On my left we have science and on my right we have faith. As a Catholic I believe the two do coexist but for now I’ll seperate the two. If I were to have to make a choice between the two I would choose God because then I would have an explanation for creation, whereas science has none. If science someday explains how matter can come from absolute nothingness then I might listen.
But what is spirit? How is it at all different from the physical universe and if it is seperate how can we possibly even know it exists?God is spirit and therefore isn’t bound by the material universe. The universe is bound by the laws of matter, being that matter cannot create itself. Something cannot come from nothing. The questions should be asked of the scientific community not the religious IMO.
Campell suggests that the difference between “forever” and “eternity” is that forever is “for all time” and that eternity “exists beyond time.” That it always was, always will be. Fascinating thread!
First off, you keep on forgetting that the Bible is not to be read in a vacuum. Yes you can get very diverse interpretations if you read it so. The New Testament was written by the Church for the Church. Early members of the Church wrote the books. Bishops later compiled the books into a canon we call the New Testament. The Church has never encouraged private interpretation. The Bible is HER book, and is interpreted within the context of her other teachings. Don’t confuse us with Protestants. The Bible did not “start” the Church. The Church created the Bible for her own benefit. (Though this happened very early on, of course). We must take into account the genre. Jesus parables were never taken literally by anyone. They employ the genre of allegory. Something can be true without being a historical record. (Other parts of the Bible certainly are historical records).
If one believes in God then one has to believe in one unexplainable thing to explain everything. If one doesn’t believe in God then one has to believe in countless unexplainable things to explain some (but never all) things.On my left we have science and on my right we have faith. As a Catholic I believe the two do coexist but for now I’ll seperate the two. If I were to have to make a choice between the two I would choose God because then I would have an explanation for creation, whereas science has none. If science someday explains how matter can come from absolute nothingness then I might listen.
Must I spell it out? Spirit is what’s not material. Creationists simply believe that something outside of the material universe and not limited by it created everything, or at least was the cause.
So you’d rather accept what is tangible despite its inability to explain creation rather than what is intangible which does have an explanation? That is the choice that I’m presented with and I have chosen. So have you. You wanted to know why we believe and now you know.
Whoa! Sounding a little Inquisition-ish! I don’t think that’s what he’s doing by just questioning.
I don’t necessarily think that independent thinking is disobedient to God or anyone else. God gave us a brain with which to reason and we have been asking questions since we learned to talk, yes?
Eh, I don’t see that. The kid’s just trying to figure things out for himself.
Hey, that’s pretty good!If one believes in God then one has to believe in one unexplainable thing to explain everything. If one doesn’t believe in God then one has to believe in countless unexplainable things to explain some (but never all) things.
Occam’s Razor clearly favors belief in the existence of God.
Hubriss said:
A quick reading note. It is justifiable to assume that miracles are impossible? Read C.S. Lewis’ Miracles for the case about whether or not we should assume that miracles are impossible before we investigate individual miracles historically. Most people who deny miracles come to the conclusion that miracles are impossible before investigating them, and, shockingly, come to the conclusion that no miracle occured. I know this isn’t really what you were talking about, but C.S. Lewis writes clearly and lucidly, and I highly recommend his book.
The problem becomes, to deny Jesus’ existence is to set such a high bar to prove an historical personage that it can’t possibly be applied broadly. The stringent way that people tend to disclude the evidence about Jesus ends up being rather ridiculous. I’ll give you two links to read. One is a link from a man named James Patrick Holding over at his website. Especially compared to the scant information we have from the time period in which Jesus lived, we have a wealth of information about him. This is not even counting the Gospels or Paul as witnesses to Jesus existing. I recommend that you especially look at his individual treatment of sources including, Tacitus, Josephus, Thallus, Pliny, and Lucian.
This hits a snag when he identifies himself as God. “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I Am” in Jn 8:58, using I Am just like YHWH did in Ex 3:14. And if you think that that’s a vauge, ambiguous way to identify oneself as God, then realize that the Jews listening did not think so. In the very next verse “they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple” (John 8:59), because they thought it blasphemy. Likewise, his apostles believed him to be God because he claimed to be so. Thomas falls to Christ’s feet, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28), and Paul writes of Christ, “[w]ho, being in very nature God,” (Phil 2:6). This is to speak nothing of him going around forgiving people of their sins. Remember, no good Jew can do these things. And Jesus is a Jew, a monotheist of a strict variety. A good Jew doesn’t go identifying himself with God, because then he is a bad Jew (a liar or insane). Jesus is good, of course, if he is God. But, just a reformer? Nah.
Which would seem to make it a bad idea. Not that I want to drag this topic onto communism. A bridge with bad enginerring that breaks is not a good bridge, but a bad bridge. It may have been, “good in theory,” or, “good on paper,” but since the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failed to account for the windy conditions, it succumbed to a dangerous torsional wave which was ever amplified as the wind blew it in resonance until finally the stresses it was subjected to were greater than it could endure.
No. It actually isn’t. I think you should give a good look at Fatima. It isn’t a series of cheesy, vague prophecies. It is an event with thousands of eyewitnesses. How many eyewitnesses do you want for the confirmation of a miracle? Even the athiest editors of some local papers witnessed it, the so-called miracle of the sun. I have no problem with you rejecting the miracle at Fatima, per se, but I do have it with you rejecting it this way. Imagine if I took one of your objections and gave a vauge denial to it like this-- wouldn’t it be more proof to you of the way theists ignore things inconvient to them and accept things on bad evidence? If we have to hear you out, you have to hear us out, and engage us just as diligently.
Oh really?
hastily takes down Aquinas shrineOr maybe they do. An assertion to the contrary really shows nothing.
And they are only that. A beginning. Whoever said anything different? We just find it pointless to convince you that Christianity is plausible when you think the existence of God is not. One must go step by step.
Not if we’ve just affirmed Aquinas’s five ways, because then it seems to make much more sense to say that God created us.
Of course it isn’t new. The truth is ageless.
Hubriss, I encourage you to be more careful about statements like this. First, because as a good, rational, nontheist it is best not to make an assertation (“you just give up”) without being able to prove it. Second, because to make such an assertation tends to encroach on needing to know the state of mind of a person, which is nearly impossible for you to testify to at this point.
But you* must* of course explain how these absolute truths came to be. If not God, then where? Feel free to explain. In fact, I encourage you to do so. Remember, absolute truths are invisible, intangible things, just like God, so make sure you have plenty of evidence to convince us hardened skeptics out here.
When I say “the Fathers” I’m referring to the leaders of Christianity in the first seven or eight centuries. I don’t mean modern leaders. I would say that today the vast majority of bishops (if not all) interpret Genesis symbolically. What I was saying is that a fair number of the ancient Fathers interpreted Genesis in a non-literal fashion.
. Apparently you’ve fallen prey to the common myth. 19th century writers wanted people to feel that we had evolved beyond the primitive and short sited peoples of the Middle Ages. These sorts of lies were fabricated. I was just talking to another agnostic about this the other night. (He was the one who mentioned that the “flat earth myth” was fabricated in the 19th century). The controversy was over the idea of a geocentric universe versus a heliocentric universe. The Church never infallibly defined this as dogma either. Church leaders screwed up here…but it wasn’t a matter of infallibility. (By the way, my history textbook has a little section on this too…the completely false notion that Medieval intellectuals perceived the world to be flat). Please check out davidmacd.com/catholic/galileo.htm. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei for a completely secular account of this. It had nothing to do with a flat earth! ).