Q: do you, Christian, claim that God exists, rather than you believe that he exists?

[fr0d0]

I'm trying rasetsu



To me you're saying that only thought based on hard fact is valid. You're saying that belief that cannot be empirically proven is irrational.



I say belief has to be based on the non empirical. Rational thought, produces belief, which produces our understanding of the world. Not the other way around.

[Angrboda]

I'll have to think on that some. I'm not a rationalist myself, so the bar of rationality isn't as important to me as to what I see as the typical atheist.

(ETA: I'd probably appeal to something like Heidegger's concept of thrownness here, that we are born "mid-stream" as it were, so you can't put one end of the chain ahead of the other, in practice.)

[fr0d0]

I think rationality is my weakness. People say I have to have a reason for everything, and I think that's right.

[Esquilax]

I say belief has to be based on the non empirical. Rational thought, produces belief, which produces our understanding of the world. Not the other way around.

I think you're missing a step, though, and that step is testing those beliefs to see if they match up to the external reality. After all, you can't just think something into existence; stopping at the "having beliefs" stage puts you on the same footing as any old crazy person with a fantasy in their head. In fact, it puts you in the position of considering multiple, mutually contradictory beliefs rational at the same time, where they come up.

That's where empiricism comes in. Without it, you're living in a bizarre, solipsistic world, or you're engaging in special pleading.

[Jackalope]

If a strong belief is knowledge, and I'd agree with your definition, then I'd say that was outside of the realm of religious belief, or a worldview, an attempt at understanding purpose etc.. that is I don't think you can apply knowledge to purely mental problems, beyond helping to support the logic.

I'm still not sure we're on the same page. I didn't intend to imply that strong belief is knowledge (except in the sense of knowledge about what one believes). That is, if one has a strong existential belief in X, one could only say that one knows one believes X, it doesn't speak to the actual existence of X.

Perhaps we've just been misunderstanding each other.

In any case, my point was that one holding an agnostic position bears no burden until they expect a second party to accept their position as truth. An evangelic [a]theist can reasonably be expected to bear some burden, if they expect to be convincing. (How heavy the is another matter, and certainly debatable.)

Hopefully, I've made myself more clear.

On the second part of your reply - I think I see what you're saying regarding the applicability of empirical knowledge to purely rationalist arguments. However, I would personally say that I don't find arguments that have no apparent correspondence to observed reality to be particularly persuasive - in much the same way, I treat observations that defy reason as suspect. Reason and empiricism seem to me to be at their best when they are complimentary.

[Whateverist]

There is still the problem of "god" being poorly defined. If I look past the hollow omni powers and uncaused cause and all the other crap you hear many apologists say, what I see is that people who believe in them simply feel that they are in the presence of god(s). I think believers in God feel in His presence. They feel that they are transparent to God and that God knows their every struggle.

Those who believe don't know a thing about how any of this is possible, at least not until the apologists and preachers get at them and start foisting connections to this apprehension of God's presence to various narratives stemming from the bible. It would be more honest for people who have just the belief of being in touch with God to talk about His existence in the world they experience. The experience of God can be an essential aspect of how one experiences oneself.

If God exists in ones psyche but not in the sphere one identifies as oneself, then God's true place in the world is within the totality of oneself. Ones body and mind give rise to consciousness and that consciousness can take the form of being with but also apart from the God which ones consciousness also gives rise to. God isn't a conscious invention. No mere flim, flam. It has been an essential part of how people experience their world and themselves for as long as there have been people.

If that is the case, and I truly do believe it myself, then should those whose psyche has formed like this make the conscious effort to boot out God? I can't think of any reason they should. I'm quite sure it would be possible to have a very rich and satisfying interior life while continuing to honor as "other" and "wiser" the part one identifies as God. I see no problem.

PS: And I voted none of the above in my own case.

[Violet]

I think there are meddling forces. Can't prove it, but damn if it doesn't eat at me.

---

I think rationality is my weakness. People say I have to have a reason for everything, and I think that's right.

And at the root of it all: there is faith. Whee.

[Angrboda]

There is still the problem of "god" being poorly defined.

This is a recurrent theme of yours, that a concept has to be clearly defined to be meaningful. I think this is a canard. We use words without clear definition all the time without difficulty communicating. Language is very slippery on the aspect of meaning, and to demand greater clarity on this one word because it has a special place in your belief structure strikes me as special pleading. Take the sentence, "The ball came to a stop at the bottom of the stair." We don't understand the reference ball and its full meaning until we reach the end of the sentence; the action doesn't resolve itself until the end of the sentence. But we don't feel any anxiety about the vagueness of meaning prior to the end of the sentence. Vagueness and ambiguity is, to my mind, what makes communication in language so powerful. If it didn't have this looseness about it, we'd hardly be able to talk in anything less than book length sentences with any clarity.

So while I can appreciate that you may not have an intuitive grasp of the concept and find it puzzling, whether because it wasn't a part of your culture or whatever reason, I think you're demanding things of this word that you don't ordinarily require of other words that you use. That's special pleading.

(And as a mathematician and philosopher, I can tell you that some of the most interesting things are vague and depend on such slipperiness. Demanding that specific definitions not be vaguely defined appears both rather stodgy, and an example of the fallacy of the beard.)

[Whateverist]

There is still the problem of "god" being poorly defined.

This is a recurrent theme of yours, that a concept has to be clearly defined to be meaningful. I think this is a canard. We use words without clear definition all the time without difficulty communicating. Language is very slippery on the aspect of meaning, and to demand greater clarity on this one word because it has a special place in your belief structure strikes me as special pleading. Take the sentence, "The ball came to a stop at the bottom of the stair." We don't understand the reference ball and its full meaning until we reach the end of the sentence; the action doesn't resolve itself until the end of the sentence. But we don't feel any anxiety about the vagueness of meaning prior to the end of the sentence. Vagueness and ambiguity is, to my mind, what makes communication in language so powerful. If it didn't have this looseness about it, we'd hardly be able to talk in anything less than book length sentences with any clarity.

So while I can appreciate that you may not have an intuitive grasp of the concept and find it puzzling, whether because it wasn't a part of your culture or whatever reason, I think you're demanding things of this word that you don't ordinarily require of other words that you use. That's special pleading.

(And as a mathematician and philosopher, I can tell you that some of the most interesting things are vague and depend on such slipperiness. Demanding that specific definitions not be vaguely defined appears both rather stodgy, and an example of the fallacy of the beard.)

Perhaps. But isn't it enough to look for God within without supposing it is something outside of ourselves? You're not exactly the most inclusive theist on these boards and rarely (if ever) find common cause with any others. Perhaps you could share your sense of what gods are, Kali perhaps?

[Angrboda]

Perhaps. But isn't it enough to look for God within without supposing it is something outside of ourselves? You're not exactly the most inclusive theist on these boards and rarely (if ever) find common cause with any others. Perhaps you could share your sense of what gods are, Kali perhaps?

Perhaps you could define the distinction between inside and outside first.