What to believe, crisis of faith

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Cmon now...."not having any doubt whatsoever"? Thats bullshit.

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Well, do you constantly doubt the existence of God and your entire basis of having faith?

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Folk who talk about scientific truth, if pressed, will inevitably retreat to a position that science can't tell you the truth it can only say what appears most likely.

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"When pressed"?Actually, us science-minded folks are quite up front about the tentativeness of science, and how the job of science is to come closer and closer to having full understanding of natural phenomena in the full realization that we will never reach full understanding.

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Neither can science tell you how close to truth (if truth were said to 100%) it is. It could be 2% or it could be 92%. There is no way of knowing.

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Actually, that is inaccurate. For example, we hold the Theory of a Heliocantric Solar System as a very highly confirmed, very well-supported theory of science. We are not as confident in the various Theories of Gravity, and less confident still in certain theoretical quantum theories of Physics.

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Similarily, people who say they believe in God can't prove it.

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Sure they do, and they do it all the time!Just about every new Creationist who comes storming here bashing Science says they have proof of God. Scientific proof, even.A few threads where people try to get them to show this proof later they then either disappear or they reluctantly "retreat" to the position that they can't show proof of God and that they just have to believe for themselves.

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Quite often the belief is based (according to themselves) on blind faith. They don't pose to know objectively.

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Again, my experience is quite the contrary.

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Because I met God, I could no more denounce His reality than I could denounce the reality of a person named Schrafinator! I have met you through your words, and, although I have never seen you, I trust that you are real. Why should I question that? (You ARE a real person, right? Not a computer generated response?? Nah....too human!

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What tests could you perform to show to others that I exist?For example:We could talk on the phone where a disinterested observer could listen in.We could have a video conference call in which a disinterested observer could observe my voice and image on the screen.We could meet in person in the presence of a disinterested observer observes that I exist and that you met me.Can you do the same for God?

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I could pray for someone who later reported either inner peace or even so much as an answered prayer. A disinterested observer could verify the reaction and check back with that person in six months to see if they had stronger faith...either in God, prayer, or even in themselves.

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That is an experimental design with way, way too many uncontrolled variables, all of which could very easily affect the outcome.That's why my experiment is much better.

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If a disinterested observer hung around me or some (very few, but some) ministers, they would see a positive corallary between our interactions with the inner city kids and the results and changes within their lives.

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That doesn't prove that God exists, and for exactly the same reasons I give above.It does show that when kind people take an interest in the lives of inner city kids, the kids do better in life.

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Perhaps you could argue that the reaction is due to human interaction and that God is not a provable part of the picture or process.

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Indeed I could.

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Thus...it all comes down to belief. Perhaps the disinterested observer would sense more than human interaction at work. Scientifically, they could not record their subjective feelings and interpretations as fact.

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But that's just it, Phat.I suggested a real test of your claim in my previous message that was specific and narrow in scope (which would actually be able to tell us something useful), and you instead came back with vague tests that have so many uncontrolled variables that the results would be meaningless.

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Does this prove that belief, although perhaps effective, is not scientific? (Or are you going to cite the human interaction as the placebo effect, where God is the pill being presented?)

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I think that kindness and personal interest combined with social pressure to follow societal rules will help any neglected kid to do better in society.Here's an experiment.Don't mention God at all to the next couple of kids you meet and help. Do everything else the same; encourage, counsel, etc.See if they do about as well as the kids you preach to.

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Thats one difference between believers and non-believers. Believers are often satisfied with non verifiable "warm fuzzy" feelings whereas non-believers want to see concrete results on a graph or blips on a brainwave.

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Well sure, when you make a positive claim about "god" being as real to you as a human being, I'm going to question you about that.

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Believe it or not, I don't mention God to perhaps half of the kids whom I talk with. They know that I am a Youth For Christ volunteer, and unless they bring God up, I never do.

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Do any of them not know you are connected to any religious group at all?OTOH, how do the kids whom you never have any religious conversations with do compared with the rest?

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Why?

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Um, because this is a debate board?

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What purpose does this serve for you? What if you succeed in causing people to doubt that which they originally believed? What will that accomplish for you? What will it accomplish for them?

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Doubt is good.Being too certain in what one believes leads to dogmatic, lazy thinking, and also to close-mindedness and rigidity.Doubt can be scary and uncomfortable, but it's a necessary part of personal growth.

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Aren't you, in a way, a preacher? A preacher whose message is "I really highly doubt the existence of the God of the Bible, because He has not revealed Himself in any experimentally verifiable way."

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A preacher of doubt? I am a pretty big supporter of evidence-based determinations of reality, it's true.However, I don't reserve doubt for the God of the Bible, you know. I also include doubt of fairies, the Loch Ness Monster, Chakras, Theraputic Touch Therapy, alien abductions, Krishna, Santa Claus, ghosts, dowsing, levitation, and dozens more claims that have not been experimentally verified.

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Have you convinced anybody of your message?

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Yes. But it wasn't because I feel a need to change people. I just like to debate and various discussions with a couple of people have given them some major food for thought, I suppose.

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How many?

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Two or three, that I know of.

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What if your doubts turn out to be wrong?

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Then I'll have evidence that will convince me.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 09-15-2005 07:39 PM

Well, if those are going to be your parameters for the experiment, the experiment is useless.Phat used the fact that the kids he does outreach with imporove themselves as evidence that god exists. He wasn't stipulating that the kids go to heaven as evidence.

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Is there life after we leave this world? Life, the exhistence in general, the BIG question, WHY ARE WE HERE? and WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE IN LIFE? or is there one?

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Our species is very smart but there are disadvantages to that.The only reason you, or anyone else has been able to ask and be troubled by such questions is because we have evolved to have these big ol' brains capable of very abstract thought. More specifically, we are capable of understanding that we are going to die.Part of humans' enormous success as a species is that we are very curious. We like to figure stuff out.But there are some questions we will never know the answer to.I think a big difference between people who need religion and people who don't is in the way individuals learn to deal with uncertainty.Nobody knows what happens when we die. Nobody knows if God or gods exist. Lots of people say they know, and all of them tell a different story, but nobody's story is any more credible than anyone else's, as they all have the same basis; faith.I can choose to accept the fact that nobody knows the answer to these questions and live with the ambiguity, or I can decide to believe in one or more of the multitude of speculative, non-evidence based answers humans have come up with over the millenia.Personally, I choose to live with the ambiguity.I prefer leaving it at "I don't know" to a belief resorted to in order to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty.Because once you pick a belief to believe without evidence, and you decide that it is The Truth, then you have closed yourself off from any information which might contradict that belief.You have stopped being open.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 09-16-2005 08:04 AM

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I'm not sure you are understanding me. It is highly possible that God will never choose to submit to your need to have Him experimentally verified.

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What probability formulae did you use to determine this? I used to be a believer, so it wouldn't be my whole life.But as I said, I do not go out of my way to try to convince others that they shouldn't believe in Zeus or Loki or Krishna, but this IS a debate board. I do not publish pamphlets and leave them at interstate rest stops, nor do I have a television show during which I beg for money to sustain my agnostic ministry, nor do I go door to door trying to convince people to have doubt in their faith.People choose quite freely to interact with me (or not) here. To debate ideas is the reason we are here.

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IF the Bible is true, though, then your doubts are wrong. You and those you have convinced will find out on the other side of life, in which case, it is too late to do anything about the matter.

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That may be true.However, IF The Buddha was correct, then all of your closeminded thinking and fear of death will not have gotten you any closer to reaching Nirvana, and possibly will have set you back a couple of steps. No, I am a participant on a debate board and people are responsible for themselves.

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Listen, you believe what you preach (i.e., "I doubt the Bible is true"), and I don't mind you preaching it. But isn't there a possibility that you are wrong?

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Sure. Just as there is a possibility that you are wrong.

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If I am wrong, what happens to those I preach to? They rot in the dirt like every other product of abiogenesis and billions of years of evolution.

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They also live a life of lies, denial, guilt, and fear.If this life is all there is, you will have influenced people to live it much less fully than they might have, and with their minds not enjoying and experiencing the here and now, but always focused on some imaginary afterlife.You could also be setting people back on their path to reach Nirvana.

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If you are wrong (AND the Bible is right), what happens to those you preach to? Possibly, they spend an eternity in hell.

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Are people responsible for themselves or should they be completely sheltered from all thoughts and ideas that just might cause them to think and struggle?

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Have you or science disproved the Bible?

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Many of the factual claims about natural phenomena mentioned in the Bible have been shown by science to be untrue.Has the Bible disproven the Buddha?I noticed that you made no comment upon my answer to your questions. I am interested in what you believe the role of doubt is for personal growth.

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What purpose does this serve for you? What if you succeed in causing people to doubt that which they originally believed? What will that accomplish for you? What will it accomplish for them?

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This message has been edited by schrafinator, 09-16-2005 08:32 AM

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Did God tell people to use the speed of light as a clock to guage the age of the universe? Is it possible that God is not confined to the laws regarding one of his creations: i.e., light, and that He can put light wherever He wants and however He wants?

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Did God tell people that isotopic ratios in rocks were indicators of the age of the earth? Is it possible that God set the ratios for some other purposes and we have misinterpretted them?

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So, is it your contention that pretty much all of the natural sciences have gotten everything wrong about the Earth and the life that lives on it? The many hundreds of thousands of scientists over the last 200 years or so, the millions and millions of observations and tests of theories are all spectacularly wrong, yet somehow scientists have been able to use all of those completely wrong conclusions to make enormous medical and technological advances that influence nearly every aspect of our lives?

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I believe the events in Genesis occurred just as it says it did, and I fail to see how science has disproved it.

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And quite a failure it is.

You know the truth?How do you know you're right and not the thousands of others who think differently, but think that THEY are right?Am I supposed to just take your word for it, or do you have anything more concrete to help convince me that you actually do know the ultimate Truth?

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You ask all the right questions, in my opinion. People who say they are content to die like a dog in a ditch, or end up fertilizer for the cemetery grass, or claim to be fulfilled by the idea that their memory in the minds of a few and a good reputation in their small sphere is enough immortality for them, are in a state of self-deception bordering on hysteria. In my opinion. The idea that this amazing creature we are could fulfill our destiny in any of those ways is absurd. In my opinion. The idea that this amazing creature we are could be CONTENT with such a destiny is the absurdest of all. In my opinion.

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I used to ask the same questions. I was never happy with any of those answers. I believed in evolution; it made me cynical. What's the point in living a good life at all? Morality makes no sense. Not that I was for violating all morality of course (it IS built into us), I just couldn't find a reasonable basis for it. How does one CARE about an evolutionarily useful adaptation? Loving and protecting your child because you are programmed to love your child? Yuck. Blech. Sucks the breath right out of the lungs to think like that. Shrivels the heart. How do people manage to make a LIFE out of such ideas? My suspicion: They don't. They make a life in SPITE of such ideas.

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You know what all of this looks like to me, faith?Your ego wasn't satisfied with you thinking that humans, and you, aren't specially-picked, first in line, be-all and end-all, God-made and super-important.So, you picked a belief that satisfied the self esteem needs of your fragile, undernourished ego.It's very much looks like you couldn't stand not being the center of the Universe's attention.

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Can science put a probe into someones brain and locate the part of them that knows that they are an "I am". No it can't. How can it even be tested?

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Science can and does, actually, study the self-aware part of human cognition.There are ways of testing if young children can differentiate between themselves and other people, and there seems to be a stage of development at which very young humans begin to realize that their minds are seperate from the minds of others around them.Autism is another very obvious example of when there is something wrong in the brain which renders autistic people unable to realize that other people have their own thoughts, points of view and plans, and have difficulty understanding others'attitudes and emotions.

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The reason I can be certain for myself is quite simple. Like Robin Rohin I was lucky to be a blank slate about things God. Zero information, no interest, no need of God (or so I thought).

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You never heard of Christmas or Easter, never even saw a church before, never realized that Christianity existed, nobody you ever knew or talked to or read or listened to or saw on the TV ever mentioned God, ever?...in IRELAND?You know, the country that has had religious conflict for generations?Come on, what kind of cock and bull story are you telling yourself?

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Then something happened (see first post). And it was only later that I found what had happened to match exactly with what the Bible says happens.

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What about someone who tells me that they never heard of Buddhism before, but then something happens to them, and when they go read the tenets of Buddhism, the thing that happened to them matched exactly with what the tenets of Buddhism predicted?Why are they wrong and you right?

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When i say I know the truth I have to limit that by saying I don't know everything about the truth - but that God exists as described in the Bible is certain to me.

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What about all of the other people who say that the gods exist as described in the bhagavad gita?They are just as sure as you are, they have also had profound things happen to them, and they may be even more sure than you are.Why are they wrong and you right?

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Like if someone was to put a gun to my head and tell to say "God doesn't exist" then the last thought through my earthly head would be "Bang!!" I ain't a fanatic it just that I'm that sure. 100% - couldn't be surer.

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The people who drank the Kool-Ade were even more sure than that.So were the Heaven's Gate people, and so are all of the suicide bombers of various religions.If we are to use willingness to die for their beliefs as a judge of the correctness of that belief, then they sure seem much more correct than you are.So far, you have not provided one bit of reason for me to believe you over anyone else proclaiming they have "The Truth."You are no differnt from people who are 100% sure that the aliens speak to them through their fillings.

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One thing is certain. You should absolutely not take my word for it. Or any others for that matter. If truth has anything of man attached to it then run like the clappers. The only way to know for sure is that it doesn't have man attached to it - otherwise error will be included.

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So, how did you ever learn about Christianity if it wasn't through men? Men wrote the Bible, didn't they, and preach it to people?

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A question for you: given that any idea we could have about God would pale into the laughable were we actually faced with him/it, can man do anything directly from within his own capability to find God?

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If the answer is 'nothing' then your on the right track...

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There are a thousand religions with millions of adherents, many of which sound exactly as you do. Perfect surety.You can't all be right, so how does one choose?

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That's in the ballpark. I always felt that human beings are WAY too special a being to have so meaningless an origin and fate as atheism and evolution ascribe.

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But that's just your own self-centeredness, vanity and lack of humility influencing your choice of belief.The lack of feeling the most important came first and you didn't like that, so instead of accepting that you aren't the center of the universe (being the most influential species on the planet isn't special enough for you, apparently), you embrace a religion in which your ego is constantly stroked.Forgive me, but that sounds incredibly narcissistic and childish.