Bathrone

Some Xian Apologetics are trying to claim that faith cant be reasoned. That faith is beyond any scientific ability to be proved. That the supernatural cant be detected by science. That faith is something bigger.

This indeed seems to be a weird paradox. One the one hand, we have the Xian "One True God", yet on the other, no ability to perceive its presence? And its beyond all ability to detect?

WHat do you say about these claims?

Peter Kirby

I couldn't find a tie-in with biblical criticism, and this has the flavor more of an "existence of God" type of discussion. I am moving this from BC&A to another forum.

best,
Peter Kirby

Lobstrosity

First of all, if you have faith in something that's an objective truth, then you can clearly prove that truth objectively and scientifically. That's what science is for. If you say you have faith that God made the universe, you are asserting an objective truth that one may now proceed to investigate. If you say you have faith God will send you and others to Heaven after you die, you are asserting an objective truth. Heaven is a physical concept--an actual place where an actual person (e.g. YOU) will actually go at a specific time. You can't tell me all about a place and then say it's impossible to know anything about it. Somehow, information about that place reached the physical world and your brain, so clearly information flow from Heaven's plane of existence to ours is not impossible. If, however, you say you have faith that God loves you, you're asserting a subjective truth that science isn't even interested in investigating. If you want to say that this subjective form of faith is off limits to science, be my guest. It's not real knowledge.

Now let me say something incredibly sweeping meant to address the notion of the "supernatural": If you say it is fundamentally impossible to detect something, that "thing" is inherently forbidden from interacting in any way with anything in this physical universe. Any physical interaction is, well, physical. It could be detected and suddenly your notion of supernatural intangibility is destroyed. If God is supernatural in the true sense of the word and always has been, it is literally impossible for him to have created this universe (that's an interaction) and it's impossible for him to answer prayer (once again, a physical interaction we could easily detect). For example, if we allow that God can answer prayer, then one feasible scenario is to pray that God create a potential difference between the leads of a voltmeter. We would then be measuring his presence as a voltage. Christians might say that God would never grant such a prayer, but those Christians would be egotistical, hypocritical, and downright stupid. They themselves are maintaining that God is both intangible and supreme. As such, they must admit that they know nothing about him and they certainly don't understand his internal motivations well enough to tell me what prayers he will and will not choose to answer.

If God interacts with this universe, then there is a component of God we can scientifically investigate. He is not fully intangible anymore. That much should blatantly obvious to everyone.

And finally, anything that's beyond all ability to ever detect isn't worth even thinking about, now is it? Pondering such things would be like wasting time wondering what the color blue tastes like or what makes the wind happy.

Aquila ka Hecate

Faith=Belief without proof

By definition unreasoned.

It's incredibly convenient when faced with questions from these awkward bloody atheists and other rational people to claim that all your beliefs are beyond rationality.

Bathrone

Thankyou guys, especially Lobstrostry for your reasoned and informed input

Psycho Economist

Supernatural means not ontologically / naturally possible but existing / happening / acting anyway (at least in the minds of believers). A conscious volcano with the ability to make itself errupt unless virgin women are thrown into the roiling crater is supernatural. It's supernatural because it can't exist given what we know about volcanoes and consciousness... but people Pele worshippers believe Pele to be an exception to the naturalistic rules relating volcanoes and consciousness. Supernatural beliefs feast on our rule & exception way of organizing the world. Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer is a cognition-centered book on the whole subject.

Now it's true that if something is ineffable -- it's defined to be perfectly resistant to characterization let alone scrutiny -- it's trivial (but lost on Christians who use this defense) to say that inscrutability works both ways. Sure, it makes their deity unfalsifiable, but it also means he can't reveal himself to followers. But (Lobstrosity, are you listening?) ineffability, even inscrutability are not necessary characteristics of supernaturallity. Supernatural things are characterized by their logical / naturalistic impossibility (e.g. the something that existed before everything), and we are athiests because we see no reason to disregard this impossibility in assessing claims of validity. Believers insist that exceptions to the bounds of reality are out there.

On the other hand, people don't believe in ineffable gods. Christians have bastadized the meaning of ineffable (having a name that is not to appropriate speak aloud, which the authors of Exodus claim is true of YHWH) to hide their deity behind some sort of pseudo-Daoist sheild of unfalsifyability, "God is not whatever you can imagine him to be... So you can't prove he doesn't exist!" But the fact of the matter is gods people do believe in have positively-asserted qualities, and many of them can be tested. End of story. You say your god caused a global flood four thousand years ago? There was no global flood, so there couldn't have been one caused by your god.

The meaning of supernatural as "naturally impossible" does imply that all things that exist are somehow natural, but even these apologizers are confusing the two meanings of supernatural. One can dream up a way that an invisible pink unicorn :notworthy could exist... a horse with one horn that cannot be seen, but is never the less discernable as pink (if, for example you lead it under a digital color analyzer). It would still be supernatural because the natures of invisble and pink contradict each other, and unicorns aren't found in nature... so from the time we certify this unicorn as genuine until we understand how it's both invisible and pink, and how it got to be a unicorn, we would be left with something that could be supernatural, even though its staring us in the face.

To the extent these guys even bother with logic, they are equivocating two meanings of supernatural to shroud their god in unfalsifyability yet insist they know who he is and what he wants.

Infidelettante

Hello Bathrone, I tend to agree with the theists though not in a way they would care for. And I see things differently than the others on this thread. My brain doesn't have the bent to amass logical arguments and I tend toward the irrational so I have to come at things another way. Faith can't be reasoned because it is an emotional response, not a rational one. Some emotions are rational of course. Fear in the face of danger, that kind of thing. Religious [Christian here] faith exists as an emotional response without rational underpinnings. A Christian may protest that they do indeed have rational beliefs. That is not the point. The fact is that the conversion experiance is always an emotional event and the emotional context of that experiance supports the remainder of the converts religious life. No matter what logic or reason the convert later expresses to justify his stand it is always true that this devotion is based solely on emotion and not upon reason. I have been reading debates and message boards for many years and this is the only thing I can think of that explains why so many theists are unable to grasp the logical arguments against their faith [although to be honest I am often unable to as well] I do not think any here haven't wondered how theists can be so incapable of clear thinking. I think, perhaps they can't help it.

JT

AmericanHeretic

Lobstrosity, nice post above.

I would add that the Christian God is indistinguishable from nothingness.

On the point of emotionally based denial of all evidence to support the Christian religion:

from:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/libra...kins_21_4.html

These are the words of Kurt Wise a Ph. D. who studied under Steven Jay Gould at Harvard. He knows the data better than we do, and look, he still denies it all and clings to his emotional crutch! I pity him, and also fear this sort of psychology. No truth can penetrate the armor of emotional needs like these here. No fact can prevail, no matter how kindly said or honestly come by.

It is maddening is it not? It is derangement and delusion and mere myth and as Kurt Wise said so clearly "if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate." Notice, he says "seems to indicate". He doesn't even claim to fully and clearly understand the Bible. He "just believes" no matter what.

He may as well say "I don't care about facts, I just like believing in whatever...."

And this guy teaches science for a living?

Scary isn't it.

Lobstrosity

I was just operating under a somewhat personalized definition of "supernatural." My feelings are that anything that is not intangible can be investigated by science (because science is nothing more than an objective method for investigating what is). Anything that's not intangible is simply natural since it is what we find in the natural world. When science investigates these things people refer to as "supernatural" and shows that they fly in the face of all reason and established theory, these people respond that such entities are things which science cannot understand. They rationalize the existence of supernatural things by invoking scientific intangibility, so I intrinsically link the two concepts. For me, a tangible supernatural entity is something that, if it exists (and this is a big if), is something natural that we have yet to scientifically understand.

I concede, however, that your definition of supernatural would probably be the accepted definition of the term and I agree with everything you say pertaining to that meaning.

Lobstrosity

Incredibly.