There is a difference between Believing and the other sort of believing. I believe that Jesus lived and that he died on the cross, I believe it is possible for him to rise again after 3 days, but I don't fully believe it happen, I dont fully believe that there is a God out there, these are things thats I have learnt, and things I used to believe without a doubt. But I dont believe those things anymore.
What made you stop believe? Anything specific?
What point are you trying to make here.
My point is: If our senses give us a incomplete image of reality (or even a completely wrong image), then how can anything be a fact, when it is based on this image of reality? It would not be a fact at all, but just a description of our imagination of reality. To accept a empiric fact, you also have to accept things that are not a fact, but are really just things we take for granted without having any proof for it.
I'm not that smart, I honestly can't understand what is being said here.
If you doubt God, then why can't you doubt anything else? I think some of your problem is that you think some things are proven facts that can't be doubted, but if you look into the links I gave you, you will find that many of our greatest philosophers
did doubt these facts, and were not as satisfied as scientists is. Like Pascal said:
Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.
I'll try to explain
Noumenon: If you look at a stone, then you think the stone is something in a certain distance away from you, the stone is made of certain minerals, it got certain colors and a certain shape and to know this stone exist you use your eyes to see it. You can use other senses on this stone too, like smelling it, tasting it, feeling on it with your hands, listen to the sound from it when you drop it down. This information is something in your counciesness. In fact: All about this stone is something in your counciesness. And by this you don't really know the stone, but only your counciesness. Your mind and the stone is something different. What you imagine the stone to be is really a phenomena that is happening in your mind. And this is not just something that happens with stones. This is something that happens in all parts of your life. Everything that has to do with your senses, thoughs and emotions are really just phenomenas happening in your mind. Your mind is the base where you navigate your way trough these phenomenas. So if anything can be called a fact, first we need to know what the mind is, and if the phenomenas happening in the mind can be called facts.
Aristotle said:
But if life itself is good and pleasant (...) and if one who sees is conscious that he sees, one who hears that he hears, one who walks that he walks and similarly for all the other human activities there is a faculty that is conscious of their exercise, so that whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist...
This is the same conclusion as Descartes: I think, therefore I am.
This is really the only fact: That we think. That things are going on in our mind. That we experience phenomenas of the conciousness. But all the things that are going on in our mind can be made into doubt.
So to think that some things are facts, you will have to take for granted that your mind is a source of truth.
Mainly replying to the part in bold. I dont know what your upbringing was, but I was brought up in a non-christian home, where my first real introduction to christianity was when I was about 14. So for the first 14 years of my life, I never thought that there was a God, all I saw was facts and figures. Trying to change that mind set is very hard especially because I have a stuborn personality. I'm trying to work out how I can believe in something with out the facts and figures to back it up, because that seems illogical to my brain set.
I were like you, brought up in a non-christian home. Here in Norway we are one of the last non-secular countrys in Europe, so I had 9 years of Christianity education in school, and I were always the loudest one to talk against the teacher and how redicolous everything he said was. This is because I had been learned about materialism.
Materialism is:
The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism. Fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions; therefore, matter is the only substance
But as John Locke said: We "know not what" the basic substance [matter] is. In my other post here I mentioned quantum physics, and I don't really understand this field of science myself, so I'll let someone else that does understand (some of it) explain it in a easy way:
Why Atoms Dont Exist
In the 1980s, some enterprising young men performed a sequence of experiments to show the weirdness of quantum theoretical phenomena. They used a very nifty laser that emitted identical photons one after another in single file. First, photons were proven to be particles. Then, they were proven to be waves. Finally, a photon was proven to be a particle and a wave at the same time. This is the sort of thing that might have elicited a shouting match across the dinner table between Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli. In fact, Niels Bohr might have become quite upset and disturbed the meal.
The problem is that a particle has a particular location in space-time, whereas a wave is spread out over space-time; obviously, a particle cannot be a wave, and a wave cannot be a particle - they are mutually contradictory things. A wave-particle is an oxymoron. It's rather like a chair-table or a red can of blue paint. This problem exists for all quantum theoretical things. Atoms are quantum theoretical things.
Historically, atoms have been called particles. However, if an experiment is done to show their wave properties, then they don't look like particles at all.
The problem can be solved sort-of by saying an atom is like a particle and like a wave. This leads to a different problem.
What are these things we call atoms? They can't be particles, because they're waves. They can't be waves, because they're particles! What are they? If you don't say what an atom is, you're just saying that an atom is "something". How do you know that something exists? Uh, I dunno, just 'cause, I guess (scratch ma head).
Saying that something exists without saying what that something is is meaningless. Existence of meaningless things is meaningless. Therefore, the only meaningful thing to say is that they don't exist in a meaningful world. No one can meaningfully argue for the existence of a meaningless thing.
Another problem arises. Boy, problems, problems!
What about chemistry? Chemists play with atoms! Can we say that a chemist's toys don't exist? No way! Yes, way!
This is very important: If the model works, then it's a useful model. If the model is wrong, then so what! The idea of an atom is a theoretical construct. The very complicated and abstruse mathematical equations become doable when we use the approximations involved in saying that there are these tiny things called atoms.
Saying that something exists is a bit like naming a child with every name in a phone book. Call any name, and the child will answer. Who is the child?
This reason why atoms don't exist is a bit more esoteric than most.
You see, these things we call photons behave in a strange way. Due to Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, a photon's meter stick has zero length, and a photons clock never ticks; therefore, an inhabitant of a photon will not measure a distance to travel. Therefore, from the standpoint of a photon inhabitant, there is no distance between the electron it is emitted from and the electron it is absorbed by. Furthermore, a clock on a photon won't tick, because it takes zero time (as measured by photon inhabitants) for a photon to travel from one place to another. In fact, there is reason for inhabitants of a photon to believe that the emitting electron and the absorbing electron are the same electron. Since the paths of photons overlap, all photons would necessarily exist in the same position (according to their point of view). Therefore, the Universe is zero dimensional. This does not allow for enough space for an atom to exist. Pretty esoteric, huh?
So what is this "matter" that materialism teaches us about, and that most scientists take for granted?
And I am not sure if your following me, but: It makes no sense in calling something facts.
By this we are back to the mind and the phenomenas we can observe. And God is one of the things that are going trough our mind. We can choose to accept or reject this, like anything else, with no proof and no facts. Thats what I've ended up with. And I believe God is real, like I believe the world I am living in (maybe) is real.
Why not give myself fully to God? Because when I did, nothing was different, I heard about people who know God was there, yet I never felt that. I never have felt that god was with me. So I no longer fully believe in God because when everything was stripped to bare bones, it was the facts i could rely on, not God I couldnt rely on God.
We come into life naked and with no knowledge, and everything we know comes from what we have learned from somewhere else. So if everything was stripped down to bare bones, then we still are that helpless, newborn baby - just with a lot of things added to us that are not us at all or what we really are. And we are privilidged that we can choose what we want to be added to our mind or not.
Rom 10,17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
So if you want faith, you better fill your mind with the word of God. If you want doubt, then fill your mind with all the other things.
God bless. Hope all this writing has given you something good, and if not, at least I had some fun writing it
