Is Infallibility Possible or Desirable?

Mountainmike said:

Despite the bible saying it is!
Checkout the meaning of “ bind and loose in heaven” as it was understood by first century Jews,

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Your interpretation of "binding and loosing" may be different than mine. Jesus Christ of Nazareth gave this command to the Apostels, the original 12. This is not meant for anyone else as they are the foundation of the Gospel and Christ is the Chief Cornerstone.
We should probably stop at this point as we are trying to reconcile a long on going debate between Catholics and Protestants. Thanks for engaging!

It is true that authority is what divides us.

The problem is without that power you no longer have a New Testament or creed.

All Christians have relied on God acting infallibly through men.

Maria Billingsley said:

Your interpretation of "binding and loosing" may be different than mine. Jesus Christ of Nazareth gave this command to the Apostels, the original 12. This is not meant for anyone else as they are the foundation of the Gospel and Christ is the Chief Cornerstone.
We should probably stop at this point as we are trying to reconcile a long on going debate between Catholics and Protestants. Thanks for engaging!

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Hmm said:

A definition of faith I've always liked is that it's belief in the face of objective uncertainty.

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That's a nice "internet definition" of faith, but it isn't the Christian definition. Your definition will lead you astray.

Psalms 78:17-22 is a powerful passage that helps us define faith. They absolutely believed God existed. But they doubted he would take care of them if they followed him.

Psalms 78:22 tells us that these people did not have faith. They "believed in God." But didn't have faith in his character.

Hebrews 11:1 isn't very helpful towards understanding faith, but Hebrews 11:6 helps a lot.

Hebrews 11:6
And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Faith is about trusting that God is real, and that seeking him is worthwhile.

Infallibility of knowledge to do with certain truths is both possible and (somewhat) desirable in an epistemological sense if Christianity is true.

If, for example, the experience of Gods presence isn’t just an evolutionary brain fog, rather it’s actually the product of an outside referent (i.e. God Himself,) then right there we wouldn’t just have an off colour belief produced by who knows what, rather we’d have an experience as infallible as anything else we see, hear or feel in daily life.

We would be understanding the source of that feeling aright.

Long before I had formed any sort of sophisticated theology I experienced the company of someone else, an invisible, benevolent someone else, calling him God worked fine for me, as fine as me calling Him anything else.

I class that in the same way that I class moral experiences.

Ditto the Holy Spirit. Once again, presupposing Christianity were true, you and I could know infallibly (or as infallibly as anything else we know) certain truths.

Maybe we wouldn’t class sights and sounds as infallible, we probably shouldn’t, but thinking on it now, the experience of Gods presence is more reliable than those things when we do experience it.

For more on the subject I’d recommend people read Alvin Plantinga’s Knowledge and Christian beliefs. He goes into concepts beyond beliefs, exploring notions like rational warrant, the justifiability of our range of beliefs.

So I believe it’s possible.

But certainty being desirable, to us it’s desirable, because we’re always out to negate danger or to mitigate the consequences of certain behaviours. We want to ease our troubled mind mostly.

From a Gods eye view I’m sure it’s not always preferable, simply on account of what we’d do with certainty.

For example, social studies show us that human beings don’t avoid crime based upon the severity of the punishment, so if I said stealing a candy bar from the store will result in your hand being chopped off, that’s not necessarily going to stop people from stealing.

What stops people from stealing is their own notions about the likelihood of them being caught, their own level of certainty as to whether they’ll be caught or not. If they’re certain of being caught they’ll restraint themselves.

We’d steal candy all day long (even if the punishment is death) so long as we feel there’s slim to no chance of being caught, but we won’t dare steal for fear of a slap on the wrist (if we think the slap is definitely coming.)

So certainty isn’t always something we use to our own spiritual development, it’s like Paul writing “all things are lawful to me, but not all things are beneficial.”

A modern saying I liked was “opportunity creates the criminal.” Very true too.

Or we could just write in plain that when the wife gets a ring on her finger, she puts on 10 pounds and stops taking care of herself.

We’re the bride, not always a faithful one. If God isn’t putting a ring of absolute certainty on everybody’s finger, maybe that’s a kindness to them.

In short I think certainty is possible, but it’s such a crutch for most people, that comes in the form of hiding behind an infallible teaching magisterium too, it’s comforting.

We want to live in a certain kind of world, making a bet we can’t lose on, but the world we have isn’t safe like that. God often deals cards we’d rather exchange, if we could.

Hmm said:

Well, it came from Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and canon at Christ Church, Oxford.

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I don't care who it came from.

Hmm said:

You're obviously free to care or not care about whatever you want

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As are you. I showed you where I got my definition from. Did he show you where he got his?

I have nothing if God is not good. I have everything if God loves me. that is how I look at it. i'm already terrible enough. I need God or I need to not exist. atheist don't have high standards because they don't believe in God. I can't lower my standards because I believe God gives much more meaning to me and all of reality. that often gives me pain and suffering just as much as it can give comfort.

i'm not omnimax. you can't even be certain as to the nature of this universe. it could be a simulation. I live in the reality of spirit but it could all be mere psychological and biological phenomena, especially to the ones that have faith that it is only such. it seems we can not escape from the reality of subjectivity, perception, desire, reason, faith. most people do not count subjectivity or themselves as a special part of reality.

a persons freedom is something God wants more than the person often wants. but it will be worth it once we discover the grand purpose of our own freedom and we can reflect on some questions arising from AGI (artificial general intelligence) speculation. I was listening to a lex fridman podcast with elon musk, the first one. a question was asked to elon about "how would one know if an AGI was telling the truth if it said it loved you?" which is sort of in the same line of thinking as "how would you know if AGI was conscious like we humans are?".... he replied that he does not know about some kind of higher reality which could or could not be and that looking at it from his training as a physicist he concluded that if it can convince us that it loves us then it does and is perhaps indistinguishable from humans biological and psychological complex computations. the last question was "if elon could ask an AGI that is superior to humans one question what would it be?" and then he paused for a long while and said "I ask it what is beyond the simulation?" which I thought was humble of him.

are we even real to God if we are simpletons forever enslaved and captured by the divine beauty? it's no wonder a reality like this exist. God might be making sure we are real, or he is trying to show us that we are real or he is trying to make us realer. a variety of experiences might make us come to life more. to an infinite God we might not seem very real compared to him. we got a long ways to go I guess, which is a great hope full of meaning. to me a simulation ends up implying that there is an ultimate God.

Hmm said:

Good to read your posts again... knew that that was fated though

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Irresistible even.

You’re right though about exchanging our lot of hardships in life, they’re ours in a unique way. Since uncertainty is often part of why people are hurting though, we’d love to exchange that for a large part of someone else’s confidence. Whether or not that confidence is ill founded people usually don’t care, they’d rather be fully sold out on anything than be ill at ease with the truth.

Not knowing comes as a hardship and certainty is it’s cure, relief from being forced to live in that uncertain space.

There’s a popular experiment where a group of paid actors or students in on the joke are in an elevator, they all face the back wall, not the elevator door, and they ride that elevator all day long.

Regular people who come into the elevator start by facing the door like always, that’s sensible. Though here’s the mad part. The longer they have to ride, chances are they’ll turn around and start facing the wall like everyone else.

They face the wall, partially turn to face it a little more, anything to fit in. Young people were more likely to conform, the older less so. We want certainty and safety, to conform to something that “works,” even if it doesn’t work.

Mega churches and the ancient power of the RCC (whether true or false) are a great example of that feeling, safety in numbers, authority, certainty. A feeling that says wherever you’re going, at least there’s company.

René Descartes was a fantastic read on certainty for me. He wrote about a wax fruit on the table by his hand, he holds it, rolls it about, gets a feel for it’s substance so that he can say he knows the thing.

Then he moves the table nearer to his fireplace, in awhile the wax fruit is a puddle. It was cold to the touch, now it radiates heat, it was solid and mouldable, now it’s liquid and (to him) untouchable.

He ends by writing “so, how much did I know about the fruit at the start?” Not so much as he first assumed given its changes while still remaining the same in essence.

So he starts winding back his beliefs, is this my hand, my arm, do I have an arm, an arm in a different sense from the wax fruit or an arm in the same sense.

In the end he lands on one sure fire belief, “I think, therefore I am.” He can doubt everything but himself, since if he doubts himself, who’s the one doing the doubting. So we’re here, thank God.

That rules out every belief that says we aren’t here, Buddhism, for example.

He goes on to believe that every other belief (if worthy of being believed) has to be the product of his senses, reliable senses, and the only sure fire way to know our senses were reliably made is to believe in a creator whose loving, kind, truthful and has our best interests at heart.

Not to derail but that rules out every faith with a trickster god or a deceptive god, Allah in Islam, for example.

Descartes wrote we could just as easily be the victims of an all powerful devil who sends us delusions like I have feet, or I have an arm.

The seeming realness of dreams alone should make people shudder, they’re so real to us that women get in a foul mood at their husbands when they’ve dreamt he’s cheated on them in a dream.

Hmm said:

The only knowledge that we can apprehend directly without any need of interpretation is the fact of own consciousness.

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That’s why some people flirt with solipsism, their standard of what constitutes a known thing is so strict that only their own existence survives the fallout.

Some beliefs (at least in Alvin Plantinga’s work) are described as properly basic. They’re properly basic beliefs, beliefs that arise naturally and are self evident. Beliefs like “I exist” and “the past really happened” are basic beliefs.

I think Rene Descarte would have agreed to a belief in God being properly basic.

Hmm said:

The fact that the universe is capable of being understood rationally strongly suggests that it was created by a rational creator.

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I actually thought the same thing while counting calories and macronutrients a week or two ago, I mean, calories are just how we understand a unit of energy that’s present in food, but I’ve been counting and keeping a rein on my macros for so long now that I can see foods as numbers. Proteins eggs 6g, mackerel fillet 20g, brown bread 4g etc etc.

The universe is so orderly (and we’re so tuned into its operations) that we can mentally break food down into its base components and then choose to avoid the food nasties if it so pleases us.

Using our collective knowledge of calories and macros can tweak the levers of our own physiology.

It takes a beautiful mind and an orderly universe to work out things like that ^^^^ Thank God.

Hmm said:

A definition of faith I've always liked is that it's belief in the face of objective uncertainty. This implies that faith involves a level of trust rather than a sense of knowing. So we do the best we can with everything that's available to us - the Bible, church, books, the testimony of others and personal experience etc. - and then commit fully to that but still acknowledging some doubt and uncertainty. One benefit of this is that if we can tolerate doubt in ourselves we'll be more tolerant of others

OTOH, I can see why some people might say that, because we're talking about God and it's so important, our beliefs should be absolutely certain and so He would provide a way for that to be possible. As I understand it, this is why the Catholic church incorporates infallibility, under certain conditions and rarely used, and why others might assign infallibility to personal experiences of the Holy Spirit they believe they have.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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Possible, desirable, but rare. Far rarer than all of the people who think they are infallible but the other guy who disagrees with them isn't.

Hmm said:

A definition of faith I've always liked is that it's belief in the face of objective uncertainty. This implies that faith involves a level of trust rather than a sense of knowing. So we do the best we can with everything that's available to us - the Bible, church, books, the testimony of others and personal experience etc. - and then commit fully to that but still acknowledging some doubt and uncertainty. One benefit of this is that if we can tolerate doubt in ourselves we'll be more tolerant of others

OTOH, I can see why some people might say that, because we're talking about God and it's so important, our beliefs should be absolutely certain and so He would provide a way for that to be possible. As I understand it, this is why the Catholic church incorporates infallibility, under certain conditions and rarely used, and why others might assign infallibility to personal experiences of the Holy Spirit they believe they have.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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Naturally we want and need to be as certain as possible about answers to these big questions, regarding supernatural truths and our eternal destinies. We all want to know-and to think that our knowledge is correct. But as humans we're limited, weak, sinful, etc. So it would certainly make sense that God would provide a means of keeping His gospel free from error-despite human limitations (and the gift of infallibility, as defined, only means that error will not enter church teachings, not that any human will be perfect in knowledge or impeccable, i.e. sin-free himself). And this is one reason why, we believe, He established His church.

But it's sort of interesting to me that while many deny the gift of infallibility they nonetheless act with that very degree of certainty when denying the beliefs or biblical interpretations of others in favor of their own.

Hmm said:

A definition of faith I've always liked is that it's belief in the face of objective uncertainty. This implies that faith involves a level of trust rather than a sense of knowing. So we do the best we can with everything that's available to us - the Bible, church, books, the testimony of others and personal experience etc. - and then commit fully to that but still acknowledging some doubt and uncertainty. One benefit of this is that if we can tolerate doubt in ourselves we'll be more tolerant of others

OTOH, I can see why some people might say that, because we're talking about God and it's so important, our beliefs should be absolutely certain and so He would provide a way for that to be possible. As I understand it, this is why the Catholic church incorporates infallibility, under certain conditions and rarely used, and why others might assign infallibility to personal experiences of the Holy Spirit they believe they have.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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in·fal·li·bil·i·ty
/inˌfaləˈbilədē/
noun
noun: infallibility

1. the quality of being infallible; the inability to be wrong.
   "his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility"
   • (in the Roman Catholic Church) the doctrine that in specified circumstances the Pope is incapable of error in pronouncing dogma.
     noun: papal infallibility; plural noun: papal infallibilities

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It's kind of like the doctrine of sinless perfection, humans do the theologizing so it's not possible to be without failing or being not wrong. (Romans 3:4, Romans 3:23)

Infallble statements of faith in Christ. The Beginning.

Matt. 16-15
15 He *said to them, “But who do you yourselves say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 17 And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.

Michael Collum said:

It's kind of like the doctrine of sinless perfection, humans do the theologizing so it's not possible to be without failing or being not wrong. (Romans 3:4, Romans 3:23)

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Except Catholics DO NOT believe in sinless perfection except for two people. And neither of them is the pope. For you and me, and everyone you will meet, we are not going to be sinless in our lives. End of story.

And for that matter we only believe in an exceptionally limited infallibility. Far less than most people around here who think they are infallible.

One good thing about the doctrine of infallibility is the realization that I don't have it. It's a good humiliation for Catholics who then don't have to pretend we are infallible. Or that our pastor is infallible. Or that some TV preacher is infallible. Or that every utterance of a denominational leader is infallible. What a relief.