Before faith has to kick in?
The whole way?
Some of it?
Does evidence take you far enough to say your religion is truer than another religion?
No faith?
cumulative evidence can build faith, but faith is kept separate.
Faith can also be destroyed by evidence, and so it is something only to be dabbled in.
No where.
I would sooner find spiritual gain in sitting still and staring at a lake than gain anything from proof.
You’re saying evidence doesn’t even suggest that there may possibly be a God; that faith has to get you the whole way there; that a rational person, i.e., one who believes things warranted by evidence, cannot be a theist?
Is religion, or faith, a system which is best modeled using evidence? A lot of theorizing involves post-hoc analyses of events in order to create a working model. We have to ask ourselves how far is the jump between what we think is going on and what evidence we have, as well as how warranted taking that jump is.
In the case of Abrahamic religions, well, they call it a “leap of faith” so we can conclude that the jump is often fairly long. Whether or not such a jump is warranted, well, that is a whole different discussion entirely and one we’ve all had enough times.
Clinging to evidence is temporal.
Religion is spiritual.
How is one’s spiritual self to grow from temporal food?
How do you feed water with rocks and expect the stream to keep flowing?
Okay…What does that mean?
The word spiritual means too many things to too many different people for you to just leave it at that. What do you mean by spirits. You see, you’re sort of forcing me to ask you to flesh out what you mean, and it’s kind of frustrating, because I have a feeling you knew I wouldn’t understand based on what you wrote. Your post is vague as hell.
…? What are you asking concretely? Is this a metaphysical rhetorical question about the immaterial soul?
Listen. I’m from an analytic tradition. This poetic language is cute, but it doesn’t really mean anything.
But let me narrow down the scope of this thread to avoid future confusions. It’s not about religion. It’s about a belief in God. Theism. I want to know what the regulars think-- do they think belief in God must be wholly faith based, in that evidence doesn’t suggest God at all, and in order to believe in God you must make a leap in the dark? Or do they think evidence suggests something abnormal, and they interpret this something to be God as it was described by people of the past? Or do they think that faith has nothing to do with belief, and that evidence takes you all the way to God.
It’s a belief about things that supposedly exist. I would expect their belief about such things to be based on evidence, and if it isn’t, then it must be based on faith. Right? You think it’s a false dichotomy? I’m wondering how far the regulars think the jump is.
Right. In theory of justification, this is called evidentialism. It’s in my opinion the best one. There’s other contenders, but they’re merely reactionary…against Gettier.
I understand that, which is why I’m puzzled whenever religious people talk about intelligent design, or evidence for God. Ya know? I just want to know how far they think evidence takes them.
Is it really a discussion? I ask, because such a jump is very clearly not warranted.
Yeah, I’m likewise puzzled by ID. But that is largely because it just plain doesn’t make sense. At least Creationism had the balls to be wrong with panache. As for evidence, well, when I think of “evidence for God”, I usually think of things like Scholastic arguments. I do think those make sense since they firm up and justify the foundations of their faith. That seems like a worthwhile exercise to me, though I disagree with their givens.
Well, we’re atheists so of course we’d answer that way 
But I don’t know whether I agree that it is completely unwarranted. When a person in a position of authority says “X is true” I think it makes sense for someone in a subordinate position to accept that X is indeed true. Naturally, that justification has a lot of problems with it but I do think that following is often warranted.
Temporal:
Of, relating to, or limited by time
Of or relating to the material world; worldly
Lasting only for a time; not eternal; passing
Spiritual:
Of, relating to, consisting of, or having the nature of spirit; not tangible or material
Of, concerned with, or affecting the soul
It’s literal.
How does someone grow immaterially by gain of the material?
It’s not a riddle; it’s a literal question.
It is the same as asking (metaphorically), how does someone get more air in a room by filling the room with boxes?
It’s not poetic; it’s literal.
How do you increase the flow of water in a river by damning it up with more rocks?
Water and air are metaphorically similar to the immaterial because of their intangibility when compared to something as tangible as rock.
So, with evidence relating to the material, or rocks, of the world, and the spiritual relating to the immaterial, or waters, of the world, then the literal is reiterating the same question:
How do you fill someone with material evidence and get immaterial increase?
It’s mathematically the same as suggesting:
1+0=2
Where 1 represents the material evidence, 0 represents the immaterial, and 2 represents the alleged gain.
However, we know that 1+0=1, which just means that you have the material evidence and no increase of the immaterial and intangible.
The spiritual gain is accomplished by a representation in mathematics such as starting at 100 and depleting it over time until you have 0.
The nature of the spiritual life and pursuit of man is to understand the nature of essence between things and not the things themselves.
Therefore, man adopts the deduction of each identified thing they examine along the way until they have removed enough to see the nothing of the material, and yet to see how they are all related to each other by the equations they have processed in the deductions over time.
It is similar to understanding the nature of water by watching it erode rock.
So to ask me how far adding more rock will take me in understanding the nature of erosion is that it only is useful if I don’t have any rocks already to erode; but no amount of piling rocks without watching them erode by water will ever let me understand erosion.
I think it’s 'bout time to define what faith means, eh? I take faith to be a term which describes a manner of believing where one believes despite being aware that their belief is not warranted by any body of evidence. It’s not faith if you believe your belief is sufficiently implied by your body of evidence. It’s faith only if you believe despite being aware that you don’t have the blessings of epistemology. In short, faith begins where justification ends. That’s how I understand faith.
Heh. I remember reading one of them, and I kid you not this guy starts off his essay with something like, “Oh God, please help me to prove your existence.” Those comedians!
Anyways, with their arguments I don’t think they were trying to firm up the foundations of their faith. I think they were trying to make a belief in God justified, and thus if you accept my definition of faith they were trying to eliminate the need to have faith that God exists in order to believe that God exists.
Nooo! It’s not faith when someone believes another person at their word when they saw they experienced God. Testimony is a manner of justification. Faith is when one makes the leap and believes despite the gaping hole left by the lack of evidence and justification. I think, definitionally, belief through faith is unwarranted belief, otherwise it’s not faith.
TS,
Do you mean to say that God is something immaterial and that because all we’re privy to in this life is physical things that we therefore can’t possibly have evidence, and thus no justification, for God’s existence; that basically belief in God is wholly a function of faith? Do you as a result believe ID, and the whole range of other arguments for God’s existence are bunk?
Concepts such as God are immaterial to our grasp, yes.
I don’t think they are false or true.
I think they are useful or not useful, depending on the person that needs to examine that part of their understanding of their spiritual self.
If they wish to examine their spiritual relationship with God, then they will focus on that.
They will then look for any method to allow their material based mind to stay focused on this aim.
For some people, this means they will indeed need more piles of rocks (to continue the metaphor) to watch erode.
And some people, simply stand marveling at their pile of rocks only.
For those that marvel at their pile of rocks; I would not say they are false.
I would however, say that they are looking at the wrong material to understand erosion.
They are staring at rocks and marveling at how they erode as if it is the rocks doing instead of the water.
It will bring marvel and insight, surely, but they will miss the entire point of those rocks existing in vested interest that no one removes one stone from the pile, should it crumble.
The pile of rocks can become the sacred thing instead of the unfixed nature of the spiritual existence.
Ironically, such piles of rocks, such as ID, are doomed from the beginning by the very thing they hope to support.
The immaterial existence slowly erodes the material existence when it comes to the spiritual endeavor.
So they are piling mountains and fearing their erosion.
To me, this is no different than the man who builds for himself his own skyscraper to declare himself master of his life, and to find the truth of his soul.
Who are you…The Grand Inquisitor? 
What entitles you to pose questions and take no position? Answer your own questions and maybe you’ll have the makings of a discussion in which others are motivated to reciprocate. Otherwise, this thread belongs in the hall of questions, IMHO.
I grant leniency when it comes to the Religion forum on that rule because the nature of Religion as people address it is to ask a great many questions in seeking of an idea that makes sense to themselves.
They may not get any answers they agree with, but they will probably end up considering some perspectives that give them insight into further ideas of what they think on the subject.
Unlike Philosophy proper, questions in Religion are actually paramount.
So I tend to turn my head as long as I see that the questioning is an attempt to understand something, or poses a position that challenges others to explain their understandings (which, in my opinion, is ultimately the same thing).
If someone simply posts a bunch of questions that are just questions, “How old do Baptists think someone must be before they are able to be baptized”, “What is the Tibetan approach to gifts?”, etc… I am a little less willing (depending) to let these stay.
But questions like xzc’s are great in my opinion, and directly relevant to Religion as a discussion.
What entitles me?! What gives me right? His Noodly Appendages, off course.
I was listening to this thing about Hume’s critique of natural and revelaed religion while driving yesterday, and I realized that the job of the atheist is determined by how the theists answer my question. If, for example, the theist says that belief in God requires faith for the whole way, then the atheist doesn’t have to do anything. This position doesn’t need refutation, because it doesn’t even get off ground. If, on the other hand, the theist says that some body of evidence suggests God, then this is where the atheist has to come in and say that that body of evidence doesn’t suggest God, or something like that.
I don’t see why my view is necessary. This topic is for people who believe in God…I’m an atheist, ya know, subhuman, unpatriotic, eat babies, hate freedom, and everything. Also, my opinion will probably offend, given how sensitive you religious folks are.
But…here goes:
I think God is a non-starter. The physical evidence we have implies only what science books report. They don’t suggest God. So I pretty much think that a belief in God requires faith for the entire journey from neutral to full belief. This state of affairs, based on my definition of faith, doesn’t even need a refutation.
I think all the talk about God being immaterial are based on the backtracking of theists who realize that God can’t be anything other than immaterial; otherwise he is immediately refuted by the sciences.
But please don’t spend any time responding to my opinion. I’m not really interested. I’m more interested in how the locals answer my questions.
You humble folk you! I don’t really mind, but I was hoping to get some answers from the locals. What do you think Felix? And for the last time, these threads where I’m picking on you theists are not a sign of me desperately seeking out God.
Oh…to be clear here, I wasn’t intending to suggest that anyone is looking for God.
I just simply see questions as an attempt to understand something, or poses a position that challenges others to explain their understandings (which is the same thing really).
Meaning…you may not have interest in understanding God; you want to understand the religious use of evidence among theists; or to challenge it’s use for the same purposes.
A while ago I came up with what I think is a reasonable faith/belief distinction: “It is my understanding that one accepts a belief with the expectation that they will be vindicated at some future point, in this world. Faith, on the other hand, cannot be vindicated in this world.”
But I’d agree with yours as well. That faith exists either independent or prior to (depending on your view) evidence. It is a given. I guess I don’t have a problem with having givens.
“Sing in me, oh muse” Classical illusions are pretty key in this sort of thing.
I think that is merely a matter of which perspective we want to employ when viewing the situation. Back in the Scholastics’ day, there wasn’t anything even resembling a debate as to whether or not God existed. God, not “a god”. The Christian God was a given in the same way to them that a spherical* Earth is to us. Sure, there may have been some crazies who stated otherwise but their model, even in retrospect, was, well, crazy. You’ve got to take the perspective of the time into consideration. They were using the best tools of the time. I can’t fully wrap my head around that sort of thing, but I can try.
I also think it is worthwhile to see how believing people hold these arguments. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of crazies who use these arguments towards crazy ends. There are a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel apologetics out there. But to me, having a discussion regarding Christianity at that level is like having a discussion about atheism at the level of “They are just angry at their parents!” There is definitely a contingent of atheists who reject their parents’ faith to spite them. There is also a contingent of atheists (admittedly, pretty small) who are atheists because they don’t want moral responsibility. Neither of these groups are in any way representative of atheism as a whole or, more importantly, the best atheism has to offer. I think it is proper and polite that we give theists the benefit of the doubt (deluded though they may be) and address the best that they have to offer rather than the worst. If they want to take the low road, eh, so what? We’ve got the march of history on our side. I’m not too worried.
*Close enough to, the present understanding accounts for the deviations anyway but we lack a precise term for it unless we want to use “Earth-shaped”. And that doesn’t really help matters.
Sure, but testimony is how these things start. Once you’ve got something in your head, misattribution is pretty damned easy. This last Monday, I was just on top of the world. It was one of those days were not only did everything go right, but on top of that I just felt fantastic the entire time. If I had been taught to believe that God’s love is what makes you feel that way, well, I almost certainly would have taken that as proof of God. That is also what I think is missing in your evidence schema, since religious evidence tends to be on a more personal level (in the West, you’ve got the whole personal relationship with Jesus/Mary thing; in the East, you’ve got your ancestor’s ghosts hanging about; and I’m sure that the Middle East has a similar system, though I am unfamiliar with it). Does my buddy exist? He’s black, he is a skilled auto-mechanic, a trained painter, and a transsexual. You haven’t met the dude. Even if I had him call you and he put his vagina up to the phone and made it go squishy-squishy while talking about how the transmission in a Ford Explorer works, you could quite reasonably insist that I’d faked the entire thing. But you don’t even have that. You’ve got my word.
I think that excluding testimony from faith is creating a situation where faith is always wrong. I can see how creating a system where that is true is appealing but if you actually want to engage people of faith, I think it is a mistake since the discussion is over before it begins. This isn’t some vague “keep an open mind, man!” appeal, but rather a critique of rhetoric. If you want the enemy to engage, there needs to be some bait.
You know how the condition of justification came about in epistemology? It didn’t sit right with some people that someone who guesses and turns out to be right can be said to have knowledge, so they came up with something to prevent guessers from joining the club. Tethered, said Plato. A belief must be tethered.
Along the same lines with faith–It doesn’t feel right to say it’s faith when someone believes they have good evidence going for their belief. I mean, if you think you have good reason to believe that you have two hands and a body, then it can’t really be said that you have faith. So I propose defining faith like this:
[For S to have faith that P, S must believe P even though S also believes that S-himself doesn’t have enough evidence to believe that P.]
Once more, to have faith means to believe something even though you know you don’t have good reason to believe it. This means that whenever you get good reason for believing something, this good reason is taking away from your faith.
In words pertaining to this discussion, having faith in God means believing that God exists despite being aware that you don’t have enough evidence to suggest such a thing. This means that all attempts to prove God’s existence take away from one’s faith in God, and add on to one’s reasons in God.
This part of my post is very crucial. If there’s any disagreement with what I say later on, it probably stems from here.
Moving on, then.
But before anything, I want to say something on the side about this comment of yours.
There is something refreshing about their honesty, isn’t there? These old Greek poets weren’t working under the assumption that it is their “I” that causes thoughts. They were too honest for it. So they wondered, “where do these great ideas come from? I didn’t force them out my mouth, or onto paper. I merely watched as they flew out of my body.”
You know how sometimes you’ll be talking to people, and you become self-aware as you’re talking, although you keep on talking. And you realize that you’re not really preparing what you’re saying. You’re not having an internal dialogue saying “Okay, it is wise if I now say this and that.” Words just flow out of you. Or, when you’re writing something, a bunch of things will just flow out of you and onto paper, but you didn’t prepare them in mind and then decide to let them out. So it’s not “you” who is causing these words in the same way that it isn’t “you” who is causing your heart to beat.
From whence do these words come from, if not from ‘me’? I mean, to any outsider, they seem like they’re from me, but I know better. Their answer to this riddle was The Muses! They thought these ideas they had a gift from the Gods. The Gods put words into their mouths. That explains how sometimes you’ll say things without preparing what you’ll say…And then it wasn’t until Hume that…what the fuck happened during that time in between?
But then why was their number one goal in life to prove that God exists? Clearly they weren’t satisfied with going to God via the faith route (and why should they, why should anybody. It’s a dumb road.) They were making a new and improved road to God. Carefully catering to every step, so you did not have to jump blindly. They tried to make each step a follow necessarily from the previous one–so that in the end, if you were a rational person, you had to go all the way to their conclusion. They didn’t like leaping, those fat bastards…but then, I think it’s pertinent to ask, were they really Christians?
If someone has only faith for their belief in God, then not many nice things can be said about them. If they have evidence that they think suggests God, then I’m all ears. So far, and as far as I know, it is only the ID peeps who have dared to say physical evidence suggests God, and they can be easily dealt with. ID-ers do not believe in getting to god through faith, and for this reason they can be reasoned with, insofar as one can reason with a religious person.
Others, like TheStump conceptualize God as ‘something else’ for which physical evidence says nothing about, and…what can be said to them? What can you dispute? That he has no grounds for which to conceptualize God as immaterial? Then what…? Conversation is over.
It doesn’t matter, I don’t think, what sort of evidence it is, as long as the person who holds the evidence believes it warrants God. If they think their belief in God is supported by experience, or testimony, or memory, or intuition, or physical evidence, or whatever, then their belief in God is not faith-based. It is evidence-based. And as I redundantly tried to show in the first part, where there is evidence, faith is missing.
This is not really a question of how much evidence you need before you can say you’re justified. This is a question of what you believe about your own belief. If you think you have evidence for your belief in God (be it in the form of testimony, memory, intuition, physical evidence, etc) then you’re not using faith to believe in God. You’re using reason…and you know…if you’re using reason, and if you believe your belief is warranted, then you can’t be said to have gotten to your belief through faith.
But if it’s not faith when a person believes they have enough evidence for believing P…and think about…it’s not, then you must say that for a person to believe through faith they must acknowledge that they don’t have enough evidence.
Hence, if testimony gives one reason for believing that P, then testimony necessarily takes away from one’s faith that P is true. It’s not that faith is wrong, at least not necessarily. It’s that faith doesn’t need to be refuted. There’s nothing to be refuted. It is definitionally self-refuting.
The discussion is indeed over before it begins if you accept my criteria for faith as I present it in the first paragraphs. If faith begins where justification ends, then there is no point in have a dicussion with someone who’s only basis for belief is faith…because their belief is baseless.
But faith doesn’t have to be all-encompassing. A religious person doesn’t have to say that faith takes them all the way from a state of atheism to a state of theism. They can say that evidence takes them safely within a short distance of God and that ultimately they have to make a small jump…protestant instead of catholic…christian instead of muslim or jewish…small leaps like that. With these people the matter to be discussed is the part based on evidence.
What I want to know in this thread is exactly how far the religious folks think evidence takes them before faith kicks in.
I’ll start at the end, since this is a pretty critical point. Not being religious in the sense you are talking about here, I’m not sure I’m really worth responding to if you don’t want to engage in a bit of a thread derail. But I’ll keep talking because, well, I’m full of myself. I like hearing myself talk in real life and the nature of discussion boards is that these tendencies are exaggerated. The 'net is a fantastic tool for narcissism. What I’m saying is important, damnit, because I am saying it.
I do think that faith is tethered. But it is tethered in things like testimony, tradition, and personal (and highly subjective) experience. This doesn’t work in terms of analytic philosophy because those three things are pretty much outside of its provenance. Part of our disagreement may lie in empiricism. When I think of “evidence” I necessarily think of empirical evidence and I don’t think I’m alone in this line of thinking. Other forms of justification are soft and fall more along the lines of “faith” since there are hard givens. To me, that is the divide between rationalism and empiricism. One is a complete system built off of hard givens whereas the other is more of a free-for-all with givens that exist only in a contingent fashion. To me, faith can exist quite happily with rationalism whereas it cannot exist (as in it makes no linguistic sense) to approach it from an empirical standpoint.
It seems to me like you are trying to have it both ways here, in that both the rational and empirical traditions can’t exist with faith and I don’t think that makes sense. As I said before, it seems like you are defining faith into a corner where it can’t succeed.
I think that honesty might be the wrong word here. It isn’t like Homer (however we want to conceive him) was singing off-the-cuff. They were reciting a memorized epic so the aspect of creation that you seem to be suggesting here wasn’t present. Stream-of-consciousness poetry didn’t really exist in a rigorous sense until the 20th Century. Before that, there was a sort of glossial approach where hermeneutics could be approached as a hodge-podge. This passage makes me think of that passage, so they must be related in some way, right? But that isn’t even what epic poets are doing. They are working within a very rigid framework and just talking. Not like you and your friends but more in an infotainment sort of way where the only freedom they have is to incorporate local heroes into the story. In rhyming hexameter.
But there were a lot of bridges in between. The scholastics, to bring them up again, tried to leave behind the glossial approach of monks in the Middle Ages and use the newly rediscovered rational approach of Aristotle and that whole bag.
Sure, but using rationalism. That is why you’ve got things like Aquinas’ four proofs of God. Keep in mind, the Christian God was a given for these folks, so things like the argument from first cause could be used to justify God. To that line of argument, I can say, "Sure, we don’t know anything about the first cause – but what does that have to do with the Christian god? There is no necessary connection there, but they could say, “Well, we’ve got this problem . . . and it can be conveniently solved by this other thing we know to exist!” It would be circular reasoning if God wasn’t a known but since for them God was a known quality, they could make that connection quite easily.
If you reject the given, question that known quality, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. But that wasn’t an issue for them. It still isn’t an issue for modern Christian philosophers like Plantinga. It isn’t so much a leap as it is a connection. Have you ever been at a party and someone is telling a story and you go, “Holy crap! I know that guy! That is my buddy Bob!” It is a leap, sure. But it is a different kind of leap than the opening line expats everywhere are familiar with: “Wow, you are from America! Do you know Bob?”
This I get. This is empiricism. And I agree. Faith is alien to empiricism. But that doesn’t mean it is alien to rationalism. I agree the conversation is quickly over because there is a disagreement over the givens and the approach which creates those givens. Of course there can’t be a conversation! The participants are effectively speaking in different languages.
See my earlier objections.