TomboyMom

Unless God turns out to be Allah, or Odin, or Krishna, etc., etc., in which case we both suffer eternal punishment. Better hedge your bets and believe in all of them. Actually, guess what, regardless of what we believe, we both just die! Sorry to give you the bad news.

Remember, Pascal, you are an atheist as regards all gods except the one you worship. According to your logic, you have the burden of proof against all gods except yours, which I'll take a wild guess is the christian jehovah one.

Rene, betting on reality and against theistic protection racket.

Wyrdsmyth

I think it's pretty straightforward and simple to understand. Jesus was talking about those people who do not get to see the evidence for why he should be believed, first-hand -- the evidence being the miracles and supernatural powers. But what do you want to call the stories of the evidence of God? Do you want to call that evidence, too? This is why I always say, "We never get the gods, only men talking about gods." I'm trying to point out that regular, ordinary people like me never get to see the gods, the miracles, or the supernatural stuff. People like me only get to hear the stories about that stuff. And then, the people telling me the stories insist that the stories themselves are evidence, that they are 'revealed truths, divinely inspired and edited, self-attesting' and so on. But you can decorate a circle all you want, but it's still a circle -- in this case, circular reasoning.


The real question is -- would I be unreasonable to still ask for evidence, even if the salesman was my friend? Perhaps you think I would be. But, let's say even if I trusted the fellow and thought he was a decent person -- but since the purchase of the car is a big deal to me, I still insisted on seeing the car for myself before signing any papers. Could anyone find fault with me for that? After all, the salesman may indeed be well-meaning and of high moral character -- yet he could still be wrong about the condition of the car. People can be well-meaning, but wrong.

Are you sure that you're not the one who's confused? I am saying you can trust a person, yet still think they could be wrong. You may genuinely believe that they have good intentions... yet, that doesn't mean that you ought to just accept everything they tell you is true. In fact, that is how I regard my parents. When I was growing up, they told me things that later on I found out were not true. That doesn't mean that I no longer trust them, or that I think less of them.

Again, the confusion arises from being cynical about something a person believes and being cynical about that person. Many people have difficulty seeing this distinction. If you are the protege of a great scientist, and he has taught you well, but you become skeptical of his best-established theory... that is not a personal betrayal on your part. And the same applies to a mentor who taught you, when you were young, that the world is only 8,000 years old, that the earth was once flooded, donkeys talked and spirits are floating around in the air, intervening in human affairs.

Of course not. But you still have to use your reasoning ability. You have to assess the plausibility of beliefs and claims, and judge for yourself how well they seem to mesh with the world of your own experience.

luvluv

Wyrdsmyth:

I disagree somewhat. I think Jesus certainly was saying blessed are those people who believe without requiring actual VISUAL/AUDITORY proof in their presence. But that is different, FAR different, from saying believe without ANY evidence. There is more evidence for Christianity other than the testimony of miracles.

Yes, I think I could find a flaw with that on a personal level. If we say this person is your best friend and he tells you he went over the car with a fine-toothed comb and it is in pristine condition, and this man had never lied to you or lead you own in your life, you would have to be a very suspicious and cynical person to still say of this person "I have to see for myself." Most of us would take that as an insult.

Realistically, you have been in situations where your friends or children or spouses did not trust you at your word and you took it as an insult, just like anybody else. Being overly-suspicious is generally recognized as a defect of character, not a virtue. Would you like someone who was always suspicious of your every word and who always checked behind you to verify your statements? A person who continued to do so even after his previous attempts have repeatedly proved you to be trustworthy?

This, I think , is what Jesus was chastising Thomas about. He had seen enough of Jesus keeping his word so that he should not have doubted him this last time.

Well, I think if someone has an established track record and they are speaking about things they have the ability to speak truthfully about, then they should be trusted unless you have some specific reason not to trust them. I'm just speaking generally here.

There is some middle ground that maybe we can agree upon. I would agree that being overly-credulous is probably a character defect, but so is being overly-suspicious. There is a point at which the constant requirement for evidence and proof is no longer prudence, it is insecurity and suspicion. At a certain point in personal relationships, the request for evidential support is ungrounded. Thus it is in the relationship with God, once you have been in a relationship with Him long enough. If you ask around, you'll find that most Christians who underwent a conversion experience found that the evidential, spiritual, and emotional support for God's presence communicated through prayer and scripture reading at the begining of their relationship with God is much greater than it is later in the relationship. After a certain point of God proving Himself to be trustworthy, He withdraws many of the evidential support and expects us to simply trust Him. Most of us expect the same thing from our spouses and friends. After we have proven ourselves to be faithful and trustworthy, we don't expect to be required to constantly provide evidence for it on a daily basis. We would consider this insulting, and suggestive that we lacked in character, and so does God.

Well, I'm not talking about faith in a particular theory or doctrine. (Other than the ressurection, which I happen to believe has pretty good evidential support, nothing is really that essential IMHO.) I'm talking about faith that God exists and that He has a certain moral character. I'm talking about the general expectation that He is trustworthy and faithful.

Thomas was essentially being cynical about Jesus' CHARACTER, since Jesus told them repeatedly that he would rise from the dead and he had never lied to them, nor demonstrated a lack of abillity to do just what He said He was going to do.

If you want to be cynical about the claims of Christ, that is certainly fine. But if you accept Christ as a personal friend and Lord, then you sort of forfeit the right to require proof of Him at every step of your relationship. I think that is all Jesus was saying at that point. I think he was saying of people who already have a relationship with Him (as Thomas did) blessed is He who maintains His trust in me without the neccesity of immediate sensory confirmation.

Absolutely.

sandlewood

You seem to be missing the point that the amount to be gained or lost does not make the claim more true. If you believe it does, you fall for the fallacy.

We know the behavior and properties of a photon well enough to make predictions. Photons work in predictable ways and any photon experiment that can be performed by one person can be repeated independently by another person. We can describe photons well enough to distinguish them from other things we know about.

However, the “power” you attribute to God is something we can say no more about. It’s magic. We can’t detect it. It doesn’t work in predictable, repeatable ways. It has not known attributes or properties such that we can distinguish it from any other thing. So we can't really talk about it. Assigning a name to it just gives the illusion that we can.

In one sense, you can claim that we don’t know what anything is really. But when you adopt that position, you can’t really even discuss anything. It would be like not accepting that our senses give us accurate information, or that the basic axioms of logic are not necessarily true.

I do define it as lack of belief. I realize that some people recoil at this and would like to be considered agnostic.

Consider two questions that one can ask. You may be asked “do you have the belief that a god exists?” to which you may answer yes or no. However, you may also be asked “do you have the belief that no gods exist?” I believe that your answer to the second question is irrelevant and that if you answer “no” to the first question, then you are an atheist. I think the trouble with the second question is due to an implied assumption that the person answering has spent some time to consider evidence and arguments for and against, and that the answer one gives is based on that. Therefore, people who don’t feel they have spent such effort don’t want to answer “yes” to the second question. But still they will answer “no” to the first.


So I’m not sure who you are saying is our friend and the one we should trust. God? The witnesses of miracles? The authors of the Bible? Other people who claim they communicate with God?

If you mean God himself, I have no experience of God.

luvluv

sandlewood:

A) For the third time, I don't believe on the basis of this. I just think it's a legitimate point.

B) No one, not pascal or anyone since, suggests that the amount to be gained or lost makes the claim more true. It simply justifies the gamble on the more beneficial/least costly proposition.

Well, the power God is said to have is said to be limited or controlled by his will, so, like all other things controlled by will, it is inherently unpredictable and nonrepeatable. You have the power to do certain things, but chances are if someone were to subject you to experimentation even given consistent controls you would perfom differently (at least slightly) every time. God is not an impersonal law of nature he is volitional agent. So we are dealing with apples and oranges on that level. God's power is not a predictable force because volitional agents are not predictable.

But the larger point is that incoherence cannot be established simply via the incomprehensibility of an entity's attributes, which is what Nielson tries to do.

I disagree, there is a big difference between not having a belief in God and believing that no gods exist. Atheists should be more careful about the distinction. In my opinion, they are not because they want the prestige of the word "atheist" without the burden of proof the literal connotation of the word demands. FWIW.

Anyone you have a relationship with, and I think the quote from Jesus applies only or primarily to those who are in a relationship with Him. I think it also applies to any well-established truth. We are now, for instance, justified in believing that relativity gives an accurate picture of the world (to a certain extent). It has been confirmed to the point where we are no longer justified in suspecting that it isn't at all accurate.

Right, but I would argue that this experience is available to you if you really want it, and once you have this experience then trust in God should result. I am a witness. It all comes down, ultimately, to what you really want.

Wyrdsmyth

Like what?

Undoubtedly, some people get insulted and think you don't trust them, if you want to check things out for yourself. But like I said previously, you can trust someone (believe they are well-meaning and have your best interests at heart) and yet also accept the possibility that they could be wrong (or possibly mistaken in some way). The bigger the issue, the more reasonable it is for you to want to check it out yourself. You have to take into account the context of the claim, the differing degrees of importance and believability. If someone I know tells me that they ran into traffic this morning, I'm not going to check into it to see if it's true -- I'll accept it at face value, because it's not a huge issue to me, and it's not a claim that is difficult to believe. In the case of making a really big purchase, one that I'll be paying on for years, I will certainly want to check things out for myself as much as I possibly can. I don't think that is the same as being overly suspicious, cynical or paranoid.

Again, I would have to look at the context of each situation. I make a distinction between paranoia and what I would call a healthy skepticism.

Sure, but now we're talking about two different things, aren't we? Thomas has as much reason to trust Jesus as Lancelot has to trust Arthur, or Patroclus does to trust Achilles... because they had long personal relationships. But I'm not talking about their relationships to each other, but our relationships to their stories. Why should we, you and I, luvluv and Wyrdsmyth, believe these stories are true, and accept them as 'evidence' that God exists and intercedes in human affairs?

Okay, I can go along with that, to a certain extent. I take astrophysicists, paleontologists, and so on at their "word" even when I can't understand everything they say. But that is only because they and their discipline have established a certain reputation based upon demonstrable success. But in the case of the Bible and religion, its quite the opposite. Why should I believe the Bible, or any ancient holy scripture of any kind, when they look suspiciously like made-up fictions from pre-scientific societies?

Agreed... Provided we can also make a distinction between unhealthy paranoia and healthy skepticism... And between trusting a person yet not always sharing their views, beliefs, assessments, etc.

But that point may be different for different people. For example, let's say you and I attend a religious revival together in which some faith-healer miraculously cures a group of invalids, because he claimed he was filled with the spirit of Jesus. This might be enough 'hard evidence' to convince you, but what if I withheld my judgment until further assessing the situation? Would you find me unreasonable? Even if I cannot immediately uncover a hoax, often in such cases as these, I do suspect a hoax to be the most plausible explanation. Do you think that is overly suspicious?

But I can't have a 'relationship' with God. That's my point. Whatever relationship I have with God is no different than a relationship I have with Zeus, Hamlet or Superman -- it's a relationship to a literary figure. I can read about God, but I can't sit down and have a beer with him.

So does God... so you claim. If God is so insulted, why can't he say it for himself? I don't know that God exists, or that he's insulted, only that you think that is the case. Are there alternate explanations for this "dropping off" effect you describe which occurs after conversion experiences? Explanations that may be psychological but not supernatural?

Are you implying we can pick and choose which parts of the Bible we want to consider accurate history, and which we can dismiss as mythology? Keep the bodily resurrection but throw out the talking donkey? (Sorry... I'm maddening to talk to, aren't I?)

Again... To me, this is like talking about the moral character of King Arthur or Beowulf. Since we can't communicate with this literary figure, we only know what others have written about him. It is their trustworthiness and the plausibility of their claims that we are evaluating.

sandlewood

I am arguing that it is not a legitimate point. I was using the word “you” in a general sense. I didn’t mean you. Sorry if that caused confusion.
You didn’t answer specifically. If you are talking about a relationship with God, then that is circular. It sounds to me like you’ve said that you believe God exists because you trust what God tells you, and he tells you that he exists.
Yes, well, we all know where that discussion takes us. It’s not new. So I won’t repeat it here. You can start another thread on personal experience if you want though.
Not in my opinion. It comes down to what is the truth about reality. What you want should have nothing to do with it.

I won’t continue with any of the other points because I think it would degenerate into a tit-for-tat discussion and would not be of interest to anyone else.

Family Man

You know, luvluv, you keep saying that. I'd love to see you put your evidential case on in BC&A and see how well it holds up.

luvluv

Anywho, guys, I don't wanna talk about that stuff anymore. We're way off topic. Is there anybody here willing to defend the notion that the concept of God is incoherent, or are we agreed that this notion is problematic?

Wyrdsmyth

Regarding your original post...

If we can derive a contradiction from the qualities allegedly possessed by some proposed object, in conjunction with the state of the world, then we can say that object does not exist. That is, I take it, the use of the word 'incoherent' in this context. Asking us to defend this is like asking if anyone is willing to defend modus tollens.

One can derive a contradiction from the typical omnigod such as posited by Judaism/Christianity/Islam, conjoined with the existence of evil (unnecessary suffering), and therefore conclude that a god with such qualities does not exist. However, one could put forth other conceptions of deity -- a god that lacks in one or more of the omniqualities, for example, or one that has ceased existing at some point -- and thereby evade logical contradiction.

If you try to twist the meaning of the word 'incoherent' around to say there are things we just don't understand, or things about which we may be mistaken, then I don't think you are using it in the original context.