"Just have faith" vs evidence

[MarcoPolo]

Did God create Sikhism, or did a man? 23 million members

I would submit this argument does not hold because popularity is one of multiple characteristics that is a compelling argument for any religion. But the true religion should also have a number of other characteristics, therefore, you can’t dismiss any of them by comparing only one characteristic at a time as you have done here. As I argued in Is faith belief without evidence? you couldn’t dismiss a crime suspect based on the fact that you found another human being that shares another quality with that suspect. What you want to do is find a suspect that meets all the characteristics of the witness’ description. You don’t want to just look for one characteristic and dismiss everyone with that characteristic on account of there being more than one.

 

[MarcoPolo]

I will check these out later tonight when I get the chance, but I will say that I am aware of ways of reconciling Polygenism with Original Sin, but the main problem is that those theories sound outlandish to me. My bigger issue right now is the credibility of the Bible accounts of the Resurrection. If you have any reading related to that that you could show me I would much appreciate it because I’ve been looking at arguments for and against that and I find the arguments against it more compelling right now.

Here are a couple more on historical evidence for a resurrection.

catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/islam/resurex.htm
catholicleague.org/the-resurrection-as-history-2/
Here is audio from Fr. Spitzer, former president of Gonzaga and PhD holder.

 

[987mk]

I would submit this argument does not hold because popularity is one of multiple characteristics that is a compelling argument for any religion. But the true religion should also have a number of other characteristics, therefore, you can’t dismiss any of them by comparing only one characteristic at a time as you have done here. As I argued in Is faith belief without evidence? you couldn’t dismiss a crime suspect based on the fact that you found another human being that shares another quality with that suspect. What you want to do is find a suspect that meets all the characteristics of the witness’ description. You don’t want to just look for one characteristic and dismiss everyone with that characteristic on account of there being more than one.

1.6 billion Muslims cannot be wrong, nor can 1 Billion Hindus.

 

[SpeakKindly]

Did God create Sikhism, or did a man? 23 million members

Did God create Islam, or did a man? 1.6 billion members

Did God create Moromonism, or did a man? 10 million members

Did God create Hinduism, or did a man? 1 billion members.

A man did in fact create Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama. 376 million members

Yes, a man can create a popular and well followed religion.

I didn’t ask if a human could create a popular religion, I asked if that religion could be what we see Catholicism is, and I’ll add - even with human failings. Numbers are irrelevant as to if it’s true or not. If the Catholic Church is a living way God is seen through His people and helps them, then that is widely different from a popular it contest.

 

[987mk]

I didn’t ask if a human could create a popular religion, I asked if that religion could be what we see Catholicism is, and I’ll add - even with human failings. Numbers are irrelevant as to if it’s true or not. If the Catholic Church is a living way God is seen through His people and helps them, then that is widely different from a popular it contest.

You cannot disprove that Islam is not the one true way or Hinduism for that matter.

It is on faith that leads you to believe that Catholicism is the fullness of truth, as opposed to Hinduism.

You receive evidence from both Islam and Catholicism. You cannot actually prove that one is true and the other false, so you make the choice to pick Catholicism and you dismiss Islam.

If you’d been born in Afghanistan, you’d dismiss Catholicism and embrace Islam.

 

[Ignatius]

I posted about my main doubts in other recent threads.

Basically, I am tripped up by Polygenism (science says yes, Church says no.

Actually, Genetics (i.e. science) says no as well. Research topic: mitochondrial Eve

 

[SpeakKindly]

You cannot disprove that Islam is not the one true way or Hinduism for that matter.

It is on faith that leads you to believe that Catholicism is the fullness of truth, as opposed to Hinduism.

You receive evidence from both Islam and Catholicism. You cannot actually prove that one is true and the other false, so you make the choice to pick Catholicism and you dismiss Islam.

If you’d been born in Afghanistan, you’d dismiss Catholicism and embrace Islam.

Truth is able to be reasoned out, that’s why there are so many people who have written about philosophy, theology, and even scientific theories. Read Thomas Aquinas for example, even just read the Church’s view on the sacredness of life and how that applies to abortion, cloning, and genetically altering babies. Look at the theology of the body writings even on the design for marriage and sexual powers.

 

[josh987654321]

As I post topics related to my doubts, it seems many keep telling me that I just need to have faith. But I know that fideism is rejected by the Church. So, is the “just have faith” advice just bad advice? Or is there something about the Church’s teaching that encourages us to “just have faith” despite not being persuaded by evidence?

I really need some clarity on this because I’m simply trying to deal with my doubts and weigh the “evidence”… but then I’ve got people telling me I can’t use empiricism in religion, that I need to just have faith…as if I shouldn’t be weighing the evidence.

So, should one weigh the evidence for and against Christianity?

I hope you don’t mind if I quote a small piece I liked out of C.S. Lewis’ book ‘Mere Christianity’ on faith.
Extract from 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis:

FAITH

I must talk in this chapter about what the Christian calls Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply belief - accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people - at least it used to puzzle me - is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue - what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then - and a good many people do not see still - was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted: but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking “Perhaps she’ll be different this time” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water - or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.

Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reason against Christianity turns up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it.

Thus, I believe if it’s not a crisis of faith, but of reason, than that must be faced, thus I would like to ask what reasoning has lead you to doubt?

Please continue to next post -

 

[josh987654321]

In the mean time though, I would also like to share with you some apologetic’s that I have enjoyed that may also help you.

I believe to follow the concept of a purely material universe to it’s logical conclusion, pulls the rug out from under the New Atheists. As John Lennox say’s, If as they claim, there is nothing in the universe except matter and energy, some of which blindly and randomly evolved into the human mind, then how can we rely on our minds in the first place to arrive at this conclusion? Our minds are themselves, according to this Darwinian view, mere random purposeless movements of atoms, unable to recognize truth, or beauty, or goodness, to know anything, or to do science for that matter.

And yet other scientists of undisputed intellectual stature with diametrically opposed views concur that, ‘The reason why what is in my little mind can understand a bit of what is out there is because both of them are traceable back to the same grand designer.’

C.S. Lewis I believe also explains it very well.

“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” - C.S. Lewis

“The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words true or false.” - C.S. Lewis

And I believe John Lennox also explains it well.

*"The very fact that we do science, means we believe that the universe is rationally intelligible. Why does a scientist believe it is rationally intelligible? Atheism tells us that the human mind is the human brain and it’s the end product of a mindless unguided process, why should I believe anything it tells me if that’s the case? Whereas theism tells me that there is intelligence behind the universe and behind the human mind which fits perfectly with science.

In fact the rise of science in the 16th and 17th century came about because people expected law in nature, because they believed in the Law giver (God). So science and faith in God fit perfectly together."* - John Lennox

There was also 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.”*

Please continue to next post -

 

[josh987654321]

I also like this quote from C.S. Lewis -
Extract from C.S. Lewis' book 'Mere Christianity':

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?

A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe, we should never have know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

And this one by John Lennox regarding the ‘God of the Gaps’ idea -
Extract from John Lennox's book 'God's Undertaker':

In some quarters the very success of science has also lead to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safety conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place.

However, such reasoning involves a logical fallacy, which we can illustrate as follows.

Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford disliked him. Of Course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it. neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for it’s working.

His Grasp of the impersonal principals of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works. So far, so good.

But if he then decided that his understanding of the principals of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false - in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.

It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principals according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms of the universe with either it’s cause or it’s upholder.

The basic issue here is that those of a scientific turn of mind like Atkins and Dawkins fail to distinguish between mechanism and agency.

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, “I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.” Quite the opposite, precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.

“Be careful not to confuse scientific statements, with statements by scientists.” - John Lennox

I hope this has helped

Please feel free to reply/refute anything said.

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[josh987654321]

Did God create Sikhism, or did a man? 23 million members

Never heard of it.

Did God create Islam, or did a man? 1.6 billion members

We both believe in the same God, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, so in many respects, we don’t believe everything in Islam is wrong.

Did God create Moromonism, or did a man? 10 million members

I don’t know much about Mormonism.

Did God create Hinduism, or did a man? 1 billion members.

The ‘type’ of deities they have I believe would be a classic example of the ‘god of the Gaps’ and when many Atheists try and use the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument against the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, I believe it simply shows their ignorance of our Faiths.

A man did in fact create Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama. 376 million members

I don’t know a great deal about Buddhism.

Yes, a man can create a popular and well followed religion.

Yes, a man can, but I believe speakkindly wasn’t talking about ‘religion’, but rather, one in particular, Christianity.
Extract from C.S. Lewis' book 'Mere Christianity':

THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD

I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all of those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic - there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.

I hope this has helped

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[josh987654321]

If you’d been born in Afghanistan, you’d dismiss Catholicism and embrace Islam.

I believe this is known as the ‘Genetic Fallacy’

 

[Aloysium]

. . how do you come to know that Catholicism/Christianity is true? So far the answer seems very simple: you can’t. There is no way to know for certain that Christianity is really from God, or that it really isn’t. The evidence is ambiguous.

Sorry for the shotgun blast response:
Everything that we know is ultimately based on faith.
Even if you do the actual statistical analyses and research, which I don’t believe you have, it is all based on reasonable and accepted facts/biases/truths.
I would guess that you know “science” from text books and the media - faith.
The fact that we use words compels us to certain ways of understanding.
I don’t believe that I can communicate what I know, since you don’t know the same thing.
No offense, but it is like describing a color to a color blind person
I’m not saying you can’t know; you just don’t see things the same way.
Unfortunately, skepticism is destructive; it doesn’t come up with anything, but finds faults.
Where the faults are in the person’s understanding, he’s going to be stuck.
He’s going to find that what he thinks is being said, is false. That does not help understand what the other person is saying.
If you interpret scripture with the idea that it is talking about the nature of love, it may make more sense to you.
Somewhere in this thread apparently, you say that you believe what science says about polygenism. Please acknowledge that your views on this are founded on faith. You have no idea what data they used and how it was analyzed. I am saying there is much bias in the process and that the current understanding is wrong. When I first attended university, using my slide rule to do calculations, there was only some early evidence of the microwave background radiation without much confirmation, so a steady state universe was still in the text books. That’s all gone now. Science as a set of knowledge about the physical world is always undergoing change.
Does it matter what you believe? If you can love your neighbour, I cannot see how it is possible that you do not love God. You just don’t know it, or call Him by another name. That’s what I think anyway.
I see God in everything, and maybe that’s why you don’t. You have never not seen Him.

 

[D0UBTFIRE]

Actually, Genetics (i.e. science) says no as well. Research topic: mitochondrial Eve

Actually, I’ve already done that…maybe you should research mitochondrial Eve because based on your comment I don’t really think you know what that means… but it definitely is not something that disproves polygenism.

 

[Aquinas21]

Recently thanks to this webpage, I saw a brief statement of the relationship between science and religion: “Science raises questions that science cannot answer. God is the answer.” Of course there is a little more to the subject than just that statement by itself, since science also sometimes raises questions that science does answer eventually, but the main point of the statement is still valid. If scientists will recognize the limitations of their disciplines, and if believers will be careful about telling scientists how things ‘must have been’ (or ‘must be’), then supposedly everyone can live happily within their limitations. The source for this statement is a book from a few years ago by Hans Küng entitled Anfang aller Dinge, translated into English by John Bowden as The Beginning of All Things.

 

[D0UBTFIRE]

I hope you don’t mind if I quote a small piece I liked out of C.S. Lewis’ book ‘Mere Christianity’ on faith.

Thus, I believe if it’s not a crisis of faith, but of reason, than that must be faced, thus I would like to ask what reasoning has lead you to doubt?

Please continue to next post -

Hi there,

I’m in the “here is new evidence that I’ve never looked at before” camp.

Basically, what started everything was reading StrangeNotions.com and reading through the comments written by atheist. One comment mentioned something that really bothered me - I posted about it a while back - it is regarding voluntary doubt and involuntary doubt, and what the Catechism says about it. Now, based on the responses I got to my post then, it seems that I was mistaken (although I never really managed to see how other than everyone seemed to think that the Church couldn’t possibly teach that involuntary doubt was sinful). But it was too late. I had already VIEWED it as the Church taught that involuntary doubt was sinful and I had gotten really upset about it because I felt like I was back in that cult of my childhood that didn’t allow you to really ask questions. So I started asking questions, so to speak. I started from sctratch. I asked a question on the philosophical forums here about proving God through reason thinking lets start from scratch and see if I can still get to the same point that I was (orthodox Catholicism). That whole philosophy thing took a lot of reading, I read both sides of the arguments there online and in blogs, as many as I could find…and I actually never found it convincing that we could prove God - at least not as the Christian describes Him - through reason alone. Nonetheless, I accept the idea of God, almost strictly on my personal experience and faith, at least for now. So I moved on. Next topic - Christianity. What makes Christianity true, I asked. Well, the Resurrection. So I started looking into arguments for and against that. And here’s the rub, I don’t know if these blogs on atheist websites just didn’t exist 7 years ago when I had originally started researching Christianity, or WHAT, but after taking the time to look through the arguments from both sides regarding the Resurrection, I have been more persuaded by the other side. I am not really eloquent enough to hash out all the arguments in my own words here, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to link to atheist blogs where these arguments against the Resurrection are found…so I won’t for now unless someone tells me otherwise.

Before I converted to Catholicism I read the Case for Christ, and was convinced by it. Maybe it was because I was younger or because they weren’t as easily found back then, but I never thoroughly studied the counterarguments that I now find so convincing. And let me be clear, I’m not saying that there is NO evidence for the Resurrection, I think there is enough there to make a case. I just don’t think that it’s enough or of enough unquestionable quality to be persuasive one way or the other. I would love to be convinced of one way or the other and not left in this: maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t state that I find myself in now… but I haven’t seen the light yet.

And like I mentioned before, there’s the polygenism thing that makes me question the Church’s teaching on Original Sin and how I’m really bothered about the encyclical that says that we as Christians can’t hold to polygenism (because I think it is obvious that that is what science teaches so telling me I can’t accept it is like dooming me to cognitive dissonance) So if the Church would update that and show how they reconcile things, sooner rather than later, I would feel much better about that detail, but as it stands, I’m left wondering if Catholicism and science don’t actually contradict. That line of reasoning started a little longer back before the whole involuntary doubt thing when I had gone from Creationism to accepting evolution. However at the time although I had the doubts I pushed them aside. But they’ve been there simmering for a while.

 

[D0UBTFIRE]

I have not read it but I have heard good things about Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Resurrection. I believe he has a series of books including The Case for Christ, etc… If you search for him, you can find videos that may have shorter treatments. He is not Catholic, as I understand, but his focus is on that historical event which is native to other Christian traditions as well.

I think you can find much historical data that early Christians made the claim and accepted martyrdom for that claim. Also, if you think philosophically about it, when the Christians went around claiming that Christ rose from the dead and ascended and that they went to their deaths for the belief - wouldn’t their audience’s natural reaction would be to simply produce the body? I think it is not entirely compelling to say people would go to their deaths en masse in the absence of something at least incredible. I think that puts the skeptic on at least an equally outlandish footing, for they have to come up with an alternative explanation for historical events for which there is, ironically, no evidence.

For instance, if, for example, the skeptic argues that the body was destroyed and the Christians conducted a scam, it begs the question — why was their story so compelling to others then? Likewise, the skeptic makes an argument based on plausibility rather than evidence. There is not positive evidence for some sort of scam, but the skeptic must admit he makes an argument based not on evidence, but on the plausibility of a scam. But, as I said, the idea of a scam raises other wild consequences that are, to me, at least as outlandish as the idea of God coming to earth and dying and rising. Really, the idea of someone dying and rising is SO outlandish, it ironically would explain why the event so transformed the witnesses. That would actually explain their behavior if it were true.

Finally, I appreciate your looking at the evidence. It is important that your decision regarding the Christian proposition be done freely. In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II reiterated Church teaching that, “Proclaiming Christ and bearing witness to him, when done in a way that respects consciences, does not violate freedom. Faith demands a free adherence on the part of man, but at the same time faith must also be offered to him…”

Well, thank you for understanding.

As for the Case for Christ, I read it before converting to Catholicism and it was in part what persuaded me to do so. The problem I’m having now is the counterarguments. I find them quite compelling in the sense that we don’t really have enough reliable evidence to go by to say this really happened…

 

[D0UBTFIRE]

Sorry for the shotgun blast response:
Everything that we know is ultimately based on faith.
Even if you do the actual statistical analyses and research, which I don’t believe you have, it is all based on reasonable and accepted facts/biases/truths.
I would guess that you know “science” from text books and the media - faith.
The fact that we use words compels us to certain ways of understanding.
I don’t believe that I can communicate what I know, since you don’t know the same thing.
No offense, but it is like describing a color to a color blind person
I’m not saying you can’t know; you just don’t see things the same way.
Unfortunately, skepticism is destructive; it doesn’t come up with anything, but finds faults.
Where the faults are in the person’s understanding, he’s going to be stuck.
He’s going to find that what he thinks is being said, is false. That does not help understand what the other person is saying.
If you interpret scripture with the idea that it is talking about the nature of love, it may make more sense to you.
Somewhere in this thread apparently, you say that you believe what science says about polygenism. Please acknowledge that your views on this are founded on faith. You have no idea what data they used and how it was analyzed. I am saying there is much bias in the process and that the current understanding is wrong. When I first attended university, using my slide rule to do calculations, there was only some early evidence of the microwave background radiation without much confirmation, so a steady state universe was still in the text books. That’s all gone now. Science as a set of knowledge about the physical world is always undergoing change.
Does it matter what you believe? If you can love your neighbour, I cannot see how it is possible that you do not love God. You just don’t know it, or call Him by another name. That’s what I think anyway.
I see God in everything, and maybe that’s why you don’t. You have never not seen Him.

I agree with most of what you say here.

You are right that bias and faith play a big picture in “what we know”. You are right that my “faith” in science and it’s ability to answer some questions about origins of life on this planet is what leads me to accept polygenism. You are right that I don’t have data on most things, and I take most things on faith, so to speak. I don’t feel the need to question every scientific finding because I honestly believe that scientist are doing their best to be objective. Now, to be honest, I have questioned science several times…regarding things that were so controversial to so many I would wonder, ok, what’s behind that? So I’ve researched evolution vs creationism, the whole global warming debacle, vaccines… and sometimes I land on one side for a while, and sometimes I land on the other… I’m open to this kind of back and forth and realizing I don’t have all the evidence.

Religion is different in that it’s not really open for debate. To be Catholic is to accept what the Church teaches and not dissent, not contradict… I feel like I can’t receive communion if I really don’t believe some things that the Church teaches. I’m not talking about God and it’s really frustrating that people equate God with their religion. I’m doubting Catholicism, I am not currently doubting the existence of God. At least not actively. I think it’s natural to wonder - is God really there? But I don’t have much evidence against it, and actually some for it… so I’m not hung up on it right now. I worry that if I loose complete faith in my religion that somehow that will naturally extend to my faith in God…because I’ll have less in my worldview to explain His existence…but I don’t really think that will happen. Anyway, I agree that God is Love. But your comment about “does it matter what you believe?” is strange to me because I thought it very much did matter what I believe…

 

[D0UBTFIRE]

I hope this has helped

Please feel free to reply/refute anything said.

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

Josh,

Thank you for taking the time to share with me some of your favorite quotes. I don’t really have anything bad to say about what you wrote, I mostly agree.

My crisis of faith is not exactly about God.

I’m having difficulty accepting Catholicism, a religion, which I view as distinct from God.

And to be clear also, it’s not that I don’t find Catholicism beautiful. I love it! I think it’s great in so many ways. I’m just not currently convinced that it’s true, at least not in the literal sense.

 

[SpeakKindly]

I agree with most of what you say here.

You are right that bias and faith play a big picture in “what we know”. You are right that my “faith” in science and it’s ability to answer some questions about origins of life on this planet is what leads me to accept polygenism. You are right that I don’t have data on most things, and I take most things on faith, so to speak. I don’t feel the need to question every scientific finding because I honestly believe that scientist are doing their best to be objective. Now, to be honest, I have questioned science several times…regarding things that were so controversial to so many I would wonder, ok, what’s behind that? So I’ve researched evolution vs creationism, the whole global warming debacle, vaccines… and sometimes I land on one side for a while, and sometimes I land on the other… I’m open to this kind of back and forth and realizing I don’t have all the evidence.

Religion is different in that it’s not really open for debate. To be Catholic is to accept what the Church teaches and not dissent, not contradict… I feel like I can’t receive communion if I really don’t believe some things that the Church teaches. I’m not talking about God and it’s really frustrating that people equate God with their religion. I’m doubting Catholicism, I am not currently doubting the existence of God. At least not actively. I think it’s natural to wonder - is God really there? But I don’t have much evidence against it, and actually some for it… so I’m not hung up on it right now. I worry that if I loose complete faith in my religion that somehow that will naturally extend to my faith in God…because I’ll have less in my worldview to explain His existence…but I don’t really think that will happen. Anyway, I agree that God is Love. But your comment about “does it matter what you believe?” is strange to me because I thought it very much did matter what I believe…

Do you believe in Jesus and if so, who is He to you?