Inconnu

Its Inconnu, Bert, I presume that you are addressing me. Why you feel it necessary to attempt to belittle me is confusing, but transitory and ignored. I thought your assertion was simply because you cant see it doesnt mean its not there. My assertion was that if you cant see it and it is there, someday it will be possible to see it/prove it. Yes, both assertions and spelt the same, but different, maybe with my god microscope you will be able to see this.

To search for something that is undetectable is absurd in itself.

How arrogant is this, you must have good reason NOT to believe, but no good reason TO believe? Is this faith? I have faith, faith that there is no god, thankyou.

Jamie_L

By the same token, after a while it is absurd to continue searching for God when you have repeatedly failed to detect him -by any means, be they empirical or not.

But, I think the OP has a broader meaning than just empirical observation. I have similar feelings: I have strong reasons to believe in many, many things - yet I have no compelling reasons to believe in God. In fact, outside of the instruction I received as an impressionable youth, I have no compelling reasons to even search for God.

I have never perceived God - be it empirically or non-empirically (though, I confess, I'm not sure what it means to perceive something non-emperically, or even if it's a meaningful phrase). Why should I believe in something that I have never been able to perceive?

Jamie

Albert Cipriani

Dear Inconnu,
You say Not if the means of detection is subjectivity. On the other hand, you are correct: it’s foolish to objectively search for what is objectively undetectable.

You ask, Never said that. And I don’t know about you, but I require of myself good reason to believe what I believe and disbelieve what I disbelieve. I neither lower the standard of evidence for my disbelief nor raise the standard of evidence for my beliefs.

You assert: Just as you cannot love what you do not know, you cannot have faith in what you disbelieve. Indeed, you cannot even believe in what you do know.

Knowledge of God’s existence, evidence for God, the things you guys claim you want to have before you will believe in God are precisely the things that would disallow belief in Him. Belief, by definition, is to act as if you know that which you cannot know. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Jamie_L

Albert,

Here's a sincere question:

If belief is as you have described above, there still must be some "test", something that lets you know which things to believe in and which things are merely invented superstitions or incorrect assessments of the metaphysical.

How do you test non-emperical claims for truth?

Many atheists are quick to throw out silly ideas like the Invisible Pink Unicorn (here come the flames from IPUers), but they have a point. How do you differentiate between true non-emperical claims and false non-emperical claims. Say, between Christianity and Hinduism? There must be a way to differentiate, else we are left believing any claim that comes along.

Jamie

Albert Cipriani

Dear Jamie,
You ask, The same way you differentiate between a good scientific theory and a bogus one. Employ Occam’s razor to slash away at the also-rans.

If an honest examination of Hinduism seems more credible than Catholicism, then, of course, the Catholic God will forgive you your blunder. If a million gods seems less reasonable than a Triune God, but you believe in a million gods cuz of, say, the better smelling incense of the Hindi, then you’ll have some explaining to do to an incensed God.

No religion is as rational as Catholicism. Ergo, I am a Catholic. I take seriously the verse that says God wishes to be worshiped “in spirit and in TRUTH.”

All religions but Catholicism are long-winded on the spiritual and give short shrift to the truth. Indeed, if you define God as He has defined Himself, as “the Truth,” no other religion deserves to even be called a religion for all their internal inconsistencies.

But Catholicism, the barque of Peter, from the very first year of its existence till this day has been tossed about on storm seas of dogmatic and moral controversy and rocked by heresies. Yet she’s kept her compass tacking a course through the rocks and hard places, never backtracking on any of her teachings. Proof that the truth matters. – Albert the Traditional Catholic Stepping Down from his Soapbox

Bill Snedden

Please, please tell me that you are pursuing a rhetorical point and don't really mean what this seems to indicate on its face...

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Philosoft

Albert, this reads like, "Use your intuition, but only the intuitive notions of which I, Albert, approve." This sort of thinking leads to exactly the situation we have today - "My religion is correct because it's X, Y and Z and only religions that are X, Y and Z are the truth." Lots of people have similar arguments about their own religions, and they're all based on feeling and intuition. And certainly, feeling and intuition lead us to believe some things that are false. So how does someone like me verify whose feelings and intuitions are correct?

sandlewood

How many novel and unsupported theories can there be for a given unknown? And how can we act on all of them? Perhaps there was not only a theory of germs. Perhaps there was a theory that air in contact an open incision caused death and that we needed to operate in a vacuum. Or perhaps death was caused by some sort of shock we didn’t know about. Perhaps there was also the theory that people were killed by demons and that we needed to exorcise them with chants. There is any number of possibilities. Until you identify what the cause is using empirical means you can’t assume that any and all theories are true.
Hmmm, non-empirical? How does one distinguish between what is empirical and what is not? What reason do we have to think that there is any such thing as “non-empirical”?

How did we know that germs were empirical? Why didn’t we simply say that they cannot be detected?
Better be clear about what it means to “know” something is true. There are varying degrees of knowledge; it’s not an either-or state. If we say we know something we mean that we believe it to be true based on strong evidence. The stronger the evidence for something, the more we “know” it to be true. We begin to call it a fact. As Jamie_L pointed out, both belief and knowledge are based on evidence. However, your definition of “believe” seems to be the opposite. It would seem that the less evidence we have about something, the more we can apply the word “believe” to it.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Moderator Bill,
Damn, I knew I should have kept the lid on my political persuasions. Religion is a hot enough topic. Now I’ve really done it.

I kinda thought I was safe, tho, cuz technically you can’t flush me out politically -- this being an existence of God forum. So allow me my political indiscretion and don’t press for an explanation and then y’all won’t have to think any less of me than you already do. I hate to squander what religious or philosophical capital I may have here on politics.

* * *
Suffice it to say, that by championing the Divine Right of kings I am not necessarily championing a monarchy, but (what in your mind is probably even worse!) a theocracy, a form of government in which “because because” is sufficient, where some things are not negotiable.

The value of a Divine Right theocracy is that it does for morality what states rights does for political science. It provides a laboratory for all the gods to prove to us which ones are best.

So the Mormons could have the northwest with all their wives. The Baptist would get the South. You secular humanists could have New York. Think of it, all the abortions and drugs and pornography you want would be yours by Divine Right, not by law. Ergo, your decadence, Morman polygamy, Baptist inbreeding, and my Catholic Magisterium would be absolutely secure, never challenged by any court or legislature.

Then the agnostic majority could sit back and watch ya'll self-destruct under the weight of your theological misconceptions, until, like the Shakers, you all went extinct except for us Catholics.

Seriously, only the most fit theocracy would survive. And in such a place, the populace would not be schizophrenically forced to separate their public and private lives. We’d be made whole again as we were when we were a village of hunters and gatherers united in common belief and practice, not as it is now, united only in etiquette and tolerance.

I hope that suffices. Please, let’s drop it now before I am accused of being a Taliban sympathizer. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Theli

You didn't really answer the question. How do you examine non-emperical claims? How do you seperate a non-emperical false claim from a n-e true claim?

I doubt you really believe that, I mean surelly you don't believe the earth is flat. And neither does the catholic church, yet it was once they did.
And just by looking at catholics today and catholics 500 years ago, the difference is huge. People simply doesn't take the religious texts as literal anymore, and the concept of God has gotten more and more abstract as our knowledge of the world progresses.