Synaesthesia

Biff,

Could you be a little more clear in your attributions? It's quite tedious to sort out who says what given your formatting.

Thanks.

Devilnaut

Well Geo, take a break, no big deal really

I agree with you to a large extent that many atheists aren't *really* interested in discussing theology, they are interested in debunking it. I think the reason this bothers you is because you see it as having great value, and they do not.

Oh well. The whole world is like that. Take it or leave it. Maybe you're just posting here too much. I burn myself out sometimes, and often I have to calm myself down reading threads (from theists and atheists and pantheists and asantaists alike) where I feel that people are pushing them in petty directions of little or no value. When that starts to happen a lot I either take a break or pick a different forum to sift through. It happens to all of us i'm sure.

I'd also really try to hesitate from drawing broad conclusions about what peoples' posts represent about their character, and try to cut em a little slack.

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: Devilnaut ]</p>

Brian63

Well, I think it's quite an inaccurate stretch to say that he called it negative "because it didn't reinforce his opinions." There are probably lots of things that don't "reinforce his opinions" but he would not call them "negative." He seemed to call atheism negative because, in his view, it offers nothing and is defined by what it does not believe in. Yes, that is his opinion but he did not say (or imply, it seems to me) that atheism is negative because it "doesn't reinforce his opinions."



I suppose it would be to much to ask exactly how it is you know that Christian theism is a fantasy? This has been an issue that has been debated extensively and intensively for hundreds/thousands of years by extremely brilliant people on both sides. Do you have some proof that all of them have overlooked? Can we now put the issue to rest, because Biff the Unclean has solved the riddle for all of us? Pray tell.

Brian

Synaesthesia

Brian,

The reason many atheists refer to it as a fantasy (although I don't quite agree with the term, since it disregards social forces) is that the reasons people delude themselves and fail to see it are also found within the context of christian belief. 'To know why I dismiss your religion' to paraphrase a famous quote 'you must understand why I reject all other religions.'

That intelligent people fall into deep cognitive traps is nothing new. It is no suprising that human cognitive proclivities have been manifesting themselves for thousands of years. That does not, unto itself, confer legitimacy to the belief system. Justification has yet to be set forth that distingushes christianity from the rest of the superstitious hoi poloy.

Brian63

Originally posted by Synaesthesia:


The question becomes then: Is Christianity indeed a "deep cognitive trap" or not?

Synaesthesia, based upon the little of your posting that I have read, I believe you to be an intelligent person, but I would no more take your mere word for it that Christianity is a "deep cognitive trap" than I would take the mere word of a Christian that says Christian theism is true. What I would expect from either proponent is some evidence to back them up. That is what I asked of Biff the Unclean (that is not to say I want to get into it on this particular thread).

The reasons he is not a Christian are probably very similar to the reasons that I am not, but that does not mean that they are actually sound arguments; it only means that each of us perceives them to be. It could be that both he and I are the ones that are "deceived" or living in a fantasy (to borrow his words). If Christian theism is in fact true, then that indeed is the case.

The reasons that both he and I would bring forth as objections to Christianity (assuming that they are pretty similar) are not anything new to philosophers of religion, and Christian philosophers in particular, I would venture to say. They would perceive our arguments against Christianity to be weak; as weak an argument as we would consider Pascal's Wager to be for Christianity, as an example. They would probably see flaws in our argumentation that both Biff and I would not. Biff and I would be in the same boat there.

Where Biff and I differ is that I am not so quick to insinuate that all Christians are naive, deluded, and living in a fantasy world. It could very well be that they actually are right and it is us that are in that state. If Biff makes such insinuations and has impeccable, flawless arguments to back them up, then I'd give him a little more credibility. As is, he is merely asserting that Christianity is a fantasy without providing the requisite evidence.

Brian

Synaesthesia

Here is a case where I suspect more has been read into the wording than is quite warranted. It's difficult to deny that most Christians are as well adapted as most Atheists. The reality is, we have full grown adults believing in invisible friends. Most have additional beliefs such as the efficacy of TV psychics or the coming apocalypse.

Not only do most people believe, they believe vigilantly. This is something they are very convinced to be true. Do they justify their belief any better than, say, crop circle believers or Loch Ness hunters? No. But this is not suprising if Christianity is false. These are sane rational people, and they have not thought through to the very insane consequences of their epistemology.

Clearly the conviction is very far out of tune with the ability to defend their conviction. (One can have a true belief, but be delusional on one's emotional or epistemolgical attachment to it. This is very standard clinical usage.) What's more, we understand very well why these beliefs are attractive even apart from their truth or falsity.

The durability of these beliefs despite the very superficial or totally absent rational justification is evidence enough. Yet there is a great deal more to say to your question. (more than I can say, to be sure.) Although I assert that there is very little to the epistemological defense of Christainity, there is a great deal to Christianity itself.

All very old religions, from what I have discovered, employ concepts that are very good for people to... play with. They do not give us a worldview, they give us pieces with which we can build a very large and complex paradigm of the world.

That the paradigm is ungrounded in it's core idea does not affect the fact that it is pragmatically grounded. It is a system that people can actually apply in many different ways. The God/ghost/ghoul/miracle element has a mutual relationship to the pragmatic element.

In conjunction, we have an appealing, useful memepool which can convince rational people to believe in [i]what are otherwise[i/] ridiculously implausible things.

Could be, but I am well prepared to defend my beliefs: I have spent many thousands of hours attacking them and have eliminated a substantial amount of deadweight. If I am wrong, I am less wrong than the many erronious beliefs that I have discarded.

Fiach

Fiach

A3

Hello Everyone,

Now that the dust seems to have kind of settled... maybe this is a good time to get back on topic again. Although this may cause my burn-out let me consider the original statement and see what to make of it.

Why would an omnipotent god need to become flesh in order to sacrifice himself to himself, so that his creations may escape the wrath of himself?

I hope no one expects to have this age old question answered in three lines or less. It seems best to take things in sections and so go through the whole thing. Please excuse my capital “H”es that is just a custom.

“Why would an omnipotent god need to become flesh.” To me this is the highest truth. For some reason however the fact that it was the omnipotent God who become flesh is totally ignored by most Christians. The average Bible scholar can give a long list of prophesies in the Old Testament that promise precisely that. This was the ultimate of several Revelations.

Why would He come in the flesh in the first place? Some time (millions of years?) after a perfect creation, people began to use their God-given freedom to question things. They first were in the Garden of Eden which is a heavenly state of mind, not a place. The first challenge was not so much about God as between beliefs, between the people themselves. To make a long story short, people allowed themselves to become more and more external and distant from God.
Over time, five Churches have existed. Each started with a new revelation in which God accommodated Himself to the condition of the people. He did not change.

Each revelation started its own church, and there have been five. As I understand it, first there was a direct link with the spiritual world helped by nature called the Garden of Eden state. Then the contact was indirectly through angels and spirits. The next method was through passed-down legends and myths which were written down at some point into the Ancient Word. The next stage was that part of this Word was copied and became the first 10.5 chapters of Genesis. This is “made-up history.” At the end of the OT the connection was so bad and about to be lost completely that God came on earth Himself to repair the damage and create a new link. He could not come to earth as Himself any more than the sun could come to us to warm things up. Everything evil would be destroyed and that means the very people He still loved. That is the main reason why He came as a human baby. The other reason is that He could only be approached and tempted if He was a human being. That is how He redeemed and saved the whole human race. He bore (did not take away) every evil, through temptations, that ever existed on this planet and put it back in its place, hell. This restored our spiritual freedom, we could no longer be totally possessed as in those days.

Did Jesus sacrifice Himself? He most certainly did but not the way most people think. He was tempted all His life and won every one of them. His last and most horrible temptation was on the cross. He was tempted to get Himself off the cross and save Himself. He did not succumb to that and so saved the human race. With every temptation He won, all through His life, He became more united with God (His Soul). On the cross, His last and final temptation, He became completely united with His Soul.
From then on He is with us not only in spirit but also as the risen Lord. Someone we can picture in our mind and so have a much more personal relationship with than an infinite spirit or “higher power.”
God is love itself. I understand the OT was written from the perspective of a child. Loving parents can appear very angry to a child and sometimes that is the only way to make them obey and behave...
There is smoke coming out of my spell checker...

Regards
Adriaan

Keith Russell

Adriaan:

Your post does not conform to the view of Christianity held by most of the Christians I know, the preachers I have heard in person, on TV, on the radio, etc.

They believe that Jesus was not a person who grew to become one with 'God', but that Jesus was 'God' from the beginning.

You disagree with them. Could you point to some evidence I can verify myself as to which view (yours, or theirs) is the correct one?

Keith.

Kenny

Synaesthesia,

I disagree. My description of God’s actions and purposes in the atonement appealed to fundamental principles with respect to the Judeo-Christian understanding of the moral attributes of God – such as God’s being good and just. Such an explanation is neither ad hoc nor arbitrary. Human beings have a basic intuitive understanding of what concepts such as justice and goodness involve. We may disagree, at times, whether or not a particular course of action is just or good, but the fact that it is possible to rationally discuss such differences by appealing to more fundamental or other shared intuitions concerning basic moral principles suggests that more is involved in discussions of morality than just arbitrary declarations. If I had said (may it never be!) that God’s purposes in the atonement were merely the result of sadistic desire to inflict suffering, then I think both theists and atheists would recoil at the thought and find such an explanation inconsistent with the attribution of qualities such as justice and goodness to God. This example alone demonstrates that the range of possible explanations for the atonement has non-arbitrarily defined limits.

Furthermore, the fact that both theists and atheists recognize the problem of evil as a genuine philosophical problem for theism to wrestle with also suggests that neither theists nor atheists believe that any “absurd, contradictory, and seemingly evil action on God’s part” can be accounted for in terms of an understanding of God as being good, loving, and just. Leaving the question of the legitimacy of such an approach for the side for a moment, the fact that the theistic community sometimes appeals to mystery with respect to the presence of certain types of horrendous evil in the world which seems to have no redeeming value, rather than produce an ad hoc explanation for it in terms of God’s character, also suggests that theists do not conceive of God in such a way that permits any seemingly evil action on His part to be arbitrarily explained. We (that is, the theistic community) may believe that God must have some purpose beyond our understanding for allowing such evils to occur, but we find ourselves unable to produce just any sort of arbitrary explanation for them, because we recognize that the existence of such evil does seem to be inconsistent with our understanding of God’s character traits.

Finally, in addition to moral considerations, are theological considerations – which are also not arbitrary. The NT writers understood that God’s revelation in Christ must be consistent with what God had already revealed about Himself – which is why they sought to explain the atonement in terms of categories they had inherited from the Old Testament. Prior revelation concerning God had set the boundaries of explanation for new revelation from God in NT theology in way very similar to how prior observations of certain natural phenomena sets the boundaries of explanation for newly observed phenomena in science.

The fact that the sort of explanations that we apply to our understanding God may necessarily differ in some respects from the explanations which are applied to human beings does not mean that we have no available explanations to apply. We (Christian theists) are not conceiving of God as merely a human being with infinite power, though we understand that there are certain attributes which human beings share in common with God because God has created them in His image (not in the sense of their being exact replicas of God, but in the sense of their being personal beings and their reflecting certain moral and spiritual qualities which God possesses). Thus, we recognize that in some areas the types of explanations we apply to God overlap with the types of explanations we apply to human beings and in other respects the types of explanations differ. Whether accounting for information gathering or explanations of intentional states necessarily demand the presence of a brain (or other sort of physical processing device) and the presence of bodily (or other sorts of physical) limitations is a philosophical matter far beyond the range of this thread, but suffice it to say for now that to assert such without argumentation is to dogmatically assume a physical reductionism which even many atheists would disagree with.

To address the more general question implied in your statement here of explaining God’s nature in non-arbitrary terms – this question has not been left undressed in philosophical theology. Classical theism understands God to be, in some sense, a necessary being. This means that there must be some sort of logical contradiction involved in both God’s non-existence and God’s nature being other than it is. Various forms of the ontological argument (which I have always seen as far more valuable for doing philosophical theology from within the assumptions of theistic metaphysics than for trying to prove the existence of God) give us hints concerning what such a contradiction might involve and hint that God’s nature might be explained in terms of some fundamental predicate such as ‘unlimitedness’ or ‘maximal greatness.’ And, there is certainly room for more development along these lines – in other words, there are certainly resources within theistic metaphysics for addressing this question even if it has not been (or ever will be) completely resolved.

At the very least, however, the atheist cannot claim to be better off than the theist in this respect. Either the atheist believes that the ultimately everything is explained in terms of some set of necessary truths (in which case the atheist must appeal to the epistemic possibility of a sound ontological argument which gives naturalistic rather than theistic results) or the atheist must concede that ultimately everything is contingent -- in which case there is no ultimate explanation for anything at all. In fact, the Christian theist is in a better position in this respect. Since the Christian theist believes that the universe is the creation of a necessary being who, being personal, rational, and morally good, does all things with a rational and morally good purpose, and since the Christian theist believes she is created in the image of this being, she has reason to believe everything around her as some sort of rational explanation which she is capable of understanding to a certain extent (though, perhaps, not fully). The atheist, on the other hand, has no reason to believe that the universe is anything more than an arbitrary collection of brute facts and no reason to think that she is capable of genuinely understanding any of it.

You suggest here that theology has no sort of normative criteria or any way of checking its assertions. That is simply false. The fact that both theistic and atheistic philosophers participate in philosophical theology and except certain criteria when they do it is, by itself, enough to refute such an assertion. Furthermore, within the Christian community, there is the normative authority of Scripture, the belief that the Holy Spirit guides the community, and a certain amount of wide ranging theological consensus that runs across most main-line Christian traditions which we believe has come about as a result of such guidance. This provides the basis for a system of checks and balances and a set of normative criteria for doing theological research within the epistemic context the Christian community provides. In fact, Nancey Murphy (who holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science and a PhD in Theology), one of the professors of philosophical theology at <a href="http://www.fuller.edu" target="_blank">Fuller Theological Seminary</a> (where I attend), has written an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801424003/qid=1038432612/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-8797793-3805604?v=glance&s=books" target="_blank">intriguing book</a> suggesting that all the ingredients are in place within the Christian community for a theological method for studying God which reflects, in many ways, the practice of the scientific community in studying nature. You may want to pick the book up if you ever get a chance (it’s a great read even just for epistemology and philosophy of science).

God Bless,
Kenny

[ November 27, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>