Dear Michael,
It is an honor to discuss these profound matters with you again. I couldn't hope for a wiser or more generous interlocutor.
I would like to take up your invitation to locate the "exact areas of disagreement" between believers and unbelievers. While we could proceed at a fairly general level--debating, for example, whether the prevalence of a belief is a marker of its truth--I propose starting from the concrete. Nonbelievers find themselves surrounded every day not just by abstract statements about, say, the compatibility of reason and faith, but also by quite specific claims about God's attributes and effects in the world. I would appreciate learning how you would counsel a nonbeliever to approach such claims, since they are part of religious faith no less than metaphysics.
Perhaps, Michael, you share with me a certain despair at the gullibility of seemingly educated Westerners towards New Age quackery.
One homeopathic cure for illness prescribes pinning onto one's lapel a piece of paper with the name of a homeopathic chemical written on it. There is simply no excuse in my opinion for anyone who has had the benefit of even a mediocre education to entertain such a claim. It is a betrayal of the loving, hard-fought victories of science not to ask the most basic questions of causality when confronted with homeopathy, astrology, crystal therapy, or any other such "alternative" theory of the world.
Last year, Pope Benedict the XVI canonized an 18th century friar, Antonio de Santa Ana Galvao, as Brazil's first saint. Nuns in Brazil dispense pills containing little scrolls with prayers to Fra. Galvao wrapped up inside. In canonizing Fra. Galvao, the Church declared that ingesting those pills had helped cure a young girl of kidney disease and had allowed a woman who had had a series of miscarriages to carry a child through the first two trimesters of pregnancy after doctors declared her incapable of doing so.
I assume--perhaps incorrectly--that these two cases do not "merely" involve God intervening directly to help these two individuals. Rather, as I interpret the canonization--again, forgive me if I misunderstand--the Fra. Galvao pills were somehow instrumental in the outcomes--otherwise why bother to make or take them?
Now I am not for an instant suggesting that homeopathy and earthly manifestations of the divine belong in the same category. But for someone standing outside a religion, such claims as the efficacy, however sporadic and limited, of the Fra. Galvao pills present a rather formidable barrier to entry, I have to tell you, Michael. Should a neutral observer, in your view, assess the claims of homeopathy and of God's workings in the world differently, or should our standards of proof be the same? How do you evaluate empirical claims from other religions--say, the assertion that America was peopled by lost tribes of Israel? Do you cut such a claim slack because it is religious or do you test it against what you already know about archeology and expect that it clear the same scientific hurdles as you would a secular revolution in our understanding of Bronze Age history?
I ask these questions, Michael, out of a sincere desire to discover where our two approaches to knowledge about the world diverge and to understand how reason and faith are compatible.
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Kevin you waste our time quoting from an old book with no validity. And I don't "deny that Jesus Christ is God"; to do that I'd have to think there is a god, one like yours in fact. And I don't think there is any god, let alone one like yours.
You are standing on a crumbling sand castle barking up the wrong tree.
You actually implicate yourself here, but I can't tell you about it. You're right, I am standing on a crumbling sand castle. I've been knocking on your door, so it is yours. My only parting advice is that you should respect the Bible because it is made valid by the amount of testimony for it. And that is only one part of it's validity. You seem to be impressed that a lot of scientists are evolutionists, based on another post of yours. If this makes your argument valid, then why are you not fair to realize that the Bible is made valid through testimony? Also, you may mean 66 "old" books written over 1400 years, which have influenced world civilizations and society more than any other source, that is, other than God Himself.____P.S. It is not logical for the universe to have always existed because it is not self defining or dinstinct. God, in concept, would be, and Is the only way to completely define ourselves and our world. For example, a fish is a fish because it swims in water. Water is clear because it cleanses. A bird is a bird because it flys. The sky is the sky because it testifies to God's Glory. - Evolution and all athiesm is redundant in this effect. Example
Here is the whole P.S... my post was cut off again.
P.S. It is not logical for the universe to have always existed because it is not self defining or dinstinct. God, in concept, would be, and Is the only way to completely define ourselves and our world. For example, a fish is a fish because it swims in water. Water is clear because it cleanses. A bird is a bird because it flys. The sky is the sky because it testifies to God's Glory. - Evolution and all athiesm is redundant in this effect. Example; A fish is a fish because it has scales, fins, gills, etc; or a bird is a bird because it has wings, light bones, feathers, etc.
"If this makes your argument valid, then why are you not fair to realize that the Bible is made valid through testimony?"
Scientists worry a lot about what is true and change their minds based on facts. Religious people pride themselves on their faith, believing in something without justification. Which is better at testifying about how the world works? No brainer; the one who respects facts, not received beliefs.
" a fish is a fish because it swims in water. Water is clear because it cleanses. A bird is a bird because it flys."
So whales are fishes? Tadpoles are fishes? Sand (which is often used to cleanse things) is clear? A mosquito is a bird?
"It is not logical for the universe to have always existed because it is not self defining or dinstinct. God, in concept, would be, and Is the only way to completely define ourselves and our world."
You've read way too much pseudo-philosophy. To begin to justify that claim you'd need to say what you mean by "self defining and distinct" and to explain why anything needs to be that. But I'm afraid of the knots you'll wrap yourself in if you try to do that, given your problems with fish and water and birds.
Kevin, Bertrand Russell demolished your argument that the universe is not self defining in a paragraph. If everything must be defined by something else, then there are an infinite number of those "something else"s because each thing must be defined by something else, thus it goes on for infinite. If something can exist that is self justifying, it may as well be the universe as God, and thus your argument has no validity. You assume that God is self defining, but God, in reality, simply makes the problem more complicated by taking it to a higher level.
On top of this, your "argument" begs the question of why something has to be self defining to be the first cause? (and by self defining, I assume you mean being justification for personal existence) Even so, what makes you think that God is self defining? How is he his own justification for existence? God exists because he says he does?
Your argument is basically the "first cause argument", which states that something had to come first, because everything has a cause. It is a little different, but not enough to change the argument against it.
The religious do not have the upper hand in this debate. The atheist community has shot down every single argument for the existence of God. If you think you can overcome the likes of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins, you are welcome to try, but it will do you no good.
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