The Falsification Debate

[LightSeaker]

1) The 'personal experience' ploy. If God didn't exist, then I wouldn't have had the experiences of Him that I have had. Or, at least, I would have interpreted them differently. Of course, my spiritual life has little relevance to anyone else, and is far from a testable, repeatable, verifiable piece of evidence. It may persuade me, but it is foolish to think it would persuade anyone else. Even in aggregate, the personal testimonies of all the theists that have ever lived are insufficient to persuade a single atheist. That is one reason, I suppose, why it so important to 'live the faith', to 'let our little lights shine', as opposed to retiring into hermitage, or to the seclusion of monastic isolation, however tempting the desire to contemplate absolute goodness might be. The best witness is not what we say, but how we live, and it's consequence for the world.

I'll respond to this part of your post since it looks sort of like a response to my post.

I saw the OP as a request for inner searching. The OP was asking something about ourselves, not others and not how to witness to others. Our relationship with God is not all about converting others. As such, my response was not centered around how to persuade others. In my post, as I searched inwardly, I was taking an inventory of my own relationship with God and knowing that for myself, it IS my own experiences of the presence of God that moves me the most towards the Divine that I see everywhere I turn my eyes.

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[god's_pawn]

The existence of evil proves that God, as defined in mainstream Christianity, doesn't exist. For it holds that:
(1) God is perfect in love.
(2) God foreknew the fall of Lucifer and Adam.
These two statements contradict each other. To see why, suppose you wanted to give birth to three kids, but were compelled to pick A or B below:
(A) Three kids foreknown to abstain from sin and thus make it to heaven.
(B) Three kids foreknown to condemn themselves, by sinnning, to hell.
Which would you choose? Obviously, if you are a loving person, you'd prefer choice A. If God is loving, He would only create those people and angels foreknown to abstain from sin. (Plenty of angels never sinned, for example). Therefore a loving God cannot be said to exist on the assumption that He foreknew evil. Well, I believe that a loving God exists, so I am forced to conclude that He did not foreknow all the evil seen today (He didn't know Adam would fall and was hoping that he wouldn't fall).

FYI: This doctrine that God lacks foreknowledge is known as Open Theism.

negative. if God created only good, it would not be good, simply normal. without evil there is no good. if God only made those who would abstain form sin, He would be a selective God and therefore not all-loving. God had to create the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (note the good and evil) in order that we would have a choice. if He hadn't created it and allowed us to sin and evil to be born then He would be nothing more than a ventriloquist and we his puppets. no ability to choose, no abilty, i dare say, to truly love. i don't believe in a God who creates robots.

 

[Zeena]

negative. if God created only good, it would not be good, simply normal. without evil there is no good. if God only made those who would abstain form sin, He would be a selective God and therefore not all-loving. God had to create the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (note the good and evil) in order that we would have a choice. if He hadn't created it and allowed us to sin and evil to be born then He would be nothing more than a ventriloquist and we his puppets. no ability to choose, no abilty, i dare say, to truly love. i don't believe in a God who creates robots.

The Lord did not create sinners, He created man who sins!
Man is responsable for his OWN sins!

He did not create Satan as a FALLEN being, but Satan chose to sin and fell!
Satan is responsable for his own sins!

God is NOT the author of sin!

 

[god's_pawn]

The Lord did not create sinners, He created man who sins!
Man is responsable for his OWN sins!

He did not create Satan as a FALLEN being, but Satan chose to sin and fell!
Satan is responsable for his own sins!

God is NOT the author of sin!

please forgive me, i did not mean that. to better put it, God permitted sin to occur, or should i say: He gave us the choice to sin if we so desired. We are responsible for our sins, but that is because we made the choice to do them, not because God made us do them.

 

[Zeena]

please forgive me, i did not mean that. to better put it, God permitted sin to occur, or should i say: He gave us the choice to sin if we so desired. We are responsible for our sins, but that is because we made the choice to do them, not because God made us do them.

TYVM!

 

[2ndRateMind]

No, Lightseaker...

I'll respond to this part of your post since it looks sort of like a response to my post.

I saw the OP as a request for inner searching. The OP was asking something about ourselves, not others and not how to witness to others.

I wasn't replying specifically at you. Though we do seem to be thinking along parallel lines.

Take the contention; there is a God. If we cannot falsify it, if we cannot disprove it, some philosophers would say that we simply haven't said anything meaningful. It is like saying 'there are unicorns', in a world bereft of unicorns. Each time you are asked for a definition of a unicorn, or about the qualities of a unicorn, you move the goalposts. First, a unicorn is like a horse, but with a horn. Nobody finds one. Then, you say they live deep in the forest, but nobody finds one, however far into the forest they venture. Then you say they can only be summoned by virgins, and still, virgins notwithstanding, nobody finds one. Then, you say they are invisible to mortals - and at this point one might ask, pertinently, what sort of reality are you attempting to describe by saying 'there are unicorns'?

It is not about an inner search, as I understand the OP. It is about 'does God's being make an objective, observable difference to the world'? If it does, He is significant. If it doesn't, in what way is He different from the unicorn we have gradually defined out of common-sense reality?

Best, 2ndRateMind.

 

[2ndRateMind]

negative. if God created only good, it would not be good, simply normal. without evil there is no good. if God only made those who would abstain form sin, He would be a selective God and therefore not all-loving. God had to create the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (note the good and evil) in order that we would have a choice. if He hadn't created it and allowed us to sin and evil to be born then He would be nothing more than a ventriloquist and we his puppets. no ability to choose, no abilty, i dare say, to truly love. i don't believe in a God who creates robots.

Couldn't disagree more. The good would still be good, whether we perceived it as normal or not. God is about ultimate goodness, not pandering to humanity's partial, biased opinion of what goodness is. If that means humanity suffers pain, and loss, and even death - well, faith is basically that these things are not meaningless, and that our lives are not trivial, but that they have some significance in the grand scheme of things. It is not necessary that evil exists so that we can tell the difference between good and evil. It is merely that evil exists so that ultimate good can exist.

The classic example is the surgeon's knife. Without the 'evil' of the surgeon's 'assault', then the goodness of recovery from illness could not happen.

I do agree that humans are not robots; I just think that their capacity to do evil, and their decisions to do evil, were entirely foreseen and deliberately designed to bring about a greater, long term, perfectly good conclusion. If one is to have monotheism, it seems to me that one must lay responsibility for both (what we consider) good and (what we consider) evil where it truly lies; at the innovative, creative spirit that built the entire universe. We should particularly be careful of doing a PR job on God; absolving Him from anything we disapprove of, and crediting Him with anything we approve of. That is not God, but a conceptualisation of Him that allows the atheist, with force, to state that God is a human creation, rather than the other way around.


Best wishes, 2ndRateMind

 

[god's_pawn]

Couldn't disagree more. The good would still be good, whether we perceived it as normal or not. God is about ultimate goodness, not pandering to humanity's partial, biased opinion of what goodness is. If that means humanity suffers pain, and loss, and even death - well, faith is basically that these things are not meaningless, and that our lives are not trivial, but that they have some significance in the grand scheme of things. It is not necessary that evil exists so that we can tell the difference between good and evil. It is merely that evil exists so that ultimate good can exist.

The classic example is the surgeon's knife. Without the 'evil' of the surgeon's 'assault', then the goodness of recovery from illness could not happen.

I do agree that humans are not robots; I just think that their capacity to do evil, and their decisions to do evil, were entirely foreseen and deliberately designed to bring about a greater, long term, perfectly good conclusion. If one is to have monotheism, it seems to me that one must lay resonsibility for both (what we consider) good and (what we consider) evil where it truly lies; at the innovative, creative spirit that built the entire universe. We should particularly be careful of doing a PR job on God; absolving Him from anything we disapprove of, and crediting Him with anything we approve of. That is not God, but a conceptualisation of Him that allows the atheist, with force, to state that God is a human creation, rather than the other way around.


Best wishes, 2ndRateMind

i am content with that. i tend to view the existance "good and evil" to be something similar to "north and south" on a magnet. without one the other looses its meaning. however, this difference in opinion is of no consequence since i also believe that only through the evil that God has allowed can the greatest good be achieved. that, yes, Adam and Eve were intended to eat of the forbidden tree such that a true maturing of God's most loved creation (that is us humans) can be reached. As James puts it in chapter 1 verses 2-4 Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

God bless, Stephen

 

[Yab Yum]

Ebola.

 

[Yab Yum]

The Lord did not create sinners, He created man who sins!
Man is responsable for his OWN sins!

He did not create Satan as a FALLEN being, but Satan chose to sin and fell!
Satan is responsable for his own sins!

God is NOT the author of sin!

So Satan's freedom is worth the suffering of a billion children?

 

[Yab Yum]

The classic example is the surgeon's knife. Without the 'evil' of the surgeon's 'assault', then the goodness of recovery from illness could not happen.

Don't worry folks, childhood leukemia is for our own good. Kid of like - "I'm so glad I'm back, I'm glad I went".

 

[god's_pawn]

So Satan's freedom is worth the suffering of a billion children?

Don't worry folks, childhood leukemia is for our own good. Kid of like - "I'm so glad I'm back, I'm glad I went".

you seem to be under the impression that any thing that is good must look good at all points in time. that God's goodness is more or less restricted to each present moment and that something that looks bad now must obviously be bad and will always be bad with no hope of ever being good or of good ever coming out of it. i hate suffering as much as you do yet that does not blind me from understanding the fact that a good and loving God MUST have a plan that is ultimately the best good possible despite what agonies and pains i must suffer and see others suffer. i have faith that despite the pain that exists, has existed, and will exist for some time to come (though thank God not indefinitely), God has the best intentions and plans in mind as well as both the ability and the desire to execute them. we are finite beings and therefore cannot comprehend the infinite effects of each and every happening/occurence that we see here on earth. God on the other hand, as an infinite and completely unrestricted being, can comprehend these things and i have no doubt that He uses each and every circumstance, whether it appears good or bad, to His ultimate glory and our ultimate and universal good.

(please also note the verse i posted in an earlier post on this thread: Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:2-4)

 

[ittarter]

Thought provoking thread.
2) The 'morality' ploy. CS Lewis uses this in his 'Mere Christianity'. I do not find his exposition entirely persuasive, yet it was by this method, by trying to be good and to understand goodness, that I eventually 'found God'. As I did so, the world I perceived radically altered. I was forced to re-evaluate all my beliefs, and from a new perspective I had previously dismissed as superstition. It was an humbling process. I can vouch though, having tried both atheism and theism, that the world of the atheist is very different from the world of the theist, but that only those who have known both can know that difference.

It seems to me now, that goodness in the world, whatever its provenance, natural or moral, heathen or Christian, is the shadow God casts upon His world, as He works through us all. Without God, there would be no shadow, no goodness, no significance to morality (and I am not talking here about who sleeps with who, but the widest possible sense of the term, which sees all our decisions as acting on our global community, and therefore all moral). In a world without God, the moral is reduced to the expedient, to what is in our (however enlightened) self-interest. And I think, as Lewis did, that in the end that is an unsatisfactory, incoherent, trivial world.

This reminds me of a lecture I heard in Edinburgh from Professor Oliver O'Donavan, entitled "David Hume's Surprise: 'Is,' 'ought,' and the transition of reason to faith." The basic idea is that the transition is philosophically inconceivable, but so are lots of things, as G. K. Chesterton's discussions of mundane social acts like "promises."

A summary of the lecture is available here, at my old blog.

With respect to the falsification debate, the move from reality to morality is astounding. O'Donavan finds its justification in the belief of a creator, and the belief that we are created, hence we are imbued with a sense that we are not merely IN the world but are also FOR the world. Perhaps the belief in a God, or a higher power to which we are accountable and to whom we owe a sense of purpose and calling, is truly necessary for morality as you define it, not morality in the sense of social taboos (easily explained by amoral origins such as evolution), but morality as you defined it earlier,

the widest possible sense of the term, which sees all our decisions as acting on our global community, and therefore all moral.

Thanks for your contribution.

 

[2ndRateMind]

The classic example is the surgeon's knife. Without the 'evil' of the surgeon's 'assault', then the goodness of recovery from illness could not happen.

Don't worry folks, childhood leukemia is for our own good. Kid of like - "I'm so glad I'm back, I'm glad I went".

I didn't say that, Yab Yum, for the simple reason that I don't believe it, or anything remotely similar. Recovery from a disease cannot justify the disease; it merely restores the status quo, as you imply. Yet, recovery is undoubtedly 'a good thing', possible only because some evil has befallen the afflicted. And suffering in general (from cancer to road-casualties, from earthquakes to insanity) seems to strike on a more or less random basis - it has little to do with the fault of, or the benefit of, the sufferer.

But I do think, as God's_Pawn does, that a perfectly good, omniscient, omnipotent God who created us to be the objects of His love and wants the best for us must have provided us with the best of all possible worlds. Clearly, God thinks that that involves challenges for us (collectively and individually) to overcome.

Perhaps that is the falsifying test, albeit a qualitative one, that we are looking for; if we can find some unanswerable reason or set of reasons why the world could be better than it is, why some evil or set of evils are unnecessary and gratuitous, then we would have good reason to doubt God's love or even His very existence, as Flew asks.

Best wishes, 2ndRateMind

 

[2ndRateMind]

With respect to the falsification debate, the move from reality to morality is astounding. O'Donavan finds its justification in the belief of a creator, and the belief that we are created, hence we are imbued with a sense that we are not merely IN the world but are also FOR the world.

Interesting that you think reality and morality are different. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you - CS Lewis sees morality as a brute fact about the human condition, which he appeals to as he attempts to explain to the casual atheism common in this country why faith is not unreasonable. I am inclined to agree with him here; morality is not subject to our whims and preferences, but is independent of human volition. Social mores may change, and as the Bible relates, clearly have changed, but I see morality as an objective ideal towards which it is humanity's privilege and duty to aspire.

Perhaps the belief in a God, or a higher power to which we are accountable and to whom we owe a sense of purpose and calling, is truly necessary for morality as you define it, not morality in the sense of social taboos (easily explained by amoral origins such as evolution), but morality as you defined it earlier...

Even as an atheist, I was aware of the call towards a universal morality. Indeed, part of the reason I wanted nothing to do with organised religion was that I felt it failed in this regard. The difference was, as an atheist, I wanted morality simply because it would be in our various self-interests to have it; as a Christian, I want it more for it's own sake, it's intrinsic value, because it is true, and just, and beautiful, and good, and right, and pure. The fact that it is also God's Will for us, (as I believe), is a secondary consideration for me, though the last of a rather elegant and satisfying confluence of concepts.

As usual, you have made me think; thankyou for that.

Best wishes, 2ndRateMind.

 

[Yab Yum]

It's very, very simple - there is no "complex plan" about it.

Is Satan's free will more valuable than the sum of all suffering, or not?

It's a very simple yes or no question.

 

[2ndRateMind]

It's very, very simple - there is no "complex plan" about it.

Is Satan's free will more valuable than the sum of all suffering, or not?

It's a very simple yes or no question.

Hey Yab Yum

You might like to check out this thread: http://www.christianforums.com/t7393185/

In which I make the case that Satan's freedom is our freedom.

Best, 2RM

 

[Yab Yum]

Hey Yab Yum

You might like to check out this thread: http://www.christianforums.com/t7393185/

In which I make the case that Satan's freedom is our freedom.

Best, 2RM

Yes of course it is - I agree with that. The question still stands however.

 

[2ndRateMind]

Yes of course it is - I agree with that. The question still stands however.

Indeed it does, with a subtle distinction - is our freedom more valuable than the sum of all suffering? And that is a difficult thing to weigh. However we decide, God has already made His choice. The most that is left to us is to properly appreciate the martyrs to His decision, and exercise our freedom by doing what is in our power to alleviate whatever suffering we find.

Best wishes, 2RM.

 

[ittarter]

Interesting that you think reality and morality are different. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you - CS Lewis sees morality as a brute fact about the human condition, which he appeals to as he attempts to explain to the casual atheism common in this country why faith is not unreasonable. I am inclined to agree with him here; morality is not subject to our whims and preferences, but is independent of human volition. Social mores may change, and as the Bible relates, clearly have changed, but I see morality as an objective ideal towards which it is humanity's privilege and duty to aspire.

O'Donavan would agree. The necessity to determine the one good is not a freedom to choose, but merely a freedom to decide. In other words, we cannot choose what obligations we have -- we can only decide whether or not to fulfill them.

The difference between reality and morality that I was trying to point out was that the former is merely descriptive, whereas the latter is prescriptive. Reality is what IS (leading solely to reflection), and morality is what is OWED (leading past reflection to action). Because morality involves human decision-making in its fulfillment, it ranks not as actuality but as possibility.

Even as an atheist, I was aware of the call towards a universal morality. Indeed, part of the reason I wanted nothing to do with organised religion was that I felt it failed in this regard. The difference was, as an atheist, I wanted morality simply because it would be in our various self-interests to have it; as a Christian, I want it more for it's own sake, it's intrinsic value, because it is true, and just, and beautiful, and good, and right, and pure. The fact that it is also God's Will for us, (as I believe), is a secondary consideration for me, though the last of a rather elegant and satisfying confluence of concepts.

I think that this is exactly what is most poignant in the falsification debate. Morality with respect to self-interest or utility is really no morality at all. Morality must exist for its own sake, as you say, it must have "intrinsic value," or it fails to pass the test as a "proof" of the existence of God.

Sociologically, this is simply what Peter Berger describes as the stage of internalizing social norms into one's self-consciousness, and is yet again sacrificed at the great altar of utility, the true god of the modern era. For myself, anyway, this constitutes the arena where the last battle between my religious and the secular parts will occur.

Your "morality response" to my OP has been very helpful for me. Thanks!