Is it Rational to Believe God Exists?

[Peter_Plato]

As I told Charlemagne above, I never argued that cognitive abilities should be used alone. It’s strange that you both managed to hallucinate the same imaginary post you seem to think I made.

No, but you did argue that cognitive abilities supercede and determine (are necessary and sufficient) whether one believes in “a god.”

Therefore you have to be able to trust your own cognitive abilities before you ever come to believe in a god.

It wasn’t a “hallucination.” It was by implication from your point.

You said, “you HAVE to be able to trust your own cognitive abilities BEFORE you ever come to believe in a god.” The implication being that the use of cognitive abilities, in themselves, are necessary and sufficient to arrive at a belief in a god.

My point was that our own cognitive abilities ought not be trusted without corroboration with the other triangulation factors, so I disagree that we have to trust “our own” cognitive abilities. What we have to trust are the coordination of our faculties with and to a host of reliable sources that may even cause us to reevaluate our own current cognitive abilities. It’s called ‘changing your mind.’ Not that that should be done on a whim, but the possibility shouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, either.

 

[Oreoracle]

No, but you did argue that cognitive abilities supercede and determine (are necessary and sufficient) whether one believes in “a god.”

I said they were necessary, but I never said they were sufficient. Show me where I said that cognitive abilities alone would be sufficient.

My point was that our own cognitive abilities ought not be trusted without corroboration with the other triangulation factors, so I disagree that we have to trust “our own” cognitive abilities.

But how did you reach this conclusion about the importance of the other “triangulation factors” if not by using your own reasoning?

Even to take someone else’s word for it requires you to use your own reasoning, so you can’t pawn the responsibility off on an authority figure. For someone to argue that “this God sure sounds like a clever fellow, so we ought to trust him” requires one to infer that god is indeed a clever fellow and that this implies that he ought to be trusted.

 

[glendab]

Hello JapaneseKappa.

So the ends justify the means? Its fine to deceive and kill people for the sake of a good story?.

Is this really what you think of God? He is deceitful and kills people?

If you were to get an invitation to visit with the King of your country out of millions of people and he selected you to dine with him and meet his family and ask him anything you wanted and he promised in his invitation to give you a very special gift when you came to see him and many persons were envious because out of all the millions of persons in the land, you received this enviable invitation and most of your family members were giving you lots of advise about what to wear, how to behave, what to say, what not to say, and you knew that your family too would be favored by your visit to the King, would you say nasty horrible things about him the whole way there and totally disrespect him and his family to anyone who would listen?

You have said some very nasty things about God in your posts here in this thread and you really should try to be a little more respectful. It would be smart because whether you believe it or not, you will have one visit with the King of everything eventually. We all do. Better to fear Him now and act accordingly then act as if He is just a figment of our over active imaginations.

One other thing. Are two thousand years worth of people wrong about Him? The population of the planet that has Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is in the billions. Are you smarter than all of them? Do not take too long to think about that one either.

Glenda

 

[glendab]

Hello JapaneseKappa.

… If God has his reasons for killing people that’s one thing, but unless he makes me understand those reasons I will not cooperate. In fact I think that unless you understand the reasons, you have a moral obligation to resist.

The Good News is that God is never going to ask you to kill anyone, ever. In fact, if you decided to do it His way instead of yours, He tell you to keep His Commandments and the Precepts of His Church. ALL of them. And there’s more Good News about that: His yoke is easy and His burden is light. I’d venture to say it is a tremendous bit lighter than having to constantly fight against Him and prove He is wrong and let everyone know how wrong He is, etc. You’re swimming up stream. If you simply let go and let God be God, things would go well with you.

Glenda

 

[Charlemagne_III]

To reiterate the gist of my last post, the problem with these arguments is that if the human** intellectual** capacity is as inept as you say it is, then surely no one can trust the theological reasoning they employ to conclude that an omniscient god exists in the first place. Therefore you have to be able to trust your own cognitive abilities before you ever come to believe in a god.

That is the complete text of that post. It emphasizes “intellectual,” “reasoning,” and “cognitive” capacity as the route to finding an omniscient God. If you did not mean to imply it was the only or sufficient route, you didn’t say so. If you want to repave your route to include a larger avenue toward God, that would be welcome.

So what are the other human resources one might employ to help us conclude that an “omniscient god exists in the first place”?

I have suggested some already.

If someone said to you, "I have by my imagination, my intuition, and my instincts, along with prayer and the practice of what Christ preaches, come to a personal experience of God, would you say there was there some foundation, along with the cognitive awareness, to conclude that an omniscient God truly does exist?

 

[Peter_Plato]

I said they were necessary, but I never said they were sufficient. Show me where I said that cognitive abilities alone would be sufficient.

But how did you reach this conclusion about the importance of the other “triangulation factors” if not by using your own reasoning?

Even to take someone else’s word for it requires you to use your own reasoning, so you can’t pawn the responsibility off on an authority figure. For someone to argue that “this God sure sounds like a clever fellow, so we ought to trust him” requires one to infer that god is indeed a clever fellow and that this implies that he ought to be trusted.

Actually, this misrepresents my position.

To use “God sounds like a clever fellow” is to have a preconception of what constitutes “a clever fellow,” which presumes that your own cleverness (aka reasoning ability) is up to the task of determining the nature of “clever.” Hence, you presume that your reasoning ability is sufficient to determine who ought to be trusted. It is still a “closed” determination that follows from reasoning and relies on reasoning alone - i.e., is necessary AND sufficient.

The point of triangulation is that reasoning is used as a tool to weigh data from authoritative sources, but the “authority” IS, indeed, “pawned off” (I prefer ‘distributed’ as in computer parlance) among Church teaching, Scripture, Tradition, experience (including formal sciences) and inspiration/revelation.

Reasoning isn’t a source of information or data, in any case, it is the means or method by which to deduce what follows from the data, which also means reason isn’t an ‘authority’ with regards to determining which source should be trusted. Reason can only find contradictions or irreconcilable differences between what is suggested by the individual sources or ‘authorities.’

At the same time, if one of the “authorities” presents data that reason cannot deal with (is beyond the current scope of reason) the default position is not necessarily to claim reason as its own authority. The new data may be helpful to determine the limits of human reason and induce an admission of where the point at which “we don’t know” is to be found. Now, that need not entail that further knowledge is, therefore, impossible, just that current knowledge has found its limit.

If God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent there is no reason to assume that God cannot (name removed by moderator)ut into our knowledge that which is beyond our ability to determine by deduction, i.e, by revelation or revealed truth.

 

[Bradski]

Is this really what you think of God? He is deceitful and kills people?

It makes no sense to say that an atheist thinks of God in a particular way. That He kills people is something that we get from the bible and from Christians. There are too many examples to even start listing them. We don’t just make this stuff up.

One other thing. Are two thousand years worth of people wrong about Him? The population of the planet that has Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is in the billions. Are you smarter than all of them? Do not take too long to think about that one either.

I didn’t know that you could determine truth by having a vote.

Are you saying that Christianity became ‘more true’ as the numbers increased? Would it become less true if you were the only Christian? If you don’t think so then your argument doesn’t really count for much.

He can even give a command and then reverse his command upon being satisfied that we would obey no matter what.

So when we don’t obey, it comes as something of a surprise to Him – ‘Gosh, didn’t expect them to disobey that command. I’ll have to try another. And if they don’t obey that one maybe I’ll just kill them. Let’s just wait and see what happens’.

Doesn’t really sound right…

 

[Charlemagne_III]

If God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent there is no reason to assume that God cannot (name removed by moderator)ut into our knowledge that which is beyond our ability to determine by deduction, i.e, by revelation or revealed truth.

Or by planting the seeds of knowledge in our imagination, our intuitions, our instincts, and even our existential need to know Him as the alpha of our being and the omega of our destiny.

The human soul cries out for a meaning, a purpose for our very being. The universe cannot supply that meaning or purpose. Only an omniscient God can supply it. Only an omniscient God can speak to us above the din of the world around us … but even then only if we have ears to hear, and eyes to see the law he has written on our hearts.

 

[Bradski]

My human soul cries out for a meaning, a purpose for my very being. The universe cannot supply that meaning or purpose for me. Only an omniscient God can supply it. Only an omniscient God can speak to me above the din of the world around me … but even then only if I have ears to hear, and eyes to see the law he has written on my heart.

That sounds more accurate to me (with apologies for editing your post)/

 

[josh987654321]

I’m not attempting to speak for Bradski or anything, but if I may:

Sure, Hi Oreoracle.

The problem with this argument is that everyone was an atheist at some point.

I don’t believe so.

Surely you weren’t born believing in God, right?

I agree, but I also don’t believe I was born disbelieving in God either. I don’t believe people are born Atheists or Theists. I also believe that it is only natural to believe in God, given the complexity of the universe and everything in it including us (Intelligent design).

In your worldview at that time, you had (by your argument) nothing to fall back on. You had no reason to trust your cognitive faculties. And yet, with these doubtful faculties, you came to the conclusion that Christianity is true. Why should you trust your possibly impaired faculties to reach that conclusion?

Precisely because I reached that conclusion. If I reached the opposite conclusion, than I believe I would have to call my cognitive faculties into question.

To be honest though, I have always believed in God, I was also raised Catholic, but I am also aware of the genetic fallacy if that’s what your now thinking.

You can’t say that you can trust them because of God, for the reliability of the belief in Christianity is the very thing you’re trying to prove! You have no choice but to admit that you trusted yourself all along.

Yup, which I believe is evidence for God, as common sense (don’t mean to sound offensive or anything , just can’t think of another word) or personal experience, I believe tells us that we are more than a chemical make up of atoms, that we have free will and that our thoughts are not random purposeless movements of atoms in the brain.

There was a poster in another thread that I believe put it well when he said, “I believe in God because I believe in free will. If all we are is matter, then all our actions are due to the laws of physics and random movements of particles. The concept of an immaterial soul allows for the possibility of free will. That’s what really allowed me to grab on to faith in God. I made the decision to decide that I had free will. If I am wrong, then nothing really matters and I can’t control my thoughts and ideas anyway.”

I hope this has helped,

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[Bradski]

…but then they latter deny right or wrong, good or evil itself, by saying that we are simply DNA and dance to it’s music, thus calling good, evil, right or wrong a matter of preference such as blue or green.

But unless I’m mistaken, Josh, we both agree on what is evil and what is good (with some obvious exceptions such as contraception for example). If the world was as you described, that I am just dancing the genetic polka, then how is it we do agree? It isn’t credible to suggest that I have just happened upon the same truths as you by sheer chance. Either we are actually using the same method to reach the same verdicts without realising it, or we are using two different methods that reach the same conclusion.

Trust me, I’m not pulling my decisions on morality out of my butt. And in passing, it does become quite frustrating (not in this case, because your posts are quite respectful) to be told, implicitly in most cases but on occasion quite explicitly, that because I am an atheist I obviously have no idea what morality means, that I don’t know what love means, that my life can have no meaning, that I believe nothing etcetera et-bloody-cetera when I have spent the best part of lifetime trying to work all this out.

I believe it would give you a reason to believe in reason itself. I believe it would make sense of the words true, false, right, wrong, good or evil.

From my perspective, that should read: ‘…give me another reason…’, because I already understand what those concepts mean. And, as I said, they mean the same things to me as they do to you.

 

[josh987654321]

But unless I’m mistaken, Josh, we both agree on what is evil and what is good (with some obvious exceptions such as contraception for example). If the world was as you described, that I am just dancing the genetic polka, then how is it we do agree? It isn’t credible to suggest that I have just happened upon the same truths as you by sheer chance. Either we are actually using the same method to reach the same verdicts without realising it, or we are using two different methods that reach the same conclusion.

Trust me, I’m not pulling my decisions on morality out of my butt.

I agree, However may I ask, with an atheistic worldview, from where?

And in passing, it does become quite frustrating (not in this case, because your posts are quite respectful) to be told, implicitly in most cases but on occasion quite explicitly, that because I am an atheist I obviously have no idea what morality means, that I don’t know what love means, that my life can have no meaning, that I believe nothing etcetera et-bloody-cetera when I have spent the best part of lifetime trying to work all this out.

Oh, I don’t mean to tell you implicitly or explicitly that because your an atheist you don’t have X Y & Z. I mean to say, that I believe with an atheistic worldview the fact that you do have X Y & Z doesn’t make sense.

I mean to imply the fact that you do have an idea of what morality means, that you do have a sense of right and wrong, that you do know what love means and that your life does have meaning that I believe the atheistic worldview doesn’t add up.

From my perspective, that should read: ‘…give me another reason…’,

May I ask what the other reason is?

because I already understand what those concepts mean. And, as I said, they mean the same things to me as they do to you.

I agree.

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[Bradski]

I agree, However may I ask, with an atheistic worldview, from where?

From reading, from talking, from listening, from experience. I’m pretty certain that you do these things as well, but you also feel that religion perhaps confirms these things (or perhaps you start with religion and then everything else confirms that). Either way, I don’t give religion the same priority as you do.

Oh, I don’t mean to tell you implicitly or explicitly that because your an atheist you don’t have X Y & Z. I mean to say, that I believe with an atheistic worldview the fact that you do have X Y & Z doesn’t make sense.

I appreciate that it doesn’t as far as you are concerned. All I can really do to explain is to ask you to put yourself in a position where you had no religious belief and ask if you’d be able to understand concepts like love and sacrifice and whether this life would have a meaning for you.

As I’ve said so many times, if you think you think that you wouldn’t understand those concepts, then Christianity has been of benefit for you.

May I ask what the other reason is?

To believe in reason itself? Well, quite simply, because it works.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

From reading, from talking, from listening, from experience. I’m pretty certain that you do these things as well, but you also feel that religion perhaps confirms these things (or perhaps you start with religion and then everything else confirms that). Either way, I don’t give religion the same priority as you do.

To believe in reason itself? Well, quite simply, because it works.

It’s easy to see that you don’t give reason the same priority that religious people give it.

But actually, since as of this post you have posted 1,631 times in a Catholic forum, it seems you are giving it some kind of priority. Not complaining, mind you!

I believe in reason also. I don’t believe only in reason. And I also believe reason has its limitations. Some of these limitations are natural, as in the case of exactly what happened to cause the Big Bang. Some of the limitations on reason are self imposed, as when scientism (logical positivism) takes the view that we cannot know anything unless we can empirically know it. That is a fatal flaw in reasoning. It virtually abolishes all religion and philosophy in one grand sweep of the cognitive broom. Scientism even abolishes its own basic principle, since we cannot empirically prove that nothing can be known unless it can be empirically verified. More than that, scientism is arrogant. It wants to hoard all the oxygen in the cultural world, for all the knowledge of ourselves and others that we gather through music, painting, poetry and other arts are rendered irrelevant because such knowledge cannot be empirically verified.

And then, of course, comes all our wondering about God and human destiny. These too are rendered irrelevant because we cannot empirically verify God or the meaning of our lives (there is no God and no meaning to verify). One wonders, indeed, how it is possible on this premise to even verify that there is no God and no meaning.

O.K. This cognitive dance is over.

 

[Bradski]

It’s easy to see that you don’t give reason the same priority that religious people give it.

I thought you would have said that it was the other way around.

But actually, since as of this post you have posted 1,631 times in a Catholic forum, it seems you are giving it some kind of priority. Not complaining, mind you!

My stats give me one and a half posts per day. That’s a few minutes on average. I’m not disputing what you are saying, but just giving it some context.

 

[Oreoracle]

If you did not mean to imply it was the only or sufficient route, you didn’t say so. If you want to repave your route to include a larger avenue toward God, that would be welcome.

Are you suggesting that if I don’t explicitly state that I’m not meaning to imply something, then I’m implying it? I also didn’t explicitly state in that post that I was human. Indeed, as the saying goes, “On the Internet, no one knows that you’re a dog.”

Here’s a more reasonable solution: When you read a post from an atheist, don’t be presumptuous. Don’t assume that they are a disciple of scientism. Don’t assume that they don’t value anything other than reason. Don’t presume to know their priorities.

You claim that you were once an atheist (well, in the sense of being one as an adult, everyone was an atheist as a kid). Did these presumptions you have accurately reflect you as an atheist? Don’t answer that, because it doesn’t matter. Anecdotes don’t justify stereotypes. The label “atheist” tells you zip about a person other than that they don’t believe in a god.

So what are the other human resources one might employ to help us conclude that an “omniscient god exists in the first place”?

If I thought there were an answer to that, I wouldn’t be an atheist, would I?

But whatever the answer is (if there is an answer to that question), it involves reasoning. I simply don’t see how you can make a conscious decision of any kind without employing reason, even if the decision is to trust an authority (like the Church). And if you use reasoning to reach the conclusions necessary to become a Christian (you decide to embrace the philosophy, accept that you need a savior, and so forth) then you must have trusted your reasoning abilities before becoming Christian. That is all I’m saying.

So the argument that “atheists have no reason to trust their cognitive abilities” is self-defeating. If that were the case, then you would have had no justification for trusting the reasoning that led you to believe there is a god.

Actually, this misrepresents my position.

To use “God sounds like a clever fellow” is to have a preconception of what constitutes “a clever fellow,” which presumes that your own cleverness (aka reasoning ability) is up to the task of determining the nature of “clever.” Hence, you presume that your reasoning ability is sufficient to determine who ought to be trusted. It is still a “closed” determination that follows from reasoning and relies on reasoning alone - i.e., is necessary AND sufficient.

Not at all. Reasoning is just a necessary component. Another factor, though perhaps not a sufficient one, is observation. As you said, reasoning cannot produce new information from thin air, so you have to observe someone’s behavior before deciding to trust them.

The point of triangulation is that reasoning is used as a tool to weigh data from authoritative sources, but the “authority” IS, indeed, “pawned off” (I prefer ‘distributed’ as in computer parlance) among Church teaching, Scripture, Tradition, experience (including formal sciences) and inspiration/revelation.

But how did you reach this conclusion, if not by using your reasoning?

 

[Oreoracle]

I agree, but I also don’t believe I was born disbelieving in God either. I don’t believe people are born Atheists or Theists. I also believe that it is only natural to believe in God, given the complexity of the universe and everything in it including us (Intelligent design).

A lack of belief in gods makes one an atheist. It is true that some atheists go further and assert that no gods exist, but even being “neutral” in the matter makes one an atheist.

Precisely because I reached that conclusion. If I reached the opposite conclusion, than I believe I would have to call my cognitive faculties into question.

You used reasoning to conclude that Christianity is true, and then used that conclusion to assure yourself of your ability to reason? I hope you’ll agree that that is a circular argument.

 

[glendab]

Hello Charlemagne III and Oreoacle.

That is the complete text of that post. It emphasizes “intellectual,” “reasoning,” and “cognitive” capacity as the route to finding an omniscient God. If you did not mean to imply it was the only or sufficient route, you didn’t say so. If you want to repave your route to include a larger avenue toward God, that would be welcome.

So what are the other human resources one might employ to help us conclude that an “omniscient god exists in the first place”?

I have suggested some already.

If someone said to you, "I have by my imagination, my intuition, and my instincts, along with prayer and the practice of what Christ preaches, come to a personal experience of God, would you say there was there some foundation, along with the cognitive awareness, to conclude that an omniscient God truly does exist?

I’m jumping in between the two of you before you :slapfight: Guess what? Faith and reason can be reconciled to each other. That is what made St. Thomas Aquinas the Doctor of the Church that he is. God can and does use all means necessary to reach a soul. That means if a person will be persuaded by reasoning, He will send His Spirit to that person in that particular way. If a person will turn to Him through other means such as acts of faith, then He will come to that person that way. If a person is to come to Him after witnessing the works of charity others do, then He will come to a person that way. He never stops trying to reach people and by whatever means, even a song on the radio while stuck in traffic can be used by the Holy Spirit to reach a soul. A person does both, think and intuit in varying degrees.

The two of you seem to be trying to out-prove each other over something that has been way settled in the past. Faith and reason are both part of how God reaches souls and one isn’t exclusive of the other. I’d venture to say that when a person recognizes God’s actions in his or her, life it is through a combination of things, not one or the other and in measures that vary depending upon what each and every soul needs. They aren’t exclusive of each other but are complimentary.

So, the two of you need to realize you are saying much the same things as each other but in differing ways. Or to put it another way, you’re beating around the same bush.

Glenda

 

[Peter_Plato]

Not at all. Reasoning is just a necessary component. Another factor, though perhaps not a sufficient one, is observation. As you said, reasoning cannot produce new information from thin air, so you have to observe someone’s behavior before deciding to trust them.

But how did you reach this conclusion, if not by using your reasoning?

You aren’t saying that what you observe is relied upon because you have reasoned that it should be?

Reason might make you second guess that what you just saw/heard/felt/etc. is what it appears to be, but I don’t think reason tells you that observation ought to be relied upon. You were relying upon observation (all your senses - external and internal) from before you had a developed capacity to think.

Therefore, reason does not ‘authorize’ observation, it merely accepts it, though it may use data from other sources to better understand or ascertain the accuracy of what is signified by the perceptual cues. Observation might be called a ‘properly basic’ or ‘authoritative’ source of information.

What I am arguing is that Tradition, Scripture, Church Teaching, experience (including formal science,) Revelation, etc., are and should be, likewise, ‘properly basic’ because we do not have the wherewithal to assess their truth value.

Be clear here, what I mean us that we cannot, in principle, dismiss Revelation, for example, as a source of data because we cannot ‘get beyond’ Revelation to see if it actually comes as a truth from God. We can evaluate particular revelations, in some respects, by comparing their content with the content from other sources, but that does not give sufficient reason to dismiss Revelation, in principle, as an ‘authoritative’ source of data. This is true for observation, for Tradition, for Church teaching, for Scripture, for experience (including science,) etc.

Reason cannot provide a conclusion that all or any these of these ‘authoritative sources’ can simply be dismissed holus bolus. The content they provide must be compared and contrasted with content from other ‘authoritative sources’ to arrive at the meaning and significance of the ‘data’ in terms of understanding reality.

Admittedly, some have tried to dismiss Revelation, for example, but I don’t think their arguments are compelling. Merely because some purported revelations have been shown false does not mean they all are, or that properly attested Revelations are demonstrably false.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Here’s a more reasonable solution: When you read a post from an atheist, don’t be presumptuous. Don’t assume that they are a disciple of scientism. Don’t assume that they don’t value anything other than reason. Don’t presume to know their priorities.

You claim that you were once an atheist (well, in the sense of being one as an adult, everyone was an atheist as a kid).

I’m never presumptuous about atheists. But I don’t see how atheists (since I was one) can escape being logical positivists. Which is why I shared my thoughts with you, that proved to be unwelcome. Sorry about that.

So if you are not a victim of scientism, it would be interesting to know on what grounds you would reject religion as unproven. You seem to require proof. Am I wrong in this? Do you not require proof? But then you know that proof of the kind you would require is not the kind of proof God necessarily has to provide you. How about some faith, imagination, intuition, and instincts along with the cognitive indications of a Creator God? How does the balance of evidence in your mind weigh so heavily against God as opposed to in favor of God? I just don’t get it. How can you be so absolutely sure there is no God when you have not, and logically cannot have, one ounce of evidence to make that case.

We can’t just say we are all born atheists as kids (which is false, by the way) and if nature had her way we would stay atheist. The truth of the matter is that religions are more prevalent than atheism among adults, so wouldn’t that be another and better argument in favor of nature’s way? Perhaps even more to the point, how many people die as atheists, compared to how many atheists reach out to God at the end, realizing after all that they have been wrong all the time and at last, when they have nothing to lose and everything to gain, reach for the everlasting stars?