Joykins, thanks for the thoughts. I am totally amazed at how few Christians particiate. Perhaps I am sufficiently a lost cause and not worth the time or energy. However, I also went over the the apolgetics and soteriology forms and said, "gulp
," surprised at the lack of depth scholarship - in science, in Christian history, in interpretations, and in the texts of the Bible itself. In bewilderment, I asked myself, "How in the earth, could they have affirmed every point of the Nicene Creed?" I'm befuddled.
Makes me think of the following I read by Sam Harris on newsweek.washingtonpost.com.
Bertrand Russell pointed out a century ago, the major religions make incompatible claims about God and about what human beings must believe in order to escape the fires of hell. Given the sheer diversity of these claims, every believer should expect damnation on mere, probabilistic grounds. The second problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for the most common religious doctrines is terrible or nonexistent—and this subsumes all claims about the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, etc. For thousands of years, religion has been a haven for dogmatism and false certainty, and it remains so. There is not a person on this earth who has sufficient reason to be certain that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in his cave. And yet, billions of people profess such certainty.
No. I think I'm trying to say that evidence for (or against, for that matter) of the historicity of Christian beliefs is not strong enough to be historically conclusive.
Indeed. Otherwise, it would just be either an
appeal to tradition or an
appeal to popularity.
Globalization and the Internet have created new competitive memetic environments where ideas, where especially unevidenced, ideas are having to compete like never before. I suspect the role of religion in society will be changing rapidly. I don't know how but it is a brave new world in which ideas compete with ideas like never before. In fact, this has been part of why I have wanted to know the
truth.
People are now seeing with first-hand experience how broadly different the deeply-held (unevidenced) beliefs the adherents of numerous religions are.
People are now asking the questions. Asking the questions that would have been taboo to ask prior and otherwise. I know my questions might make many uncomfortable as just having them in my head made me very, very uncomfortable for many years.
So often I would believe (or pretend? or even self-decieve?) that still, small voice in my head to be the one of God Almighty.
But wasn't it that same still, small voice in my head that really wanted to know the answers to the unquestionable, the unaskable? Perhaps wasn't this too about wanting to know what is
true?
The other thing I'm saying is that the only way the existence of God matters one way or another is *relational*--that is, if there is some watchmaker God, who cares?
I for one care! And thus has been the nature of my pursuit.
I fear the essence of the logic of your statement is that it is more important that you know God the way you know him than to know him that way in which he really might be.
If God truly
is the blind watchmaker, I want to know it. What set me out on this whole pursuit was to
truly know and to truly know God.
I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. ~ Proverbs 8:17
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ~ Jeremiah 29:13
Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. ~ Matthew 7:7,8
If that God is uninterested or unwilling in entering into any kind of relationship with us, whether we believe in this God does not really matter.
If God truly
is the blind watchmaker, I want to know it. Otherwise I'm just believing some (possibly random, albeit with a long, rich heritage) something in deception.
And I think I'll paraphrase you a bit. You said:
the only way the existence of God matters one way or another is *relational*
I just mentioned the issue of whether or not it truthfully, objectively, and absolutely matters which, for me, it does.
Whoever or whatever God is, that's what I've been in pursuit of.
There is another aspect for which I'll paraphrase.
the only way the existence of God benefits myself personally one way or another is *relational*
This reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said:
"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."
As well as the following by Richard Dawkins from
something I read on beliefnet.com.
Dawkins: Obviously, a lot of people find the theistic answer satisfying on another level. What do you see as the problem with that level?
Interviewer: What other level?
Dawkins: At whatever level where people say the idea of God is very satisfying.
Well, of course it is. Wouldn't it be lovely to believe in an imaginary friend who listens to your thoughts, listens to your prayers, comforts you, consoles you, gives you life after death, can give you advice? Of course it's satisfying, if you can believe it. But who wants to believe a lie?
The other thing I was trying to get at is that there are things that are not factual but nevertheless not precisely "lies" or "deceptive" and that creative expressions / art / or even imaginary friends can be a way of expressing underlying truths without the surface meaning of it being factual.
I understand your point, but
asserting something hoped to be so as known to be so,
as the absolute truth,
is what makes it deceptive. Thankfully when one claims Chicago was the best 80s rock band, nobody takes it with such seriousness. But then again, maybe that's because nobody claims you're going to suffer eternal torture for believing otherwise.
Kind of like how Jesus taught in parables.
Don't get me started on that.
Teaching in parables is mastery of
argument from analogy. Yet another
inductive reasoning logical fallacy. The list is long of leaders who have mastered
argument from analogy and teaching by stories in order to sway the minds of less-than-critical thinkers.
In
Don't Believe Everything You Think: The Six Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, author Thomas Kida identifies "the six-pack of problems" that us as humans unconsciously to accept false ideas. They are:
• We prefer stories to statistics.
• We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.
• We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
• We sometimes misperceive the world around us.
• We tend to oversimplify our thinking.
• Our memories are often inaccurate.
In a complex society where success requires the ability to evaluate the validity of many conflicting claims, critical-thinking skills are, well,
critical.
Makes me wonder, why do religions teachers of all religions, preachers included, teach through stories so much?
If Jesus is indeed God, then God teaches in stories, so it's perfectly acceptable to think of the Bible as a collection of divine story (and poetry and legend and myth and even in places history).
I would believed that statement to be generally supported by the evidence. Leave out the "if," though and you'd need to leave out the "divine."
Otherwise Biblical scholarship over the last few centuries reveal the Bible to be a collection of stories, poetry, legend, myth, and history.
And similar to the idea I mentioned Sam Harris attributes to Bertrand Russell, there are many, many such collections out there and even a few as globally popular as the Christian story.
So I continue in my struggle for evidence. That's what I'm looking for. Sufficiently enough evidence more, in fact, substantially more, than the devout of other faiths have for their faith.
You asked some questions about science I don't think I have the background to answer, so I won't try. I'm more of a literature person (as if you couldn't tell
)
No worries. I have degrees in computer science and in business. It's only my advocational quest for truth that has caused me to study up in so many different fields. Personally I feel more comfortable in the sciences than in Biblical scholarship, soteriology, and apologetics. Oh well.
I think Luke's version show it as clearly consensual--Mary submitting to the will of God. Matthew's is more silent on the point. I do not see this story as a
Leda and the Swan type rape at all.
And there actually is nothing in the Greek, at least from what I've researched, that hints at anything really sexual in nature. My question was just about the pregnancy. Kind of like if a sicko OB/GYN secretively inserted his sperm in the course of an exam. That would be morally reprehensible and our modern society would deal with it accordingly. Anyhow, this is more a mundane point than some of the other Big Ideas we've been discussing. (Unless you want to talk about Osiris and Dionysus instead of about Leda.)
