(January 30, 2017 at 5:24 pm)SteveII Wrote: Even with all the additional connotations, faith never means belief in God with no evidence.
My criticisms are not about belief in a god, but about Christianity in particular. Deists don't claim you will burn in hell for not believing in a deity, Christians do claim you risk hell for not believing in the gospel. I never said faith means belief without evidence, I said faith means belief beyond the evidence; meaning that even if there is some limited foundation to make an argument (some evidence rather than none), the supporting evidence does not necessarily imply the conclusion. For example, Christians have faith that the resurrection occurred based on the empty tomb and the rest of the events described in the gospel accounts. Well, from my point of view if we are wondering whether a certain man came back from the dead, does the fact that these particular accounts of uncertain authorship and veracity say it happened serve as sufficient evidence to convince me? No, it's not sufficient to me, and yet under Christianity, the fact that I'm not convinced of this is reckoned as a moral failure on my part. That because I'm not convinced of this story and reject it I deserve to suffer forever in the afterlife? It's ludicrous to me, and I find it silly that a god depicted as kind and merciful would be so arbitrary in judging the children he allegedly loves based on this.
(January 30, 2017 at 5:32 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Not exactly. I think the claim of atheists that there are so many different gods is simply wrong. With respect to the Divine Attributes that come from general revelation, I cannot find any substantial differences between the De Fide of the Catholic Church and the Westminster Confession of the Reformed Church. The statements of faith of most mainline churches, despite minor doctrinal differences, read the same with respect to the attributes of God
I completely agree, which is why I think the argument that centers around equating disbelief in the God of classical theism with gods Thor or Zeus a bad argument because Thor and Zeus aren't gods in the sense classical theists use the word. These gods of ancient myth are basically superheroes, they're just really powerful versions of humans and don't really have anything in common with the god of classical theism other than the three letter title. My criticisms in this thread aren't aimed at the existence of a god, in fact you can presuppose a god exists (in fact I'm inclined to believe in one even if I don't claim to know for certain) in my criticisms of these religions. My criticism is aimed at the religions specifically and in this case Christianity.
And in regards to what you quoted from me, I was responding to what is a common evangelization tactic, and that is where believers tell you that things will only start to make sense to you when you allow yourself to believe and act as if their religion is true from the start. If you don't believe it's because you don't understand, and the only way to understand is to just go ahead and believe. So in order to become convinced and take that leap of faith you have to presuppose the truth of that which you are considering in the first place; it's awfully convenient that this is the way believers supposedly make sense of their faith.
(January 30, 2017 at 5:32 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I am not an expert on Islam. I get the sense that it is almost all dependent on special revelation and from my limited exposure their list of divine attributes have notable differences. At the same time I have read some Sufi commentaries that seem to conform with the divine attributes advocated by Christians. The same is true for Hinduism. There pantheon is bound by a single Ground of Being that seems remarkably similar to the Christian God of general revelation and the God of the Philosophers known to the ancient pagans.
So when I brought up the case of Islam, I was merely trying to illustrate that another religion besides Christianity demands you have faith in it, and uses faith as a basis for belief. Both Islam and Christianity hold that people have a moral obligation to embrace their faith, that's the essential point. So when you have two competing belief systems (Islam and Christianity) that both demand you have faith in it, and that faith serve as a basis for belief, how are you supposed to determine which (if any) is true?
You can't responsibly agree to believe in the first one your encounter just because they tell you that you must have faith, that's incredibly gullible. You have to evaluate them critically and determine if any of them seems credible enough to believe based on the evidence. Christians are awfully good at this when it comes to critiquing other denominations or other religions, but when it comes to self-critique along the same lines in Christianity no such thing is possible to me. I say it is not possible because for the believing Christian the conclusion has been reached in advance, before the research or the critique have even started. Due to the foundation of faith, no matter what you find, even if it appears to flat out disprove your religion, will cause you to reassess the authenticity of your religion because faith, once embraced and directed towards a particular belief system, causes one to ignore counter-evidence.
