Rational Faith
- Thread starter Motar
- Start date
Ya, but you and JLM are not bricks. I like reading what you and Sinister write but I stopped reading those long posts with biblical quotes.
Yeah, there's very little talent involved in those "copy and paste" posts. What Ezekiel and Jeddediah spaketh can get a little boring!
That will be when people stop being born. It's encoded withing us to contemplate the heavens, it's in the word religion (binding back) itself, the binding back drives us to reach conclusions about our source. That is a closing of a cycle/circle.
Some rational faith, cj:
Of Lewis's arguments, which one was the most difficult for you to dispute?
"To my surprise, I found myself fairly easily compelled by his arguments about the existence of some sort of a God, because even as a scientist, I had to admit that we had no idea how the universe got started. The hard part for me was the idea of a personal God, who has an interest in humankind. And the argument that Lewis made there — the one that I think was most surprising, most earth-shattering, and most life-changing — is the argument about the existence of the moral law. How is it that we, and all other members of our species, unique in the animal kingdom, know what's right and what's wrong? In every culture one looks at, that knowledge is there. Where did that come from? I reject the idea that that is an evolutionary consequence, because that moral law sometimes tells us that the right thing to do is very self-destructive. If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning? He's one of the weaker ones, let him go. It's your DNA that needs to survive. And yet that's not what's written within me. Lewis argues that if you are looking for evidence of a God who cares about us as individuals, where could you more likely look than within your own heart at this very simple concept of what's right and what's wrong. And there it is. Not only does it tell you something about the fact that there is a spiritual nature that is somehow written within our hearts, but it also tells you something about the nature of God himself, which is that he is a good and holy God. What we have there is a glimpse of what he stands for. I know this is not a new idea that Lewis came up with. It builds upon long traditions over centuries of careful scholarship and thought. But I'd never seen it before, and I don't think I've ever seen it explained as well as it is in his book." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/collins.html
What moral law can you identify? For me, slavery is always wrong.
Or maybe art imitates life, LG:
"The Vulcan salute was devised by Leonard Nemoy, based on a gesture made by various Jewish denominations, including Orthodox and Conservative. Nimoy learned the gesture, which takes practice to do, from visiting his grandfather's synagogue as a child ... The gesture forms the Hebrew letter "Shin" and represents the name Shaddai, which means "Almighty (God)."
The hand gesture is traditionally used by the Kohanim (Hebrew "priests"), Jews of priestly descent, during a blessing ceremony performed during the prayer service of certain Jewish holy days. The Jewish blessing is done with both hands, with arms extended upward at roughly a 45-degree angle, rather than one hand held upright as in the Salute.
The blessing is found in Numbers 6:22-24 of the Old Testament where God tells Aaron, Moses' brother, the first High Priest, to bless the Israelites and say, "May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." Vulcan salute - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki
Collins' understanding of evolution is a little flawed, Lewis'moral argument is the weakest of his propositions and amounts to no more than the God of the Gaps argument. Evolution does provide explanations for altruism. Even granting the proposition that a creator deity started up the universe, the deist position, you can't get from there to the personal god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam without begging the question, as Lewis does. Even Aquinas gave up on that one.
Religion got a bad name because of the lower orders it cultivated against the thousands of years of sound advice to the contrary.
Yes. Pretty much any fiction writer I've ever read has included some factual aspects of his or her life within their works. It adds a little realism to the tales, but in no way does it make the tales true and non-fiction. EG; I could suggest that there's a teapot god always orbiting the dark side of the moon and it is black porcelain with gold accents and holds 1.6 liters of the finest tea available anywhere. And there actually may even be a teapot such as the one I described, but if it isn't a god, the tale will still be fiction.
Last edited:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It can hardly be doubted that this social interpretation of the Egyptian sources and a social reconstruction of Egyptian religion as the earliest adequately known chapter in the evolution of morals and social idealism will find general acceptance, just as the analogous interpretation of Hebrew history has done. [/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Since the lectures mentioned above were delivered the discovery of new documents, especially in Egypt, has not only substantially increased our knowledge, but has also made quite certain the social significance of the Feudal Age papyri. The most extraordinary revelation has been the fact that the Wisdom of Amenemope, preserved in an1l an Egyptian papyrus in the "British Museum was translated into Hebrew in ancient times and, circulating in Palestine, was the source for a whole section of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]How many modern clergymen, requested to preach before some convention of business men, have taken as text the quotation from the Book of Proverbs "Seest thou a man diligent in business, he shall stand before kings"? It is not likely that any such clergyman ever prefaced his sermon with the observation that this text was taken by the Hebrew editor of Proverbs from a much older Egyptian book or moral wisdom. This discovery has added profound significance to the fact that civilised development in the countries surrounding Palestine was several thousand years earlier than that of the Hebrews. It is now quite evident that the ripe social and moral development of mankind in the Nile Valley, which is three thousand years older than that of the Hebrews, contributed essentially to the formation of the literature which we call the Old Testament. Our moral heritage therefore derives from a wider human past enormously older than the Hebrews, and it has come to us rather through the Hebrews rather than from them. The rise of man to social idealism took place long before the traditional theologians' "age of revelation” began. It was a result of the social experience of man himself and was not projected into the world from the outside.The Dawn of Conscience by James H. Breasted[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]How many modern clergymen, requested to preach before some convention of business men, have taken as text the quotation from the Book of Proverbs "Seest thou a man diligent in business, he shall stand before kings"? It is not likely that any such clergyman ever prefaced his sermon with the observation that this text was taken by the Hebrew editor of Proverbs from a much older Egyptian book or moral wisdom. This discovery has added profound significance to the fact that civilised development in the countries surrounding Palestine was several thousand years earlier than that of the Hebrews. It is now quite evident that the ripe social and moral development of mankind in the Nile Valley, which is three thousand years older than that of the Hebrews, contributed essentially to the formation of the literature which we call the Old Testament. Our moral heritage therefore derives from a wider human past enormously older than the Hebrews, and it has come to us rather through the Hebrews rather than from them. The rise of man to social idealism took place long before the traditional theologians' "age of revelation” began. It was a result of the social experience of man himself and was not projected into the world from the outside.The Dawn of Conscience by James H. Breasted[/FONT]
More rational faith from Francis Collins, cj:
"I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist's assertion that "I know there is no God" emerged as the least defensible. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative ... I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory." Collins: Why this scientist believes in God - CNN.com
I find that Dr. Collins' rational faith is quite compatible with mine.
I find that Dr. Collins is quite wrong. "I know there is no God" is logically and philosophically indefensible, but Chesterton's assertion is also quite wrong, very few atheists would state it as a universal negative like that and those that do are over-reaching themselves. Atheism is simply the rejection of claims about the existence of a deity (of any description) on the grounds that the evidence and arguments offered in support of them are not sufficient to justify accepting them as correct. You cannot build a strong case for the plausibility of any deity on purely rational grounds unless, as Lewis does, you indulge in logical errors and fallacies.
Or you propose a god like a mindless Big Bang Creator what brings order and mind through purely material copulations.
Motar, I find it reasonable and logical to think that God exists based on creation. For me, it is entirely illogical and bordering on ridiculous to imagine that life evolved into being.
Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
The very hardest thing for a human being to say, Dex, has always been "I don't know." They'll come up with the most abstruse, bizarre chains of fantasy to avoid it, then kill to defend their delusions.
And yet our most "advanced" civilisations have used child labourers, child soldiers, left the elderly to die, and murdered the intellectually disabled. And justified it, frequently in the name of God. I'm not talking about primitive, back-of-the-beyond tribes, they usually take care of their weak, to the maximum extent they can. I'm talking about Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Canada, those countries that folks here usually see as the shining beacons of morality, or at least better than all those primitives.
Someone is going to have egg on their face when their appointed day comes.
Sounds like sin to me.