Is it Rational to Believe God Exists?

[josh987654321]

Hello Josh.

Wonderful post. Thank you.

It has been my observation that those adherents of a science that requires all that randomness to succeed in creating a universe or multiverses, live in ivory towers that are quite ordered. They tend to be found in labs, exceedingly ordered, or Universities, very structured and ordered and the most randomness they experience is the change in weather. In fact, if you stepped into their lab and created some disorder randomly, say by simply attempting to re-arrange their furniture, you’d be escorted off their property by security very quickly. I don’t think it would help you at all either to claim you are simply creating some chaos that will bring about higher life forms for them.

Glenda

Thank you Glenda.

God Bless

 

[Oreoracle]

True, but may I ask, what reason do you have to trust your cognitive faculties given an atheistic worldview? keeping in mind that whatever your view for the creation of the universe, that your mind is also a product of that same universe.

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

The problem with this argument is that everyone was an atheist at some point. Surely you weren’t born believing in God, right? 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?

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.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Since you used hypotheticals before in this thread, I will too. Place yourself in Iraq and you are 17 years old and they’ve come to your village “recruiting.” You are handed a gun, bullets and some rudimentary training and a bit more religious instruction regarding the need for jihad. You are taken to the next village with others like yourself in a truck and told to kill everyone. If you try to not shoot you will be killed with the rest of those villagers. Do you surrender your life to not do so JapaneseKappa? Be honest. Those conducting the jihad believe their orders DO come directly from God through their Prophets. Rwanda is another example. Do you think your moral platitudes would’ve stopped anyone from doing what they did?

Your question seems to be “Would you do the wrong thing if you were young, didn’t know any better, and people were using force to pressure you into it?” Of course I most likely would.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

If having a plan doesn’t justify God taking a life then it must mean that it also isn’t right for God to deprive all human beings of life at their death. Have you noticed that every man is mortal? Are you trying to argue that God has no right to take life away? If he has that right, would he also not have a right to determine how? By disease, natural event, accident, or, even, by command? Why not?

The difference in the Abraham case is that God isn’t doing it himself. 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.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The difference in the Abraham case is that God isn’t doing it himself. 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.

So, you are conceding that Abraham could have known those reasons and that YOU would, possibly, have done the same if you had known them?

It isn’t clear to me that knowing the reasons is the necessary condition, either, however. Wouldn’t it suffice to know that God is the Creator of all that exists, that nothing exists except what comes into being through him AND that he has HIS reasons even though they are not divulged to you?

Why would you knowing the reasons make the difference, provided you knew for certain that the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, who never acts except from omniscient omnigoodness willed it?

By the way, this is not to concede that anyone who claims to know God’s will therefore does. Islamic jihadists would have to demonstrate that God’s determinable will is forceful conversion or the death of infidels.

Abraham has supporting evidence - with regard to his intimacy with God’s will - in how the narrative has continued in history. God asked him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. He demonstrated his faith in the living God by capitulating to the command.

At the same location several thousand years later - Mount Moriah, the site where Abraham was led to sacrifice Isaac is the site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem very near where Jesus was tried and crucified - the God of Love was willing to sacrifice his beloved son, Jesus. You have to admit a certain kind do symmetry to the narrative, no? One that demonstrates something of the “reason” that God had even though it wasn’t divulged to Abraham at that moment?

Why does reason trump person? Why is having a good reason warrant for acting, but the assurance of the omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God - if truly known and making the request - NOT sufficent?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Of course, because if you actually read the story as “submission to God’s will comes before personal conscience and reason” then you’d probably be some flavor of Muslim.

Regardless, I’m pretty sure Catholicism teaches that the ends don’t justify the means. Just because God had a plan doesn’t mean that it was right to command a father to kill his son. If nothing else, it is deceptive.

God is the originator of all laws. He can make them or break them at will. He can even give a command and then reverse his command upon being satisfied that we would obey no matter what. This is what plagues the atheist, never seeing God’s will as superior to his own. He would never die for God, never mind sacrifice his own son at God’s command.

It’s very simple. Lack of trust all around.

It was also because of Job’s trust that his sadness and pain was transformed by God into unparalleled joy and celebration.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

So, you are conceding that Abraham could have known those reasons and that YOU would, possibly, have done the same if you had known them?

If Abraham knew the reasons, then it wasn’t much of a test of trust.

It isn’t clear to me that knowing the reasons is the necessary condition, either, however. Wouldn’t it suffice to know that God is the Creator of all that exists, that nothing exists except what comes into being through him AND that he has HIS reasons even though they are not divulged to you?

No. What if the creator of all that exists was actually evil or amoral? Regardless, there is no reason to make yourself guilty of “just following orders” when presented with orders that appear blatantly immoral.

Why would you knowing the reasons make the difference, provided you knew for certain that the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, who never acts except from omniscient omnigoodness willed it?

The problem is that God’s definition of benevolence could very well be different from mine. Was God benevolent to the mothers of Egypt whose children he killed and husbands he drowned? Maybe God’s benevolence is directed at some future evolution of humanity and he doesn’t actually care about us right now. Maybe his benevolence takes the sort of impersonal optimization path which holds that it is permissible to torture someone for 50 years if it would prevent a sufficiently large number of other people from getting specks of dust in their eyes. Maybe God’s benevolence is defined to be exactly the opposite of my conception of benevolence.

The point is that I have some faith in my own ability to discern right from wrong, and I wouldn’t abandon it just because someone else came along and ordered me to, regardless of how powerful or benevolent that person claimed to be. If God (with all his omni-s) really wanted me to do something, he would be able to convince me to, but I’m not going to make it trivially easy for him. A human life is worth giving even God at least a little push back (e.g. What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?)

Abraham has supporting evidence - with regard to his intimacy with God’s will - in how the narrative has continued in history. God asked him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. He demonstrated his faith in the living God by capitulating to the command.

At the same location several thousand years later - Mount Moriah, the site where Abraham was led to sacrifice Isaac is the site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem very near where Jesus was tried and crucified - the God of Love was willing to sacrifice his beloved son, Jesus. You have to admit a certain kind do symmetry to the narrative, no? One that demonstrates something of the “reason” that God had even though it wasn’t divulged to Abraham at that moment?

Why does reason trump person? Why is having a good reason warrant for acting, but the assurance of the omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God - if truly known and making the request - NOT sufficent?

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

I also think that you’re overstating Abraham’s certainty; Abraham certainly couldn’t see the future. I wouldn’t immediately know that the voice that just told me to kill someone was actually God. I could very easily be mentally ill, or being deceived. Knowing the reasons why I was supposed to kill someone is defense against some of that uncertainty. If my reason is unreliable, then I really have no way to evaluate what I should do in *any *situation, let alone this one.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Science doesn’t change depending on the attitude or beliefs of the person using it.

Really?

Einstein believed before he developed his famous theories of relativity that the universe was infinite and eternal. This bias made it possible for him to ignore the implications of his own mathematics. Lemaitre, a Catholic priest, believe the universe was created in time, and then saw in Einstein’s mathematics the possibility to verify that. This verification became known as the Big Bang Theory.

So philosophy or theology can very definitely influence science. And science can influence philosophy and theology.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

Book of Genesis: Centuries before Christ: “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The difference in the Abraham case is that God isn’t doing it himself. 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.

Well, there it is.

“Why should I trust God?”

“It’s God who is always on trial, not me.”

Note: for the record, Abraham did not kill Isaac, thanks to the Lord’s intervention.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

God is the originator of all laws. He can make them or break them at will. He can even give a command and then reverse his command upon being satisfied that we would obey no matter what. This is what plagues the atheist, never seeing God’s will as superior to his own. He would never die for God, never mind sacrifice his own son at God’s command.

This is simply might makes right. God gets to sort us after death, so God gets to tell us to do whatever he wants and we have no right to complain.

All I’m saying is that we should complain.

Genesis 18:25

Far be it from thee to do this thing, and to slay the just with the wicked, and for the just to be in like case as the wicked, this is not beseeming thee: thou who judgest all the earth, wilt not make this judgment.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The difference in the Abraham case is that God isn’t doing it himself. 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.

Blind obedience is not in itself immoral or stupid.

The soldier, who obeys his commander who has ordered him into battle, is not expected to require that the reason be explained to him for entering a bloody scene in which his life may well be sacrificed, or else he may have to kill someone with his bayonet. Yes, war is hell. God was testing Abraham’s obedience with the prospect of hell on earth. Having passed the test, it was only fitting that God should choose a future seed of Abraham to be the one who would offer, as Isaac did, the sacrifice of himself upon the blood cross at Calvary.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

This is simply might makes right. God gets to sort us after death, so God gets to tell us to do whatever he wants and we have no right to complain.

All I’m saying is that we should complain.

In the absolute sense, might does make right. Almighty God makes all things right sooner or later.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The point is that I have some faith in my own ability to discern right from wrong, and I wouldn’t abandon it just because someone else came along and ordered me to,

This is insightful, is it not?

You have every reason to trust a 1.4 kg lump of flesh with, perhaps, 20-60 years of empirical sensations to go by, but NO reason to trust an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, as if you have the wherewithal to distinguish between just “someone” and God. In any case, perhaps the fact that you admit to being completely unable to distinguish God from “someone” or anyone else should give you additional reason not to trust your own judgement.

… regardless of how powerful or benevolent that person claimed to be. If God (with all his omni-s) really wanted me to do something, he would be able to convince me to, but I’m not going to make it trivially easy for him. A human life is worth giving even God at least a little push back (e.g. What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?)

That’s just it, you see. This “command” by God to Abraham didn’t just come out of the blue, it was based upon a whole lifetime of Abraham’s experiences with God. Abraham did a whole lot of “pushing back” - (his call, Sarai, journey with Lot, sojourn in Egypt, the covenant with God, Hagar, the three visitors, Abimelech, birth of Ishmael and Isaac, etc.,) have you not read the entirety of Genesis? You seem to forget that Abraham, who gave God a little "push back about Sodom and Gomorrah, saw how they had been destroyed by “someone” with the power to rain fire from Heaven. You are claiming your little 1.4 kg brain, possibly with memory and attention deficits, should still be trusted above a lifetime worth of definitive proof that was provided to Abraham?

Certainly, it is not clear how the cumulative case offered by your life experiences and your ability to draw conclusions from those experiences should, a priori, trump the cumulative case offered by Abraham’s experiences and rational capacities.

If your claim amounts to, “Well MY experiences are not Abraham’s!” Fair enough. But don’t go faulting Abraham merely on that count.

 

[Peter_Plato]

-]/-]

This is simply might makes right. God gets to sort us after death, so God gets to tell us to do whatever he wants and we have no right to complain.

All I’m saying is that we should complain.

Genesis 18:25

Based on what?

Wouldn’t you agree that if the following two conditions hold, there is nothing to complain about?

1. Command X is determinably and infallibly from God.
2. God is the Omnibenevolent, Omniscient and Omnipotent Creator of all that exists.

If God is Omnibenevolent, or as Aquinas held, the Actus Purus that IS Existence itself and the very definition of Goodness (Being) itself, then it is not merely the case that what God commands is right, but that God’s Being is Goodness Itself. The fact that you have moral sensibilities at all comes from the “brute fact” that you exist as a being. In other words, morality flows from existence - a particular kind of existence because “to be” is what provides the ground for anything to be “good,” especially in any moral sense.

It is simply self-contradictory to say Being Itself (aka God) COULD be immoral or evil since Being and Goodness are transitive to each other. If God is fullness of Being, Being Itself, then he is ipso facto fullness of goodness, Goodness Itself.

Properly understood, God is not susceptible to the Euthyphro dilemma, nor subject to determinations of “good,” but rather definitive of “good.” This is NOT because “might makes right,” but because Being, in itself, does.

 

[Oreoracle]

This is insightful, is it not?

You have every reason to trust a 1.4 kg lump of flesh with, perhaps, 20-60 years of empirical sensations to go by, but NO reason to trust an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, as if you have the wherewithal to distinguish between just “someone” and God.

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.

 

[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.

Well, not really.

With respect to God, it requires more humility of heart than pride of intellect to understand His will.

Some have it and some don’t. Some will acquire it and some won’t.

The idea that one has to have great cognitive ability to experience God is false on the face of it since the essence of God is cognitively like looking through a glass darkly.

What has to be trusted along with cognitive abilities is faith, hope and charity, along with generous doses of imagination, intuition, and instinct. God gave us all these gifts together. The usurpation of all power by the cognitive gift alone is the essential heresy of scientism.

 

[Peter_Plato]

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

I think you missed the point. It wasn’t for the sake of a good story that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac, it was to demonstrate that history is in the hands of God to determine. That means God is outside of time and can control future events.

Abraham’s prophecy that “God himself will provide the lamb,” is another indicator that subtly confirms God’s hand in history, since Abraham was provided with a ram to take the place of Isaac. The Jewish people understood and awaited God’s provision of a lamb, little suspecting what that meant until John the Baptist announced, “Behold, the Lamb of God.”

I also think that you’re overstating Abraham’s certainty; Abraham certainly couldn’t see the future. I wouldn’t immediately know that the voice that just told me to kill someone was actually God. I could very easily be mentally ill, or being deceived. Knowing the reasons why I was supposed to kill someone is defense against some of that uncertainty. If my reason is unreliable, then I really have no way to evaluate what I should do in *any *situation, let alone this one.

The fact that you could be mentally ill or being deceived is irrelevant regarding whether Abraham was. Given the entire narrative of his life and how he was led through it, and how things have borne out in history, you have corroboration that God was acting in Abraham’s life. Again, watching fire rain from the sky on Sodom and Gomorrah would seem to be definitive proof that whoever you had been “pushing back” just a short time before was competent and had authority to override whatever moral determinations or objections you might have raised, especially since the reasons for the destruction were spelled out to you as “moral” reasons.

Suppose, in present day terms, the “city” under judgement was an ISIS camp? You could, I suppose, argue that if ten just men were found in that camp, God should spare it, but once fire started raining from Heaven (a decidedly unnatural event) on that camp - at the very moment the “voice” you had been ‘pushing back’ on said it would - does that not provide sufficient proof that God determined - beyond your capacity to object or find otherwise - that HE could not locate ten just men in the camp? What stronger moral evidence could there possibly be?

 

[Peter_Plato]

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.

No one is denying that cognitive abilities serve to corroborate theological reasoning, what is being contested is that cognitive abilities ought to be the sole criterion upon which to base reasoning.

For my part, it is more like “triangulation” with cognitive reasoning being one aspect. The others are authoritative Church teaching, Scripture, (big T) Tradition and personal experience. It is a matter of carefully weighing the full and complete “contributions” from all of these and judging where they conflict with each other to determine where errors of reasoning or judgement are being made.

It is, by the way, insufficient to use what I think Church teaching is or what I think Tradition has held or my current reasoning with regard to a philosophical or theological issue. My current understanding of any or all of these may be deficient, which is why searching for truth is an ongoing process.

I view it as calibrating the instrument (my mind) by using external means (see above) to properly calibrate the tool in order to find the truth. It isn’t sufficient to assume the tool is capable in its “unvarnished” state to locate the truth.

So, while it may be true that “you have to be able to trust your own cognitive abilities” you cannot a priori assume those “cognitive abilities” are up to snuff just 'cause they are yours. It is a question of fine-tuning which means trusting a number of external and internal calibration tools makes more sense than merely trusting one internal capacity on its own.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I think you missed the point. It wasn’t for the sake of a good story that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac, it was to demonstrate that history is in the hands of God to determine. That means God is outside of time and can control future events.

Clearly, the Jews of Jesus’ time understood the importance of Abraham and the promises made by God to him as being the strongest evidence to corroborate current events.

That is why they claimed Abraham to be their “father,” implying that it was part of God’s plan and promise that they exist as “children of Abraham.”

Jesus’ reply that “…before Abraham ever was, I AM,” was intended to demonstrate that “something greater than Abraham,” i.e., God himself, was in their presence because Jesus clearly indicated his eternal nature by placing himself outside of time and, therefore, having the capacity to determine history. His prediction of the complete destruction of the Temple - “not one stone left on another” - corroborated, for the Jews, his authority, as God, with the same level of force that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had for Abraham.

 

[Oreoracle]

Well, not really.

With respect to God, it requires more humility of heart than pride of intellect to understand His will.

It wasn’t my position that intellect is all that is necessary. My position is only that trusting one’s intellect is necessary, as you yourself admit here:

**What has to be trusted along with cognitive abilities **is faith, hope and charity…

The usurpation of all power by the cognitive gift alone is the essential heresy of scientism.

This is a strawman, as I never claimed to advocate scientism.

No one is denying that cognitive abilities serve to corroborate theological reasoning, what is being contested is that cognitive abilities ought to be the sole criterion upon which to base reasoning.

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.