Lack of Questioning Leads to Atheism?

[PRmerger]

By the way, there have been plenty of cases of drunk airline pilots…

Oh yeah. Scary stuff.

Atheists don’t have the same standard, curiously, for something as of supreme import as their safety, and seem to have great…FAITH…in the system.

With no verification.

 

[PRmerger]

. Not trusting individuals, but trusting the system which is being verified continuously, every minute of every day.

Ah. So, like a system of theology? Or a Church hierarchy?

Or is there some different standard for our system because…there is some peculiar double standard that we have to obey?

 

[CHRISTINE77]

Oh yeah. Scary stuff.

Atheists don’t have the same standard, curiously, for something as of supreme import as their safety, and seem to have great…FAITH…in the system.

With no verification.

How they can have faith in a socially engineered “system” that really doesn’t exist is beyond me. I’d like to know whose running it, and what it is supposed to accomplish.

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

Oh. I thought you said that all beliefs should have some way to verify it.

I did not say that. Actually I said the exact opposite. I am willing to accept your word for normal, everyday claims, for example your claim that you are nurse. If you would claim that you have a few children, I would not care to verify it, I would accept it without questioning. If you would say that you have one hundred naturally born children, then I would not accept it - even though it is not biologically impossible, only extremely unlikely. Twenty quintuplets would do the trick, one set every year.

One more time: irrelevant claims are not subject to verification - precisely because they are irrelevant. I sure hope that I don’t need to repeat again - but I do NOT have a reasonable expectation for it.

Ha ha -“self-correcting system”… that’s rich! What about all the corruption in this so called “System”? By the way, there have been plenty of cases of drunk airline pilots…

How many commercial airlines lost their planes due to drunken pilots?

Atheists don’t have the same standard, curiously, for something as of supreme import as their safety, and seem to have great…FAITH…in the system.

With no verification.

How many times do I have to repeat it, before it sinks in? The verification is an ongoing process, every day, every hour, every second. What you call “FAITH” is a reasoned expectation. My car starts every morning. It is not “FAITH” that I expect it to start tomorrow. Every time I step on the break, the car slows down. If is not “FAITH” to expect it to slow down next time. That is the ongoing verification process.

You like to play fast and loose with the word “FAITH”, just like that poster who did not understand that hitting the jackpot is not a 50% chance.

I recall that you like to remind skeptics how good it is for us to have a conversation with knowledgeable Catholics. I bet you consider yourself to be one of those. Well, I beg to differ, since you don’t even get the difference between “FAITH” and “reasonable expectation”.

Ah. So, like a system of theology? Or a Church hierarchy?

Or is there some different standard for our system because…there is some peculiar double standard that we have to obey?

Let it be theology, or angelology, or demonology. All these systems make certain claims. How do we know if the claims are true or not? The church does not offer a comprehensive epistemological method to separate the wheat from the chaff. The only “method” it offers is authoritarian and based upon hearsay.

If you can present a method to summon up a demon, and the method to examine it before it is banned to the place where it came from… go ahead, make my day. I can hardly wait. The church has exorcists, who are able to detect demonic activities. What are they? The exorcists claim that they can expel these demons. How? And then they claim that they can verify that demons are gone. How?

Can I verify the transubstantiation? The church asserts it. What is the method it uses? If you have a question about chemistry, you can open any textbook and study it for yourself. Likewise about physics or biology. Where is the textbook about the claims of demonology made by the church? I would like to study them.

 

[Gorgias]

So what is the answer that so often gets rejected? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard it.

Sure you have. On a Catholic site, the answer is self-evident and manifest.

 

[PRmerger]

As long as you are willing to accept the most outrageous claims based upon hearsay, I will point out your inconsistency

Well, you, too, accept outrageous things based on hearsay.

You haven’t verified that polio is pretty much eradicated in the world. You haven’t verified that we actually landed on the moon. You haven’t verified that the Holocaust truly killed 6 million people.

You read about it, and you believed it.

Not a single time have you actually verified all of these rather outrageous events in our world.

NB: If you offer a website that proclaims that we landed on the moon landing, I’m going to offer this, which proclaims that Jesus rose from the dead, so…same standard.

Unless you actually put your foot on some moon dust in the 1960’s, and sat next Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the spacemobile, well…it’s all hearsay…which you’ve believed.

You can’t have one standard for yourself: “I get to believe what I’m told, and endorse someone’s alleged documentation of this”…but also say: “You Christians don’t get to do this. You have to have some sort of OTHER documentation.”

 

[PRmerger]

I did not say that.

Ok. Then I think you should retract this then:

At the end of each epistemological path there MUST be an actual experiment which needs no acceptance based upon “blind faith”, which can be performed by anyone who is willing to invest the time, the resources and the energy to verify the claim personally.

'cause that certainly SOUNDS like you’re saying that verification of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon could, indeed, be performed “by anyone who is willing to invest the time.”

Now, you’re saying, no? It’s perfectly fine to accept this just on hearsay?

Your “MUST”, in all caps, doesn’t really apply?

 

[PRmerger]

One more time: irrelevant claims are not subject to verification - precisely because they are irrelevant.

I think that your designation of something I’ve asked you to prove as “an irrelevant claim” is a bit opportune.

What makes something “irrelevant”?

Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon

• is certainly not irrelevant to a historian.
• is not irrelevant to these people, who have searched Google for “Caesar, Rubicon” (perhaps you’re one of those folks, trying to glean data for this discussion? )
• is of great import to students in this professor’s history class. (You’d better believe these students are simply trusting in their professor that this really happened)

At any rate, whether you’re in one of those groups or not, that’s otiose.
None of these folks, either, could verify that Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

Would it be appropriate for you to criticize them for believing something on hearsay, (which is very significant to them) even if you reserve the right for yourself to do so since, for you, this is irrelevant?

 

[PRmerger]

How many commercial airlines lost their planes due to drunken pilots?

Please answer this honestly: if you knew that your pilot had flown, successfully, while drunk, would you be ok flying with her today?

 

[PRmerger]

IThe verification is an ongoing process, every day, every hour, every second. What you call “FAITH” is a reasoned expectation

Ah. Ok.

So you have a “reasoned expectation” that what Dan Rather told you on the news was, essentially, true.

You have a “reasoned expectation” that when Mrs. Caltigarone told you in 4th grade that the island of Sri Lanka is south of India that this is true.

So we Christians can have a “reasoned expectation” that what the Church tells us is true?

Or is there some different standard that we Christians should have that you don’t have to have?

You like to play fast and loose with the word “FAITH”,

Nope. But I just don’t have a fundamentalist view of FAITH.

I know that it, like love, is multivalent, and depending upon the context, we use the word in different ways.

I recall that you like to remind skeptics how good it is for us to have a conversation with knowledgeable Catholics. I bet you consider yourself to be one of those. Well, I beg to differ, since you don’t even get the difference between “FAITH” and “reasonable expectation”.

LOL!

Look at what I found:

google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=faith+reasonable+expectation&start=20

Let it be theology, or angelology, or demonology. All these systems make certain claims. How do we know if the claims are true or not? The church does not offer a comprehensive epistemological method to separate the wheat from the chaff. The only “method” it offers is authoritarian and based upon hearsay.

This ^^, too, is an uninformed view of Catholicism.

I reject the Catholicism you reject, Vera.

But the more informed view of the Church acknowledges that she has millenia of apologia for her data.

More than than computer science has.
More than the field of genetics.
More than the field of astrophysics.

So…

 

[ccmnxc]

In that case the next question is: “do you ever ask for something in the form of an intercessory or supplicatory prayer”? Mind you, I am not asking about “meditative prayer”, there is nothing problematic about that. I am questioning if you ever ask for some specific result - even if you add the almost mandatory “if it be thy will” to it. You can see many examples in the “Prayer Intentions” sub-forum.

Because if you do, then you believe in the “magical guy in the sky who grants wishes”, which is underscored the Bible as “ask and you will be answered” and “knock and the door will be opened”. It does not matter what do you ask for, a new, better paying job, a miraculous recovery for someone you love… or to get home when your fuel indicator is too low.

All these people believe in the “magical guy above the clouds”.

This falls apart once we unpack what is being meant by “magical guy above the clouds.” When this is uttered by an atheist, it is typically an absurd anthropomorphization, who characterizes the Christian God as some corporeal, super old, super powerful, knowledgeable & stuff, but-otherwise-just-like-us demiurge. Perhaps some believers actually hold to something like this, but I’ve met none who endorse this, and I bet their numbers are relatively limited. I suppose it could also be some petty and obnoxious insult or attempt at edginess, not something I’d guess you’d want associated with you.
However, my guess is that when you are using the phrase “magical guy above the clouds,” it is largely in line with some transcendent being who hears and responds to prayers and to whom said phrase might be ascribed metaphorically.
If that’s the case, then well, I suppose you’re right, but you are no longer defending the characterization of God that was being attacked.

Since there is no universally accepted concept of God, it is hardly the fault of skeptics that they seem to be “confused”. As a matter of fact, there are at least two very different and mutually contradictory “Christian Gods”… one is the “God of the Bible” and the other one is the “God of the philosophers”. They have nothing to do with each other.

I suppose if you have a ridiculously narrow view of how the Bible should be read and interpreted, this might fly, but I see no reason to accept this. Even reading the work of Eleonore Stump or Thomas Joseph White should be enough to at least show this simple exercise in hand-waving is hardly enough to establish that they are contradictory. Keep in mind also that the truths revealed about God through Revelation are “Top Down,” so to speak, where we are being spoon fed things our reason cannot attain of its own accord. Conversely, the truths that come through reason are “Bottom Up.” Given this, we would expect to find superficial discord because:

1. Our reason is fallible
2. The “Top Down” truths have to be revealed in such a way as to be able to be understood by us with our finite intellects and as such lose some of their fullness, and
3. We cannot know God’s essence, being the creatures that we are, and so the picture is incomplete and patchwork.
   This doesn’t make the two understandings you mentioned contradictory wholesale, though there might be contradictory parts (esp. since there isn’t full agreement every minute detail regarding the God of either inquiry), and the picture would be incomplete. Such is the nature of the discussion of the divine. You may not like it, but it’s got a heck of a lot more epistemic realism than the demand that we should be able to make God sufficiently intelligible to us (where “sufficiently” is demarcated by whatever psychological threshold we wish to set up).

And, of course, you can just read the posts in this small thread, and you will find examples of “you don’t really want answers”, “you just want to dictate and insult”, which are the most insulting types of utterances.

Pity they are all too often true. Maybe not here in the thread (I haven’t read through the posts you are mentioning), but I’ve seen these debates play out too many times to believe that nobody but the Christians have their egos and biases in the game. Perhaps said comments are generally uncalled for. If so, it is more for the sake of facilitating discussion rather than because they are false.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

This falls apart once we unpack what is being meant by “magical guy above the clouds.”
I suppose if you have a ridiculously narrow view of how the Bible should be read and interpreted, this might fly, but I see no reason to accept this. Even reading the work of Eleonore Stump or Thomas Joseph White should be enough to at least show this simple exercise in hand-waving is hardly enough to establish that they are contradictory. Keep in mind also that the truths revealed about God through Revelation are “Top Down,” so to speak, where we are being spoon fed things our reason cannot attain of its own accord. Conversely, the truths that come through reason are “Bottom Up.” Given this, we would expect to find superficial discord because:

1. Our reason is fallible

More importantly, religion gives us no objective epistemic method. Of course reason is fallible, which is why “checking your work” via an epistemic method is so important.

1. The “Top Down” truths have to be revealed in such a way as to be able to be understood by us with our finite intellects and as such lose some of their fullness, and

This reads to me as: “If any conceptions of God end up seeming contradictory, we need a get out of jail free card.” Specifically, by asserting that all revealed truths about God are “fuzzy” (i.e. analogous and oversimplified) is essentially conceding the point that there isn’t one concrete conception of God. If there were only one, there would be no such fuzzyness.

1. We cannot know God’s essence, being the creatures that we are, and so the picture is incomplete and patchwork.

This reads to me as: “We need one more get out of jail free card if we get asked something about God that we don’t know.” Once again, you’re essentially agreeing with the “no agreed upon definition” position. Unless you’re going to assert the easily-falsifiable claim: “There are things we don’t know about God, and most people are in agreement about what those missing pieces are.”

Such is the nature of the discussion of the divine. You may not like it, but it’s got a heck of a lot more epistemic realism than the demand that we should be able to make God sufficiently intelligible to us (where “sufficiently” is demarcated by whatever psychological threshold we wish to set up).

But that’s precisely the problem.

Lets return to the actual topic of this thread “Lack of Questioning Leads to Atheism?”

I don’t think anyone here has shown much evidence that atheists ask fewer questions. Indeed, the atheists asked some questions which were evaded. Whats different is the approach to the questioning.

Atheists restrict their serious energy to areas where they have a way to objectively separate right answers from wrong answers. Theists do not. It’s not to say that atheists don’t ask the same questions as theists, its that the atheists know ahead of time that you simply can’t get a definitive answer to a question without an objective means to get a definitive answer. Since atheists and theists seem to be in agreement that many theistic questions fall into that category, atheists simply relegate those questions to the bin that also holds things like “Last Thursdayism.” Theists on the other hand believe that you can get an answer by thinking a lot and “really feeling it:”

He pointed out that some admit of theorem, others of deductive reasoning, and still others of experimentation. However, some require what he called the ‘illative sense.’ (I’ll let you do the research. ) In short, some things require an individual to assent to a conclusion, given evidence presented. Some will assent easily, some after great deliberation, and some (by definition) never at all.

 

[PRmerger]

More importantly, religion gives us no objective epistemic method. Of course reason is fallible, which is why “checking your work” via an epistemic method is so important.

This seems counter-intuitive.

Rather, what you should be professing is: “Of course reason is fallible, which is why ‘checking your work’ via an epistemic method is so inutile”.

If our reason is fallible, how can we trust it when we’re “checking our work”?

 

[ccmnxc]

JapaneseKappa,

More importantly, religion gives us no objective epistemic method. Of course reason is fallible, which is why “checking your work” via an epistemic method is so important.

Well, I suppose I’d agree insofar as Catholicism itself (“religion” here is too vague and unwieldy to be of much use) does not provide us, as a matter of Church teaching, with an epistemic method by which it can verify itself, so to that I suppose I’d agree. This is different, however, from the claim that no reasonable epistemic method can be applied to the faith, which strikes me as wrong. More below.

This reads to me as: “If any conceptions of God end up seeming contradictory, we need a get out of jail free card.” Specifically, by asserting that all revealed truths about God are “fuzzy” (i.e. analogous and oversimplified) is essentially conceding the point that there isn’t one concrete conception of God. If there were only one, there would be no such fuzzyness.

It could be abused in that way, I suppose, by the position I laid out doesn’t actually entail anything like that. Let me lay out a rough train of thought here, epistemically speaking.
I am working with the background assumption that the classical proofs for God (a la The Five Ways, the proof from De Ente, Plotinus’s Argument for the One, the Argument from Eternal Truths, etc.) are correct and that the divine attributes are properly derived from them (obviously, I know you disagree with them, but this is the line of reasoning one might be able to take). We conclude, among these things, that God is infinite and transcendent. Given our finite intellects, then, we would expect not to understand much of God’s nature. Our limited epistemic horizon is thus a conclusion of previously established arguments, not a mere stipulation. It is not some ad hoc means of trying to save the coherence of theism, but rather a position that follows from the previously mentioned argument, so the charge of a “Get out of jail free” seems misplaced.

Further, I would agree that the truths from revelation are in large part “fuzzy,” which is one of the reasons why I think the Catholic Church (and Orthodox, I suppose) have a leg-up on Protestantism inasmuch as the Church lays out the general parameters by which one must view God and leaves some room left for speculation and experience. Among the Church, then, there might not be one exact picture of God, but the parameters rule out a heck of a lot that other people seem to speculate about. Definitely no demiurges here, for example. So sure, plenty of people have plenty of different concepts of God, but I have no interest in defending all of them. Rather, my interest is in defending God as seen by the Church, who is not some amorphous thing of whom practically anything can be predicated given the fuzziness. To put it pithily if somewhat flippantly, the plethora of view of God might make your job more difficult, but it also is neither my problem nor my fault, because there is only one general (if not ultra-particular and concrete) conception that I’m interested in defending.

This reads to me as: “We need one more get out of jail free card if we get asked something about God that we don’t know.” Once again, you’re essentially agreeing with the “no agreed upon definition” position. Unless you’re going to assert the easily-falsifiable claim: “There are things we don’t know about God, and most people are in agreement about what those missing pieces are.”

I think my response immediately above pretty much covers this.

 

[ccmnxc]

Lets return to the actual topic of this thread “Lack of Questioning Leads to Atheism?”

I don’t think anyone here has shown much evidence that atheists ask fewer questions. Indeed, the atheists asked some questions which were evaded. Whats different is the approach to the questioning.

Atheists restrict their serious energy to areas where they have a way to objectively separate right answers from wrong answers. Theists do not. It’s not to say that atheists don’t ask the same questions as theists, its that the atheists know ahead of time that you simply can’t get a definitive answer to a question without an objective means to get a definitive answer. Since atheists and theists seem to be in agreement that many theistic questions fall into that category, atheists simply relegate those questions to the bin that also holds things like “Last Thursdayism.” Theists on the other hand believe that you can get an answer by thinking a lot and “really feeling it:”

And herein lies the problem. The theist has provided reasons (again, I’m sure you’d disagree with their soundness, but the claims aren’t hanging in thin air) that there are truths that are not amenable to easy separation into right or wrong given that we recognize:

1. Our finitude and the epistemic horizons that thus result, and
2. The infinity and transcendence of God.
   This is to say, the circle of truths we can discover purely through reason does not exhaust all the important truths out there.
   Okay, so we can’t get a definitive answer through reason alone. Now what? Well, is there any evidence for God acting in the world that cannot be captured by our powers of reason alone? This is where the Resurrection argument, miracles, phenomenological arguments, and best explanation arguments (like, the Christian faith takes the facts about the world -such as facts x, y, and z - and puts them into a satisfying picture in a way other worldviews don’t). Problem is, none of these things are definitive inasmuch as they are a posteriori and are often patchwork or not first-hand. Doesn’t mean they’re unimportant or that one cannot justifiably hold them. Again, we just need to get rid of that Cartesian demon demanding certainty from us.

Now, all of this hinges upon whether the arguments mentioned actually work, but it provides, at least, a sketch of a possible epistemological method one might adopt in evaluating the Catholic worldview against other claims. No “really feeling it” required.

Addendum: It’s not exhaustive, but this gives a general sketch of where I’m coming from:
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/05/pre-christian-apologetics.html

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

Well, you, too, accept outrageous things based on hearsay.

You haven’t verified that polio is pretty much eradicated in the world. You haven’t verified that we actually landed on the moon. You haven’t verified that the Holocaust truly killed 6 million people.

Looks like that your self-proclaimed “knowledgeable” status is steadily losing credibility with every post you make. None of those claims are “outrageous”. Walking on water, resurrecting the dead are outrageous. Claims that violate the known laws of nature are outrageous.

You try to argue that all hearsay claims are somehow epistemologically the “same”. If you accept one, then you should accept all. So, let’s test it. In the Middle Ages many witches testified that the devil has a forked penis (so he could take them both from the front and the rear), and his semen is ice-cold. Do you accept the testimony of those witches?

What makes something “irrelevant”?

I hope you can figure it out on your own. It is not rocket science.

Please answer this honestly: if you knew that your pilot had flown, successfully, while drunk, would you be ok flying with her today?

Don’t change the subject. How many commercial airlines crashed because the pilot was drunk?

So we Christians can have a “reasoned expectation” that what the Church tells us is true?

It all depends on what you call “reasoned”. Some people are more gullible than others. Has anyone ever taken a guided tour in heaven, hell and purgatory? Especially with a smart-phone? Is there any independent method to find out if one unrepented masturbation sends one to eternal damnation?

I know that it, like love, is multivalent, and depending upon the context, we use the word in different ways.

If you do, then you are intellectually dishonest to use the word out of context. Faith in some supernatural is fundamentally different from expecting your car to start up in the morning.

This ^^, too, is an uninformed view of Catholicism.

It is? Does the church have an objective epistemological method to find out claims about angelology, demonology? A method to verify transubstantiation? Why don’t you share these methods? So far no exorcist was willing to share his method to summon up a demon.

But the more informed view of the Church acknowledges that she has millenia of apologia for her data.

Too bad that it is not shared with the outsiders. Not even a simple book which separates the literal and allegorical verses of the Bible.

 

[PRmerger]

Looks like that your self-proclaimed “knowledgeable” status is steadily losing credibility with every post you make. None of those claims are “outrageous”. Walking on water, resurrecting the dead are outrageous. Claims that violate the known laws of nature are outrageous.

Sorry, but you don’t get to come here and claim you don’t know how to define good and evil (“I don’t know how to define good and evil!”), but then, inconsistently again, decide that you are the Outrageous Definer.

Pick a paradigm and stick with it.

#beconsistent
#thatsallIask

 

[PRmerger]

Too bad that it is not shared with the outsiders.

This is the most astonishing thing you’ve said here, Vera.

You really can’t think that the Catholic Church, which has the most rigorous, exhaustive, systematic theology–with giants such as Anselm, Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Pascal, Edith Stein, Benedict, Congar–hasn’t examined the important questions?

That you haven’t availed yourself of the voluminous writings, well, that I am not astonished by.

But that you can profess that our great theology is “not shared with outsiders” is puzzling indeed.

 

[PRmerger]

Don’t change the subject. How many commercial airlines crashed because the pilot was drunk?

I just asked you a simple question.

Not sure why you won’t answer?

 

[PRmerger]

You try to argue that all hearsay claims are somehow epistemologically the “same”.

Not at all.

I am simply asking you to divest yourself of the position that you get to believe hearsay, and that’s perfectly licit for you, but you object to others doing exactly what you’re doing.

Again: I’m quite satisfied that you will never again object to Catholics believing in Jesus, without hearing the wee voice in your head saying, “Oh, but wait, I believe some things based on the very same methodology that Catholics use…so…eek! I think I may have to rethink this particular criticism”.