What do you consider proof of God, if anything?

[masterjedi747]

And in response to the OP…

What do you consider proof of God, if anything?

…everything.
But to put it more accurately: the sheer fact that things exist necessitates the existence of a necessary being (even though that alone isn’t enough to establish that God as the Christian God).

Has anyone had what they would consider a miracle happen, seen an angel, seen a person healed by prayer, etc?

No, although I certainly believe that these things have happened before. However, even if they never had, that wouldn’t affect the fact at hand. Even the pagan Aristotle reasoned to the existence of a necessary being above all the other gods, and I seriously doubt that he ever saw a miracle, an angel, or a person healed by prayer.

I don’t believe because I have never seen any proof…

It’s all around you, buddy. Just look at the big picture. Why is there something rather than nothing?

 

[DavidHume]

No, any use of observation and experience to justify cause-and-effect must already presuppose that observation and experience is true… seeing as how those are the means by which we come to our understanding of cause and effect.

Mere observation and experience cannot suffice for inferring things that one does not directly observe and experience, like the principle that every effect in the natural universe has a cause. This requires induction, which relies on principles like cause and effect for its operation.

I’m curious as to whether you’ve read Kant, by the way? Critique of Pure Reason? Not that he’s right, in the end, but he’s at least better than Hume in many respects.

Because he’s not an atheist, I assume?

One of the first things that he does, by the way, is point out the fact that Hume contradicts himself by denying the possibility of any a priori concepts but somehow still granting the validity of mathematics apart from our experience of reality.

Hume grants the validity of mathematics as a self-consistent system, but it is one which is not necessarily connected to the world of experience that we call the universe. It was important to Kant that mathematics be included in the same ontological realm as knowledge gained through sense perceptions, so that one could claim certain knowledge about propositions outside mathematics.

It was not important to Hume that this hold true.

Hume is not the final word on empiricism, of course. Despite my forum nickname, I favor many of the ideas of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

 

[DavidHume]

You are going to need to have a very good reason to deny that you cannot use that past reason to do the exact same thing again.

Not at all. This event is not the same event as the last time – it is happening at a different time. What reason do I have to think that I can predict the effects? More importantly, what reason do I have to think that I can generalize that I can always, even given as much knowledge of the past as possible, deduce effect from cause, and vice versa?

Your position is based on a faulty premise that induction relies on causality to work.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to truth. That is, what is the justification for either:

1. generalising about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that “all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white,” before the discovery of black swans) or
2. presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold).

edit: plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ is a bit more authoritative than Wikipedia

 

[PaulAndrew83]

I have read those sites today actually we are searching the same things. My brother has all of my philosophy books right now about 5 mile away so I have to use stanford and wiki to revise what I remember.

Point 1: In neither of those sites does it state that induction as in inductive reasoning rely on cause and effect to be true.

Point 2: After observing a single event and you have seen a cause and effect relationship do you deny that in this one single event causality was observed. Or do you say there only appears to be a cause and effect relationship in this one event.

Point 3: Causality is observed continually by us. I do not see how you can then deny that causality is at least a particular law of our existence.[edit: at least up to right now ]

Discuss

Paul

 

[DavidHume]

I have read those sites today actually we are searching the same things. My brother has all of my philosophy books right now about 5 mile away so I have to use stanford and wiki to revise what I remember.

Point 1: In neither of those sites does it state that induction as in inductive reasoning rely on cause and effect to be true.

The SEP link contains

First two notes about vocabulary. The term ‘induction’ does not appear in Hume’s argument, nor anywhere in the Treatise or the first Inquiry, for that matter. Hume’s concern is with inferences concerning causal connections, which, on his account are the only connections “which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses” (Hume THN, 89). But the difference between such inferences and what we know today as induction is largely a matter of terminology. [emph. added]

Point 2: After observing a single event and you have seen a cause and effect relationship do you deny that in this one single event causality was observed. Or do you say there only appears to be a cause and effect relationship in this one event.

If it suits me, I can say that a cause and effect has occurred. But I do not have any more justification according to logic, or justification according to perception alone, than someone who would say that it was a random confluence of events.

Point 3: Causality is observed continually by us. I do not see how you can then deny that causality is at least a particular law of our existence.[edit: at least up to right now ]

It’s not so much a question of flat denial as it is a question of dubitability. I have no way to know for sure – according to ancient, medieval, and renaissance ideas of “knowledge” – that the universe was not created ex nihilo at 7 AM today, and my memories and everyone else’s memories were created intact to seemingly reflect a causal chain that never happened.

Epistemology since the eighteenth century has largely taken the form of responses to this observation, either by positing other kinds of knowledge aside from analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori (see Kant and the idealists), or by re-examining what it means for something to be true in an empirical framework (see the logical positivists and the pragmati(ci)sts).

 

[PaulAndrew83]

The SEP link contains
SEP:

First two notes about vocabulary. The term ‘induction’ does not appear in Hume’s argument, nor anywhere in the Treatise or the first Inquiry, for that matter. Hume’s concern is with inferences concerning causal connections, which, on his account are the only connections “which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses” (Hume THN, 89). **But the difference between such inferences and what we know today as induction is largely a matter of terminology. **

[emph. added]

I’m almost out of time till later so I only can deal with one of the points I made.
Please show exactly how inductive reasoning depends on causality. With quotes from Hume stating that the substantial method of inference depends on causality being true.

This will be specifically different from this particular inference depends on causality.

Paul

 

[DavidHume]

As the SEP states, Hume only discusses causal chains, and never uses the term “induction.” If you read section 4 of the Stanford “problem of induction” article you will see how the two are related.

This is moot, though, because as you said yourself, the cosmological argument specifically requires causality, which Hume did address. Forms of induction unrelated to cause-and-effect are also unrelated to the rejection of the cosmological argument.

As far as the relevant text from Hume goes:

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses. If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. A man finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious. The hearing of an articulate voice and rational discourse in the dark assures us of the presence of some person: Why? because these are the effects of the human make and fabric, and closely connected with it. If we anatomize all the other reasonings of this nature, we shall find that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that this relation is either near or remote, direct or collateral. Heat and light are collateral effects of fire, and the one effect may justly be inferred from the other.

As you can see Hume tends to use “cause” in its ancient, broader connotation rather than in the more modern material sense. This is what the SEP entry means when it says the difference is terminological rather than substantive.

 

[KatyElizabeth]

If you wait for proof, you may never experience the joys that Faith brings and the elation that comes from feeling your sins are forgiven by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
For me it was existential despair or Faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
Simple really.
I don’t feel that I need an “explanation” for those that might harass me for my decision to believe. If it be God’s Will, they will be inspired by my actions, not my intellectual debating skills.

 

[lcalise]

Even though I have faith and have experienced God’s presence, in the past, I’ve been fearful that my belief in God could plausibly simply an emotive response masquerading as faith. But the nice side is, faith is always compatible with logic and this is the one that always ropes me back into sanity:

Everything in scientific and human experience has a beginning from which it came. However, with simple “existence” you hit a road block. Even the hypotheses about the nature of space-time prior to the Big Bang still require something to either happen or exist prior to set everything else in motion. Now, that doesn’t in any way prove the Catholic Christian understanding of God, but it does demand that something has to exist outside of the normal order of the universe to allow for the nature of the universe to simply be.

After accepting that, my faith, study, and experience always lead me home =)

 

[masterjedi747]

It’s not so much a question of flat denial as it is a question of dubitability. I have no way to know for sure – according to ancient, medieval, and renaissance ideas of “knowledge” – that the universe was not created ex nihilo at 7 AM today, and my memories and everyone else’s memories were created intact to seemingly reflect a causal chain that never happened.

But you don’t actually believe that. You don’t think that you know the universe was created ex nihilo at 7 AM this morning. And, if there’s a scientific bone in your body, you think you know that the universe is billions of years old. You think you know, and yet, somehow, you don’t know that you know… just like you think that you know that you can’t really know anything about the outside world for sure.

Well, guess what? In a very real sense, you’re right. And surprisingly enough, Aristotle covered this in the Posterior Analytics (71b9–12): “We think that we know a thing without qualification… whenever we think that we know the cause, that it is the cause, and that it cannot be otherwise.”

You think that you know things when you think that you know though the cause, but you can’t know for sure… because you can’t demonstrate it through the cause. If you could demonstrate though the cause, then you would think that you knew it. But you can’t. It’s an indemonstrable first principle.** However**, that does not and cannot stop us from recognizing that we know things – it’s indemonstrable, but it’s still self-evident that it is true, even though it is not self-evident why it is true. So yes, it is a different kind of knowledge – we don’t know it through the cause, so we don’t strictly speaking know it in the most proper sense. But we still know that it is true, and that’s good enough. Because, no matter how much we might wish it to be the case, not everything can be demonstrated through the cause. And some first principles are of this sort – we can’t know why they’re true (so yes, we can’t know them most perfectly), but that doesn’t mean we can’t be certain that they’re true.

However, if you deny that knowledge is possible on any level, then not only do you destroy all scientific knowledge, you contradict the most fundamental principle of all common experience. Your choice. But I think the choice is obvious for any intelligent person that’s got their head screwed on straight… Aristotle was right. Dogmatic skepticism leads nowhere. We think that we know when we know through the cause, and that alone, even though it can’t be shown through the cause, is self-evident, and thus is enough of a solid basis for us to begin building a science upon.

 

[DavidHume]

However, if you deny that knowledge is possible on any level, then not only do you destroy all scientific knowledge, you contradict the most fundamental principle of all common experience.

To deny that cause and effect is self-evident or observable is not the same as to claim that knowledge is impossible. In my (silly) example, aside from a belief in global cause and effect being the result of misinformation, it is still meaningful to talk of knowledge within the universe as it is experienced.

In the 7AM world as it is observed it is useful to talk of cause and effect, insofar as it can be perceived within that world, but it is useless to use that pragmatically accepted cause and effect to postulate properties about things external to that world – which a cosmological argument requires us to do.

 

[masterjedi747]

• We only know of the principle of cause-and-effect through induction about events that we actually experience
• Therefore there is no a priori justification for supposing any cause-and-effect relation for events that we do not actually experience

So you’re basically denying that induction can lead us from particulars to more universal truth. (Yes?)

what Hume says is actually stronger – we don’t have any a priori justification for cause-and-effect period

…which still seems absolutely nuts. Every effect must have a cause, practically by definition. Something cannot come from nothing. (…or do you also reject the principle of non-contradiction?)

but certainly not for events that are only known through hypothesis like in the Thomist argument

…which event is only known through hypothesis in the Thomist argument?

Aquinas’s cosmological argument takes as a priori that causality uniformly applies throughout the entire universe and throughout all of time.

I’m not sure which step in what argument you’re referring to, but I can’t even begin to imagine what you might mean by suggesting that causality might not “uniformly apply throughout the entire universe and throughout all of time”. Again, are you suggesting that the principle of non-contradiction is somehow false?

A Humean objection would be that there is no justification a priori for this idea of causality and no way to establish it via observation…

…which again, I think, arises from the Humean denial that induction can ever lead us from particulars to a more universal truth. Because if it could, as Aristotle/Aquinas maintain, then there’s really no problem if our observation of particulars leads us to develop an idea of universal causality.

…or one must reject the cosmological argument as sufficient justification for belief in God, since it relies on an unjustified premise.

Remind me of how the “cosmological argument” runs again, and which premise you are referring to particularly? Which of the 5 ways are you classifying as the “cosmological argument”? (…?)

Kant and the German-style idealism that followed him can all be viewed as attempts to rescue causality from Hume’s critique.

Yeah, well that might be because the conclusions that Hume reached were so obviously false that no one would seriously continue to defend it once he was gone…

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

I’m curious what people consider as proof that there is a God, or if you even think proof is possible. Has anyone had what they would consider a miracle happen, seen an angel, seen a person healed by prayer, etc?

Two problems - we can be deceived; &, certain things can’t be experienced by proxy nor their reality known at second-hand. A mystic may have a genuine apparition, but the experience can be known fully only by being experienced; otherwise, all one has is the news that someone has had the experience. St Bernardette experienced apparitions - we have only the news that she did. So X may have seen an angel - but for Y, X’s vision is news, & no more.​

Another problem - angels are only creatures. Seeing creatures is no big deal (even if it ought to be); & “seeing God” cannot be comparable - because God is Incomparable. He Alone really exists (atheism gets things back-to-front AFAICS ) How can nothingnesses such as angels be proof of God ? At most, the universe may point to a mind of some kind as its author - that is no evidence (let alone proof !) of the “Christian” Deity. The Unmoved Mover is not the God of the Gospel.

I don’t believe because I have never seen any proof, so I am curious what others have seen or what they would even consider proof. My purpose is not to try and explain anything away, I’m actually just genuinely curious about other’s experiences and logic on this subject.

Several notions of God are involved here, & they are not identical - the name God may be used for any or all of the following:​

• The various OT ideas about God
• The NT God
• The various ideas about God in the centuries of the Church Fathers - i.e., to 750 or so
• The fully developed notion - so far, that is - of the God of Christian systematic theology
• And there are lots of other ideas about God or gods.

So which are you asking about ?

I don’t believe that God can be proven to exist. I hate the idea of proof of God. Atheists who deny that any God exists are preferable, because their position is clear; one can know where one stands with them. The covert atheism of attempts to prove that God exists are dangerous because it is not so obvious that these attempts are rationalistic attempts to make clear to the intellect through reason what can be known only by faith. Reason is too feeble, & its reach is too short, to come to God - as well might one expect a goods train to travel over a bridge of gossamer. Besides, faith is God’s gift, to whom, in the measure, at the time, in the circumstances that it pleases Him to bestow it. It can’t be had by any human effort - it is entirely the gift of God alone. And to seek to force God to prove His existence to our feeble reason, by using that same reason, is to make God serve sinful man

Luther said, very rightly, “Reason is a whore”. He has often been criticised for saying so, but all he meant was this: that reason can be used to demonstrate anything & to prove anything: to argue against God, as well as to be used to serve God. Reason has its uses, but if it seeks to prove God, it is like Icarus flying too near the sun & finding his wings come unstuck - to soar too high on the wings of our reason is to come too near the Sun of Righteousness, & if we do that, more than our reason will be blasted - because “man cannot bear too much reality” - & God is Wholly Real. God can be known - but not grabbed. That’s impolite, & it’s no way to come to Him. God can’t be known on any terms except His own.

Hope that makes some sort of sense

 

[masterjedi747]

God Alone really exists… How can nothingnesses such as angels be proof of God ?

Not quite right. All creatures in existence have existence. But God alone has perfect existence – He alone is wholly actual, whereas all creatures necessarily are imperfect in some respect.

At most, the universe may point to a mind of some kind as its author - that is no evidence (let alone proof !) of the “Christian” Deity.

…what are you talking about? Yeah, it kind of is, especially in retrospect.

The Unmoved Mover is not the God of the Gospel.

That is just not true. The Unmoved Mover is definitely not the only thing that the God of the Gospel is, but they are most certainly one and the same God.

I don’t believe that God can be proven to exist. I hate the idea of proof of God.

Reason is too feeble, & its reach is too short, to come to God

Well then, let me just make it clear to all our other readers that your position is 100% opposed to Church doctrine on this matter: (underline added)

35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.

36 "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason."11 Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God’s revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created “in the image of God”.12

37 In the historical conditions in which he finds himself, however, man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone:

Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.13

38 This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God’s revelation, not only about those things that exceed his understanding, but also “about those religious and moral truths which of themselves are not beyond the grasp of human reason, so that even in the present condition of the human race, they can be known by all men with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error”. 14 ** IN BRIEF***

47 The Church teaches that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty from his works, by the natural light of human reason (cf. Vatican Council I, can. 2 § 1: DS 3026)*

Besides, faith is God’s gift, to whom, in the measure, at the time, in the circumstances that it pleases Him to bestow it. It can’t be had by any human effort - it is entirely the gift of God alone.

Absolutely correct. Don’t disagree with a word of it.

And to seek to force God to prove His existence to our feeble reason, by using that same reason, is to make God serve sinful man

God can’t be known on any terms except His own.

Nobody is forcing God to prove anything. But, while we’re here, just who are you to tell God how He should or should not choose to reveal Himself to His creatures?

 

[masterjedi747]

Luther said, very rightly, “Reason is a whore”.

Luther was dead wrong about many things, including that statement.

But let’s just flesh out his whole statements a little more, shall we?..

“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed…”
—Martin Luther, Works, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148.

“Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
—Martin Luther, Table Talks in 1569.

…yep. Dead, dead wrong. :nope: Not a shred of truth in those statements. Reason is one of God’s greatest gifts to man, and it is most certainly not opposed to Faith.

…all he meant was this: that reason can be used to demonstrate anything & to prove anything:

Not strictly speaking true. The intellect can be deceived, but reason cannot possibly demonstrate or prove something from false principles.

Reason has its uses, but if it seeks to prove God, it is like Icarus flying too near the sun & finding his wings come unstuck - to soar too high on the wings of our reason is to come too near the Sun of Righteousness, & if we do that, more than **our reason will be blasted **- because “man cannot bear too much reality” - & God is Wholly Real.

Faith and Reason are NOT opposed. The Divine Light of Revelation does not “blast” reason away – it illuminates reason, raising it to even higher truths.

 

[DavidHume]

So you’re basically denying that induction can lead us from particulars to more universal truth. (Yes?)

Induction can lead us from particulars to other particulars. There are only “particular truths”… the idea of some kind of varying hierarchy of truth is Platonic metaphysics.

…which still seems absolutely nuts. Every effect must have a cause, practically by definition.

Every effect must, yes, but it is not established that everything that exists is an effect. It is also not established that anything causes anything else.

…which event is only known through hypothesis in the Thomist argument?

Uniform cause and effect is only known through hypothesis in the Thomist argument. No deductive argument is given to support it, and no inductive argument is possible.

I’m not sure which step in what argument you’re referring to, but I can’t even begin to imagine what you might mean by suggesting that causality might not “uniformly apply throughout the entire universe and throughout all of time”.

Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses.
…
Suppose, again, that he has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which the one object produces the other; nor is it, by any process of reasoning, he is engaged to draw this inference. But still he finds himself determined to draw it: And though he should be convinced that his understanding has no part in the operation, he would nevertheless continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion.

This principle is Custom or Habit. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom.

Again, are you suggesting that the principle of non-contradiction is somehow false?

The truth or falsehood of a principle of non-contradiction, being one purely concerned with the relation of ideas and not with matters of fact and observation, is not germane to the conversation.

Remind me of how the “cosmological argument” runs again, and which premise you are referring to particularly? Which of the 5 ways are you classifying as the “cosmological argument”? (…?)

It’s post 11 and post 20.

Yeah, well that might be because the conclusions that Hume reached were so obviously false that no one would seriously continue to defend it once he was gone…

I think you are operating under a medieval view of philosophy. Philosophy is not simply a competition of dogmas, their champions and their acolytes. Philosophy is an intellectual and historical dialogue; philosophers always proceed by contrasting their work with that of their predecessors. One measure of a good philosopher is how often other philosophers bother to rebut their work.

That being said, the logical positivists (Carnap, Ayer, et al.) and American pragmaticists (Peirce, James, etc.) both advocated direct descendants of Humean thought.

 

[HelenaMT]

I’m curious what people consider as proof that there is a God, or if you even think proof is possible. Has anyone had what they would consider a miracle happen, seen an angel, seen a person healed by prayer, etc? I don’t believe because I have never seen any proof, so I am curious what others have seen or what they would even consider proof. My purpose is not to try and explain anything away, I’m actually just genuinely curious about other’s experiences and logic on this subject.

I have nothing I’d call proof but a lifetime of experiences that led me to believe that some outside force was present in my life. Many instances of unlikely “coincidences” after praying for guidance or strength, several inexplicable psychic-seeming ocurrences that still make me uneasy (these didn’t point to God for me, however, just to the existence of something past the normal understanding of the physical), several instances of having obstacles placed between me and some sinful or dangerous behavior, and the feeling of peace and safety I used to get from praying to God as a child even before I ever had a religious affiliation or knew anything about Christ.

I was raised in a secular household, never went to church, never learned anything about religion until adolescence. My family and friends were pretty much all anti-religious and either atheists or agnostics. I have no memory of where I got my early ideas of God from, but I recall I thought he/it was all seeing and existed in everything, and might listen to you if you concentrated hard enough. I had no concept of hell or heaven, other than that heaven was what some people called the place you went when you died.

I lost my belief in God as I got older and picked up the influences around me and didn’t find religion appealing until adulthood, and even now after 20+ years as a Christian, would consider myself a chronic doubter.

My husband had a relative who had a near-death experience that changed his life, and himself has had quite a few “psychic” experiences, some that I have been present for, that keep me from being able to ever totally dismiss that there is “something out there” and I guess that feeds my continuing belief in God.

I don’t think there is any one definitive proof that will convince a skeptic who is at peace with his non-belief, or who finds god-belief distasteful. With my upbringing, I doubt I would have ever come to believe in God again at all without my personal experiences. It’s one of the reasons I do feel connected to God more often than not. Without the benefit of growing up in a faith-filled household, I am sure I would have remained an atheist had I not actually gotten to “feel” that connection for myself.

 

[BirdandBee]

I personally find the teleological argument pretty compelling…

…And that’s not why I’m a Christian, or even why I believe in God.

I don’t like to discuss divine truths with people of a very sceptical or hostile spirit; more often than not I turn them against the truth rather than assist them in their search. Suffice it to say: reason, untempered by divine truth and the heart, turns against itself.

 

[masterjedi747]

the idea of some kind of varying hierarchy of truth is Platonic metaphysics.

Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.

Seriously, though, do you simply deny the existence of universals? I suppose you don’t recognize a difference between the concepts signified by “triangle” and “this triangle”, or between “man” and “this man”?

Every effect must, yes, but it is not established that everything that exists is an effect. It is also not established that anything causes anything else.

But we see things cause other things; we see causes produce effects. So once I’ve seen the same cause produce the same effect a sufficient number of times, why can’t I simply conclude that one is the cause of the other?

And to ask a parallel question: Why is common sense being done away with? Why not simply admit that we can make such a conclusion, and go to work on determining how we can (since we obviously think that we can)?

Uniform cause and effect is only known through hypothesis in the Thomist argument. No deductive argument is given to support it, and no inductive argument is possible.

Well, perhaps no deductive or inductive argument can possibly be given. Perhaps it’s simply an indemonstrable first principle that you just have to accept as a patently obvious and self-evident fact.
David Hume:

…
Suppose, again, that he has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which the one object produces the other…

And… this is exactly where I think Hume is quite wrong. Just because we don’t understand why one object is the cause of another, it doesn’t mean we can’t still know that one object is the cause of the other. I don’t have to know “the secret power” of fire in order to know that it will always burn dry wood under the proper conditions.

And I don’t just mean “I’m pretty sure fire will burn dry wood, because that’s what I always see it do; although maybe it won’t this time”… I mean “I know that fire will always burn dry wood under the proper conditions, because that’s what fire does; and if it doesn’t, then something else is preventing it from happening”.

I think you are operating under a medieval view of philosophy.

And maybe the medieval view of philosophy is the correct one…

Philosophy is not simply a competition of dogmas, their champions and their acolytes. Philosophy is an intellectual and historical dialogue

…and what is that supposed to mean, and what exactly does the difference amount to? Is it ever possible for there to be one philosophy that reaches the truth, or is it just a continual evolution of ideas with no certain end?

philosophers always proceed by contrasting their work with that of their predecessors.

Often so, but I don’t see why they particularly have to… other than the fact that they often do intend to build upon or tear down certain teachings of their teachers.

One measure of a good philosopher is how often other philosophers bother to rebut their work.

Perhaps a better measure of a good philosopher is how long and to what extent their teachings survive among the most intelligent circles of thinkers after they are gone.

 

[DavidHume]

Well, perhaps no deductive or inductive argument can possibly be given. Perhaps it’s simply an indemonstrable first principle that you just have to accept as a patently obvious and self-evident fact.

That’s fine, but why not simply accept God as an indemonstrable first principle instead of pretending to do philosophy?