RE: Question about "faith"
September 24, 2020 at 5:33 pm
(This post was last modified: September 24, 2020 at 5:38 pm by Simon Moon.)
(September 24, 2020 at 12:50 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 24, 2020 at 9:31 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: When something is based on evidence and reason, I find that I need not exert any will to believe it.
Provided the evidence and reasons meet your personal threshold. And of course, your biases against a proposition undoubtedly raise your acceptance threshold, and biases in favor lower it.
So please tell us what in the Christian proposition has met your personal threshold to allow you to accept it.
And what is it about your threshold that allows Christianity to clear the bar, but rejects all other very similar claims?
From someone who is outside ALL of all religious beliefs, all of them would fail to meet my threshold based on the exact same criteria. I don't have specific thresholds for different religions, yours fails to clear the bar for all the exacts same reasons that: Hinduism, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc, do.
Quote:The forum seems unaware that people's thresholds differ; and they judge another's threshold by contrasting it to their own. To use a potentially wrong analogy: for some people the existence of Black Holes is reasonable based solely on the math; for others it is reasonable only when gravitational waves are measured; and still others find it unreasonable until a Black Hole is observed directly.
I think we are all well aware that people's thresholds differ. But the problem is, when someone has differing thresholds for the same categories of claims.
Quote:When it comes to God: for some people, existence alone is sufficient to make the proposition reasonable;
The only way to get from: existence>therefore a god, is to be guilty of flawed and fallacious thinking. How else would one get from existence>therefore a god, except by appealing to a god of the gaps fallacy? "I can't think of a reason how the universe exists, so it must have been a god".
So, if claims that appeal to fallacies pass your threshold, your epistemology is flawed.
Quote:As such my only concern is not to convince anyone here that God exists, but getting them to see how someone else might find it reasonable, and to respect that.
I respect believer's freedom to believe it is reasonable, but I don't respect their belief that it actually is reasonable.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.