Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 12:53 pm
If the physical world could not be explained by science without it having to concede that the hand of God was essential to its existance and its functioning, there would be some significant gaps in the text books. Science does not need to include God in order to make sense of what it discovers.
This is actually a recent conceit on the part of modern, secularists. It has not generally been so.
An investigation will reveal that not only were the majority of scientists clergymen and religious folks, but that the scientific method itself was produced by one. And that is not accidental. For, it is because thinking people could expect regularities in nature that they first began expecting to find scientific laws, and to look for them. But to expect them, they had also to expect the existence of a rational, consistent Creator, who would produce a law-governed universe. Thus, monotheism, Jewish and Christian particularly, formed the suppositional basis on which modern science was itself launched. And this also accounts for why it did not launch much earlier, in other places where there are lots of smart folks (indeed, far more than in the West, numerically), like China and India. The religious suppositions for such a thing were simply not in place there.
So the idea that science can be severed off from God awaited the appearance of a rival, secular "genesis" theory -- which was to appear in the speculations of one Charles Darwin...though the search for the same had been on literally for millenia leading up to that, without success. Those who believed Darwin became convinced they'd found a plausible alternative to belief in God; and thus, for the first time in history, natural science and natural theology went through a partial divorce. Still, many of even today's scientists remain Christians and Jews, among others.
So the nice myth of the tight opposition between faith and reason, or between science and "religion" is just that: a secular myth that is neither historically nor presently true.
But that's a big subject, and requires much more than this rapid treatment in these small spaces can afford, admittedly. The point, though, is simple: you don't have to be a secularist to be a scientist. That much is abundantly obvious.
You seem to be saying that God's involvement in "creation" is obvious,
Romans chapter 1 says that. I'm merely agreeing.
yet, at the same time, also saying that God deliberately hides the evidence of his involvement.
Yes. That is interesting, isn't it?
Did you ever ask why He would do that, or did it automatically seem to you to be ground for dismissal of such questions?
It seems to me that if God wanted us to know about him, he would reveal himself plainly, and if he didn't want us to know, we would not have the slightest inkling of his existence.
Hmmm...
I don't know why those are the only two alternatives. What if He revealed Himself plainly, but left open to people the option of remaining unbelieving? Like, what if He...say, incarnated? But say He did so not by exploding with glory into the face of all mankind, so that nobody could possibly doubt His existence and nobody could help but bow to Him, but instead appeared uninvasively -- say, among us, as a human being -- and walked with us, and showed His authenticity, and demonstrated the kindness of His intentions toward us, and told us all we needed to know, but even so, left us the possibility of acceptance or rejection so that our free will and individual choosing would remain intact?
Why couldn't that be the case?
You raise a good point: a moral indictment that we know to be subjective would hardly p**** our consciences at all, I should think. You're right: we have to believe they are objective, in order for them to have any particular weight with us at all.
No. I didn't say we have to believe they are objective, I said it has to feel as though they are. [/quote]
I accept that caveat.
It is also the case that some people who do not believe in God still believe that morality is objective,
Yes. But are they justified in that confidence? I think you'll find they're not.
Given Atheism, or Materialism, or Physicalism, or whatever, when people say "morality is objective," all they can mean is "morality is something human beings do socially." It's a "social phenomenon," a "strange habit people have." What they can't say is that the moral precepts themselves are objectively true or right; only that it is true that some people practice them or believe in them.
In other words, they have to hold that morality is merely a psychological delusion...one that many have, perhaps, and maybe even one that has some limited social usefulness; but no more substantial in the final weighing than belief in Aristotle's four bodily humours or in alchemical transformations of lead into gold. It's just another kind of supersitition, really, an oddity of human misbelieving.
Then how can you be a sinner?
For absent any objective moral prohibition or prescription, one cannot really sin. There is no party that has any right to be offended, and your own conscience has no warrant in being twinged.
I am going to define "sin" as any act that is considered to be morally wrong.[/quote]
Okay...but who is doing the "considering" in that sentence? Who is the person who has so much authority that they can determine what you should and should not believe is wrong?
One can commit an act that violates a subjective rule just as easily as with an objective rule.
Yes, but not at all with the same reasons for guilt.
If my rule is only subjective, it's like my diet...I can cheat on it, and I may feel "guilty" if I do. But really, since only I care whether or not I stick to my diet, and since only I made the "imperative" for it in the first place, it's pretty easy for me to forgive myself and move on. Really easy, in fact.
Contrast that to something really
objectively wrong, or that I firmly believe to be so. If I have, say, beaten my wife, I not only feel subjectively guilty -- I
know I AM guilty...and not in such a way that I can simply forgive myself, but in such a way that I know I am answerable for it to justice -- not just the human kind, but the ultimate, divine kind.
If I commit a "sin" against my own moral code, there is likely to be a victim of it who is entitled to be offended,
That doesn't look obvious.
If you make a subjective rule that you will not fly in airplanes, say, who does that "victimize"? And what gives anybody a right to be "offended" if you don't feel safe in airplanes?
...a defining characteristic of sin is that it causes harm.
That depends. One has to understand "harm" in a very clear sense, and certainly in more than ways that are merely obvious.
My own self esteem will also be offended.
That happens when I break my diet.
But I can get over that.
The matter, to my way of thinking, is solely between the sinner and the sinned against, and is none of God's business.
What if that's not so?
What if one part of the offense we commit against another person is that it violates a creature given life, liberty and other rights by God Himself, so that our affront to that person, His creation, is also an affront to the Creator?
And what of the
justice of God, if He will let such things happen and go forever unredressed? What if He is what He says: the Just one, and the ultimate and final defender of those harmed by what I have chosen to do?
I mean that sin separates us from God. We lose our ability to relate to Him properly, and to be fit for His company, because God does not tolerate sin. So something must be done about my guilt before I can be hopeful of any prospect of relationship to God.
And since, as it seems, I am a victim of my own nature, and far too prone to sin, I need to be forgiven for what I have done. But more than that, I also need to be enabled to change, and to start being a better person. But even so, I'm never going to be quite good enough to merit God's forgiveness, so I'm going to need more; I'm going to need a permanent solution to my guilt, but I'm incapable of producing it myself.
That's why I need help. And that's what "saved" means. It means I gave up on myself and my own efforts, and asked for the help only God could give me, to forgive me first and wipe my account; and then to start working with me to change me, and gradually to make me what I could never be on my own.
It means that what I could not do, God did. And I accepted that for myself, because He offered it in Jesus Christ. And so, I was saved from what I was by HIm, not by myself.
That is your story, not mine. [/quote]
Of course. I did not say it was any other.
But it is a story open to anybody who wishes to have it.
The other solution is this: to admit that the things we've done wrong are just as bad as we feel them to be...and usually, that they are worse than that even, worse than we can feel. And feeling the truth of that, to plead with God for His remedy, since honesty forces us to despair of our own power to fix things.
But you know that I don't have the option of pleading to God.
Everybody has the option. Some people choose not to take it.
Please don't tell me that that option is always open to me, because it isn't.
And yet, God says it is.
We just don't have the power to fix those things. But neither can we live with them. What can we do, then, but turn to God and say, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner," just as the man Christ spoke about in the Temple did? (Luke 18:13-14)
Not having the power to fix things that are hard to live with is one of the hard facts of life.[/quote]
Indeed it is. And one can decide to stop there, and think no further about it.
But what if that were not the end of the line, and one just refused to go further? How would that be wisdom?
I'm not, actually. I take Atheism to entail only one premise: that there are no gods, no God. And that's just definitional. However, it of course also entails some kind of Physicalism or Materialism, since it's manifest that we are here and the world is here, so some God-free explanation has to fill that space.
If we take Atheism to entail only those two things, then morality is dead. We need no more to do the job.
Yes, atheism just entails an absence of belief in God. Some people don't need to fill the space where you say God should be, it is of no interest to them. [/quote]
I didn't say they needed to fill some emotional or existential "space."
What they need is to fill some scientific, explanatory space. For we can all see that the Creation is here, and every one of us has to have some theory about how it came to be. Either it was a deliberate creation of some kind, or it was an accidental one. There aren't any other options, and everybody assumes one or the other.
But the consequences of whichever one assumes are profound, of course.
Atheism does not preclude morality.
Yes, it does.
It can never suppose that morality is more than a sociological phenomenon of some sort of situational origin. It can never suppose that the claims of morality are objective and morally-binding in any way.
Atheists are moral agents just as much as Christians or anyone else.
Nobody says otherwise: certainly not me.
Atheists are moral agents who don't really know what morality really means (other than it's a subjective state) or what can ground or justify its claims as objective truth. Christians are moral agents that do. In some cases, you may not even be able to tell the difference, based merely on behaviour. Both may be very nice, well-behaved, decent folks. So both are moral agents.
Still neither is anything but a sinner, ultimately, since, as the Bible says, "All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." (Rm. 3:10)
Another difference is this: a morally-minded Atheist is a man who feels guilt, but can do nothing about it. A Christian is a person who knows he's guilty, but has done something to deal with it.
Again, the difference makes all the difference.
It's a "disbelief system," you mean? Well, it is that.
No, I don't mean that. Atheism is not a system of any kind, that is what I mean.
It's a single disbelief claim. But it does have cascade effects. Most Atheists don't want to think about that, but it's true.
One is that it requires them to have an alternate theory of creation. Another is that it requires them to presuppose some sort of Physicalism or Materialism; and another, that it rules out any possibility of transcendent realities. But an additional one is that it leaves morality as a mere social phenomenon, with no legitimacy beyond that.
So it very quickly turns into a package deal, and dominates other areas of thinking and living.
But we have a right to ask the Atheist this: "Is your Atheism premised on evidence, or on your wishes?" If he says it's premised on evidence, then we have a right to ask him what evidence that is. If it's not premised on evidence, then we have a right to ask him why he is simply believing his wishes can come true.
So Atheism ends up either being evidentary or speculative. And since I have yet to encounter an evidentiary Atheist (what could ever disprove the existence of the Supreme Being, after all?), I think we have to conclude it's speculative, and wish-based.
You've got this completely the wrong way round. Absence of belief is the default position.
I don't think it is. We would have to wonder, for example, why all ancient cultures, without exception, were religious.
But let's say it is, just for argument's sake. Let's say we all come into this world as at least latent Atheists.
Does that give us reason to think Atheism is true? No. It gives us no more reason to think it's true than if we came into the world believing it was flat, which plausibly, we might.
But that's not the point, really. The point is that the Atheist wants us to believe something: namely, that there is no God. And since he wants us to believe that, he owes us evidence to justify that conclusion. He can't just say, "The world is flat because I was born thinking that."
Atheism a positive disbelief in God. It's the claim, "There IS no God."
That is a designation you are imposing on it yourself.
No, actually. It's analytic in the word itself, both etymologically and conceptually.
If you were holding up Richard Dawkins as your archetypal atheist you might get away with saying that,
Well, Dawkins, like so many Atheists, is very inconsistent. One the one hand, he publishes a book calling God a "delusion," and then, on the other, he denies that he is an Atheist at all, and prefers to position himself as what he calls, "a firm agnostic" instead. But he does this latter as a way of escaping the trap of the inherent vulnerabilty of Atheism itself -- for he knows that the claim of actual Atheism would cause the burden of proof to fall on him, and he knows it cannot be borne.
I don't say there is no God, I only say that I have no reason to think there is one, therefore I don't think it.
That would make you an agnostic.
And even if I did think that God was the most likely explanation for the existence of everything, so what? It would not necessarily follow that what you say about morality is the case. I would have to believe in the truth of the Bible to accept that, and I make absolutely no concession whatsoever towards that being remotely plausible.
Yes, you would. And yes, that's your choice.
Well, the brush is in their hands, and the tar is their own. It's they who make that declaration: I don't invent it for them. But if one is going to disbelieve in God, then one owes us reasons...assuming one is also saying it's irrational for us to believe in God, not merely that it's only wrong for the speaker.
And that is, in fact, what most Atheists seem to want to say. They seem to want to assert, "I don't believe in God, and you shouldn't either." That second part is yet another reason why they owe us sufficient evidence to warrant disbelief in God.
Yes, many atheists will tell you it's foolish to believe in God, and a good few of them will go out of their way to do it. When that is the case, you will tend to find that they shower you with reasons for their disbelief.
I find the opposite, actually.
I find that in the face of supplying reasons, they wilt. They say feeble things like, "Well, I've never seen God, so you can't believe in Him either." Or "I just don't like the evil in the world, and since I don't know what it means, I believe there's no God," or even "I don't like your morality, like your prohibition on abortion, so I reject God."
These are poor evasions of the problem, of course, hardly a "shower of reasons."
Some atheists might tell you you shouldn't believe in God if they get the opportunity, but they are far less likely to create the opportunity themselves.
Like Dawkins? Or Hitchens? Or Harris? These are men who have to be dragged from the spotlight screaming and kicking. They publish books and go on tour to proclaim their anti-gospel of faithlessness to the masses.
But the average Atheists is, indeed, usually more quiet. And with good reason. Most become Atheists by way of knee-jerk reaction, out of a desire to escape the very question of God, it seems. So understandably, having shut the door on the question, they are reluctant to open it again.
I don't feel any desire to talk anyone out of their belief in God, unless their belief is causing harm of some kind. Their belief, or "faith", is very important to some people, it would be mean, even cruel, to attempt to deprive them of of it.
That would depend, of course, on what you thought was entailed.
You might not feel any desire to disturb your neighbour unless you realized his house was on fire. Then, maybe, you'd feel more inclined.
Much of our current conversation has consisted of your telling me why I should believe in God, and my trying to explain why I don't need to believe. I don't think you will find even one instance of my trying to convince you not to believe in God.
Maybe I'm concerned that your house may be on fire.
You spoke of guilt. I've been thinking about that. It seems to me that guilt is like a fire-alarm...it often alerts us to the fact that something is really wrong. So if you have been feeling guilt, then maybe the good news is this: you're morally functioning properly. Your radar's tuned right. And maybe you know something about yourself or your life that quite rightly troubles you, and your natural faculties of conscience are inviting you to do something about it. All of that would actually be very healthy, I think.
So I've been talking to you about what can be done about guilt. I'm not so despairing of the case as you seem to be. I know that there is really nothing that God cannot forgive, and nothing that is actually hopeless. Because whatever you think of yourself, God sent His Son to save you. That puts a price on your self beyond measure. And if God thinks something's worth saving in Harbal, how can I possibly think otherwise?
When you look at that, you can realize that there is a difference between
what you (may) have done, and
what you are worth. Your self is something different from
how you've felt, or
what you've done. And even if you're despairing of an answer to guilt, God is not despairing of you.
That's all I'm really saying.
Sorry...this is just...goofy. There's no other word for it. There's so much obviously silly about it, I don't even want to get started. Go talk to Hume. Or find out what "legitimation" means.
