... and A lingering question

[The D.S.]

Moderator’s note: This tread was moved from the Introductions forum thread 14089, because it’s more a Theological discussion than a Introduction/greeting one.

 

Hey!

 

Well, I'm new to Hypography (obviously) and although I've been a member for some time I rarely seem to get on to make posts, view others, and read things of interest. However, as of late I have become more and more interested in people that share my passion for knowledge, understanding, and overall wisdom of the world we live in. I believe far too few ask the questions that are truly pertinent to life and here's where we get our chance to shine.

 

So...on that note I ask my first question.

 

As of late, I have been plagued by the question of "does God exist?". My fiance and I have frequent debates on this topic and although I call my self "agnostic" I also happen to lean very close to the side that does NOT believe in God. She claims that this world is "far too amazing and beautiful for a God to have not created it". My response is almost always "why can't a garden be beautiful without imagining fairies exist in it as well?".

 

Clearly my question is this- I wish to discuss claims of God and claims against his existence and I don't want opinions...I want factual evidence that can be defined and supported. I'm welcome to all viewpoints. Thanks and let the fun begin! :phones:

[Boerseun]

Hi there!

 

Golly, 8 posts in THREE YEARS? Jeez, your keyboard must still be smelling like the factory in China that gave birth to it!

 

Any case, on to your lingering question:

 

You're looking for "factual evidence" regarding God's existence/non-existence. Problem is, that belief in any deity of any flavour requires a leap of faith; that's why it's called "religion", and hence there can be no backing empirical evidence to support or disprove it.

 

It simply exists outside the realm of science, or, in my opinion, solely in the minds of those believing in it.

[REASON]

Hi D.S.,

 

Welcome back to Hypo. :phones:

 

The key to this type of discussion, particularly with a loved one, is to avoid allowing yourself or the other person to get upset as you discuss your beliefs. As Bo said, there is absolutely no way to prove or disprove the existance of God so you are simply left with your unsubstantiated beliefs. And there is nothing wrong with simply having unsubstantiated beliefs, the problem begins when you start judging others for not sharing them. You may very well need to agree to disagree at the point you feel the discussion start to get heated.

 

I am an agnostic as well because it seems to be the only reasonable position to take from a reality based standpoint, and I don't believe any God who could create the entire universe would condemn me for taking such a stance considering he is unwilling to reveal himself openly. And, I am comfortable in that I know I live my life in consideration of others. No matter what any human generated religious doctrine implies, no reasonable God would condemn me to an eternity of misery, despite the life I've lead, simply for questioning his unrevealed existance. If God were my creator, than he created me with scepticism, and it doen't seem fair to then condemn me for utilizing it.

 

When it comes to faithful belief, I find myself most interested in what it is at the root level that motivates a person to choose to form their beliefs as they do. For example, is it because they don't know any better, because they want to feel apart of a group, or is there another emotional element driving their beliefs. If you can get at that without coming across as prying, or attacking their emotional security blankets, it can be very revealing as to how they form their world view. If you and someone else are willing to be open about these inner feelings, you'll likely develop a deeper appreciation for each other despite your differences of opinion.

 

I have come to believe that one of the primary motivators that drives people toward religious faith is their inherent fear of death, and the promise of an afterlife. Being the only species that can actually ponder what it means to die, believing that we can continue on beyond our death, and spend an eternity with our loved ones is a powerful motivator for religious faith, as opposed to believing that you will lose consciousness forever. It is rooted in our survival instincts shared by all living things, and it is powerful enough to subvert the rational minds of most people who claim to have such faith.

 

Another powerful emotional motivator for many appears to involve group association. People, generally speaking, don't like to feel like the oddball. Considering the substantially higher percentage of people who are religiously faithful, to belive in agnosticism or atheism places you in the oddball minority of rational thinkers. For some, this is home, but for most people, being in the unfaithful minority is an uncomfortable place to be.

 

These beliefs are perpetuated generationally as religiosity is typically passed on to children who can become indoctrinated into their parents' religious belief system from a young age. One grows up saying, "I am Baptists", or "I am Jewish", becoming wholly what they have been taught. That's why when you attack someone's religious beliefs, they interpret it as an attack on their person.

 

These beliefs are often at the core, so my recommendation is that you tread lightly if challenging the religious beliefs of someone you care about. And try to understand that their beliefs may not actually be indicative of who they are as a person, which is where your evaluation of them should be focussed.

 

Good luck, and you can rest assured, it will definitely be a learning experience. :naughty:

[The D.S.]

I totally agree with what has been stated above. Agnosticism is my hold on life and shall continue to be until this God reveals itself or it is actually proven that there is, or isn't, a God. It can be quite difficult trying to understand ones views of God when I do no feel hispresense anywhere in this existance.

 

I liked the reference of faith that was posted above. This "faith" is all that most can cling on to for their proof and although it's the single saftey many religious followers hold onto, it is also their strongest arguement, and often hard to break down.

 

I also agrre that peopel turns to religion because of their fear of death, the fact that so many others believe, and their upbringing from birth to believe in a "higher being". All these lead to a future religious follower in the making. I was not raised in a religious enviroment and my parents often told me to choose based on personal experiance and what facts I could derive from life. So far, life has told me that there is no God, that we as humans live in a universe of amazing complexity, and that ust living, by itself, is an amazing feat of nature.

 

Yes, my posts have been random and scattered, but fear not, I'm here to stay

[CraigD]

A study of the question of the existence of God is badly incomplete, I think, without including the ontological argument.

 

A lot of people, including the 9th century Muslim, and 10th century Catholic saint credited with its invention, and countless numbers of theology students, found and continue to find marvelously compelling.

 

IMHO, the argument is lacking, because while arguably proving either that God must exist, or cannot possibly not be believed to exist, it’s so unspecific in its description of God that the student is left with such a vague image of what it has proven to exist that he’s unsure what it is.

[The D.S.]

I find the ontological arguement lacking in clarity...could you more specifically define it for me?

[InfiniteNow]

I find the ontological arguement lacking in clarity...could you more specifically define it for me?

 

Funny that you'd phrase your question the way you did.

 

Here's a cliff's notes version... God has no adequate (nor universally agreed upon) definition, and without adequate definition it cannot be measured or observed (since you don't even know what you're looking for).

 

 

Sort of like asking someone to prove love... Only once it has very clear parameters identified can the pursuit to find it scientifically begin.

[CraigD]

I find the ontological arguement lacking in clarity...could you more specifically define it for me?

Sure. It’s an easy argument to outline.

 

Define God as “that which nothing greater than can be conceived”. This definition is the core of the argument. Saint Anselm and later folk tended to do this by listing attributes that things could have, and “maxing them out” for the thing named “God”.

 

Now the “does God exist” question becomes:

• Consider two things:
  • God as defined above (to the best of the definer’s ability), with an “exists” attribute of “yes”,
  • and exactly the same thing, but with exists=no.

  [*]The former is greater than the latter. [*]Therefore, by definition, the latter is not God, while the former may be.

Here, IMHO, is where the first of two major strange quality of the ontological argument becomes evident: it’s not actually addressing the objective, natural or supernatural existence of God, but the necessity of a person to conceive of God as existing or not.

 

Note that the argument doesn’t require anyone to precisely define all the nothing-greater-than-can-be-conceived attributes of God, only accept that the “exists”, attribute is “yes”.

 

This leads to the second of two major strange qualities of the argument: it’s literally agnostic on most of the qualities of God that most of religion and theology has spent most of its history and effort considering. For example, is God loving? The ontological argument itself is mute on this, because it doesn’t claim that “loving” is a greater trait than “not loving”. It only levels the claim that “exists” is a greater attribute than “doesn’t exist”. God could be a evil microscopic purple unicorn, and we humans at fault for not having the intellect to understand that this is the greatest thing that can be conceived, but He must exist, because, as Anselm (roughly paraphrased) put it “even a child knows that something that exist is greater than something that does not.”

 

There are thousands of pages, spanning about a millennium, written about the ontological argument, so my little post can at best scratch the surface of it. Hopefully, though, I’ve succeeded here in bringing a bit of clarity to it, in hypography’s small nook in the theological world. :)

[REASON]

One of the biggest problems I have with Ontology is that it seems to require an advanced intelligence to support it. If there were no humans with advanced, contemplative minds, there would be no perception of God and the argument would collapse. It's kind of like the tree in the forest with no one around routine. It seems to imply that God's existance is because we can imagine it. Am I off base with this notion?

 

Secondly, and more important to me, is that ontology has no practical application in how people form their beliefs about God. It's great for philosophers, but if I were to conduct a little experiment where I asked 1,000 people how much of an influence ontology has on their belief in God, I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the vast majority of responses will be in the form of a blank stare.

 

People don't believe in God because thay can define a reasonable philisophical explanation, they believe simply because it is what they have been taught about the world, and it just feels better. The sense of security it brings, as long as there is some sort of compliance, is pretty powerfull stuff for most people. This is revealed in their rhetoric. Consider the sense of security that comes with the notion of being "saved."

[The D.S.]

Ah ha! You have all cleared the air of this stiffling smoke, and I now understand the purpose and claims of the ontological arguement. I happen to agree with it all and it makes much more sense now.

 

I also agree with the idea that Gods existence depends on those who think of it or believe it. Without followers and believers, the notion of God would simply fall apart. The God of the Christian world, among others, is far too fetched of a claim for me, and many others, to reason with and even begin to believe.

 

So...the ontological arguement is more of a "logical proof" than anything, even though I'm sure it's got its share of holes. Are there any other kinds of arguements that go for/against the existence of God? And on a side note- does anyone believe that religion has hindered human progress throughout history?

[CraigD]

One of the biggest problems I have with Ontology is that it seems to require an advanced intelligence to support it. If there were no humans with advanced, contemplative minds, there would be no perception of God and the argument would collapse. It's kind of like the tree in the forest with no one around routine. It seems to imply that God's existance is because we can imagine it. Am I off base with this notion?

I think the last part of your idea (God exists because we can imagine It) is an accurate comment on the ontological argument.

 

The first part (the argument collapse without an advanced intelligence) is, I think, on shakier ground. Despite their small, geocentric worldview, the 11th century clerics who through about the argument were willing not only to accept the existence of many sorts of non-human intelligences – including God Itself, but the Greek Idealist notion of an idea having a separate, “more real” existence than the being that has it.

Secondly, and more important to me, is that ontology has no practical application in how people form their beliefs about God. It's great for philosophers, but if I were to conduct a little experiment where I asked 1,000 people how much of an influence ontology has on their belief in God, I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the vast majority of responses will be in the form of a blank stare.

I agree. I’m pretty sure you’d encounter very high recognition rate among Catholic clergy and well religiously educated laity, and even a pretty good rate among protestant clergy, but outside of these groups and academics, recognition is, I think, rare.

People don't believe in God because thay can define a reasonable philisophical explanation, they believe simply because it is what they have been taught about the world, and it just feels better. The sense of security it brings, as long as there is some sort of compliance, is pretty powerfull stuff for most people. This is revealed in their rhetoric. Consider the sense of security that comes with the notion of being "saved."

Again, I agree. However, the argument’s popularity says something profound, I think, about the worldview of medieval catholic intellectuals, that time’s closes equivalent to a scientific community, and cultural relatives to folk like us here at hypography. What it tells us about approaches to belief is, I think, relevant to the present.

 

Anselm and his cohort believed God to be a real part of the physical universe, and further, believed that God created the universe not as an impenetrable cipher to test the faith of His believers, but as an understandable system capable of proving his existence. Although all medieval clerics tended to write in the style, one gets the impression reading Anselm that his delight in the ontological argument was genuine – he really did view it as a revelation provide him by God, and confirmation that scientific logic could not possible result in other than proving the existence of and increasing knowledge of God. Anselm and others of his and later centuries seem to have believed that God welcomed skeptical inquiry and religious doubt, and that such inquiry, if sufficiently free of error, would lead to rational acceptance of God as scientific truth. This attitude is strongly present over half a millennium later in people such as Newton, and even since the 20th century in the likes of Einstein – though the image of God held by more modern scientists has become so strange that I doubt Anselm would have recognized it.

 

Though I think Anselm was familiar with it, the idea that the universe was created by God with the specific intention of making his existence impossible to detect scientifically, requiring instead “an act of faith” (I suspect this idea is prehistoric) is the antithesis of his world-view.

 

 

PS: This thread has become a bit theological for the introduction forum. If there are no objections, I’ll move most of it to the theology forum.

[moyself]

Sorry I erased an old message

[The D.S.]

Save me from what? The idea of simply dying? Or to save me from an inconvenient truth that I, personally, actually embrace? The Christian God can save me by...well...existing. I may sound rude, but the only saving that needs done in todays world is for all those that still believe a supreme being rules their lives.

[Thunderbird]

 

Clearly my question is this- I wish to discuss claims of God and claims against his existence and I don't want opinions...I want factual evidence that can be defined and supported. I'm welcome to all viewpoints. Thanks and let the fun begin! :doh:

 

 

An awareness of a higher intelligent force [God] that is at work in our lives is always a personal experience that happens to individuals once they reach a spiritual maturity.

 

These experiences are usually preceded by a letting go of something.

 

Usually this something can be associated to ego,……fear, hate, control, the past,

 

Once this happens a paradigm shift occurs from focusing awareness from the point of view of the ego to an opining within us to something that which is outside of us.

 

The short answered is God exists in our own awareness.

 

Not in any religious institution.

 

Not in any philosophical or scientific explanation.

[REASON]

An awareness of a higher intelligent force [God] that is at work in our lives is always a personal experience that happens to individuals once they reach a spiritual maturity.

 

Once this happens a paradigm shift occurs from focusing awareness from the point of view of the ego to an opining within us to something that which is outside of us.

 

What makes you so sure that god is something that has to reside outside of us? Where? :doh:

[Thunderbird]

My point is you start to care for others.

[The D.S.]

So God is a personal interpretation? People resort to their God when they fear death, whats after death, the fear of loss, the need to have comfort, something to make life worth living, ect. God is like a comfort food, except religious followers arent fat, they just can't seem to satsify their minds.