RE: Knowledge and belief in God
April 29, 2016 at 7:16 am
(This post was last modified: April 29, 2016 at 7:29 am by Harris.)
(April 27, 2016 at 3:39 am)robvalue Wrote: This is basically some sort of appeal to popularity combined with a non sequitur. Lots of people think about it, so it must be real.
ALL matured and healthy people (including you) know what is God whether you agree that God exists or not.
(April 27, 2016 at 3:39 am)robvalue Wrote: The thing that we naturally have is a desire to ask questions; which is not matched by our ability, as a species, to answer them. This makes many people uncomfortable. So much so that they make up a proxy answer. People just happen to use the most popular three letter word going around as the current mental pacifier. But there's so little in common between what different theists carry around in their brain that to even refer to it as the same thing is a stretch.
The scope of your rationale is primitive because it works only within the range of your perceptual experiences. All of your so called evidences are based on the generalised views of other people.
Reason is what makes us distinct from animals.
Reason is the faculty of consciousness, a form of awareness, and a cognitive capacity. Reason is a capacity to think beyond the range of what we can perceive through our senses. It is the capacity to acquire objective knowledge on a wider scale from atoms to galaxies. Reason gives us the ability to generalise from perceptual observation and identify causal regularities that are not evident to the naked eye. It was reason through which we have discovered indiscernible black holes.
Reason gives the ability to invent new products and technologies by imagining the things that do not yet exist.
If you are an empiricist, you could trust your senses but that would not do as much good as you might think. Science and Technology, business and finance operate only on the bases of reason. They exploit the power of reason to expand knowledge, health, wealth, and other human goods.
“From the wheel to the sky scraper everything we are and everything we have comes from the single attribute of man the functioning of his reasoning mind.”
Ayn Rand
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/58643-ma...e-comes-on
