Gavinicus

It is difficult for us to grasp how much any religion with a long history has changed over time. We live in a snapshot. So many things that were believed to be true have been proven wrong, not least the fact that for the last 2000 years the Christian rapture has been imminent. Religion is nothing if not adaptable. It takes advantage of our short memories and finite lifespans to quietly sweep under the rug any holy Truth that hasn't withstood the progress of knowledge.

I am no religious history scholar, so I put it to those who are: if you plopped St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas (or any smart believer who thought about the nature of god) into today's world--perhaps in a modern university--and let them get up to speed, would they be able to hang onto their faith? Does it matter if they are Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim?

So scholars, I ask you: take your favorite religious thinker of the past and tell us whether they would still be a believer today.

Chris Weimer

Augustine would probably still be. He held the motto that if you believe first, then you'll see the reward, the very same principle today Christians grasp so tightly to. All they have is faith that something is out there...

Peter Kirby

Given that there are equally intelligent believers today, I don't see why not. Of course, I'd like to think that some of the contents of their beliefs would be different, to reflect changes in science and philosophy.

best,
Peter Kirby

Gavinicus

My point is not that there are no intelligent believers today--there surely are. My point is that a believer of 200, 500 or 1500 years ago held many things as true that have simply been proven wrong. Wouldn't it be natural for an intellectually curious person, who was forced to confront a reality very different from the one they thought they knew, to challenge all of their beliefs? To start over, from square one and say, "what do I know for sure?"

I though the earth was flat, and so taught the church. Or the stars are in fact giant furnaces fueled in a way that boggles my medieval mind. And modern medicine and biology challenge what I thought I knew about life. And computers! Don't get me started!

Humans and their ingenuity and replaced god in many aspects of peoples' lives; the advance of knowledge has improved the human condition in ways no religion ever has. This advance is hardly universal, but that's not the point. Millions of people live today in conditions and with resources no Pope, King or Holy Roman Emperor could have dreamed of--and none of it requires a god. We treat this as nothing special because it is what we have been born to. For those who could never have dreamed how far we could go, wouldn't the way we live today argue strongly against an interventionist deity?

Ojuice5001

Thomas Aquinas definitely would be a believer. His Five Ways are timeless arguments that are no less valid today than they ever were. Most of the Christian thinkers who are remembered today as great, like St. Augustine, are similar; their central ideas are timeless, so we can assume that they would still hold them if they were alive today, and, by extension, they would still be believers.

The idea that the old reasons for believing in God(s) are outdated is very much exaggerated in the minds of atheists.

Gavinicus

I am interested in hearing more about this. Please expand.

Toto

Chili digression split off here

Ojuice5001

My point is that the nature of the world is the same as it always was, and only the particulars are different. Even with regard to our knowledge of the world, there is still all kinds of facts that remain virtually unchanged; I mean all the everyday stuff we take for granted. Now theological systems concern themselves with universal issues, or in other words with the nature of the world. But if religious and secular philosophies are concerned with the nature of the world, and the world hasn't changed radically, the case for theism and atheism can't be as different as some people think.

One good example of this is the success of science in explaining things solely in terms of natural causes. That's surely one of the main reasons for atheism today. But how much of a new discovery is it? We always knew that if you throw a rock, it flies through the air and falls, in the same way every time. We already knew that crops grow when seeds are exposed to the right conditions of soil, water, and atmosphere, and only then. In short, we knew that natural causes pervade our world. As early as the Greeks, it was already possible to argue from this that everything works this way. On the other hand, other people saw all this order as evidence for one or more designers. In ancient times, it was already possible for both sides to use arguments of a kind that would be recognizable today.

G.K. Chesterton put it quite well:

Vorkosigan

The thoughtful mind can discover the reasons, if it is willing to do the research. But what characterizes belief is not a lack of education or a lack of brains, but an unwillingness to explore every end, a kind of reflexive doublethink that insists on not listening to the voice of cognitive dissonance. It's a matter of will, not intellect.

Anyway, this is more of a GRD topic.

Toto

I'll go which ever way Gavinicus wants. If there is more discussion on the historical Christian figures listed in the title, it might as well stay here.

But so far we haven't identified any particular modern fact that would have made a difference to Acquinas or Augustine. Certainly the lack of a second coming of Christ has been a problem for Christians since about 70 CE.

It would be different if you had asked if William Paley were alive today, would he still believe.