Agnostic, God Probably Doesn't Exist: When not to receive the Eucharist? When not to recite the Creed?

[ethereality]

Actually, I was speaking of modern-day missionaries and ordinary people.

I thought you might have been, which is why I thought it was good to focus on the better question. As for people today, it’s the same thing that causes people to fly planes into buildings: Conviction that a doctrine is true, regardless of whether it actually is true. I’m surprised you haven’t encountered this argument before. That is why what matters is not what believers do, but what credible eyewitnesses do, because they don’t have the potential to be mistaken (i.e. they know what they saw).

 

[lax16]

I thought you might have been, which is why I thought it was good to focus on the better question. As for people today, it’s the same thing that causes people to fly planes into buildings and cut people’s heads off: Conviction that a doctrine is true, regardless of whether it actually is true. I’m surprised you haven’t encountered this argument before. That is why what matters is not what believers do, but what credible eyewitnesses do, because they don’t have the potential to be mistaken (i.e. they know what they saw).

No, it’s what keeps us from harming others. What compels us to put others first.

I am talking about a complete change of heart that causes people to want to serve their fellow man and forsake his own needs.

 

[Vico]

…
Looking at what you wrote again, I see now another interpretation would be to think of myself the same way I think of God, i.e. timeless (“time is tenseless and time-flow an illusion”): But if the flow of time is an illusion, then our incompetency is absurd, and God absurd for his crown of creation (man) being thus so, and God is placed in the same ridiculous category – of Deceiver – as the Creationists’ claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and God allowed Satan to put down dinosaur bones “to trick us into thinking otherwise”.

To answer the objection to b-theory that you refer to you could read about perdurantism worm theory which utilizes four-dimensional worms that stretch across space-time. There are so many philosophical sources to choose from, you should probably start with an overview, but I do not have a list of websites with this.

 

[ethereality]

Sorry, to clarify, I messed up the point about Young Earth Creationists: Karl Keating had a pretty good blog post a while back about visiting the Grand Canyon, and how, as he put it, “God makes the earth look old,” experiencing the Grand Canyon, combined with our leading theories about erosion and carbon dating. His points better illustrate the objection that denying appearances puts God in the role of Deceiver, since God is the Designer who gave it these appearances for us.