Is The Christian "God" Coherent?

[muichimotsu]

Why assume he hasn't done so?

Evangelicals like to emphasize the Bible as an authority, but they don't seem happy when people read the Bible and come to different conclusions from their orthodoxy. That makes orthodoxy their real authority, not the Bible.

Even adding in the other legs of the stool that I recall hearing in my second year of college from Episcopalians, it doesn't grant more credence unless you're already taking those people as authoritative in the first place, which gets into more circular logic as to defending the veracity of your worldview by appealing to others that agree with you.

 

[muichimotsu]

A very odd statement for an atheist. I constantly hear atheists arguing that their unbelief is not a position, but rather absence of a position. Yet when I ask you to actually start with an absence of position - to take an agnostic stance on my statement - you accuse me of wanting it both ways. Does that mean atheists also want it both ways?

Do you not understand that the burden of proof is on you in arguing your position about the reality of a deity or its coherency? The default is not belief, it's skepticism, or you'd literally hold contradictory positions about things that you haven't been shown to be wrong in some limited perspective

Even if my unbelief was a position, it's hardly equivalent to the position of belief, because it's not held with absolute certainty or based on illogical and faulty reasoning, so the tu quoque attempts are failures from the start, because atheism isn't comparable to theism when it has a

Your failure to see isn't helped when you refuse to answer my questions

.When you ask a self evident question based in math and try to implicitly equivocate your notion of God to that, I kind of have a problem with that, because God is not math in the slightest unless you stretch math to be completely useless and nebulous.

What other questions do you really have that aren't rooted in already assuming I buy into one definition of God in the first place?

 

[muichimotsu]

The problem here is that some of us 'Christians' think that constructing what is both a 'sound' and 'valid' argument in relation to God is not only nearly impossible to come by on a human level, but that God meant for it to be difficult.

Besides, if Kierkegaard is right--and I think he is--even if we have a bevy of both sound and valid arguments on behalf of Christianity, this in and of itself may or may not 'mean' a whole lot, and doesn't by necessity HAVE to mean a lot to any one person since................we can't really have an existential relationship with a [set of arguments about God X].

So God intentionally obfuscates? That certainly would fit with the passive aggressive attitude and victim blaming of the entities it created with freewill and yet knew they would screw up constantly.

No one said you can have an existential relationship with arguments, but existential interactions are rooted in things that aren't just subjective in the initial notion, but subject to massive divergence in interpretation and have no reasonable basis to interpret them in the same way with dreams or prophecies in a holy text, it leads nowhere but a further rabbit hole

 

[muichimotsu]

My own view is that none have a 'technically accurate' view. Nor even a mostly accurately view. (but of course some could at least could learn the limited things that are known pretty well, which isn't at all the same as a highly accurate view )

You having an accurate view in some sense that might as well not matter is on the level of a Dunning Kruger effect, where you think you know more than you do based on overconfidence

 

[FireDragon76]

thanks for the reply, and by the way I have for the most part Got out of the kitchen but not without learning how to cook first. Realize if they are being polite, they are winning. Just see that pretty please. As soon as you use logic against them, you will see a darker side. Realize these are not people with the holy spirit. Civility is not natural to them. Name calling starts etc. But your current definition of athiesm is wrong. I won't get into it. But it's not a lack of belief. Not originally. And besides there are many things athiest believe as part of their world view. So don't let them play that trick with you. For instance they believe the big bang created the universe, ex nihilo. From nothing. Which is a miracle if you ask me. How does something create something else from nothing, and where did that something come from? As soon as you start to mention their beliefs, they run. So try it, and you will see how quickly they stop talking to you. I do appreciate some athiests more than others. That is true. But eventually there is always one who I can't block fast enough that makes me mad. It usually starts from mocking and making fun of christianity, even though athiests have just as much faith as anyone else. They have faith that their car works in the morning when they stick the key in, they have faith that the internet is working when they login to CF. They have faith that cells evolved in a primordial soup. No one took pictures, no one was there. It happened miraculously. That is faith. They have faith that these little organisms evolved from asexual to hetero sexual. How one does that, I don't know. But they did it, not only that but then they got legs and lungs and walked out of a puddle, grew fur and a tail and started swinging from trees. Then they got a bigger brain and realized they should not swing from trees, so they ditched the fur, grew longer legs and became bipeds. They eventually believed they came from monkeys which in turn came from soup, which in turn came from a rock in space, which in turn came from the big bang, which in turn came from ex nihilo.....nada. So you can see lots of religion there. Don't let them tell you that faith is religious. Faith simply means trust. You have faith in 911 that firefighters will come when you call. That is the primary definition of faith. Some have faith in God. I do. And that is ok. but it's more logical to believe God created us, than all the above.

"Faith" that your car works in the morning when you turn the ignition is justifiable since there is a demonstrable pattern from which we can infer a probability. It's a little different from the nonsense that gets circulated by many Christians, which is more akin to wilful self-delusion, since more than a few cherished Christian beliefs are unlikely to be true, and some may even be blatantly unethical.

 

[Halbhh]

"Faith" that your car works in the morning when you turn the ignition is justifiable since there is a demonstrable pattern from which we can infer a probability. It's a little different from the nonsense that gets circulated by many Christians, which is more akin to wilful self-delusion, since more than a few cherished Christian beliefs are unlikely to be true, and some may even be blatantly unethical.

Yes, it seems that way to me also: faith is justified (after the leap of faith) by the outcome, just like a car that starts and runs. Not some ideas/theories/ideology, etc. Though I have not been able yet to locate a thing Jesus said that doesn't work, and I've tried hard to find things that don't work, trying to disprove or falsify something (or at least my own understanding, an important distinction, of course -- people definitely tend to have a version (or viewpoint) of what they imagine or think (or have recast or just invented) of what Christ said, and that's key: we can find some things that are popular notions of what is supposed to be from Christ punitively, but I wasn't able to find in his words in the accounts). After a very long time now, I've now recognize the outcomes of my testing does have meaning: He is obviously smarter than us, and anyone not expecting or allowing or realizing that will of course mistake things He is saying pretty easily.

 

[Halbhh]

The problem here is that some of us 'Christians' think that constructing what is both a 'sound' and 'valid' argument in relation to God is not only nearly impossible to come by on a human level, but that God meant for it to be difficult.

Besides, if Kierkegaard is right--and I think he is--even if we have a bevy of both sound and valid arguments on behalf of Christianity, this in and of itself may or may not 'mean' a whole lot, and doesn't by necessity HAVE to mean a lot to any one person since................we can't really have an existential relationship with a [set of arguments about God X].

Until the person you are trying to discuss with demonstrates good faith -- a civil manner of being willing to discuss things in a good faith way -- what's the point in even discussing with that person then?

They need help instead in getting out of their own hostility towards others. Maybe the only good would be to just point out to such a person their hostility and ill will, and try to help make it understandable, since a person very accustomed to attacking others may not even have any awareness they are so far out of balance.

 

[Halbhh]

You having an accurate view in some sense that might as well not matter is on the level of a Dunning Kruger effect, where you think you know more than you do based on overconfidence

Here's an example of your ill will and practice of smearing or mislabeling your imagined opponents.

It is a very visible and obvious example of how you are stuck in a self-harming place mentally. You should seek a way to escape from the trap you have built around yourself.

 

[muichimotsu]

Here's an example of your ill will and practice of smearing or mislabeling your imagined opponents.

It is a very visible and obvious example of how you are stuck in a self-harming place mentally. You should seek a way to escape from the trap you have built around yourself.

You want to play psychologist, look somewhere else, that's a red herring from the discussion at large and you playing the victim as well rather than addressing flaws in your argumentation that amounts to little more than rhetorical spin: you think your experiments work, but consistency based on a faulty reasoning is not justification for a belief

 

[FireDragon76]

Even adding in the other legs of the stool that I recall hearing in my second year of college from Episcopalians, it doesn't grant more credence unless you're already taking those people as authoritative in the first place, which gets into more circular logic as to defending the veracity of your worldview by appealing to others that agree with you.

Episcopalians don't necessarily think of their religion primarily as a "worldview" so much as a way of life, from what I have seen. It's true there are evangelical Episcopalians more inclined to that, but many are not. Episcopalians are putting a certain amount of trust in their church to guide them as a community, that's far different from saying Episcopalians encourage groupthink and authoritarianism.

While I am not a Christian anymore by the standards of this forum, I do think we should work together with people of goodwill to make this world a better place. Part of that involves fairly treating other peoples religions, and not merely wanting to score cheap polemical points.

Anyways, my main point is that atheists and non-Christians should read the Bible (how could one appreciate western literature without doing so?), but they could come to different conclusions. The blindness of religion is assuming that your own answers are the only correct ones. Get away from the philosophical assumptions about abstractions like "Truth", and you realize that having multiple correct answers is entirely possible.

We simply don't need bogus notions like "orthodoxy" in the first place. Jesus certainly never preached the concept (Mark 9:40), it was entirely invented based on Greek philosophical assumptions.

 

[FireDragon76]

Yes, it seems that way to me also: faith is justified (after the leap of faith) by the outcome, just like a car that starts and runs. Not some ideas/theories/ideology, etc. Though I have not been able yet to locate a thing Jesus said that doesn't work, and I've tried hard to find things that don't work, trying to disprove or falsify something (or at least my own understanding, an important distinction, of course -- people definitely tend to have a version (or viewpoint) of what they imagine or think (or have recast or just invented) of what Christ said, and that's key: we can find some things that are popular notions of what is supposed to be from Christ punitively, but I wasn't able to find in his words in the accounts). After a very long time now, I've now recognize the outcomes of my testing does have meaning: He is obviously smarter than us, and anyone not expecting or allowing or realizing that will of course mistake things He is saying pretty easily.

The issue is I see is that people like me look at the results, and we realize that often times non-Christian religions seem to produce better results, at least for some people, and yet this is done without the faith that Christianity seems to say is necessary for salvation.

 

[muichimotsu]

Methinks the answer would be something to the effect that better results in this life don't matter versus salvation, the afterlife. Or any benefits in this life are incidental (because Christians point to verses that note how those in the right way will be persecuted by the world to defend God's plan involving Christians suffering more than being successful)

 

[FireDragon76]

Methinks the answer would be something to the effect that better results in this life don't matter versus salvation, the afterlife. Or any benefits in this life are incidental (because Christians point to verses that note how those in the right way will be persecuted by the world to defend God's plan involving Christians suffering more than being successful)

It can be but that's not the only way Christians understand the issue. It pretty much negates the incarnational and liberationist themes found in the religion in favor of a politically expedient otherworldliness.

Evangelicalism really distorts Christianity in many ways because it tries to produce extremely simple answers out of a variagated religious tradition that often has embraced mystery and paradox in the past. It's not a coincidence this kind of religion thrives in the US, with a very laissez-faire attitude to religion - in Europe it was often seen as too divisive, too extreme, and not conducive to the good order of society.

 

[muichimotsu]

Ecumenical ideas are particularly foreign in many American's minds because it's likely conflated with multiculturalism or some skewed interpretation of religious pluralism that's usually more syncretism or eclecticism.

 

[FireDragon76]

Ecumenical ideas are particularly foreign in many American's minds because it's likely conflated with multiculturalism or some skewed interpretation of religious pluralism that's usually more syncretism or eclecticism.

I think it has to do with the parochialism that the fundamentalist movement adopted early on as they lost political and cultural battles in the early 20th century.

They have caucused with Catholics over political issues but really they couldn't be more dissimilar in how hostile they are to cosmopolitanism and ecumenism.

 

[Halbhh]

The issue is I see is that people like me look at the results, and we realize that often times non-Christian religions seem to produce better results, at least for some people, and yet this is done without the faith that Christianity seems to say is necessary for salvation.

With like about on the order of 2bn being considered or identifying or associated with "Christian", well, there ought to be every possible example of human behavior in such a large number, from the very worst to the very best. How would you even guess which ones actually believe, since a large number also will have simply grown up in a church, and identify that way, regardless of what they actually believe or even know about what Christ said. So, see, I expect a lot of criminal behavior. Right?

That, and also of course, the opposite too. Here's an interesting question possibly that you could potentially check on (if you wished) -- when you find someone that really seems to be doing good results, what precisely do they hold as their standards/beliefs/ideas/principles (or just 'what do you believe in?'). There are a lot of possible ways to ask, like: "What do you think is important in life?" or "What are some of the most important rules for living life the best way?" This kind of question might be pretty interesting for any of us to ask anyone, actually.

 

[Uber Genius]

Completely missed this thread.

The question is a good one. It is usually focused on things like trinitary nature vs. divine simplicity or timelessness and God's action in time, or God's impassibility/ God's omniscience and the existence of counterfactuals of free creatures. But I will try to stay on the topic you offered us.

To say "God" is just and loving (sometimes absolutely so for both) creates a particular way you must justify that, in a similar fashion to "God" being sovereign and yet also respecting human freewill (sometimes less effectively than others).

All loving contrasted with all-just. This doesn't seem to be much of an objection. I don't see that the definition of "love" necessitates eliminating moral standards so as to eliminate dealing out justice. If creatures are free to choose and have some sense of right and wrong the way every culture across the world across history seems to, then there is no internal contradiction in the slightest. No logical tricks are necessary, in fact we might have to rely on logical tricks to make this pair seem incoherent.

Similarly, if God is sovereign he gets the world he wants. But there is no specification that every human action is necessarily what God wants. In fact we have a whole collection from over 40 authors that continually appeals to peoples free will. They are persuaded, to study, and memorize, learn and teach, and meditate, on correct ways of living and avoid incorrect ways. All of those thousands of references are impossible without free will.

If God's sovereignty allows that for a time free humans choose to serve themselves and not him, that doesn't impact sovereignty until God gets a world he didn't expect. There is no evidence that God is surprised at free creatures choosing to serve themselves. Nor is the world at end and God standing with a quizzical look on his face.

Now on some forms of Reformed thinking (Calvinism) men are argued to not have free will. Or not have it in certain areas.

That version of Christian thinking with those presuppositions I do think is incoherent.

It means God created Adam and Eve and forced them to sin.
It means a being who by nature can't sin and hates sin created puppets and made them sin.

That is where I would go if I were you. It is incoherent and Calvin even thinks so in his Institutes.

But I'm a molinist and find no such presuppositions in the Bible.

how does this not suffer a similar fate of Antony Flew's Invisible Gardener example?

The Hiddenness of God argument are serious. Every person thinking about religious knowledge should engage them. It appears that many Christians have dodge this portion. I won't.

Whether it is Russell's Tea Pot floating in orbit around the world, or Schellenberg's version painting God as unloving because "non-resistant" "non-believers," exist, or Flew's Invisible Gardener all have several things in common. Firstly, in all cases we have non-believers. Secondly, there are various reasons for their non-belief that God could overcome, given his omni attributes. Thirdly an loving God would want to overcome non-belief so if he existed we would expect him to:

1. Eliminate evil
2. Provide enough evidence for each individual to come to belief

• (1)There are people who are capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe.
• (2)If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there are no such people.
• (3)So, there is no such God (from 1 and 2).

I think this argument works well in concert with the argument from evil and suffering. It should be its own topic however. I am out of time to give a full-throated response but will follow up and discuss further. I have to head to feed a barn-full of horses and do some barn work.

If you are not familiar with Schellenberg (not likely but possible) here is a discussion of his argument:
Hiddenness of God (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[muichimotsu]

The question is a good one. It is usually focused on things like trinitary nature vs. divine simplicity or timelessness and God's action in time, or God's impassibility/ God's omniscience and the existence of counterfactuals of free creatures. But I will try to stay on the topic you offered us.

Coherency within a Christian viewpoint is arguably for Christians to deal with because they're the ones trying to claim the revelations are meant to be self evident with understanding about them and yet we have multiple interpretations of the same entity, leading to more obtuse problems of revelation

All loving contrasted with all-just. This doesn't seem to be much of an objection. I don't see that the definition of "love" necessitates eliminating moral standards so as to eliminate dealing out justice. If creatures are free to choose and have some sense of right and wrong the way every culture across the world across history seems to, then there is no internal contradiction in the slightest. No logical tricks are necessary, in fact we might have to rely on logical tricks to make this pair seem incoherent.

I never said love necessitated such a thing in regards to moral standards, but absolute manifestations of BOTH is where the contradiction comes about, since it's like being absolutely hot and cold at the same time, they necessarily come into conflict

Can one really say we are free to choose in a world where a deity supposedly has foreknowledge and sovereignty by its divine nature? If I program a robot and it can only behave as such, how is God's setting up the system where we must believe in Jesus to be saved and other qualifications in regards to how we choose, etc any different except in scale from me knowing all the possible actions my robot can make (assuming I didn't program AI or such)

Similarly, if God is sovereign he gets the world he wants. But there is no specification that every human action is necessarily what God wants. In fact we have a whole collection from over 40 authors that continually appeals to peoples free will. They are persuaded, to study, and memorize, learn and teach, and meditate, on correct ways of living and avoid incorrect ways. All of those thousands of references are impossible without free will.

If God's sovereignty allows that for a time free humans choose to serve themselves and not him, that doesn't impact sovereignty until God gets a world he didn't expect. There is no evidence that God is surprised at free creatures choosing to serve themselves. Nor is the world at end and God standing with a quizzical look on his face.

If God's plan can even remotely be interrupted, then it would suggest the sovereignty is far less than the absolute nature ascribed to it, merely that it can always course correct

The problem becomes that the correctness or incorrectness is less about demonstrable harm and more whether it conforms with the commands of an entity, authoritarian in its ontology of ethics

But how can God get a world they don't expect if they also have divine foreknowledge and could see all possible outcomes, Dr. Manhattan style?

Now on some forms of Reformed thinking (Calvinism) men are argued to not have free will. Or not have it in certain areas.

That version of Christian thinking with those presuppositions I do think is incoherent.

It means God created Adam and Eve and forced them to sin.
It means a being who by nature can't sin and hates sin created puppets and made them sin.

That is where I would go if I were you. It is incoherent and Calvin even thinks so in his Institutes.

But I'm a molinist and find no such presuppositions in the Bible.

Not so much that God forced Adam and Eve to sin, but created them knowing they would make those decisions, which barely seems different from what I'm gathering on Molinism as an attempt to rationalize between God knowing all and also somehow respecting human freedom. It's like a multiverse that God can just wipe away all the bad endings and fit it into a framework where it ends up working to whatever grand design it supposedly has for humanity rather than letting us condemn ourselves to utter destruction

To say humans are puppets would apply seemingly only if the idea is that there is absolute determinism as regards how events progress and that we cannot help but make choices, regardless of the source of our will being motivated by "Satan" or "god" respectively (as I've heard it generally presented. If we can still deliberate in some sense even in Calvinist thought, then we aren't so much puppets as we are disposed to be sycophants to a master of some form or another, which is abhorrent and morally bankrupt, I'd argue, since it reduces us to servants, which is almost worse than puppets, because puppets wouldn't necessarily realize their status if it's in our nature not to question

The Hiddenness of God argument are serious. Every person thinking about religious knowledge should engage them. It appears that many Christians have dodge this portion. I won't.

Whether it is Russell's Tea Pot floating in orbit around the world, or Schellenberg's version painting God as unloving because "non-resistant" "non-believers," exist, or Flew's Invisible Gardener all have several things in common. Firstly, in all cases we have non-believers. Secondly, there are various reasons for their non-belief that God could overcome, given his omni attributes. Thirdly an loving God would want to overcome non-belief so if he existed we would expect him to:

1. Eliminate evil
2. Provide enough evidence for each individual to come to belief

• (1)There are people who are capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe.
• (2)If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there are no such people.
• (3)So, there is no such God (from 1 and 2).

I think this argument works well in concert with the argument from evil and suffering. It should be its own topic however. I am out of time to give a full-throated response but will follow up and discuss further. I have to head to feed a barn-full of horses and do some barn work.

If God can just overcome any nonbelief because it's able to know what would convince ALL nonbelievers, then God is doing a terrible job at convincing more and more people to not disbelieve, and I've disbelieved since I was 17 or so, I'm 32 now, God's taking its time.

Eliminate evil seems like a strawman of particular misotheists who just hate God because they can only think an agent set up things so that their parent got cancer, etc, rather than a God that supposedly understands nuances of suffering that could make a world that would have that happen as little as possible. But ultimately the problem of evil, as I see it, is not for atheists to debate, but for theists to confront, because it's more their fundamental problem of having an agency that governs the world but simultaneously wants free will to exist, which would throw any idea of a plan into utter chaos even with divine knowledge, because you're constantly having to shift things around like a chessmaster to make it so you'll win in the end (and it gets more complex with shogi, from what I've read of a handful of manga centered on them, or even go)

If there was any such god entity as people describe, my problem is more with the coherency of the qualities ascribed, though I also find the cogency of the God concept itself questionable when it assumes a human-like agency rather than something that may not be a mind at all, almost more like the Force. And engaging with the God idea in an interesting sense is tricky in fiction, though I can't say I've read a huge amount.

Platinum End, a manga by the authors of the more famous Death Note series, looks into this (Death Note supposedly has God issues brought up as well in a sense, just not in the same fashion, more maltheist with the Death Gods). God is seen as such that it is moreso a human construct, though the exact nature of the entity that the characters are in a sort of competition to take over the position (because it can die, so clearly an entity of less than omnipotent power). If anything, a lot of the issues come into play because of our engagement with things that are unknown and not necessarily taking a step back and thinking they are impressive, but not going flat out to the worship angle, something I never found myself wanting to do even while in church as a teenager and less so as I studied religion as a young adult and continue to in a lesser manner.