How did you arrive at Christianity?

Silmarien said:

Well, I am a classical theist, so I would say that there are some constraints on what God can and cannot be, though they mostly revolve around the fact that God cannot be a creature in the same way that we are, or his existence would also need to be grounded in something external, and he would therefore not be God.

I do not think we are actually suggesting that nothing existed before, though. For me, the question is manifold: are scientific laws observations about the way the universe works or explanations thereof? In either case, their explanatory power is a bit lacking, as they beg the question of why reality is predictable at all. I am also a convinced anti-materialist, so must ask what the nature of reality is that consciousness could ever arise in it at all? Toss in my postmodernism and the idea that reality is subjective rather than objective, and you're left with the question of ultimately subjective to what?

I do not expect that part to make sense to anyone else, though. I had to fight my way out of agnosticism and took a couple of strange detours. But I see too many reasons to think that the cause of the universe is mental, if in some ineffable way, to throw up my hands and say I have no idea whatsoever. I get accused of being theologically slippery, since I do not like making stronger claims than "ineffable something," but it is what it is.

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As someone who's been around a longer time than yourself Silmarien, I can confirm you will continue fighting your way around the meaning of the universe (images of old Monty Python and Red Dwarf episodes suddenly appeared in my head). Isn't it odd that minds work so differently, I see absolutely no reason to invoke a god to explain the universe, especially the ridiculous ones in holy books around the world, the reason being I simply do not know what existed before this universe came into being. so can make no judgement on what if anything before the natural world there would need to be.

I do however understand why people create gods of all different variety, they have a wondrous universe that needs explaining what better way than to create a super powerful being that made it for us. Of course we would have to create that god as eternal.. otherwise who created god.. and so and so forth.

Which traits in specific? There are orthodox approaches to Christianity that avoid most of them. The only additional trait I'm willing to attribute is Goodness, since I do not think it psychologically healthy to deny that human concepts of good and evil are intrinsically valueless, and if something like the Christian God exists, denying yourself as made in the image of God does seem like it could have some ugly consequences above and beyond that. That is basically a Pascalian Wager, but I think a very powerful version.

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Anger, jealousy, love, hate, vengeance, patience, faithfulness, a whole range. Then you get all the god-only extras omnipotence, immutability, omnipresence all of which are unverifiable of course. I would say gods are made in the image of man with all the powers man could think of as extras.

I don't know, but all things considered, certain possibilities look more likely than others. I think that naturalism as presently understood cannot properly account for reason and thus shoots itself in the foot, and it also has an amusing tendency to refuse to even address any of the interesting questions about existence, so I see no reason to play by its rules and stay on the fence in the absence of incontrovertible proof. Taking that approach is picking a side while pretending you haven't.

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I think certain possibilities look more likely, form different viewpoints. I don't have to account for reason other than to acknowledge it is there, to attribute a reason-giver though is just a step too far for me.

For me though i have fought to get out of the habit of attributing what we don't know to a higher being, especially as many thing we now consider natural events were once considered whole domains of various gods. It still amazes me though how people still attribute natural events or disasters to a god, I look at the blood moon posts and on news of a flood 'the end is nigh' proclamations and have my head in my hands.

Scientistic evidence? If the science does not seem to fit the current popular metaphysical framework without some serious twisting, I take that as evidence that the framework is false. I have many more problems with materialism than naturalism, but I am admittedly not fully convinced that matter exists at all! I am an energyist, I suppose.

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Wow, I would love to hear more about that. and .. does that mean my delicious creams scone and strawberries are not real !! And seriously I would love to know what an Energyist really is

But if science does not make sense except in something of a teleological scheme (in the Aristotelian sense that effects are built into the nature of reality--evolution may or may not be guided, but it certainly is not random), I would count that as evidence for teleology and question whether that is more compatible with atheistic or theistic intuitions. I do not think that is technically scientific evidence, though, since it's in the realm of philosophy of science.

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No it's not random on that I would agree at least in the sense that one thing cannot suddenly become another but that it is built upon previous builds.. as it were. I also think it's fair to say evolution itself is a young science and there is much more to learn.

I do not know of anyone who denies that consciousness is influenced by phyical processes, though I will point out that meditative techniques and their influence on the brain indicate that the relationship is not one-sided.

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I find that interesting, yes indoctrination shows that a mind can be altered there is no denying that. You only have to look for at the genocide around the world to see how easily you can get people to believe almost anything.

The brain just like a computer can be trained to believe almost anything, and meditation is just like that, relax believe you are at peace, there are many variations and people make lots of money doing just that, Life coaches, Meditative practices, Spiritual leaders, Political propaganda the list goes on. There is no doubt at all that the brain can be manipulated, and you can even do it yourself as you suggest through meditation.

The sounds coming out of radio are dependent upon the wiring and settings of the radio, but we know how radios work and understand that the radio is not singlehandedly producing music. We do not understand how consciousness works, and as we can only really study the material aspect of it (i.e., the brain), we have dogmatically decided that this is all that is really going on.

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I understand what you are saying, I've heard various versions of that arguement, certainly it feels as if we are a person. The difference is though until we can show that consciousness comes from elsewhere or give a good enough reason to speculate it does then why add complications. It's very interesting to think out of the box (pun intended) on this one as it were and I admit to doing it myself even wondering about why i wonder !!

I frankly find this a much more problematic position than some of the alternatives, since it involves either handwaving away the question of how physical processes alone could ever give rise to mental processes or denying that the mind exists at all, and the motives for doing so are clearly based on preexisting commitments to materialism. Nothing that's going on here is scientific.

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I don't think simply throwing a creator into the process of discovery is helpful, no one is hand waving, so far we have not discovered or had any real reason to believe that consciousness does not reside in a brain. There is even some research that shows a chemical process takes place before we have a thought even. I found these articles interesting, though there are many others.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

https://phys.org/news/2010-03-free-illusion-biologist.html

You have a delightful approach to the world around you Silmarien, never settle for belief, there are always too many questions around the corner.

Silmarien said:

My position is not merely that we are trapped within our own cultural viewpoint. I think our species itself has a unique vantage point and interacts with the external world through physiological and psychological intermediaries, creating some distance between us and objective reality. So I would start with Kant to defend postmodern intuitions about the limits of knowledge. I think that any study of intellectual history would support the view as well, as it is difficult to argue against the fact that different cultures with different metaphysical assumptions viewed the world in vastly different ways. The idea that we are finally advanced and objective enough to have the tools to see through the mist, as it were, is why we now get to deal with the scientism of the New Atheism.

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It seems that we can recognize the obsessive drive by modern philosophers to defend "Certainty of epistemic defenses," is self-defeating as the skeptics point out. There is no way to avoid the question begging premises in modern epistemological.
However postmodernism (broadly construed ...as it covers such a definitional breadth as to be compared to existentialism), seems to throw out the baby (knowledge with a capital K), and it seems we don't have to go there either.

It seems that we can arrive at an external world and other minds, the reality of the past and uniformity of the world, through a combination of exeriential and nearly universal uniform data about our world gathered a posteriorily.

Every blade of grass I have ever seen has certain testable attributes inside a range of attributes. So we have 10s of trillions of such data in our life experience.

Similarly we seem to be wired to understand much of our world first sensorially, later concrete conceptually and finally abstract conceptually.

Silmarien said:

Learning how to manage the problem of subjectivity may well be like learning how to manage a psychological disorder--you (hopefully) get better at taking it

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So here we certainly have limits such as when we put a stick in the water and it appears to bend. But then we devise repeatable experiments that demonstrate why it is the case our senses failed to perceive the nature of the stick properly.

So we do learn and do so over time.

Silmarien said:

ouroborus-style

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Had to look this reference up!

Love the way you express yourself.

Reformed Epistemology (Alvin Plantinga) gives us an approach.

His work on Naturalism being incoherent given Darwinian evolution is also helpful.

Starting with the idea that if there exists a personal God,

And he created us either through special creation or a host of secondary causes,

Then it is possible that he either designed us directly, or knew that the secondary causes would produce, humans who could understand much of their external world and have some understanding of their creator.

It is possible that God is okay with humans and even those who believe and follow God, having a large number of false beliefs about the external world.

That we could reduce these false beliefs over time concomitantly gaining knowledge over time across all knowledge areas.

The new atheists who hold scientistic epistemolgies (practice scientism) are pleading for a special exemption on socalled "scientific" knowledge. However their claims are obviously self-refuting, and need not be addressed unless an individual holding those beliefs has not had the benefit of any philosophy aiming whatsoever.

possibletarian said:

I see absolutely no reason to invoke a god to explain the universe, especially the ridiculous ones in holy books around the world, the reason being I simply do not know what existed before this universe came into being. so can make no judgement on what if anything before the natural world there would need to be.

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Special pleading.

We need an explanation for things except for the big questions like how do we get something from nothing or why is there something rather than nothing?

Philosophers and cosmologist across the last 2500 years would broadly disagree.

possibletarian said:

I do however understand why people create gods of all different variety, they have a wondrous universe that needs explaining what better way than to create a super powerful being that made it for us. Of course we would have to create that god as eternal.. otherwise who created god.. and so and so forth.

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Genetic fallacy.

Why not engage cosmological arguments from need for a beginning (Kalam), or from contingency (Leibnizian)? Instead you create a false explanation that atheists don't tend to give and attack it. (Straw man again)

possibletarian said:

Anger, jealousy, love, hate, vengeance, patience, faithfulness, a whole range. Then you get all the god-only extras omnipotence, immutability, omnipresence all of which are unverifiable of course. I would say gods are made in the image of man

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Genetic fallacy again.

possibletarian said:

I think certain possibilities look more likely, form different viewpoints. I don't have to account for reason other than to acknowledge it is there, to attribute a reason-giver though is just a step too far for me.

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Straw man.

The argument isn't "God exists because humans have X attributes"

Easy to knock down straw.

It seems that you have been heavily influenced by Dawkin's and his ilk.

I would strongly recommend Antony Flew (before he converted to theism from atheism), j.l. Mackie, j.h. Sobel, Kai Nielsen, and Graham Oppy to your examination. They provide some strong objections to the theistic inference without leaning on rhetorical devices and logical fallacy.

Goal is to discover, "What can be known about the world it seems, not, "How can we fool most of the people most of the time!"

Uber Genius said:

Special pleading.

We need an explanation for things except for the big questions like how do we get something from nothing or why is there something rather than nothing?

Philosophers and cosmologist across the last 2500 years would broadly disagree.








Straw man.

The argument isn't "God exists because humans have X attributes"

Easy to knock down straw

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Wow, so convincing, I've changed my mind already

possibletarian said:

It's all what people thought the universe was like, you are simply reading what you want into it. To equate the idea that people though god stretched the sky daily over the earth like a tent with expansion of the whole universe and equate folding space with tent material is intellectually dishonest.

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Complete crap.

Don't get why anyone would try and misrepresent a small minority of Hebrew and Christian scholars across the last 3200+ years to holding a literalistic inference on Genesis 1?

Oh yeah STRAWMAN!

7 current conservative scholarly views on Genesis 1 and not one of them denies the use of metaphoric language the way you claimed when you were deriding the OP!

You are ignorant of the scholarship, logic and are impugning others who don't share your ignorance.

Your not even trying to understand the facts.

1. Literal Interpretation
   (b) Gap Interpretation
   (c) Day-Gap Interpretation
   (d) Day-Age Interpretation
   (e) Revelation-Day Interpretation
   (f) Literary Framework Interpretation (g) Functional Creation Interpretation (h) Hebrew Creation Myth Interpretation
   

Uber Genius said:

Complete crap.

Don't get why anyone would try and misrepresent a small minority of Hebrew and Christian scholars across the last 3200+ years to holding a literalistic inference on Genesis 1?

Oh yeah STRAWMAN!

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So do you believe that it is referring to the expansion of the universe and folding space ?

possibletarian said:

So do you believe that it is referring to the expansion of the universe and folding space ?

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Rediculous!

There are many legitimate inferences listed above for how to understand what the original author of Genesis would have been trying to convey to the original audience. Reading current scientific understanding back into scripture is called concordism and is a fallacious method of exegesis.

It attempts to read meaning into the scriptures, AKA eisogesis.

Further if we want to measure ancient knowledge against current knowledge in an attempt to destroy the ancient we commit the fallacy of anachronism. To be coherent we would end up destroying all historic knowledge.

Uber Genius said:

Complete crap.

Don't get why anyone would try and misrepresent a small minority of Hebrew and Christian scholars across the last 3200+ years to holding a literalistic inference on Genesis 1?

Oh yeah STRAWMAN!

7 current conservative scholarly views on Genesis 1 and not one of them denies the use of metaphoric language the way you claimed when you were deriding the OP!

You are ignorant of the scholarship, logic and are impugning others who don't share your ignorance.

Your not even trying to understand the facts.

1. Literal Interpretation
   (b) Gap Interpretation
   (c) Day-Gap Interpretation
   (d) Day-Age Interpretation
   (e) Revelation-Day Interpretation
   (f) Literary Framework Interpretation (g) Functional Creation Interpretation (h) Hebrew Creation Myth Interpretation

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Then, do you believe the bible explains the expansion of the universe and folding space in these in these scriptures ?

Uber Genius said:

Rediculous!

There are many legitimate inferences listed above for how to understand what the original author of Genesis would have been trying to convey to the original audience. Reading current scientific understanding back into scripture is called concordism and is a fallacious method of exegesis.

It attempts to read meaning into the scriptures, AKA eisogesis.

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Well yes, but that was my point.

possibletarian said:

Wow, so convincing, I've changed my mind already

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So don't expect anyone to change their mind as you suggest. But expect those who are serious about investigating various inferences to do some basic research about the inferences. That's all.

possibletarian said:

Then, do you believe the bible explains the expansion of the universe and folding space in these in these scriptures ?

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Hmm, I believe the bible is a collections of writings by over 40 authors spanning multiple cultures and controversial subjects across 1500 years.

Not a science book (which is a straw man representation)

I believe they wrote in ways common to their individual cultures, borrowing stories handed down from culture to culture.

And just because they don't have and understanding of GTR or quantum gravity doesn't mean they we should poison the wells to all their representations of facts (sweeping generalization).

Of course there are strong defeaters of theism and paradigm carriers for atheistic and weak agnostic inferences. You are just not making those claims but rather focusing on popular myths and rhetorical appeals.

If you review the authors I mentioned above they will provide you with over 3 dozen arguments, all of which are defensible.

Uber Genius said:

So don't expect anyone to change their mind as you suggest. But expect those who are serious about investigating various inferences to do some basic research about the inferences. That's all.

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I'm not expecting anyone to change their mind, people rarely do. And of course I expect people to do a little research.

Uber Genius said:

Hmm, I believe the bible is a collections of writings by over 40 authors spanning multiple cultures and controversial subjects across 1500 years.

Not a science book (which is a straw man representation)

I believe they wrote in ways common to their individual cultures, borrowing stories handed down from culture to culture.

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I would agree. I would never use it as a science book, though i never said we should.

possibletarian said:

Well yes, but that was my point.

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Your point was to create a straw man it seems, forcing OP into literal-only interpretation that even literalists don't hold.

You seem to have a lot of non-sequiturs once the fallacious nature of your appeals has been divulged. Why so slippery?

"Wow, I'm conconvinced." "I didn't say I expected to be convinced"

You represent a false dicotomy about scripture representing modern science and then say see I don't beleive that either, but mock someone for representing a metaphor.

So this is not how good-faith conversations about various inference are handled. This is how new atheists engage and some Christian apologists like Ken Ham or Ray Comfort engage.

It doesn't help.

Uber Genius said:

Your point was to create a straw man it seems, forcing OP into literal-only interpretation that even literalists don't hold.

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Oh I see, No that wasn't my aim at all, of course the writer didn't think it was a real tent or that a god actually struggled stretching the heavens out like throwing a tent over the earth..

Rather I was making the point that they took a very earth centric view of the heavens.
To say that god stretching the heavens is code for the expansion of the universe as we understand it now, or that a tent is a metaphor for folding space or a tent has no centre (even though it does) is somehow a hidden meaning that the universe has no centre is ridiculous.

You seem to be adding to your posts after I've replied so let me respond to the extra's you put in.

Uber Genius said:

Your point was to create a straw man it seems, forcing OP into literal-only interpretation that even literalists don't hold.

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Of course they don't I never said they did.

You seem to have a lot of non-sequiturs once the fallacious nature of your appeals has been divulged. Why so slippery?

Click to expand...

That can happen with multiple posts

"Wow, I'm conconvinced." "I didn't say I expected to be convinced"

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I think you meant convinced, not so sure your sentence makes any sense.

You represent a false dicotomy about scripture representing modern science and then say see I don't beleive that either, but mock someone for representing a metaphor.

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I don't believe scripture represents modern science at all, or indeed were meant to. That was not my claim, the opposite in fact. Metaphors only get you so far though, the leap from the earth centric view of Genesis to an expanding universe, folding space-time and hints about the centre of a universe outside that earth-centric point of view being represented in scripture is a massive leap.

So this is not how good-faith conversations about various inference are handled. This is how new atheists engage and some Christian apologists like Ken Ham or Ray Comfort engage.

It doesn't help.

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You may be surprised to learn have I never read any of Dawkins books. and certainly don't identify with new-atheism

possibletarian said:

You seem to be adding to your posts after I've replied so let me respond to the extra's you put in.



Of course they don't I never said they did.



That can happen with multiple posts



I think you meant convinced, not so sure your sentence makes any sense.



I don't believe scripture represents modern science at all, or indeed were meant to. That was not my claim, the opposite in fact. Metaphors only get you so far though, the leap from the earth centric view of Genesis to an expanding universe, folding space-time and hints about the centre of a universe outside that earth-centric point of view being represented in scripture is a massive leap.



You may be surprised to learn have I never read any of Dawkins books. and certainly don't identify with new-atheism

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"Ed1Wolf"
"Some of these references are just metaphors not meant to be taken literally but some aspects are such as the stretching and the folding of the universe which has been confirmed by science to be similar to behave like a surface. Also, the analogy of a tent also confirms what science has determined that the universe does not really have a center, just like a tent."

"possibletarian"
"It's all what people thought the universe was like, you are simply reading what you want into it. To equate the idea that people though god stretched the sky daily over the earth like a tent with expansion of the whole universe and equate folding space with tent material is intellectuallydishonest."

So perhaps you were not regarding the metaphoric nature of the "stretching," but the concordism found in reading into GTR entailments back into biblical text.

Either way let's clean the slate.

I am committed to representing you accurately and engaging you in a way where we can maximize our communication.

And I respect the agnostic and atheistic inferences. I think there are good reasons for both.

2PhiloVoid said:

In the context which you're talking about here, holiness would be an additional metaethical concept to the two you've cited. Holiness would incorporate some aspects of these other two, but it would do so in a way which reflects one's moral quality as it stands in the presence of God and one's relationship with God Himself.

The reason I say that holiness incorporates some aspects of the other two rather than fully incorporating them is because it is possible to have authentic faith that is 'small' and in need of growth. It is also possible to attain virtue, but while it is commendable to have a helpful skill or moral attribute [or set of such attributes] recognized by other human beings, it may not appear so tidy and clean from God's perspective.

Of course, there's more to it than this, but I'll just say this for now. Great comments, Silmarien!

Peace,
2PhiloVoid

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Silmarien said:

Well, there isn't just one postmodern position. I would agree that a lot of what falls under the postmodern umbrella is people building castles in the sand, but I think that many of their observations about other worldviews are accurate. Their own alternatives are generally as flawed as the ones they criticize, but I do not think that pointing out the deficiencies of modernism is itself vulnerable to the criticism of being unverifiable by its own rules.

My position is not merely that we are trapped within our own cultural viewpoint. I think our species itself has a unique vantage point and interacts with the external world through physiological and psychological intermediaries, creating some distance between us and objective reality. So I would start with Kant to defend postmodern intuitions about the limits of knowledge. I think that any study of intellectual history would support the view as well, as it is difficult to argue against the fact that different cultures with different metaphysical assumptions viewed the world in vastly different ways. The idea that we are finally advanced and objective enough to have the tools to see through the mist, as it were, is why we now get to deal with the scientism of the New Atheism.

Are we hopelessly trapped? I would say that we're not in a position to answer that, since the very knowledge that the claim relies upon is unattainable by its own standards, as you pointed out. My stance is rather that it's impossible to really determine where subjectivity ends and objectivity begins. I don't think it's an extreme claim, but some of its potential implications certainly are. Learning how to manage the problem of subjectivity may well be like learning how to manage a psychological disorder--you (hopefully) get better at taking it into account, but it will always be with you.



Oh, my assumptions are generally Aristotelian. I just have a postmodern, labyrinthine way of approaching them and end up chewing on my own tail ouroborus-style fairly often. I'm not really sure what premises would be acceptable, though, since those required for a discussion of naturalism are quite different than those you'd expect for the Problem of Evil.

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Uber Genius said:

It seems that we can recognize the obsessive drive by modern philosophers to defend "Certainty of epistemic defenses," is self-defeating as the skeptics point out. There is no way to avoid the question begging premises in modern epistemological.
However postmodernism (broadly construed ...as it covers such a definitional breadth as to be compared to existentialism), seems to throw out the baby (knowledge with a capital K), and it seems we don't have to go there either.

It seems that we can arrive at an external world and other minds, the reality of the past and uniformity of the world, through a combination of exeriential and nearly universal uniform data about our world gathered a posteriorily.

Every blade of grass I have ever seen has certain testable attributes inside a range of attributes. So we have 10s of trillions of such data in our life experience.

Similarly we seem to be wired to understand much of our world first sensorially, later concrete conceptually and finally abstract conceptually.


So here we certainly have limits such as when we put a stick in the water and it appears to bend. But then we devise repeatable experiments that demonstrate why it is the case our senses failed to perceive the nature of the stick properly.

So we do learn and do so over time.


Had to look this reference up!

Love the way you express yourself.

Reformed Epistemology (Alvin Plantinga) gives us an approach.

His work on Naturalism being incoherent given Darwinian evolution is also helpful.

Starting with the idea that if there exists a personal God,

And he created us either through special creation or a host of secondary causes,

Then it is possible that he either designed us directly, or knew that the secondary causes would produce, humans who could understand much of their external world and have some understanding of their creator.

It is possible that God is okay with humans and even those who believe and follow God, having a large number of false beliefs about the external world.

That we could reduce these false beliefs over time concomitantly gaining knowledge over time across all knowledge areas.

The new atheists who hold scientistic epistemolgies (practice scientism) are pleading for a special exemption on socalled "scientific" knowledge. However their claims are obviously self-refuting, and need not be addressed unless an individual holding those beliefs has not had the benefit of any philosophy aiming whatsoever.

Click to expand...

I love trying to hang with the philosophical heavyweights, it's like when they let Christian Laettner play on The Dream Team lol.

Uber Genius said:

"Ed1Wolf"
"Some of these references are just metaphors not meant to be taken literally but some aspects are such as the stretching and the folding of the universe which has been confirmed by science to be similar to behave like a surface. Also, the analogy of a tent also confirms what science has determined that the universe does not really have a center, just like a tent."

"possibletarian"
"It's all what people thought the universe was like, you are simply reading what you want into it. To equate the idea that people though god stretched the sky daily over the earth like a tent with expansion of the whole universe and equate folding space with tent material is intellectuallydishonest."

So perhaps you were not regarding the metaphoric nature of the "stretching," but the concordism found in reading into GTR entailments back into biblical text.

Either way let's clean the slate.

I am committed to representing you accurately and engaging you in a way where we can maximize our communication.

And I respect the agnostic and atheistic inferences. I think there are good reasons for both.

Click to expand...

Fair enough

possibletarian said:

Fair enough

Click to expand...

A couple resources:

https://www.closertotruth.com/series/arguments-agnosticism

An Argument for Agnosticism
According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin (2010: 76) argues for this position as follows:

• (1)There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is intrinsically more probable than the other.

• (2)There is no firm basis upon which to judge that the total evidence favors theism or atheism over the other.

It follows from (1) and (2) that

• (3)There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is more probable than the other.

It follows from (3) that

• (4)Agnosticism is true: neither theism nor atheism is known to be true.

Le Poidevin takes “theism” in its broadest sense (which I call to refer to the proposition that there exists a being that is the ultimate and intentional cause of the universe’s existence and the ultimate source of love and moral knowledge (2010: 52). (He doesn’t use the term “versatile theism”, but this would be his account of its meaning.) By the “intrinsic probability” of a proposition, he means, roughly, the probability that a proposition has “before the evidence starts to come in” (2010: 49). This probability depends solely on a priori considerations like the intrinsic features of the content of the proposition in question (e.g., the size of that content).

From Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy on atheism and agnosticism.