RE: Theists - I want to know what you think
May 10, 2018 at 6:06 pm
(This post was last modified: May 10, 2018 at 6:12 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
(May 10, 2018 at 3:31 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Nonsense. You are confusing ends and means, i.e. choosing a belief versus holding it. Choosing to believe includes all the precursory activity leading to knowledge, such as fact seeking, challenging assumptions, reframing perspectives, and making a sincere effort to reflect about an issue...and then after all that choosing to accept it.
The bolded part is the part I am saying is not possible.
Quote: When someone like alpha says that you choose not to believe, and he can correct me if I am wrong, he means that you are not taking a question seriously enough to consider other possibilities and/or not subjecting your current beliefs (or lack thereof) up for scrutiny, and even if you did find everything tilted in favor of a certain conclusion, even then, you could choose not to accept it. You cannot escape responsibility for your own choices, Hammy.
Belief is not a choice.
You do appear to be talking about confirmation bias. But as I've said... I seek knowledge for its own sake... so that's how I avoid confirmation bias. And if God is an unknowable being then it doesn't seem much sense to be able to know that being. And if you can't reason yourself to Christianity then how can one possibly believe reasonably?
(May 10, 2018 at 3:31 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:(May 10, 2018 at 2:15 pm)Hammy Wrote: There's no gap for atheists such as myself who believe in a first cause.There is a whole host of gaps! The persistence of being,
What do you mean by "persistence of being"? Do you mean the fact that reality persists?
Quote: intelligibility
Why would God be required for that?
Quote:, rational order,
Why would God be required for that?
Quote: moral facts...
Don't moral facts make God redundant?
Quote:the list goes on and on. Your only escape is to ignore the Principle of Sufficient reason and call everything for which atheism cannot even hope to address a "brute fact."
No... I am a big fan of the principle of sufficient reason. You seem to not understand it. The principle is that there is a valid reason behind everything not that one should pretend to give a reason for everything prematurely. If you don't really know what the first cause is the rational response is to admit that there is a reason but the rational response is not to pretend to know what the reason is before you actually do.
