RE: Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”
September 3, 2014 at 10:46 am
(This post was last modified: September 3, 2014 at 10:53 am by Michael.)
(September 3, 2014 at 7:03 am)Esquilax Wrote: I think you're smart enough to see how that is begging the question.
It certainly looks like I'm begging the question doesn't it :-)
But let me say just a little more about that. Let’s leave God out of this for a moment. I believe the conscience exists and that it tells me good from bad. To me that is a ‘properly basic belief’. It is not grounded in anything, but is the ground for other beliefs I have. I take it as axiomatic. Or to put it another way I presuppose that my conscience does know right from wrong. Though that belief is basic (i.e. ungrounded) I find that it helps to make sense of my life. Though I can’t prove it, I trust it. So I wouldn't for example take the opposite presupposition, that everything my conscience tells me is good is actually bad, and then act on that reversed assumption.
Other people seem also to report a sense of conscience. So though I can only validate my own conscience through my life experiences, it seems reasonable to assume that other people can do likewise. To put it another way, I don’t think I'm the only one who has a conscience.
Where God fits in for me is that ‘the God hypothesis’ is one that joins a lot of dots for me; it makes sense of my life, from the sense of the numinous (a deeply intuitive sense of what many people have called ‘god’), to the sense that some things really are right or wrong, and to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” So ‘God’, in some respects, is the framework, the paradigm that connects lots of individual bits and pieces of knowledge and experience for me. I could be wrong, but I take the risk of trusting in this God that I think there is. So I believe that God is the fount of my conscience because that simply makes most sense to me. It’s inductive, if you like, answering the question “what is the best model that fits all the data I have?” It’s subjective, it’s intuitive at least in part, it’s not without risk, but I'm still convinced that's is a good reason for me to believe in my God. I trust God with my life.
