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Wesrock
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Damian. If you go back up to my post you can click the teal “D” to link back to the post I was directly replying to.
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Wesrock
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There is belief in faith, of course. I don’t exclude it from it. But you should have good reasons for what you have faith in.
And God can be known through reason. Belief in God need not be a matter of faith with no reasons.
And God can be known through reason. Belief in God need not be a matter of faith with no reasons.
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Damian
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I think this is where it gets muddled between the two groups of atheist and theist.
What you present with,
But where you use faith here,
Example: imagine a world where fire does not exist. Now someone comes along and logically concludes that fire should exist. Great, but how do we know when an event has had fire apart of it? We have never seen markers of charcoal wood, melted metal, boiling water, etc. Those markers of fire in our environment so that we can tell the difference between event A with fire and event B without fire. We have to interact with fire and understand what it can and can not do, how it interacts with our reality, etc. so that we can understand first that it actually exists and then how we can identify events that it did interact with. Otherwise, as I understand it, event A with claims of fire interaction and event B without fire interaction are all just appeals to our ignorance of how reality actually interacts with us. We don’t know enough of our own reality to know if there is an alternate reality interacting with ours because we don’t have the tools to make a distinction from our ignorance.
I’m not dismissing your position, just pointing out the differences between your position as a theist and mine as an atheist. That’s what I want to get it, to be able to point to the mud between us and see what we can do to clear it up with maybe coming up with better words to use than we have been using so far.
What you present with,
This matches with my use of the word, “Hope”, since we have evidence in reality of other people behaving well for other people. Since Bob is a person and we have experienced socialization of people, we can be justified to infer that Bob has the capacity to treat people well and not to treat others unwell without a reason we have been exposed to and understand.
But where you use faith here,
This has not be justified to hold to an atheist like me since, I can follow the logic for concluding a deity may exist, but its not enough to conclude anything beyond that. This follows like historical fiction character to me. The character has a logically consistent back story and we get to see how that character would interact with our reality, but you still can’t define something into existence.
Example: imagine a world where fire does not exist. Now someone comes along and logically concludes that fire should exist. Great, but how do we know when an event has had fire apart of it? We have never seen markers of charcoal wood, melted metal, boiling water, etc. Those markers of fire in our environment so that we can tell the difference between event A with fire and event B without fire. We have to interact with fire and understand what it can and can not do, how it interacts with our reality, etc. so that we can understand first that it actually exists and then how we can identify events that it did interact with. Otherwise, as I understand it, event A with claims of fire interaction and event B without fire interaction are all just appeals to our ignorance of how reality actually interacts with us. We don’t know enough of our own reality to know if there is an alternate reality interacting with ours because we don’t have the tools to make a distinction from our ignorance.
I’m not dismissing your position, just pointing out the differences between your position as a theist and mine as an atheist. That’s what I want to get it, to be able to point to the mud between us and see what we can do to clear it up with maybe coming up with better words to use than we have been using so far.
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Damian
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So faith is trusting someone in the relationship you have with them to care for each other. That’s what you are referring to right?
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rcwitness
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Is this a reason not to believe in the Creator?
Anyways, yes, there are divisions on account of our hard hearts and limited faith.
Matthew 18 is the closest I can reference Scripture about your concern:
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
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Damian
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Yes to me because they can both be wrong as well. We have to have a way to test someone’s claims against reality to see if it matches or not. The test against reality, to me, will always out weight someone’s firmly held belief that does not match what reality has presented.
You can present information to people that worked for you, but this information may not work for your brother. Example, if you point at three apples and your brother believes that you believe there are four apples, your brother will not believe there are four apples there, only three. Have a conversation with him so that you understand what his objects are and what he would need to change is mind and what he sees is the problem with the arguments and evidence. That is what is missing from Mather 18. It only responds with going out and finding other people like you to back up your presentation of pointing at three apples and believing it’s four. It’s not about the amount of people you bring to back up your claim to your brother, it’s the reason and evidence you supplied.
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Wesrock
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Part One
The arguments (as a whole) don’t stop with “and the first cause is what we call God.”
Well, it depends on where the logical demonstration stops. When the cosmological arguments are presented, they often conclude with something like, “therefore a first cause exists, and the first cause is what we call God.” But there are further demonstrations that can be made following this, such as a demonstration that there can be only one, a demonstration that it is eternal, a demonstration that it is omnipotent, a demonstration that it is omniscient, a demonstration that it is perfectly good (and what is meant by one, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good need further definition), and how all those things necessarily follow from the original demonstration, and arguments that it follows that it can interact with the world, and an argument that based on all of these things it would not have created for reasons X, Y, and Z, an argument for why rational beings like mankind were created, and so on.Wesrock:
This has not be justified to hold to an atheist like me since, I can follow the logic for concluding a deity may exist, but its not enough to conclude anything beyond that. This follows like historical fiction character. The character has a logically consistent back story and we get to see how that character would interact with our reality, but you still can’t define something into existence.
Example: imagine a world where fire does not exist. Now someone comes along and logically concludes that fire should exist. Great, but how do we know when an event has had fire apart of it? We have never seen markers of charcoal wood, melted metal, boiling water, etc. Those markers of fire in our environment so that we can tell the difference between event A with fire and event B without fire. We have to interact with fire and understand what it can and can not do, how it interacts with our reality, etc. so that we can understand first that it actually exists and then how we can identify events that it did interact with. Otherwise, as I understand it, event A with claims of fire interaction and event B without fire interaction are all just appeals to our ignorance of how reality actually interacts with us. We don’t know enough of our own reality to know if there is an alternate reality interacting with ours because we don’t have the tools to make a distinction from our ignorance.
The arguments (as a whole) don’t stop with “and the first cause is what we call God.”
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Wesrock
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Part Two
I highly endorse Edward Feser’s book Five Proofs for the Existence of God. This is not Aquinas’ five ways, it’s a Feser’s own form of argument based on arguments from Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz. Not just recapping what they wrote, but his own formulation and stripping away as much of the philosophical baggage as possible. It’s quite ambitious. But one thing I do like about it is that, for each of the arguments, he first argues to the “and therefore there is a first cause (or whatever the end of the argument is”, and then from there proceeds to demonstrate that this must possess what are commomly considered the divine attributes (oneness, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, goodness). So it goes beyond what you normally find summed up in one place, and he gives all of the arguments first informally and then formally.
I highly endorse Edward Feser’s book Five Proofs for the Existence of God. This is not Aquinas’ five ways, it’s a Feser’s own form of argument based on arguments from Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz. Not just recapping what they wrote, but his own formulation and stripping away as much of the philosophical baggage as possible. It’s quite ambitious. But one thing I do like about it is that, for each of the arguments, he first argues to the “and therefore there is a first cause (or whatever the end of the argument is”, and then from there proceeds to demonstrate that this must possess what are commomly considered the divine attributes (oneness, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, goodness). So it goes beyond what you normally find summed up in one place, and he gives all of the arguments first informally and then formally.
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Damian
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I agree you can use reason to start looking for something about reality. That the hypothesis process of the scientific method. But you can still be logically correct and factually wrong once you run the experiment and you collect more data than you had before. This is why we didn’t teach that gravity waves are part of reality until we found them in 2015. Einstein mathematically/logically concluded they should exist, but we were not justified in teaching that they are part of reality until we actually found them. That is the process I think is better for creating my internal model of reality to match actual reality. That way, I run into fewer problems of reality when I run into issues.
What is the church’s stance on having that position for belief in the supernatural? Is that being encouraged to be dismissed as an approach to believing in a deity?
What is the church’s stance on having that position for belief in the supernatural? Is that being encouraged to be dismissed as an approach to believing in a deity?
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Wesrock
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See, my own rational inquiry has led me to deny atheism as it does not match the reality presented. The lack of a deity would require the denial of something like the Principle of Sufficient Reason, or the idea that effects should have causes, etc…
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rcwitness
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Was Abraham wrong? Was Moses wrong? Was Jesus wrong?Yes to me because they can both be wrong as well. We have to have a way to test someone’s claims against reality to see if it matches or not. The test against reality, to me, will always out weight someone’s firmly held belief that does not match what reality has presented.
rcwitness:
You can present information to people that worked for you, but this information may not work for your brother. Example, if you point at three apples and your brother believes that you believe there are four apples, your brother will not believe there are four apples there, only three. Have a conversation with him so that you understand what his objects are and what he would need to change is mind and what he sees is the problem with the arguments and evidence. That is what is missing from Mather 18. It only responds with going out and finding other people like you to back up your presentation of pointing at three apples and believing it’s four. It’s not about the amount of people you bring to back up your claim to your brother, it’s the reason and evidence you supplied.
As Catholics, we believe Jesus promised the Church a gift to be able to confirm matters of faith and morals. And arguement over something the Church has difinitively made a pronouncement over should easily be settled.
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Damian
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I wouldn’t use the idea of “proof”. I would use the word, “supports” the conclusion. Proof implies that every other possible solution has been dismissed as not valid and this is the only solution. Like in mathematics, X=-b ± sqrt(-b+4ac)/2a is the proof for x in a polynomial equation. That is why the logical conclusion sounds only like the hypothesis step in the scientific method, we still need to test this against reality to see if it matches. We can be logically correct and still factually wrong. There may be new data that we did not have access to because we didn’t run the experiment before or didn’t have the precision tools for it, etc.
To me, this sounds like being culturally religious. Which is fine too.
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Wesrock
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Well, this is again the “flying spaghetti monster” argument, if much more intelligently presented, in that it confuses the First Cause as being on the same level of ontological reality as everything else, as something that could be or not be, as something that isn’t in itself absolutely necessary for there to be existence period. Not because it is arbitrarily so, but because there must be something that is is necessary, subsistent existence for there to be anything at all, and such a thing necessarily cannot be passible, contingent, changing, composite, etc…
The problem is that it’s not a question of learning more about reality scientifically. The point is that God necessarily follows from the axioms about reality that you hold to for scientific inquiry. It’s not a matter of scientific evidence, it is prior to that, the same assumptions you use to justify that scientific inquiry is useful necessarily lead to knowledge of God. Rejecting God, or these assumptions, necessarily lead to rejecting the value of scientific inquiry and empirical pursuit of knowledge.
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Damian
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I don’t know if they were wrong or not, so how can we find out? The amount of people who hold a conclusion is irrelevant to that belief being true. To me, what helps me conclude a belief is true is the results of the claim. Someone mathematically concludes that higher air pressure under a wing foil will produce lift. Okay, lets test that. All the tests, so far, produce that expected result. Now I can have an internal model of reality that actually matches what happens in reality for future predictions.
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rcwitness
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What do you believe in your heart?
You are not a computer, you are a human being.
You are not a computer, you are a human being.
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Damian
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I agree that it logically makes since for a first cause, but I don’t see why it has to be a deity. I just call it X. I don’t know if we can go further than X. I don’t believe that our logic works every where though. I believe our logic works based on the reality we actually interact with because it produces the most predictive results of our experience reality. I don’t know what it means to exists beyond space and time. What does it mean to exist for negative time? What does it mean to not have linear thought? etc. That is why I don’t assume our logic works beyond the point of the big bang.
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Damian
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Believe about what? it’s too ambiguous for me to respond to.
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Wesrock
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Well, if I don’t find the time to try and make the case, let me again recommend Five Proofs for the Existence of God by Edward Feser. It would be an interesting starting point. I won’t blame you if you don’t buy it, but if you have $15, can order something through Amazon, and have an insatiable interest in the topic, it’d be up your alley.
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rcwitness
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Is Jesus the Son of the Creator?
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Damian
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What do you mean by atheism, that word doesn’t mean anything to me. Just like a jury member who finds the defendant, not guilty. They do not have a world view of “not-guilty-ism”. I don’t have a world view of “atheism” for my disbelief.
I understand the idea of cause and affect and understand that infinite regression paradox. So logically, there must be a first cause. Okay, that’s the hypothesis, how do we test it? Why would it point to a deity instead of just X for what ever was the first cause?
I understand the idea of cause and affect and understand that infinite regression paradox. So logically, there must be a first cause. Okay, that’s the hypothesis, how do we test it? Why would it point to a deity instead of just X for what ever was the first cause?
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