Is it Rational to Believe God Exists?

[Tomdstone]

The hellfire of science is for now with nuclear weapons.

Science has told us believe in science, and we may kill you anyway with the weapons created by science.

“In some sort of crude sense … the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” Robert Oppenheimer

Nuclear energy can also be used for peaceful purposes. There were scientists opposed to the atom bomb, but lawyers and politicians in Washington, D.C. ordered and justified its use on Japan in WWII. Philosophers cannot agree among themselves whether or not the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good thing or whether it was justified.

 

[RGCheek]

All this has no weight of probability. The multiverse hypothesis is just that, hypothesis. It has no proof and, as physicist Paul Davies points out, it is not scientific because it is not falsifiable. You would think all the atheists who complain about the proofs for God by saying they are worthless because they are not falsifiable, would be equally critical of the multiverse hypothesis and regard it for what it is … pure science fiction.

Not finding the predicted cold spots = falsifiable unless I am missing something.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Nuclear weapons are a product of engineering.
cowbirdsinlove.com/46

The efficient cause of nuclear weapons is engineering, but the formal cause is science. The material cause is clear, and the final cause is the end towards which we move.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Nuclear energy can also be used for peaceful purposes. There were scientists opposed to the atom bomb, but lawyers and politicians in Washington, D.C. ordered and justified its use on Japan in WWII. Philosophers cannot agree among themselves whether or not the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good thing or whether it was justified.

It’s not just philosophers who can’t agree, I suspect most people have quite divergent views on the matter.

The job of philosophers is to bring all relevant premises to the table, break down the logical implications and help people to see the issue with complete clarity. A determination about whether dropping the bomb was justified would become very clear at that moment.

It may be that key information is simply not accessible any longer, which means a finding of “good thing” is just not determinable.

 

[inocente]

For the Catholic Church, following Aquinas, the soul is immortal and infused by God into the human body, the soul does not simply dissipate when the body dies, it DOES continue to exist when the body dies.

If you want to insist that what the Church teaches agrees with you, you will need to provide the text that states specifically that the soul ceases to exist when the body dies, not merely reading into selected text, conclusions that simply do not follow from it.

I must have misled you. It is not that the soul ceases to exist, but the means by which it continues to exist. Thomists on CAF are usually very definite that as the soul is the form of the body, rather than a substance as in Cartesian dualism, a new body is required. Thus:

*CCC 997: What is “rising”? In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus’ Resurrection.
*
Note the soul goes (i.e. in space) to meet God, and awaits (i.e. in time) its reunion with a glorified body. Also:

CCC 999 How? Christ is raised with his own body: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself”; but he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, “all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear,” but Christ “will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body,” into a “spiritual body”

Thus the soul is not disembodied but joined with a “spiritual body”. But in my experience even those who think the soul is disembodied, as in substance dualism, still see it as a ghost or a spirit having a location in space and time.

I submit that any concept involving the soul being outside space and time, or simultaneously inside and outside space and time, is more difficult to grasp than quantum physics, relativity and the Trinity combined, and neither the bible writers nor God expect such from us.

 

[inocente]

Judging by polls and Bradski’s post on the state of Christian understanding, the “average Christian” finds even what IS important for salvation to be “completely irrelevant to their faith,” so I fail to see what your point here is.

*Do you want to fashion what is relevant for salvation from the paucity of what the “average” find comprehensible, relevant or palatable?

Jesus did point out that entering the Kingdom would not be an easy matter, especially for those who are easily distracted by other endeavors they find more “relevant.”

Cf. Parables of the Sower and Wedding Feast.*

I’m shocked. To paraphrase Will Rogers, if there are no cognitively impaired people in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

Most definitely Christ is for everyone. Imagining that an elite is the elect surely must necessarily deny that all human beings descend from Adam, surely denies that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son? Some may have a less sophisticated belief, but so what?

In Matt 13 Jesus isn’t talking of peoples’ intellect but what’s in their hearts. Otherwise you’d have to explain why, a couple of chapters later, He says “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

 

[inocente]

It’s not just philosophers who can’t agree, I suspect most people have quite divergent views on the matter.

The job of philosophers is to bring all relevant premises to the table, break down the logical implications and help people to see the issue with complete clarity. A determination about whether dropping the bomb was justified would become very clear at that moment.

It may be that key information is simply not accessible any longer, which means a finding of “good thing” is just not determinable.

Agreed, although I think it’s usually historians who get the measure of these things, and they like to wait at least 50 years (a couple of generations) so as to have a clearer view.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Or take for example the property of Unmoved. But Jesus is God, and He has moved.

Fundamentally, I think you have a problem with the logic of Unmoved Mover or Divine Simplicity.

Feser discusses it on this thread…
edwardfeser.blogspot.it/search?q=cambridge+change

An excerpt:

Here, building on a distinction famously made by Peter Geach, we need to differentiate between real properties and mere “Cambridge properties.” For example, for Socrates to grow hair is a real change in him, the acquisition by him of a real property. But for Socrates to become shorter than Plato, not because Socrates’ height has changed but only because Plato has grown taller, is not a real change in Socrates but what Geach called a mere “Cambridge change,” and therefore involves the acquisition of a mere “Cambridge property.” The doctrine of divine simplicity does not entail that God has no accidental properties of any sort; He can have accidental Cambridge properties.

Now it was Aquinas’s position that “since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him” (ST I.13.7). As Barry Miller points out in his book A Most Unlikely God, this amounts to the claim that while the relation of creatures to God is a real one, the relation of God to creatures is a mere Cambridge one, so that (for example) God’s creating the universe is one of His merely Cambridge properties.

How can this be so? As Brian Davies points out in his chapter on divine simplicity in An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion (3rd edition), what is essential to acting is the bringing about of an effect in another thing, not undergoing change oneself as one does so. What is essential to teaching, for example, is that one cause someone else to learn, and not that one lecture, write books, or the like. Of course, in created things, bringing about an effect is typically associated with undergoing change oneself (e.g. for us to cause another to learn typically requires lecturing, writing, or the like as a means). But that is accidental to agency per se, something true of us only because of our status as finite, created things. We should not expect the same thing to be true of a purely actual uncaused cause of the world. Hence there is no reason to suppose that God’s creation of the world entails a change in God Himself.

To explain this differently, Cambridge properties/changes are accidental because they are only descriptive of what appears as “change” but are only relative to things that do, in fact, change. It is because our relative standing vis a vis God ”changes” that it appears to us that God is changing.

Take the idea of Jesus “becoming” man. That would only be a real change if it meant The Second Person of the Trinity took on something “foreign” to his nature. However, in Genesis it says man was created “in God’s image,” which means the essential nature of “man” derives from some aspect of God, so when Jesus became a man, it means he “lived out” or “was experienced” by human beings as that aspect or image eternally present in God in relation to other men and to the material order (a Cambridge change) when he “became man.” However, the essence of "man-ness” is contained in the very nature of God, eternally, in virtue of the fact that God is the Actuality of all Actualities.

In other words, Jesus eternally possesses “human nature” as the “image of God” in whose image all men are made. He didn’t need to “become” human by taking on new and novel characteristics he didn’t previously possess, these were merely “incorporated” in experiential relationship to human physical existence after 6 AD. We “came to know” the human nature of God in Jesus, but not because human nature is something completely foreign to God that Jesus had to “transform” himself into.

Recall that for Aquinas, God is Pure Act, the fullness of all Being, so the essence of “humanity” is eternally within the “image of God” (Jesus, the Logos, the Word) from eternity. He didn’t take on something essentially different from the divine essence, but “lived out” the aspect of that image relative to human existence on Earth - a Cambridge change, one that does not require undergoing change oneself; hence remaining Unmoved Mover. Recall: “…what is essential to acting is the bringing about of an effect in another thing, not undergoing change oneself as one does so…”

Jesus, “walking the Earth,” was essentially his bringing about the effect of humans seeing, hearing, touching, etc., him “as man,” but as “man” in the sense of Imago Dei, the image of God eternally subsistent as an aspect of God’s nature. The change did not require actual change in God, but in how God was seen or otherwise appropriated by human beings.

 

[Peter_Plato]

In Matt 13 Jesus isn’t talking of peoples’ intellect but what’s in their hearts. Otherwise you’d have to explain why, a couple of chapters later, He says “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

Humble is not the opposite of intelligent. It is possible for children (and adults, too) to be very intelligent and, yet, humble.

God is simple, but at the same time profoundly incomprehensible. If he didn’t positively want us to use intelligence, he would not have made reality intellectually challenging, but at the same time intelligence is only valuable as an aspect of wisdom - a means, though not the only means, to an end.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . Note the soul goes (i.e. in space) to meet God, and awaits (i.e. in time) its reunion with a glorified body. . . in my experience even those who think the soul is disembodied, as in substance dualism, still see it as a ghost or a spirit having a location in space and time. I submit that any concept involving the soul being outside space and time, or simultaneously inside and outside space and time, is more difficult to grasp than quantum physics, relativity and the Trinity combined, and neither the bible writers nor God expect such from us.

When I “go” to sleep, I am not travelling anywhere. Where I go in prayer has no physical dimensions.

I can’t say I understand St. Thomas Aquinas that well.
What I do understand is that my body and soul are a unity and that when my body dies I will lose connection with the the spatial and temporal aspects of the physical world in which I now participate.
How I understand God’s being in and beyond time and space is related to what I intuit of my being both transient and eternal in nature.
It is a mystery which thoughts that rely on the mundane will not grasp.

 

[PRmerger]

When the bible was written, there was only up and down. Heaven was up and hell was down. God reigned on high and came down to the mountain, Jesus ascended to heaven and sinners were thrust down to hell.

These weren’t literary conveniences. People actually believed it back then.

Don’t confuse what people “actually believed” with what was revealed by God and with what Christ and His Apostles proclaimed as the kerygma.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Note the soul goes (i.e. in space) to meet God, and awaits (i.e. in time) its reunion with a glorified body.

The point you may be missing is that where the soul goes (you claim “in space”) and waits (you claim “in time”) may be not literal (univocal) terms but analogical terms.

In the same sense that the word “see” might be used both to describe what I do when I experience a sunset as when I grasp a concept. “I see what you mean,” has its own meaning - to apprehend with one’s mind that is a manner of “seeing” similar to, but not exactly the same as perceiving with eyes is a manner of “seeing.” They need not be identical kinds of “seeing” to both be meaningful ways of “seeing.”

Merely because the use of “goes” and “awaits” are not intended to have literal physical implications does not make the ideas behind them incomprehensible - except, perhaps, to fundamentalists who can’t get past concrete or literalistic world views.

Surely, if I say, “You can’t be blind to this possibility?” you aren’t compelled to take that I mean to imply you are physically blind, do you?

Likewise, the authors of the soul “going to meet God” and “awaiting a resurrected body” aren’t doing anything more complicated or obtuse than my asking why you can’t “see” my meaning. The question to be asked is: Why are you insisting that their using words in that way is so confusing to you when we do it all the time in normal conversation? CS Lewis has a brilliant expose of literalism in one of his books - Mere Christianity, I think.

In the case of the soul “going” somewhere, a physical location need not be implied if the idea is intended as an analog of traveling. “Awaiting” need not mean “in time” except to convey the idea of suspension from time.

Again, Feser offers an instructive lesson in how we need NOT be committed to taking things literally in order to affirm the truth of things.

To illustrate the idea of analogy, consider the word “see.” When I say that I see a tree outside my window and that I see the details of an insect’s eye through a microscope, I am using “see” in a univocal way, in the same sense in both cases. When I say that Rome is the Holy See, I am now using “see” in an equivocal way, that is, in an entirely different and unrelated sense. But when I say that I can see the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem, I am now using the term in neither a univocal nor an equivocal sense, but rather in an analogical way. That is to say, what one does when he “sees” the truth of the theorem is not the same as what he does when he sees a tree, but it is not completely different either. There is an analogy between the sort of thing we do with our eyes and the sort of thing we do with our intellects that makes it appropriate to describe both as kinds of “seeing.”

Now the Thomistic doctrine of analogy tells us that when we correctly predicate some attribute of God, we are using the relevant terms, not in a univocal way, but in an analogous way. That is to say, when we say for example that God has power, we don’t mean that He has power in exactly the sense we do, though we also don’t mean that His power is completely unlike what we call power in us. Rather, when we call God powerful we are saying that there is in God something analogous to power in us.

edwardfeser.blogspot.it/search?q=cambridge+change

 

[Peter_Plato]

So you do deny that Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the right Hand of the Father as stated in the Creed?

Cf. Post #790

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Philosophers cannot agree among themselves whether or not the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good thing or whether it was justified.

Unanimity does not decide the matter. There could be unanimous false notions, as there once was regarding the flatness of Earth.

You know this very well. On any given issue you know very well that people side with the Democrats or the Republicans because they know the truth is on one side or the other. Nobody really believes everybody has to agree on anything, yet one side might be right and the other might to be wrong. It is important to take a stand and to fight bad philosophy with good philosophy.

 

[PRmerger]

First you say that God is omnipresent and that He is everywhere, and then you say that God is excluded from Hell. This is what I mean when I say that properties such as this (omnipresent, etc.) are not well defined and are somewhat questionable.

God is indeed present everywhere.

However, hell is the place where God’s presence is repugnant. As Peter Kreeft says: “The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God’s truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness. Imagine a man in hell—no, a ghost—endlessly chasing his own shadow**, as the light of God shines endlessly behind him. If he would only turn and face the light, he would be saved. But he refuses to—forever.**”

 

[Tomdstone]

However, the essence of "man-ness” is contained in the very nature of God, eternally,…

Not sure because man has an inclination to sin.

 

[Tomdstone]

Nobody really believes everybody has to agree on anything, …

Not true in Euclidean geometry. You have to agree that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal.

 

[glendab]

Hello Tom.

Not true in Euclidean geometry. You have to agree that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal.

If they refuse to agree will the triangle fall over? :whacky:

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

Glenda

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Not true in Euclidean geometry. You have to agree that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal.

We were talking philosophy, not math.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Not sure because man has an inclination to sin.

Man’s nature was created by God - the inclination to sin is found only in broken or fallen men. Sin is a perversion of what is, which is good. Sin is not a subsistent reality. It is parasitic on goodness, on being.

The inclination only comes about after a choice to do evil - otherwise called original sin or concupiscence.