Catholic - I thought that maybe this was a test of my faith. So I made the effort to accept it even more so. But the doubts came again, and I wondered what would happen if we took faith out of the equation; the world and nature still made sense, so I saw no reason to get back into it. At the time this was difficult intellectually and emotionally (I was a teenager, after all).

That was getting on for 40 years ago, and my escape from faith has freed me to embrace what science has to offer, which I consider far more plausible than belief in the supernatural, and is the nearest we can get to the truth about how nature and the universe work. I’ve felt a sense of freedom ever since, and am happy and at peace with this.

Morality is a set of behaviours developed by us and to some extent other species in our genes over millions of years of evolution by natural selection. There is some conflict with other behaviours we have also inherited, but in most the “moral” behaviours are strongest.

The following are some explanations about biblical beliefs:

The Abrahamic God seems to be a conglomerate of Mesopotamian and Canaanite Gods identified together to form the one God. At least some Gods that were assimilated were: the Mesopotamian Marduk via the Canaanite El in Genesis 1 (Elohim) and El-Elyon (God Most High whose High Priest was Melchizedek in Genesis 14, who was compared to Jesus in Hebrews), Yahweh in Exodus, the “unknown” Greek god identified by Paul in Acts 17:23 (to appeal to the Gentiles), and the Arabic Al-Illah.

In the Mesopotamian creation epic, Enuma Elish, the great dragon Tiamat, who was the personification (if you can use that word for a dragon) of the waters of primeval chaos, was the mother of the gods. The god Marduk battled against Tiamat (the waters of chaos) and divided her body to form the heavens and the earth. This seems to be paralleled in Genesis 1:6-7: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.

There are nor GODS and there is NO GOD.

All you believers place your emotions and blind faith in fake beings or existences.

There is NO proof whatsoever of any GOD, but there are countless facts proving that there isn’t one, or any “supreme existence” overlooking anything on this tiny and meager planet.

Humans in their evolutionary stages are becoming more aware of this FACT.
Lets hope we don’t spend the next 7000+ years fighting for ignorant beliefs.

Peace on Earth comes either through our own moralities or disaster. Either way that peace is inevitable. Until then and now; (as the present) humans rape, kill and mutilate their own kind. That’s not the answer to anyone’s “free choice” and “prayers”!!! Ask the millions of Jews that begged their “GOD” for help during the Hitler era, for one example.

WAKE UP PEOPLE..!

Sorry about writing a rather longish response and then another but I did not read all of the responses that followed and there is at least one that aught to be addressed at some level because it mentions David Hume’s comment on rationalism and his case for skepticism. J.P. Moreland shows at least to my satisfaction, that not only was Hume wrong to advocate for skepticism but that argument had been very exhaustively explored and repudiated hundreds of years earlier. There appears to be no evidence in Hume’s comments on this subject that would suggest he was even aware that these ideas had been addressed.

I’m not talking about ordinary skepticism. Ordinary skepticism is like the scientific method. That kind of skepticism was first articulated in the biblical mandate, “test everything and hold fast to that which is good” 1 Thessalonians 5:21. Hume’s approach was very like the language you used about “absolutely certain.” I hope I made it clear that we do not have nor do we need absolute certainty about anything.

The irony is that those who require absolute certainty deny absolute truth. Truth is fundamental. If you buy into the naturalist world view that requires nature to be the whole show, it makes thinking very much more difficult than it needs to be. There is only so much you can learn about a car from inside the passenger compartment. Think how much harder it would be to know about the outside of a car if there were no windows to look out of. That’s our universe. We’re not passing other universes on the highway, or if we are we have no windows to look out and see them. We do however have a spectacular view of the interior of the universe. In fact, we could hardly select a more unobstructed place in the universe to place our planet to get a better view.

Owing to this fact, we have been permitted to discover the size, geography, and age of our universe. We have discovered that it is finite in both size and life sustaining potential. We can now say with excellent and increasing confidence, that our universe is a one off deal unless of course there is a Creator who may have created another one or any number of other ones. We can say with equal confidence, that unless that Creator tells us about those universes we will never discover them from here.

You sound like you are simply unaware that the bible has accurately predicted scientific discoveries, one after the other; in particular unique and very recent discoveries like, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic expansion and many, many others.

Creation and [by extension] God is believable because this belief system constitutes a falsifiable scientific hypothesis. So this is the falsifiable hypothesis. First, if the universe was created by God then the evidence for the big bang will grow stronger over time confirming that the universe came into being in a unique creation event demarcating the beginning of time, space, and matter. The singularity fits perfectly with biblical the ex nihilo [out of nothing] description of the creation event, “Calls into being that which does not exist” Rom 4:17. Second, the evidence for fine tuning will become stronger and shown to be even more precise over time, showing that only an infinitely precise Tuner could have meticulously balanced it. Third, the evidence for information in nature in DNA and other places will become more and more plentiful and convincingly demonstrate that it must have been encoded by an infinitely intelligent Informer. And finally, more and more passages of scripture once thought to be poetic or obtuse will be found to have specific and predictive scientific content. Further any similar observations from non-biblical holy books will ultimately not be shown to have the same predictive, explanatory power. That is to say these claims on behalf of the bible will ware well over time while claims from other books will not. At the rate that scientific papers are currently being published you should have significantly measurable results in about three weeks. This should give you a preliminary indication of what you will find. Over time you should expect the result to become more convincing.

I would say to you what Paul said to the Thessalonians, “test [this] and hold fast to that which is true.” If the evidence for this hypothesis becomes weaker over time I encourage you to disbelieve, because in that case the bible fails its own test. If it becomes stronger over time then your own intellectual integrity will be strengthened by the knowledge that it was place there by the Banger, Balancer, and Code Author of Life [Logos], God.

I detect a certain reluctance to wander down the path of contemporary continental philosophy, adhunt, but if you’re into this whole Humean thing you might want to track down After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux. He’s one of the new breed of so-called Speculative Realists, who in various ways are trying to establish a form of realism that’s not contingent on human knowledge of the real. You’ll note that, in this discussion of Christian realism, the ground keeps shifting to knowledge, evidence, faith, belief, etc. — characteristics of human connection with the real rather than of the real itself.

A Humean perspective on Christianity would be interesting. E.g., what humans can know of God is based solely on our experiences of God. However, we can’t infer from experience what God is like in and of himself. Neither is God bound by a priori laws to manifesting himself the same ways in all places and times…