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So because people can't figure out what is right (righteousness) and wrong (unrighteousness), righteousness and unrighteousness therefore does not exist. Is that your conclusion.
in Christ, Not me
Not what I said, strawman.
People can figure out what they feel is right or wrong and act accordingly.
I'm no expert, but from what I've seen (if you know Church history) ... after Catholics went their own way from the rest of the Church, they did change their approach to become very scholastic and intellectual. Those tendencies have largely been inherited by Protestants in many ways. I wonder if it has contributed to the modern idea that "faith" really consists of mental gymnastics and making yourself believe something. It's SO far from the way the east approaches the faith though. But on the other hand, Greek philosophy had its influence on the early Church. But largely, the Church (at least Orthodoxy) is suspicious of philosophical approaches to the faith. We recognize that any "Truth" so discovered risks being nothing more than the construct of man's thoughts and imaginations.
Thanks, that helps me organize my reasoning a little bit. I honestly think there is something screwy about my brain. When I think it is like pacing in circles around the subject over and over until I gradually decide something (sometimes) after reaching a level of mental exhaustion - and the decision is never final.I think I am a "concrete thinker" instead of an "abstract thinker" (?) I don't feel comfortable until I can visualize things. Words are confusing.
But anyway I have a biography of Judaism and Christianity I have constructed that seems plausible and indicates they are malarky. But is there an alternative biography that also "connects the dots" of the historical evidence and makes the religions seem true? That's what I wonder sometimes. There are obviously many possible biographies that fit the dots. In other words can I use one of the known historical (or even personal experiential) data points to prove that any possible curve fit to this data will demonstrate the malarkey of the Abrahamic faiths? That's what I ask myself, and I don't know where to start to answer that.
The whole argument is of course very ambitious, and it's meant less as an actual solution to the question "does god exist" and more as a probe to any believer's epistemology. How they choose to attack either premise will uncover what kind of evidence warrants belief to them, and if they find they cannot successfully deny either premise within their own epistemology, they have to admit that they have no reason to believe in God. That's what happened to me. If they do attempt to deny either premise, you've got them accepting a burden of proof and you can go from there.I'd like to point out that I've seen idealists say something similar to argue that belief in matter is unjustified. They would argue that idealism begins with a premise that cannot be doubted, i.e., that mental activity exists, whereas materialism and dualism require belief in something extra that can be doubted: the existence of something outside of experience.
"Evidence" is not really a neutral idea, since what we accept as evidence will depend upon how we've been conditioned to think about a certain question. There is no evidence you can offer to a convinced idealist for the existence of matter, because they've already ruled out as irrelevant any evidence that cannot be directly obtained from within conscious experience. Likewise, a convinced atheist will be coming from a direction from which any argument for God is invalidated because it's already outside of the atheist's preferred framework for assessing the question. What I see happen a lot is what I would call a Naturalism of the Gaps--the automatic assumption that naturalistic explanations will be found for every difficult question about reality facing us, tomorrow if not today. This really amounts to assuming your conclusion, and it's one of the places where conversation breaks down.
As for the claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God, I've seen atheists over at the Secular Outpost tear people apart for that one. The question isn't really whether any evidence exists, but whether there is sufficient evidence. I think that's very subjective, though. Some people think it's really, really strange (borderline impossible) that anything exists at all, and others don't really think it's even a question worth asking. Asking the "wrong" questions can lead you out of religion, but it can also lead you back to it. I spent months trying to figure out why I wasn't an atheist and pretty much independently hit upon everything the various theological traditions have been saying for millennia. Reinventing the Wheel 101.
The whole argument is of course very ambitious, and it's meant less as an actual solution to the question "does god exist" and more as a probe to any believer's epistemology. How they choose to attack either premise will uncover what kind of evidence warrants belief to them, and if they find they cannot successfully deny either premise within their own epistemology, they have to admit that they have no reason to believe in God. That's what happened to me. If they do attempt to deny either premise, you've got them accepting a burden of proof and you can go from there.
No idea what specific truth you are referring to.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Church history (though I'd assume less so than you). From what I understand, there are two major philosophical trends within it, the original Platonic approach and then the Aristotelianism that eventually got introduced into the West through the Muslims and became the foundations of Scholasticism. Of course, the Muslims didn't just "discover" Aristotle--they got all those writings from the Byzantines, so it's not really like the West had something that the East didn't. Though I suppose the fact that all this stuff was "new" to Catholicism in a way it never was for Orthodoxy meant that it needed to be theologically integrated to not pose a threat.
Sometimes I wonder how much it is just a matter of personalities, though. What would Catholicism be without Augustine or Aquinas? Something very different than it actually is. I'm not sure if Orthodoxy can point to the influence of very specific saints in the same way (not including Paul, of course). Maybe Gregory Palamas? I've seen him pointed to as the theologian who saved Orthodoxy from Scholasticism before, though I'm not sure precisely how.
But yeah, I think Protestantism is strongly defined in contrast with Catholicism. Either they drop the mysteries entirely and try to intellectualize everything, à la Calvinism, or they go the opposite route and oppose faith and reason--some of those Lutheran theologians certainly do that. Or they do one of a million others things because you can't really pin down Protestantism very well at all.
Anyway, no worries about tangents. I always like reading what you have to say.
That's a reasonable modification I suppose, though since divine hiddenness is so problematic for someone trying to demonstrate God's existence I thought it a negligible provision. But yes, I spent my early years a devout Seventh-Day-Adventist, but as I exited my teens I found I couldn't justify my beliefs according to the very epistemology I used to reject the myriad of other "false" gods, so I spent some time calling myself an "agnostic" before finally settling with the label "agnostic atheist."Well, in that case I would change the formula somewhat, because with the potential denial of premise 1, you're conflating two questions: a metaphysical one concerning the existence of God and an epistemological one about justification of belief. So:
1. If God exists AND wishes us to have knowledge of his existence, there will be evidence that God exists.
2. There is no evidence that God exists.
3. Therefore, God either does not exist OR does not wish us to have knowledge of his existence.
4. If God does not wish us to have knowledge of his existence, all religions positing otherwise are false.
5. Therefore, all religions positing that God wishes us to have knowledge of his existence are false.
You can turn this into something of an argument from divine hiddenness (an argument which I think has some power against exclusivistic religious claims), but I would still of course have to challenge you on Premise 2.
(I thought you said you were originally agnostic, btw. I take it that was a later development?)
St. Gregory Palamas is probably a good choice. He defended the mysticism against the overly intellectual inquiry, true. I do think that is important in itself. Some of the most technically literate persons regarding Christianity that I have known have been atheists, who for whatever reason dedicated a great deal of time to studying what they don't believe. Yet for all the vast knowledge they possessed, they came no closer to understanding. Indeed, it seems to get in the way - if for no other reason they can't seem to understand overarching principles and frameworks which make sense of what can seem contradictory on the surface. That's an understandable challenge though. I'm not belittling them. Only saying once more that a strictly intellectual approach can be a hindrance.
Oh, yes. I would definitely agree that there's a difference between knowledge and understanding, though I'm not sure to what degree it's a matter of knowledge getting in the way. The problem is that if you take a combative stance towards something and spend your time looking for reasons to reject it, you never actually get to a point where you can grasp what your opponent is saying. There's a Catholic philosopher who I follow who's said something along those lines--it wasn't until he started teaching Aquinas to undergrads that he finally dug into the literature to figure out exactly what was being argued and why. And somewhere along the way he decided Aquinas was right.
I've had something of a similar experience. It took a long time for Christianity to stop looking like an opponent to be defeated, so everything I knew about it became a weapon to be used against it, not a source of understanding. Not even necessarily consciously, but if you're going to keep something at arm's length, you'll never really understand it. The problem there isn't knowledge itself, though.
The other issue is that there's a lot of misinformation out there. After all, everyone knows that Constantine put together the New Testament for political purposes and Galileo was a martyr for science against the blind dogmatism of the Catholic Church, right? No, but those myths are so very convenient that it's hard to set the record straight, since people tend to be convinced that they know everything.
So because people can't figure out what is right (righteousness) and wrong (unrighteousness), righteousness and unrighteousness therefore does not exist. Is that your conclusion.
in Christ, Not me
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