How certain are we that God exists?

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KingCoil said:
How
certain
are
we
that
God
exists.
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My view is that of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
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CCC:
II. WAYS OF COMING TO KNOW GOD

31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments”, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.

32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.

As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.[sup]7[/sup]
And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky. . . question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?[sup]8[/sup]

33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”,[sup]9[/sup] can have its origin only in God.

34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.[sup]10[/sup]

35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
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jochoa said:
Dear King Coil,

Thank you very much for the enjoyable thread! I like your logical approach to knowing God. I find it to have a slight extension to St. Augustine’s First Cause. I still encourage you to strive to know God with direct certainty based upon the experience of an external object outside the mind accessible to sense contact of every person, so it is based on an object in the factual world external to man because such direct certainty is currently possible.

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts!
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From the experience of an external object outside the mind, you mean but not God, because God is too immense for an external object to be experienced directly by man, and also too subtle for an external object to be experienced directly by man.

But from experiences of things created by God we do come to inferential certainty of God existing as creator of the universe.

Now, you will mention that you experience God’s presence and working in you, you mean in your soul, heart, mind, body, whatever, but within your self, not experiencing God as yo experience eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of a full moon.

KingCoil
 
ThinkingSapien said:
In short there’s little motivation to do so.

Research in psychology tends to come up with results that have general applicability to a group. Being a minority position there’s an expectation of less applicability. Additionally there is a wide spectrum of attributes that a person that self identifies as an atheist may or may not have. Given the prohibitions of this site I won’t go into details on those, but Strange Notions did a piece on it.

I don’t think there’s a prohibition on thinking of non-quantifiable things. But such things would be relegated to a different knowledge domain. Perhaps with the success of a useful non-quantified yet unambiguous model a new knowledge domain could be created. Kind of how Newton’s writings on “natural philosophy” were relegated to the area we now know as physics.
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Being a minority position there’s an expectation of less applicability.

I have to look more extensively in the net, because I have in mind militant atheists who are like forgive the description mad dogs with rabies in their foaming mouths.

There must be some studies done by candidates to doctorate in psychology.

It would be like examining a good number of cases of mass killers who just shoot everyone on sight and then kill themselves instead of getting arrested; but atheists do not kill themselves – although logically they should enact self-departure when life gets too unbearable, by enact I mean execute.

To be fair to them, they do not go into mass killing either, or am I mistaken.

You see, to be psychologically normal, an atheist once he comes to logical conclusion in his own judgment that there is no God, then just like there is no Bigfoot, he can go forth and live without God, but why this obsession with arguing endlessly with Christians about there being no God.

By the way, this is an invitation to atheists and others akin to their mentality in regard to at least the impossibility of proving God’s existence, to join the discussion in this thread, I am referring to folks I called satanic obstructionists and juniors reluctanists.

No more, I will not use ad hominems on you anymore even though the term means directing my attention to you as homo, hominis – I mean a human being as in homosapiens.

Hehehehe. No offense intended, just for comic relief.

KingCoil
 
KingCoil said:
…not experiencing God as yo experience eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of a full moon
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On the contrary, I am sharing the ability to experience God as you experience eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of a full moon.
 
jochoa said:
On the contrary, I am sharing the ability to experience God as you experience eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of a full moon.
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Well, that is a very good thing with you, you should go on free and public television everywhere that you are experiencing God like eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of the full moon, but don’t tell people about the sacrament of the eucharist, because many people don’t accept any such sighting of transubstantiation of human body as bread and of human blood as wine, but still looking no different from bread and wine which any non-Catholic could have mistakenly ingested but already consecrated by a priest, and that bread and wine are going the way of his GI tract.

KingCoil
 
KingCoil said:
Thanks for the long quotation from the Catholic Catechism.

Tell you what, look for any indications at all in the Catholic Catechism of rejection to my position that man can have only inferential certainty of God’s existence as creator of the universe.
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So you hold that direct certainty of God’s existence (or belief in God as “Properly basic” according to Plantinga) is impossible? I can’t find much support for your claim. Maybe this?
KingCoil said:
How do we explain why God is beyond direct human experiencing?

The explanation is because with God He is in effect for man both bigger than the whole universe and thus He encompasses the whole universe, and more subtle than the most minutest particles, fields, forces, laws of physics, laws of nature, etc., making up on sub sub sub microscopic scale the composition of the universe.

That is why we cannot come to direct experience of God by physiological contact, i.e. with our biological senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling Him.
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From that I don’t see either 1) why we cannot come to direct experience of God by physiological contact, or 2) why, even if we couldn’t, this would entail that we cannot directly experience God.

If you wish to give a concise argument for you position I’d be happy to address it. I don’t think there is any problem with belief in God being properly basic.
 
KingCoil said:
I have to look more extensively in the net, because I have in mind militant atheists who are like forgive the description mad dogs with rabies in their foaming mouths.
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It sounds like you may be talking about some one with a specific personality type…
KingCoil said:
There must be some studies done by candidates to doctorate in psychology.
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The only study of which I know looks at people of various levels of religiosity. This isn’t quite the same as a [mono|poly|pan]theistic vs atheist dichotomy. There are people that don’t have the belief of any god but hold some form of spirituality and/or belief of an afterlife. There are people that believe there is a god but no belief of an afterlife, and so on. What was found is that people that are more certain about their position tend to be happier in general.
KingCoil said:
It would be like examining a good number of cases of mass killers who just shoot everyone on sight and then kill themselves instead of getting arrested; but atheists do not kill themselves – although logically they should enact self-departure when life gets too unbearable, by enact I mean execute.

To be fair to them, they do not go into mass killing either, or am I mistaken.
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No, generally they don’t go about killing or causing intentional harm. So I don’t think this is a good simile. I think the personalities that you’ve been encountering could be some mixture of activist (intentionally trying to strike a nerve), kids on the internet (striking a nerve for different motivations) some people that are genuinely upset, and so on. When I look at Wikipedia for well known atheist the ones that tend to be a bit louder show up on the activist list ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atheists ).
KingCoil said:
You see, to be psychologically normal, an atheist once he comes to logical conclusion in his own judgment that there is no God, then just like there is no Bigfoot, he can go forth and live without God, but why this obsession with arguing endlessly with Christians about there being no God.
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Unfortunately in psychology there doesn’t seem to be a hard criteria for what is considered “normal.” It seems that psychologist try to consider how much an individual’s mental position interferes with their life. If some one is non-religious and otherwise getting along fine in society the person isn’t going to be treated as being abnormal. When a person is being treated for a psychological condition it helps if the person is interested in changing. If the person isn’t interested in changing trying to change the person tends to be challenging. You might first want to come up with something that motivates and convinces the person to make a change and then work from there.
 
jochoa said:
On the contrary, I am sharing the ability to experience God as you experience eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of a full moon.
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You mean you get to compare your experience within your self of God with your or my experience of eating ice cream or seeing the beauty of the moon.

Well, no need to argue endlessly on your comparison, it is just that it is not the thing that does justice to God: for you have got to be God to do justice to God in describing your experience within your self of God.

KingCoil
 
zippy2006 said:
So you hold that direct certainty of God’s existence (or belief in God as “Properly basic” according to Plantinga) is impossible? I can’t find much support for your claim. Maybe this?

From that I don’t see either 1) why we cannot come to direct experience of God by physiological contact, or 2) why, even if we couldn’t, this would entail that we cannot directly experience God.

If you wish to give a concise argument for you position I’d be happy to address it. I don’t think there is any problem with belief in God being properly basic.
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As I told Jochoa, he can compare his internal experience within his soul, heart, mind, self of God, with his and my external experience of eating ice cream and seeing the beauty of the full moon, but that is a comparative description of God; and it does not do justice to God – to do justice to God you have got to be God yourself.

Anyway, folks with experience of God can get together and write together about their experience of God, mentioning of course that it still does not do justice to God.

And also invite Plantinga to be your expert I mean professional consultant.

KingCoil
 
ThinkingSapien said:
…]
Originally Posted by KingCoil
It would be like examining a good number of cases of mass killers who just shoot everyone on sight and then kill themselves instead of getting arrested; but atheists do not kill themselves – although logically they should enact self-departure when life gets too unbearable, by enact I mean execute.
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Think PZ Myers, isn’t he the character and professor i.e. high level educator of kids, who abetted anyone to steal the consecrated host, by which he succeeded to obtain a stolen consecrated host and did sacrilege to it and then threw it in his garbage bin, also having it all photographed for the internet.

KingCoil
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KingCoil said:
Think PZ Myers, isn’t he the character and professor i.e. high level educator of kids, who abetted anyone to steal the consecrated host, by which he succeeded to obtain a stolen consecrated host and did sacrilege to it and then threw it in his garbage bin, also having it all photographed for the internet.
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You remember correctly. But he’s a self reported activist. And the incident was in response to a student at another school having reportedly having received death threats and threat of expulsion after he had saved the Eucharist to show to a friend. It started as a satiric protest and escalated from here. I don’t want to recount his exact actions since it might result in some bad feelings being resurfaced. It seems evident that he was trying to hit a nerve. His behavior seems to stem more from a form a form of social engineering. He shares information on his motivations for his actions on his blog along with the disposition from which he speaks. Not much of a psychological study is needed to figure him out.
 
Let’s go to my idea of the inferential certainty of God’s existence.

What do you say about the division from yours truly of human certainty, and also on my exposition on how to reach inferential certainty of God existing as per concept the creator of the universe?

KingCoil
 
KingCoil said:
As I told Jochoa, he can compare his internal experience within his soul, heart, mind, self of God, with his and my external experience of eating ice cream and seeing the beauty of the full moon, but that is a comparative description of God; and it does not do justice to God – to do justice to God you have got to be God yourself.
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What does that even mean, “To do justice to God you have got to be God yourself”? Are you saying that you cannot have non-inferential belief in God’s existence without being God yourself? That makes no sense to me. Would you care to give an argument?
Anyway, folks with experience of God can get together and write together about their experience of God, mentioning of course that it still does not do justice to God.
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The problem is that you have this conclusion that you have given no argument for, namely “God’s existence cannot be known non-inferentially.” Again, if you wish to partake in rational discourse and present an argument for you position, be my guest. If not, I will direct my attention elsewhere. (So far as I can tell, there is nothing self-evident about your position)

Side-question: are you a native English speaker?
 
zippy2006 said:
The problem is that you have this conclusion that you have given no argument for, namely “God’s existence cannot be known non-inferentially.”
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It appears King’s assumption is that inferential logic is only possible within a materialist context. But first you would have to prove materialism is true, which is not possible.

Just as it is impossible to prove God does not exist, it is impossible to logically (or inferentially) deny that the experience of God can be had with experiential certainty.

Of course, those who have never really experienced God cannot fathom this. Nor can it be explained to them since one cannot transfer one’s own experience of God to another.

Some might argue that the experience of God may be filled with subjective certainty but is still illusory. Yet that also cannot be proven just by inferential logic.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
It appears King’s assumption is that inferential logic is only possible within a materialist context. But first you would have to prove materialism is true, which is not possible.

Just as it is impossible to prove God does not exist, it is impossible to logically (or inferentially) deny that the experience of God can be had with experiential certainty.

Of course, those who have never really experienced God cannot fathom this. Nor can it be explained to them since one cannot transfer one’s own experience of God to another.

Some might argue that the experience of God may be filled with subjective certainty but is still illusory. Yet that also cannot be proven just by inferential logic.
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In other words, It all comes down to faith.
 
zippy2006 said:
What does that even mean, “To do justice to God you have got to be God yourself”? Are you saying that you cannot have non-inferential belief in God’s existence without being God yourself? That makes no sense to me. Would you care to give an argument?

The problem is that you have this conclusion that you have given no argument for, namely **“God’s existence cannot be known non-inferentially.” ** Again, if you wish to partake in rational discourse and present an argument for you position, be my guest. If not, I will direct my attention elsewhere. (So far as I can tell, there is nothing self-evident about your position)

Side-question: are you a native English speaker?
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"God’s existence cannot be known non-inferentially."

That is not what I am saying.

I am saying that man cannot have direct certainty of God’s existence based only on his internal experience of God whatever, because that is purely subjective and thus liable to be mistaken inner perceptions.

For example, one can take a drug to have an experience within himself that he is dealing with God.

However, I will accept the experience of folks who do claim to have encountered God within their “self,” scil., that to themselves that is their direct certainty of God.

So, I will respect their conviction whatever.

I don’t think I have ever used the term “non-inferentially.”

You want me to argue as to prove to you that “God’s existence cannot be known non-inferentially”?

My point is that God can be known inferentially and it is required and sufficient, and also insofar as God is in concept the creator of the universe.

Why possible and necessary and sufficient?

Because in the Christian faith there is a question whether knowledge of God’s existence is required to be saved as to enter into the kingdom of God.

Suppose a man only knows God to be the creator of the universe, can he be saved as to enter the kingdom of God when he dies?

According to my stock knowledge, no; but he could have a place in the limbo of the just who never got to know Jesus Christ – and there is a limbo for philosophers who do know God to be the creator of the universe, these will go to the limbo of philosophers.

And what will they be doing in their limbo? They will be enjoying among themselves the joy of philosophy.

And yes or no I am not a native English speaker.

KingCoil
 
Charlemagne_III said:
It appears King’s assumption is that inferential logic is only possible within a materialist context. **But first you would have to prove materialism is true, which is not possible. **

Just as it is impossible to prove God does not exist, it is impossible to logically (or inferentially) deny that the experience of God can be had with experiential certainty.

Of course, those who have never really experienced God cannot fathom this. Nor can it be explained to them since one cannot transfer one’s own experience of God to another.

Some might argue that the experience of God may be filled with subjective certainty but is still illusory. Yet that also cannot be proven just by inferential logic.
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**But first you would have to prove materialism is true, which is not possible. **

That is a very absorbing issue which I submit can be proven in any specific instance of a human experiencing something that is of the material realm and it is true i.e. a true thing.

But as usual and to be logical, we must first work together to concur on what is a material thing and what is a true thing?

Let me give an example of something material and is true, let me present to you ice cream, it is material and it is true meaning it exists not only in concept in our mind but most importantly in the realm of extant things outside our mind.

What about God?

God is a non-material thing and but it is true i.e. He is a true thing, He exists not only in concept but in the realm of factual existing things as creator of the universe.

KingCoil
 
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