RE: Why do you not believe in God?
July 16, 2012 at 5:32 pm
(This post was last modified: July 16, 2012 at 5:36 pm by Ryantology.)
I believe the past is reliable because memory is ubiquitous. All animals are capable of at least some form of information storage and recall, as well as many non-animals, and of course, computers.
It's true that at the bottom, accepting the past as reality requires an assumption to be made. But, all assumptions are not equally valid. Belief in the reality of the past is an assumption which sits on the very edge of solipsism, to the point where only a solipsistic argument can be made to dispute it. That might be fun for a philosophy discussion, but it's useless for establishing truth in any practical sense, and Christianity demands that you accept God and Jesus as practical realities, not as mere philosophical possibilities.
After all, if we go down that route, how do I know that God isn't something I personally made up in childhood?
It's true that at the bottom, accepting the past as reality requires an assumption to be made. But, all assumptions are not equally valid. Belief in the reality of the past is an assumption which sits on the very edge of solipsism, to the point where only a solipsistic argument can be made to dispute it. That might be fun for a philosophy discussion, but it's useless for establishing truth in any practical sense, and Christianity demands that you accept God and Jesus as practical realities, not as mere philosophical possibilities.
After all, if we go down that route, how do I know that God isn't something I personally made up in childhood?