Subject:
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Re: Atheism (was: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 17 Aug 2004 15:51:17 GMT
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Viewed:
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2447 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Mark Bellis wrote:
> A Christian has relationship with God.
What is the nature of this relationship? Do you and God go out for pizza
together? Who picks up the check? My example is admittedly facetious, but the
underlying question is sound.
Do you consider yourself to have a "relationship" with anyone other than God?
What is the nature of your relationship with that other person? What traits
does your God-relationship have in common with your non-God-relationship? Other
than God, do you have relationships with anyone whose existence you can not
easily demonstrate to me in a basically non-contestable way? Can you introduce
me to God (perhaps when we all go out for pizza) in such a way that a reasonable
person cannot afterwards say that God wasn't at the meeting? Please don't
resort to parables or metaphors as evidence for his presence at the meeting.
I knew a woman about 15 years ago who suffered from schizophrenia. One
manifestation of her illness was the absolutely certain awareness that a man
named "Terry" was real and in the room with her at particular times. This even
occurred on several occasions while I was with her. She maintained that she had
a relationship with Terry, even though Terry was a figment of her illness. To
demonstrate this to herself, she forced herself to realize that Terry could not
in any way make his presence known to other people, but she was still unable to
convince herself that he was not real. How do you propose to demonstrate the
reality of God in a way that would be different from my friend's efforts to
demonstrate the reality of Terry?
This example is obviously quite similar to the portrayal of John Nash's
schizophrenia in "A Beautiful Mind," and I probably wouldn't have understood the
potential impact of the disease without having experienced its impact upon my
friend.
> This is based on faith, but acting on
> faith brings experience. With experience, faith gains vision and is no longer
> blind. It is a virtuous circle.
A circle, to be sure. Virtuous? Time will tell.
Is there anything that could make you say "Hey, I was wrong about that" and
reject what you have thus far identified as your faith? If not, then I submit
that you've merely set yourself up in a non-falsifiable belief system, and
systems that cannot--even in theory--be wrong are of little value when they're
right.
> It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe that there is a god
> of some sort.
I have no faith in any supernatural phenomena or entities. How does this
require more faith than that required to believe in a non-provable supernatural
being?
> People have not yet managed to grow a tree from a jar of
> chemicals, so there is still a big gap in science. If science is not
> all-powerful then something else must be.
Science does not claim to be all-powerful. Even if it did so, then its failure
to *be* all-powerful would not require that some other all-powerful entity must
exist. You've proposed what is commonly termed a "false dilemma."
> Call it 'god', since that's what
> others use to explain things that science can't explain. This argument is not
> what I actually believe, but how well do you think the logic works?
That argument is well established, but it's ultimately a fallacy. The
short-hand way of referring to it is the "God of the gaps" argument, which is to
say that "God" is whatever science can't currently explain. The problem with
this is that it's an endlessly retreating position, relegating "God" to
ever-diminishing parts of the universe--hardly a worthy posture for the
Almighty. Let's say that at some point we can explain everything except how this
particular quark interacts with that particular quark. God, in this case, will
have been reduced to the Lord of These Two Quarks. Is that the entity you want
to worship?
> The chinese word for 'agnostic' is composed of 3 characters, meaning "not can
> know". I wonder if there's any correlation between people who have trouble
> trusting others and those who subscribe to type 1 agnosticism?
Intelligent trust is based upon experience and the perception of prior behavior.
If you trust someone sight unseen, then that is indeed a statement of faith. I
can see no reason to trust without good evidence that such trust is well-placed.
Dave!
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