Thanks for your honesty. Although your post was meant for Felix, it says much to me also. I grew into a belief in a universal God and do not lament my past years in fundamentalism. Although I have brief nostalgic moments remembering the little church I grew up in, I have moved on to more inclusive=of myself and of others–thoughts on religion. Much reading helped my thoughts to mature.
I know that this was directed at felix dakat but…
lol You really want to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater, don’t you? You did say ALL types of faith. Is that what faith is really about? ALL faith? What about the scientists? Do they not need a certain amount of faith in order to continue with their experiments, their theories? If they had no faith, what would be accomplished? Why would they bother going on, continuing with what is important to them? Why would anyone even bother getting up in the morning without faith?
What is the definition of faith? Hope in that which cannot be seen because of that which can be seen. I may be kind of paraphrasing here.
I may be wrong here but perhaps with your use of the word Faith you meant to say religion? Even that kind of faith may not be useless. There are many people in this world who have great faith (not fanatics) and they do a lot of good in this world.
Is accomplishing good things in the name of humanity or others" useless"? Simply because one does not believe in God, One cannot reasonably turn around and say that faith is useless.
It all depends on what an individual DOES with that faith. I think that for most intelligent reasonable believers, if you dig way down there, you will see that their faith is not based on certainty but hope. Let us say though for arguments sake, that it is based on some degree of certainly within their minds, can their faith STILL not be useful towards humanity if they are loving, useful people?
ONLY if that faith is not guided by reason. So what would be the real culprit there? Faith or the human mind which would be abusing it and not seeing it for what it is?
Is this the way that most scientists’ brains operate? Scientists are suppose to be logical right? Are they all absurd to have faith in the way their experiments are going?
Sculptor has absolute faith that “ALL faith is useless” - because “it is the death of reason”.
Of course that given void of all reason.
Thank you for your post. Your journey seems like a familiar pattern to me. That is, I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours. I’m curious to know what your particular theological orientation was such that when you could no longer believe in that model, you felt that the only alternative was to give up theism in any sense of the word. I myself have given it up too in the sense of God as a being with a bunch of omni attributes.
So how do you characterise your god?
It seems to me that the stardard pan-omni being is actually a contradiction. But rejecting the “bunch of omni attributes” means one of two things; one is the bemused conclusion of Epicurus when he said
“Is god is willing to prevent evil but not able then he is not omnipotent;
Is he is able but not willing, then he is malevolent;
Is god both able and willing, then whence comes evil?
Is he his neither willing nor able then why call him god?”
The second thing would have to be that there is only nature.
I gave a dictionary definition of faith on page 20.
Arcturus is right about faith in science. The scientist has reasonable faith that his experiments will be duplicable and will render predictable results. Then there is the possibility that all scientific theories are falsifiable, pending further investigation and peer approval. It takes a lot of faith to be a scientist.
Reasonable faith is what it takes to believe that there is a prime mover, that evolution, by determinism, is goal oriented, and that the individual person can have a knowing God experience. This faith lies within the scope of what it means to be human.
Faith == “not buying into my disparaging.” 
If you read the Hebrew Bible you see that they attributed both benevolence and malevolence to God. Isaiah says that God created evil. The idea that God would only be good came later. Christianity’s conception of God was influenced by Plato’s idea of the Good with whom God is identified. The idea that God is the ultimate good results in theodicy wherein events that appear to be evil are rationalized as only evil in appearance or evil in service of some greater good be it known or unknown. That idea goes beyond simple identification of God with nature.
I do not think that really contradicts the Christian god, since there are so many versions and sub versions.
You failed to answer my main question about your view of god.
Tuttut
I think it is worth distinguishing between ordinary expectation and Faith with a captial F.
The point is that when the experiments do not work, the scientist revises his expectations. But the religious person like a fool continues to believe and just say god mucst have had his reasons today why it did not turn out right.
The idea that god might be “testing my faith” is a most dangerous and stupid position to take.
No- it takes ZERO faith to be a scientist. In fact faith is the worst quality of a scientist. Studying science is a means of banishing faith.
Well quite.
You are still talking bollocks.
Expectation is a characteristic of faith.
In any event, Sculptor, you sound like a broken record that repeats itself ad nauseum.
In the Lord’s Prayer are the words," Put us not to the test." God does not, for any reason. test our faith, although the fundies, whom you see as representing all Christianity, might believe that, based on that Bible quote.
Good and evil are human, personal labels for weal and dearth. They exist only in theological appraisals of human nature and of the Natural world.
I said “goes beyond” rather than “contradicts” because the Christian conception of God typically includes nature but it also includes teleological and ontological dimensions that nature is not usually thought to include. You’re right that there are many not necessarily compatible conceptions of God among the 30,000 or so denominations that call themselves Christian.
I look at God as a symbol of Being Itself which is known to us only indirectly through phenomena and ideation.
Where?
Oh so you are also an atheist.
That makes more sense.
The same thing could be said of Dowd except his book raises so many questions for me that he needs to write another one to answer them before I could make an up or down decision about his religious perspective. Of course I’m not too bothered by that since I see no compelling need to.
Dowd the reformed young earth creationist ?? I doubt that
So tell me what does you god do?
Theories usually have a function. Does your go theory do any work?
Ierrellus,
What about the Old Testament God, Ierrellus? I can think of one example at the top of my head which did…a REAL doozy.
Felikx Dakat,
Your welcome.
After all of this time, that is good to know.
It actually happened twice to me but the first time I will say that it didn’t quite take. I was attacked on the street, fought back, and he was the one who eventually got up and ran away, leaving with nothing except for me being devastated.
Up to that time, I believed (mostly - being a skeptic) in God, creator, father, a protector, every good and beautiful thing I saw in the world this God caused and where do you think I was on the way to that evening - church. So that is the catalyst which got me to questioning, doubting, mourning a God and being angry at a God that I believed in up to that time. I would also now and then question the Divinity of Christ leading up to that time.
I am not so sure how I would word it but I suppose you can say that my only alternative was to let go of that belief system but that was only for a little while. lol. My faith/belief somewhat came back after I just let go of all of the pain/anguish/fear/negativity/anger…it took a while to climb back out of that dark well. You might be surprised how one’s personal history could lead one to becoming a neurotic. lol But something seemed to be missing or perhaps something was there that I was not willing to hold onto after awhile. My sense is that I was already beginning to shed that theist skin when I was attacked.
So then, after coming to ILP lol gradually I became aware that I really could not go on believing as I did - more skin having been shed. I actually felt all the freer for it and that I was in the only place where I could be (I don’t mean ILP). I cannot say that there is no God and I cannot say that there is. I can only say that I have no idea one way or the other but if there is Something (how can we even name it) we have not even began to scratch the surface. I am content with that since this universe is so awesome and break-takingly beautiful and wonder-filled and so Divine. lol
Although William James and others have argued at length for the functions religious belief accomplishes, it seems to me at the moment, that the question looks at the matter upside down. The question is whether we have any function within the context of being itself. And of course the short answer is that nobody knows.
The function of theories is something entirely within the scope of human purposes. So one need not look any further for an answer about that.
As far as what I said being a theory, I don’t think of it as such. It might be more aptly considered a worldview or what Charles Taylor calls a cosmic imaginary, or what Martin Heidegger characterized as an existential understanding. I fully recognize that other people see it in different ways, and I have no problem with that in general.
Is anyone’s worldview the final adequate one? I doubt it. Scientific discoveries change what we know about the universe all the time. And our personal and social experiences do the same for us as individuals. So here we are discussing how we see things. It seems like a reasonable thing to do for people who are interested in this sort of thing. Not everybody is.
I not stupid to be so easily fooled by a change of goal posts. I was really interested in the answer to my question, not they one you want to answer.
The story of Abraham and Isaac in the OT gives the quintessential example of faith as realized when it was written. I would approach the story from an evolutionary point of view, not as exegesis as Kierkegaard wrote about it. Primitive times meant a primitive view of God, one that might put you to the test, Obedience in those days was seen as loyalty. (See the original sin concept,)
I am not very fond of most of the OT. It describes a God Dawkins characterizes as evil in the God Delusion. It’s a pity that Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk attack the very fundamentalist God many modern Christians are trying to, in their evolving searches, outgrow. It is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, We see that here and in other threads, It is insensitivity to the full complexity of being human.