Kent Stevens

If we look at the Christain religion it would seem that evil comes from God. For God created evil and sustains evil. He created evil in the form of the devil and sustains him by having refused to have done anything about him. He sustains evil by not intervening in the world to prevent heinous crimes.

The problem of evil produces another contradiction. It results in saying because of God there should be no evil but we know that evil exists.

The problem of faith is that it allows you to believe anything. It even allows you to accept contradiction or such far fetched notions as an all powerful, all good God. It allows any excuse for God to do things like commit mass murder when he is supposed to have flooded the world.

People can use reason to support anything. A man can use reason to say that the world is flat. However, good reasoning prevents us from believing an infinity of impossible or false things. If God exists why does he make himself known on television thus saving billions of people from false beliefs and perhaps from hell?

owleye

Kent...

"What I am saying that I am not the only person who thinks the doctrine of the holy trinity is ridiculous."

I don't doubt this. However, I certainly would not accept it as evidence that such a doctrine is ridiculous. This is what is called an ad hominem ("to the person") argument and those who take logic to be their guide would recognize it to be a fallacy..

"I plead guilty to being a literalist, and using logic, and mathematics in the search for truth. If god exists then according to Islam I will burn forever in fire for my unbelief in God. So I had better find out the truth about this situation. I accept that if God existd he also created logical and mathematical ability in man, and expected us to use it."

This is helpful in understanding your position. However, your argument then relies on what is known as a "strawman." That is, you portray a religion in your terms and then proceed to cast aspersions on it. This is also a logical fallacy as you know, and it shows the weakness of your case against religion.

"In terms of having justified acceptance what I was trying to say was that people accept something because it feels all right to do so."

For some reason you believe you will find the answers you seek in psychology. However, if you are going to rely on psychology, I would hope you would cite chapter and verse in some text or journal or work by a psychologist on this. It would help your case. I don't think you have the credentials to make such universally applicable statements.

"Simple acceptance refers to the when you simply accept something without any other articulated reason being given at the time."

Keep working at it. Maybe you will come up with something. Trial and error must be good for something.

"I am not dogmatic. If I was dogmatic I would not be having a philosophical discussion about the truth of things."

It could be that I'm misreading you. But when you say without support that "Everyone has faith in reason." I take this to be a dogmatic assertion. It seems important to you not to be dogmatic. If true, I would recommend that whenever you assert something (or deny it), you provide some reason why I (or anyone else) should believe it. You could supply an argument or provide evidence to support your assertion or denial. If the assertion or denial makes use of terms that you are relying on that differ in their definition from what we could find in the dictionary, you should define your terms. (So that you can better understand me, I did not take up (and am not now taking up) that part of one of the senses of 'dogmatic' that requires it to be arrogantly asserted. I was merely noting that it was asserted without support, as is often done in school or in religious instruction. Notwithstanding this, I can understand it as condescending.)

"Partly this is because faith and reason are antagonistic towards each other. But it also seems weird or nonsensical to use the word faith outside of it's normal religious context."

There is one sense of faith that restricts itself to religions. However, this is a derivative use of the term. Faith in a particular religious doctrine is what we mean by its use here. Faith, in its more general use is a kind of trust. Indeed, for every instance of its general use, we can substitute the word trust and not lose any meaning.

"It is better to say that we have reason. We use reason like we use our sense of sight. We simply accept the principle without further reasoning being given. We can not prove reasoning. Some reasoning is pretty much universal like language or the sense of vision is. Furthermore, culture may reinforce the use of at least some reason."

If this is an example of one of your "trial balloons" it would be helpful if you qualified the assertions with "perhaps" or "might be" or "we can consider that" or other guarded terms. Otherwise, I would regard them as dogmatic. On the other hand, if you are going to rely on logic, I would want you to express yourself in argument form. Provide premises that lead to conclusions.

owleye

A3

Dear Kent
You make some (universal) mistakes and/or assumptions.
Did you read my post? Where do you get this nonsense?? He created people with a freedom of choice. We are free to murder someone, free to create comp. virusses etc etc. The devil doesn't do that we do . This freedom is just what makes us human. Would you force the person you love to only behave the way you want? Or only do the things you want them to? We are given the freedom to become insane, because that is what doing evil really is.

See above

The opposite is true. If you believe, based on the Bible, that you can murder, you're wrong. You are using the Bible as an excuse for your own ends.

Another example of the trouble you get into when you take everything in the Bible literally. This was a spiritual flood of evil that whiped out the last bit of good in humanity. BTW the first part of the Bible is made-up history. There never was a physical place called "Garden of Eden." That discribes a heavenly state.

You are right on the money there. But if you believe that God wants us to be good, and as a side-effect be happy, you know that you shouldn't do evil. Even if it feels good. Stealing what you have always wanted can feel sooooo good. Revenge can feel very good to.

Do you believe everything you see on the TV???Many people have the greatest satisfaction of doing evil. Read the papers. No one is forcing anyone to do any of those things. It is their choice. God doesn't force anyone to be good. That choice is ours. People in hell don't want to go to heaven and be good. Have you ever soon the movie "Godfather"? that is the best example of what hell is like. For people in hell it is heaven. You know why people are so happy in heaven and so misarable in hell? They are living with people just like them.
A3

Kent Stevens

Of course we can still give opinions about things and this is not really giving reasoning. I have given reasons why I think that the doctrine of the holy trinity is ridiculous. Basically, this doctrine is false because someone cannot have three minds existing simultaneously and be considered one, and God likewise cannot simultaneously have three minds either and be considered one.

I suppose you object to me taking a literal fundamentalist interpretation of the bible and the notion of hell. However, the churches that I used to belong to took this position on the bible and the existence of hell.

Taking a non-literalist approach to some holy book can create problems of its own. What are we to say of the good parts of the bible say on the prohibitions against murder or to do onto others as you would have them do onto you? Are we supposed to take them literally or metaphorically? If we take the good parts of the bible literally what about the bad parts such as in Leviticus 20 where the punishment of death is given for some of the following crimes? People cursing their parents, adultery, for having sex with some other in laws, and homosexuality.

I think it is standard to take what someone says literally and not metaphorically. However, I think you take at least part of your religious ideas from a text metaphorically or non-literally.

In some of what I have said I have used some summaries and some proposals of an idea. These parts of the text usually have reasons given in other parts of a passage but perhaps not directly in summaries or in proposals.

In terms of using the word faith, we could use it instead of the word trust. I have difficulties in using the term in this way and prefer to use it only in its religious context. I do not have faith in government for example as this does not describe as accurately my feelings toward government. I do have some trust in government though. I think it is more accurate to use trust instead of the word faith for when we say we trust someone we may not do so unreservedly.

We may choose to do these things but the devil according to fundamentalists is supposed to encourage us to do wrong, albeit without taking away our free will.

Free will is the standard objection to the fact that people do bad things. However, I think that free will is often just an excuse for bad engineering on God's part. Consider someone who believes in God and does good. They pray to god and help others, they are charitable, they do not commit a crime. Now does this person have free will? Of course they can choose to do this or that, they are not robots. So why is it that God does not make us all similar to this if he is all powerful?

Why not make us so that when we try to steal something we stop paralyzed, or start gasping for breath until we stop trying to steal. For if we are drowning we have instincts that kick in that compel us to seek air, so why is there not an anti-theft instinct that stops people stealing completely. Instincts do not make us robots but are part of our nature.

If you are a fundamentalist God does often compel us to do what he wants, with various punishments if we do not do what he says.


Unfortunately, if it is in the bible some people will say its true. If the Bible says that the Earth was created in only six days and God rested on the seventh day some people take this literally, when the Universe is in fact billions of years old. Some militant Islamics seem to believe on faith that they can have 72 virgin wives in paradise for committing matyrdom. Some of the parts of holy books can make some people believe anything about a certain subject.

I do not believe everything on TV. But I do tend to believe most of what is on the News for example. If God was on the News or in some documentary with normal journalistic standards being applied then I along with many others would have truth about God.

Anyway, we have to some extent off topic. These arguments against religion should not be discussed greatly in this particular philosophical forum. I am not being overly defensive here either. I have found this thread useful in refining my own ideas, even if this means that I do no longer want to use the word faith instead of the word belief.

A3

Hi Kent,
We are indeed not robots but you are trying your very best to turn us into robots by not allowing certain actions. We are used to natural laws governing our every move, you lean over too much: you fall. We have spiritual laws too. If we follow the advice of the One who knows best we will not get hurt. We are not puppets on a string.
In fact this existance is the way it is purely for the sake of us finding our "spot" in the next life.
BTW if you're interested I started the topic of the Trinity in "the Existance of God" section.
Regards
Adri

owleye

Kent....

"In terms of using the word faith, we could use it instead of the word trust. I have difficulties in using the term in this way and prefer to use it only in its religious context."

If this is true, why is it that you assert a long list of 'faith' based declarations where religion is absent. Do I have to quote you here? More specifically, when you declare that "Everyone has faith in reason" what is the religious context you have in mind?

"I do not have faith in government for example as this does not describe as accurately my feelings toward government."

The issue is over the meaning of 'faith', not whether you have faith in allegedly non-religious institutions. How would I know what you mean by your declaration of the lack of 'faith' in government unless we both understand what you mean by it.

I suspect you are not interested in either the advice of others or their journeys, as you have shown little or no interest in other than your own personal opinions, but I think it is significant that you choose 'faith' as something worth contemplating. A number of years ago, I ventured forth with this concept, discovering hidden (to me) treasures that I would not have thought there before such analysis. I was aided in this search by two conditions: (1) that I accepted as a starting point, the meaning of 'faith' I found in dictionaries (where I discovered it is better understood as founded in trust (as opposed to belief), which has in back of it, I believe, considerable scholarship; (2) having some, but admittedly weak, background in control theory. Perhaps surprisingly, an incredibly rich vein can be tapped by this conjunction.

Since then, I have discovered quite a bit from such philosophers as Kierkegaard and Kant. Kant, I have found, is a good starting point to the investigation of any philosophical issue. Hume, of course, has merit as well, but I find that once we go down his path it is difficult to establish anything on firm ground, whereas by starting with Kant I can more readily soften the ground he establishes.

owleye

Kent Stevens

If we do bad things then often bad things happen to us in turn. However, we need not need to believe in God to accept this. I will slightly disagree over the way that you present our current existence. I will qualify what you say by stating that if you do believe in God then he would want you to have meaning in our life now. If you do not believe in God it is still wise to have meaning in life now.

I will try to make as clear my change in opinon. When I first started this thread I used the word faith. I accused people of using faith in this and faith in that. However, as people got this understandably confused with how faith is used in religion I then replaced the term with acceptance or assumption. The problem with faith or acceptance is how do we deal with ridiculous statements like "Pigs might fly". So I came up with the term justified acceptance. You could get rid of ridiculous statements by saying your beliefs have to be justified. However, on second thoughts the term justified does not mean much as people who think the world is flat for example might think they are justified in thinking this. So the term justified does not save us from accepting ridiculous statements.

I thought that faith could be used in the single case of reason. That is because reason is accepted without further reasons given. But I now think that if we use faith in reason we get an abuse of language for I think that faith if it to be used at all should be used only in a religious context. I might have some trust in the usefulness of reason but this is not as deep as the word faith might suggest.

Even the term simple acceptance should be used much more sparingly then how I was initially proposing in this thread. Simple acceptance being when we accept something without further reason. But why not simply accept ridiculous statements such as "Pigs might fly" then? I do not accept this statement because this is not part of common experience or part of science or part of religion. Religion or science is not just accepted but they are accepted because these are ways to the truth. The desire for truth is something that tends to be simply accepted without further reason given. Also reason is something that is just accepted.

Something like getting out of bed in the morning may appear to be just something accepted without further reason. However, getting out of bed is only accepted as it is part of happiness or part of what we want. The desire for happiness is something that tends to be just accepted. The desire to do what we want is something that is just accepted without further reasoning being required.

Drinking a cup of copy might seem to be something simply accepted but it is only accepted as it is part of happiness or part of what we want. Drinking a cup of kerosene is not accepted because it is not part of happiness or part of what we want.

This makes it confusing for someone that reads along with what I have been saying. As essentially I have demolished most of what I was saying before. Out of the remnants of this we have that there are some basic ideas that just tend to be accepted without further reasons given. You can use the term simple acceptance to these rare basic ideas. These basic ideas are similar to what Jefferson was originally saying with self-evident truths.

In order to get to the viewpoint of certain basic ideas existing I took a few wrong turns. But this is like science itself in that you hypothesise and test then find weaknesses and then test a new hypothesus. But, hopefully you should find your way out of difficulties through experimenting.

But it terms of my religious arguments about the holy trinity or the problem of evil I have not changed my mind. To me the holy trinity is a false statement that I was trying to avoid suggesting that we just believe or that we simply accept them.

In terms of Kant I acknowledge his contributions to philosophy and his work criticising pure reason. However, I tend to agree with Hume more than with Kant. I do not want to believe on faith as this leaves me open to potentially believe something ridiculous. If we are to say we just believe a statement we should only apply this to something basic such as the desire for happiness, wants, truth, or reason.

[ March 05, 2002: Message edited by: Kent Stevens ]</p>

A3

Hi Kent,

You said
Just for your information, I started a thread in "the existance of god" under "the trinity, explained?" Would you (and anybody else for that matter) mind having a look see?
I coppied the url but don't know if it works.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=50&t=000157" target="_blank">The existence of god</a>

Adrian

[ March 06, 2002: Message edited by: A3 ]</p>

owleye

Kent...

I have another suggestion for you. Instead of trying to get a handle on the meaning of the concepts you are investigating, where I see you merely thrashing about, you should consider an alternative approach where you try to understand the notions of a) what is given in experience -- i.e., things we take for granted without questioning them; b) what faculty we rely on (faith, reason, beliefs, intuition, data, feelings) to make our judgments and determine our actions, where you might notice that each of us has a different mix; c) what constrains our thinking, preventing us, at least temporarily, from seeing what is there, or regarding what we hear from others as factual; d) and to get to the bottom of things, what is it about our mind that makes it possible for us to have the kind of experience we in fact have. The objective of taking the above approach is for you to be able to distinguish a real epistemology from an ideal one. Real epistemology (what actually makes our mind function the way it does) is different from ideal epistemology (how our mind should function). The former is a branch of psychology whereas the latter is what philosophers are most concerned about. For this reason, (analytic) philosophers are heavily indebted to logic and other formal sciences whose importance to them is bound up in the application of its formal truths. Indeed, from Frege on, philosophers have been investigating formal structures to such an extent that not since Aristotle has the field been under such scrutiny.

Hume, of course, denied reason and understanding any access to the truth of things, having access only to the association of impressions we get from sensory experience. Kant, by separating out the facutly of reason from the faculty of understanding in cognition was able to provide a signficant role in experience to the faculty of understanding (though this term must be understood in the context of Kant's time -- not that of today where we would use the term conceptual framework). Cognitive scientists are returning to the model that Kant provides in their research into how the cognition works.

Despite this, I think you will find Hume heavily relying on the powers of reason in determining how our mind works as well. Indeed, his theory of morals (at least in the second Enquiry) lifts the significance of reason such that it becomes an essential ingredient to our ability to make moral judgments. Notably, his theory of justice can hardly be taken as a brand of subjectivism, and is more in keeping with later utilitarianians.

owleye

Kent Stevens

I think that I am making some progress. I find some things as truth, happiness, morality, and wants as basic and tending not to need further justification. Or if justification is given it tends to be circular so that happiness is used to justify morality and morality is used to justify happiness for example.

Morality relates to the idea of people having rights. Happiness relates to the right of being able to pursuit happiness. Wants relate to the right of being able to do what we want. The desire for truth relates to freedom of speech.

Hume did end up accepting rationality and had ethics. He just tended to accept things without needing further support. Hume seems to be an atheist or agnostic which is more in tune with my beliefs. As I understand Kant though he demolishes certain theological arguments some of what he says can be used to support the belief in God. To do justice to both of these philosophers I need to read a little more about them.