What to believe, crisis of faith

I don't understand this attitude, truly, but of course you have a right to it. If you don't mind being of no more value than fertilizer or a platypus, who am I to argue with you. But as I said to Schraf, I believe our specialness is objectively indisputable, and it was why I objected to evolutionism -- or at least the philosophies that spin off from it -- before I became a Christian. From my point of view, uniqueness isn't why we are amazing, and who is amazed isn't why we are amazing either -- although speaking of other animals I think our ability to befriend the animals shows our amazingness among other things, and that the animals themselves recognize our specialness by becoming our friends.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-20-2005 03:20 PM

Take a rectangular array of tvs until you get 20 million pixel screen then project an image onto the bank and you have the color part sorted And we can do it 23 frames a second to tell a story

And you still have not even approached the intellegence level of the average cephalopod, that can not only change color, but texture, size, shape and do so using nothing but mind and body. As to telling a story, perhaps when we've evolved some more we might be able to understand cephalopods communications but their launguage if far too complex for us to understand right now. The most we can do is stand like children and try to understand what the grownups are talking about.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Read a book called "Whatever happened to Hell" by John Blanchard and you might change your view. It depressed me for a week. An appalling vista and not so much as the flame of a match in sight.The mere thought that folk could end up there (even if it's because they've buried their heads in the sand and hardened their hearts) is something I can't spend too much time thinking about - otherwise I'd go mad But I do have to believe that God calls everyone and there are none excluded except those who would exclude themselves.

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

The only amazement-scale we have access to (not counting cats) is the human one. Since we are humans ourselves, it is a subjective scale by definition.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Actually, we were talking about how amazing we are, but if you want to talk about value, that's fine.Let's compare the value of a human being with that of, say, an agouti.A what? An agouti. It's a cat-sized guinea pig that lives in certain parts of the Amazon rain-forest. Having exceptionally sharp teeth and a very strong jaw, the agouti is the only animal capable of opening the Brazil-nut, the hardest nut in the forest.The Brazil nut tree is also known as the "godfather of the jungle". They can become as old as a thousand years, soar high above the forest canopy, and are the centre of a vast web of life. Without it, the rain-forest would not be the same. If there were no agoutis, Brazil nuts could not germinate, because the seeds inside cannot penetrate the outer hull by themselves.So, no agoutis, no Brazil-nut trees. And without Brazil-nut trees, again, the rain-forest would not be the same.Now humans.Humans consume vast amounts of fossil fuels, releasing greenhouse-gases into the atmosphere in unprecedented amounts. They pull down rain-forests, the lungs of the earth, at an alarming rate. They wage large-scale wars against each other, destroying large portions of their own populations and habitat. They use their intellect to invent the most deadly weapons with which they can destroy the earth ten times over. They kill each other over something as trivial as whose is the better god.Frankly, the earth would be better off without them.Value-wise, I thinks it's one-nil for the agoutis.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Now if only we had listened to God in the first place, we could be chilling in a paradise jungle talking with God and the agoutis...
Maybe the big tree would indeed be the tree of life, for without a rain forest, life on earth would itself be jeopordized.I know that the Garden of Eden story is probably a parable, but IF humans are merely another animal, why did God create us? Surely we were to be the caretakers of the garden! How would we take care of an eco-system that ran itself? Maybe we were the ones who were supposed to be Gods managers here on Earth....instead we killed the heir of the vineyard and tried to grow fruit ourselves...and we end up killing each other over it!This message has been edited by Phatboy, 09-20-2005 02:54 PM

Well OK. When you and Dawkins and all the other bigwigs figure out how humanity can save itself, I'll be OK with it.Two questions:
If all of us have subjective values and ideals, who are we collectively subjected to? Ourselves?Can the sum agreement (if possible) of human goals can be agreed upon, would this agreement be a collective subjective or would it be objective...an ideal for everyone?

I think you probably don't mean it this way, but:It looks like your premise is that God created us, and you reason from there that it's not reasonable that he would create us as merely another animal, therefore we are not merely another animal.But I say your premise is on shaky ground. I think that what we were talking about was the collective assessment of the amazingness of the human species. So, in the light of that discussion, I would say that the subjectiveness of the amazement-scale is in direct relation to the only candidate for subjective projection, which is, indeed, ourselves as a species.I am beginning to sound like Brad. Did I mention Kant? Or Croizat? The only way it could be objective is if there is a reality out there that can be mapped one-to-one with our human goals. I don't think such a mapping can be done, so my guess would be that it would always be subjective. The perspective might matter though. Individual subjectivity need not necessarily correspond with collective subjectivity.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 20-Sep-2005 11:00 PM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Yes, that's the earth-centered versus human-centered perspective. If you value the earth more than humans that's, again, your subjective call and I won't argue. Animals and plants can't sin, of course, so if you want a totally predictable unmessy environment that is completely run by the laws of nature, by all means go with a humanless world.I'm not crazy about most humans myself. Really I think most of us aren't. Loving my neighbor takes work to subdue my own reactions (the "flesh" in Christian lingo) and realize I'm no better than anybody else. But subjectively speaking, from our own narrow egocentric perspective, other humans are always going against our own ideas of how things should be, or in a more personal vein, always messing things up for us. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Hell is other people."So I don't measure the value of human beings by how we actually behave, but by -- by what? I ask myself -- not exactly our capacities though those are essential -- so by our potential I guess, what we COULD be? Something like that. Or maybe really, more by our sense of tragedy, the fact that we know we exist and are going to die. Even by the fact that we have the free will to act against what we know to be right. Such a being is perverse and confused but still has something great that is unheard-of in the natural world otherwise.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-21-2005 03:02 AM

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Read a book called "Whatever happened to Hell" by John Blanchard and you might change your view. It depressed me for a week. An appalling vista and not so much as the flame of a match in sight.

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I suggest that you read another book.The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl SaganIt was quite uplifting to me.

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but IF humans are merely another animal, why did God create us? Surely we were to be the caretakers of the garden!

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Then we are failing miserably.Doesn't it make a lot more sense that we are not created by God but are just a very intelligent ape that learned to use language and technology, and subsequently inhabited and exploited nearly every environment on Earth?We are born, we consume, and we die, just like every other creature.

You may more accurately have said provisionally uplifting. For that is all it can offer.Carl Sagan said "Scienctists, like other human beings, have there hopes and their fears, their passions and despondancies, and their strong emotions, which may sometimes interrupt the course of clear thinking and sound practice, but science is also self-correcting... The history of science is full of cases where previously accepted theories and hypotheses have been overthrown to be replaced by new ideas which better explain the data".In correctly commending the nature of true science he also illustrated the fact that true science is provisional. It came up in a conversation I had yesterday that for the non-God believer the goal of life lies in the quest for answers. It's the quest that matters as answers themselves are never reached. There is no arrival at absolute truths as such, just provisional truths: existentialism, determinism, nihilism, Religion, scientism etc can be followed forever but never arrive anywhere concrete. New ideas can always arise which better explain the data.For the person to whom God has revealed himself, the quest is over. The journey has resulted in the arrival at a destination. Not that finding out more about the destination isn't fascinating - it is. But that constant craving for answers has been satisfied.It's fitting that the subtitle of the book is a 'candle in the dark'. All a candle does is partially illuminate. There is always far more to see beyond it's reach - if only it could illuminate that far. The quest can continue safe in that knowledge - forever.Maybe your different than me but I grew tired of the quest. I grew tired of provisional, never actual. I was tired of wandering around with a flickering candle. Until God threw the switchAnd if it's answers you want in YOUR lifetime, not ongoing provisional then you would possibly agree it would take God to do it. It can only be him (if he exists).There's no harm in asking. Consider the following prayer for a few moments.Lord, I don't love you
I don't even want to love you
But I want to want to love you.Imagine proposing marriage like that!You don't have to do the impossible to get to God. He made you rational he doesn't expect that you become irrational. You can only do what you can do - no more. The above indicates how far you can be away yet he will respond. It doesn't matter that you don't believe in him for him to draw you in - how can you believe what you don't know. You can be as atagonistic as you like: he understands that you are and why you are. If even the tiniest little fraction of your heart wants him, then that's enough for him to work on.All you've got to do is ask - with that tiny little piece of your heart. He's that big, he can take it. He wants you too ask

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

Subjective....by whose definition? Mans presumably. But if man's definition of subjective is valid, why not mans definition of objective?If subjective and objective are not defined by man and are not subject to mans opinion and whim, ie: they are independant of man, then have we not arrived at 'God'This message has been edited by iano, 21-Sep-2005 10:56 AM

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

We sure are. Although Parsamonium paints a dreadful picture of the human race a few posts ago and he/she is perfectly accurate in painting it so, it is not the full story. Talk of objective position of humans in the scale of things aside, you may agree that humans are the most beautiful and ugly creatures on the planet. Nothing will make you cry more that the plight of a human suffering terribly. Nothing will enrage you more that the actions of other humans who cause or could prevent such suffering.If you want provisional answers as to why things are the way they are you can read up about politics/history/business/physcology and get a murky and completely subjective explaination.Or you can read the bible which explains it in two words: The Fall It makes perfect sense in the provisional explaination call evolution. If you step back and just use your own reason, free of anyones influence you'll see a multitude of problems. There are dozens of things which evolution has no explaination for and all you have is philosophical ponderings which, over a few millenia have not managed to progress beyond provisional answers.Mans is aesthetic
Man creates
Man loves, man hates
Man fears death beyond a mere instinctual, immediate avoidance
Man uses propositional language
Man is self aware
Man has a spiritual dimension
Man asks "Who am I, Why am I here, Where am I going"Logic tells you that Man is not just an animal... Then what? You can't say 'nothing' because you don't know. Provisional/speculative is all there is to make comment with. This isn't some abstract discussion about some ultimately irrelevant topic. I'm going to die and your going to die. Death is the most inescapable fact of human existance. It would appear to be a permanent state so when considering one's position it would seem sensible to be as sure as you possibly can be.If you get it wrong, the only person who loses is you. Don't let fallible philosophers opinions determine your future (if there is one). They won't be around to pick up the pieces will they?If there is a God, this is between you and God. Deal with him directly. Cut out the middlemen - be they Philosophy or Religions. He's the only one who can give you an answer. If you want an answerSeek and you shall find implies don't seek and you won't(Has it ever struck you as curious that a diverse group of people who don't know each other all say the same thing: "God met with me" "One day my life changed for good" "I asked him to reveal himself and he did" "Now I know truth" There is ample evidence: all of us who say that God exists. It demands a verdict. None say they deserved it or are better than anyone else or followed some forumla or did good thing or got our acts together. All of that is irrelevant. The only thing that is common is that we asked him.

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."