It is imminently debatable whether any faith is informed by reason. Rationality and empiracism can't prove that when we die we either go up to heaven or to hell or end up being reborn as a cow. History doesn't really help either. Just because people have followed something since time immemorial doesn't prove anything. People practice bloodletting as a medical practice for more than a thousand years. I'm not saying this to bash Christianity only to point out that in these matters are largely beyond rational argument. You can firmly believe that when you die if you love Jesus you will have life in heaven everlasting and cite the Bible. I can firmly believe that if you follow the Eightfold Path you will be reborn in the next life as a higher being and cite the Dhammapadha. There is no way that scientifially either of us can prove or disprove which one is right. This is a matter for each person's own heart to find come to their own faith.
Manny; This is something I've always wondered about any monotheistic religion with an omniscient and loving god. There is a basic paradox regarding free will. If God is all powerful and all knowing wouldn't God already know that Adam and Eve would disobey him and that Cain would kill Abel. It seems strange to my limited human mind that there is a purpose to testing people because an all knowing God already knows the answer to that test. The most I can figure out is that while we have the illusion of free will but to God there is no such thing as individual free will. Everything that will every be done is already to known to God and further since God is omnipotent anything is preventable to God. God could've stopped the serpent or stopped Cain from slaying Abel just like he stopped Abraham from killing Ishmael. In on the other hand God is testing us and is prepared to punish us for not living in accordance to his wishes shows that God isn't all knowing or all powerful. Since we have the free will to act counter to his interest.
so none of the people on earth at the time of the flood were innocent? even all the little newborn babies were evil? or do you believe in "original sin"? is the world really that much better now than it was then? why didn't he just kill the sinners instead of throwing out the baby with the the rainwater? all those poor animals died too.
Sishir, You bring up some really good points here. I am not even going to try and tell you that I know the definitive answer, here - I can only tell you what I personally believe in and feel is in my heart: I think God knew that there was always that possibility that Adam and Eve would disobey Him, but He felt that there was a level of trust on both sides. It is just like if you are married - you trust your wife implicitly that she is not going to cheat on you, but there is always that possibility that it could happen. Since God felt that there was this trust there, I don't think He concerned Himself with scenarios where the trust was broken. However, I can see how that doesn't make a lot of sense if you consider God to be omnipotent. But who is to say that God doesn't know what is to happen for years and years into the future? But I do believe that once man committed the original sin, God gave him the free will to do whatever he wanted, including accepting a relationship with Him or not. But what you are asking is something that I don't think anyone can fully explain - we can all give hypotheses and theories, but it all comes down to what you truly believe in. I believe that God wants a relationship with me; that doesn't mean that people who differ from me are wrong, just that our personal belief system is different.
No, Noah and his family were spared because of Noah's relationship with God, but you knew that, so I don't understand why you are asking this question. How do you or I or anyone else know that the "little newborn babies were evil"? I know you didn't mean for it to come across this way but reading this makes me think that you felt that babies were being born left and right back then. However, considering that everyone in the world except Noah and his family were evil, I think it would be logical to assume a newborn would also grow to be evil. Besides, it is better for an infant to spend an eternity with God than to spend an earthly lifetime with those who do not want or refuse to have a relationship with God. It is debateable if the world is better now than it was back then. But once again, you are asking about something that has no quantifiable way of being answered. I like to think that the world is a better place today than it was back then, as there has to be at least more than one person who has a close relationship with God. He did cleanse the world of the sinners and once again, I think you are fixating too much on infants. As said above in this post, it is better for them to be with God for an eternity than to be surrounded by the evils and violence of the world of the time. It is unfortunate that the animals had to pay the price for man's mistakes, but God has always had a different relationship with us than he has with the animals. That is one of the things that sets us apart from them.
Sounds like a pro-abortion argument. (not to be confused with pro-choice) The the flood myth motif can be found in many cultures around the world. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html
Re: innocence. i was responding to kate's statement that we're all sinners. so noah wasn't a sinner because he had a relationship with god? how about the rest of his family? surely not everyone (else) on the planet were murderers and rapists. is not having a relationship with god a capital offense? does it warrant one's destruction? if that's true why hasn't god chosen to smite me yet? i haven't believed in him in over a decade.
Well, you are confusing innocence with sinning. I never said that Noah wasn't a sinner; I said that he had a relationship with God and I thought you knew that Noah's family was spared from the flood; but it wasn't just noah and 2 of every animal that got spared but also noah's wife and his 3 sons and their wives and families. We all sin outlaw - you, me, everyone here. The only person I know of that did not sin was Jesus Christ. This gets into what Sishir Chang was talking about with free will. God gave you the choice of wanting to accept a relationship with Him or not. So far, you have chosen not to have one. You are far from being the only person in the world who has gone that route. Who is to say that 5 years from now or even 2 years from now, something happens in your life that makes you WANT that relationship with Him? I can make the argument that since you have not wanted that relationship and God hasn't "smited" you down yet, that He is a loving God. But it is not my place to tell you that you have to have that. Only you can make that choice as it is one of the most, maybe THE most, personal decisions one can make. As I have said earlier, I sin every day whether it is lusting, losing my temper, profanity, etc but I seek out God for His counsel to help me not do those things and be the person that He wants me to be. But I have MADE that decision to do that; obviously, God didn't hold a gun to my head for me to make it. It is up to you if you sincerely want to change your life, but if you do not believe or refuse to believe, then me telling you these things would be like a Nobel Prize award winning physicist (B-Bob?) explaining the theory of relativity to me...might as well be talking to my keyboard about it. But I say this so you can see where I am coming from and once again, it is not my place to tell you how to live your life. If I come across that way, I apologize.
I can respect faith, even if I am incapable of it. But please explain why Christianity is informed by reason any moreso than any of the other thousands of extant religions and the infinity of imaginable religions (I think my typewriter might be the Supreme Being. Do not take the Xerox 610 Memorywriter's name in vain.) out there. Why is it any more rational than Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, other than that it's the one you believe in? And please don't give me the straw dogs of Anselm, Aquinas or the aforementioned Pascal. I agree with the gist of your statement, but I respectfully disagree with I agree that science does not or cannot (at least now) answer the question in the affirmative. But just as further inquiry into medicine stopped the practice of bloodletting, rational scientific progress seems capable of taking down the effluvia of religions. Science, historically, seems to me to be the great (G/g)od killer. (Granted, this argument ignores the major influence of cultural shifts in religions' mortality: imperial conquests, disease, the occasional Charlemagne change of heart.) As science has better been able to explain the mysteries of this earth, as enough of their followers realized the silliness of their supernatural explanations to natural phenomena, the religions that offered those opposing supernatural viewpoints have fallen by the wayside. Astronomy slew Apollo from his sun chariot; the Weather Channel felled Thor. Religion, generally, sees science as its adversary. Religion has had much trouble recognizing/incorporating scientific achievements: Galileo forced to recognize the sun around the earth, William Jenning Bryan and the state of Tennessee shouting down Scopes, the 700 Club's opposition to potentially life-saving stem cell research. What else explains the histrionics against evolution in the classroom? When the sanctity of religion is threatened, the absurd post hoc rationalizations appear to incorporate scientific discovery: maybe God's days are really billions of our human years, maybe God put the wooly mammoth fossils in the earth already as bone, maybe the Grand Canyon was carved out by a single flood in a single day. Why Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism survive is because they've proven rather flexible, adaptable to the times. (Especially, I think, this applies to Buddhism's revival over the past decade or so: the Dalai Lama's humanist philosophical rigor deemphasizes the mystical reincarnation aspects. Christianity: now you have a vengeful God that commits genocide on a whim to scare you (e.g. the flood, 9/11), now you have a loving God to comfort you (9/12). Today's religions offer internal existential palliatives moreso than solely explain the way the physical world works. The inconsistencies of literal interpretaion give way to the poetic reading. But eventually, I think, science will get these religions too (e.g., Mars has water; can the possibility of life on Mars be reconciled with so many earth-centric religions?) . Religions are proven extinguishable; science is not.
religion remains religion science remains science in my view, neither exist without a Creator. nothing is created ex nihilio. no force exists independent in itself. something set all of this off. eyewitnesses speak to the resurrection...this isn't one man writing a book and saying, "aha, God told me this is it." we can quibble about those accounts...there's been lots of that here...check out some older threads on that. i'm convinced Jesus Christ was who he claimed to be...people a lot smarter than me have arrived at that conclusion, as well. you are ultimately right, though...faith is ultimately an element. but i think there is a measure of faith in accepting science's explanation as well....the scientific method has been a while for quite some time, yet the conclusions of scientists have not been 100% accurate.
If the entire human family was heading toward destruction anyway, I guess you could say it was a loving (although radical) response to the situation. If wiping out all but eight people saved the human race from complete destruction, and this action was taken out of concern for humanity, then I have no problem seeing it as a loving response. Love requires what is best, not what is most comfortable. I think some people mistake love for molasses, and it causes them to come to inaccurate conclusions about God's love.
Then let us quibble on, valiantly. Sure. In the agnosticism/atheism distinction, the atheist in total negation does operate on some level of faith. I am an atheist with respect to the established religions that I've come in contact with, an atheist with respect to God. I think blatant inconsistencies in the various scriptures lead me to this. And as outlaw points out with the flood, the Judeo-Christian God can't be beneficent, omnipotent and omniscient. Not all three, and still let the innocent suffer. And without those three, he can't be God. So in this traditional sense I'm an atheist. But yeah, I have to be agnostic with respect to a possible, heretofore unmentioned god: one who's all-powerful but gets a thrill out of kicking us in the shins, or one who's a great guy to have over for dinner but can't reign in the world's misery, or maybe a beneficent, omnipotent and omniscient god who does wonders for the world but is prone to frequent bouts of narcolepsy, leaving us defenseless. It's unknowable in our current state. We're on a vacation to Knowledge, and you're in the backseat asking, "Are we there yet?" Of course science is prone to error; but this doesn't destroy science. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method. The point isn't that scientists know everything about the world, and you either take it or leave it. Science is prone to error, but the bad stuff is discarded while the wheat is preserved. It builds upon itself; the method is the process by which scientific, human knowledge increases, improves. If you prove that the Smithsonian is wrong, that the triceratops had four horns instead of three, good for you, good for science, and you probably get to rename it. Religion is the opposite, if one insists upon a literal interpretation of scripture. Because the Bible, for example, is supposedly divinely inspired, if you find a single error, e.g. the variances in the Gospels, the whole thing falls apart. You're not supposed to be able to prove an all-knowing God wrong.
I enjoyed reading your posts. You need to post more often! Just want to make sure I understand what you are saying on the part I quoted, though: I agree that the Bible was divinely inspired and written by man, but I think too many people get wrapped around the axle on things. For example, there are many scholars who will tell you that Nebuchadenezzar was NOT the King of Babylon when Daniel was in captivity along with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They will tell you it was like a son-in-law named Nabonidus. The same thing about Darius the Mede - history shows that there was no individual named this. But to me, it is the message that means something. Daniel got thrown into a lions' den and used his great faith and trust in God to get out of that situation. What difference does it make if the ruler that threw him in there (albeit reluctantly) was named Darius the Mede, Cyrus the Great, or Joe Blow? That is insignificant, but yet, I am afraid that is what many critics of the Bible zero in on. That's fine because that is their prerogative, but it doesn't stop me from reading it and gaining new understandings about my faith. So, if you are saying that errors like this (which really would be common if you think about it since it was written by man and done many years after the events happened) discredits an all-knowing God, I respectfully disagree with you. If you were talking about something else and I completely missed the boat, then just ignore this post or make it crystal clear to me what you are talking about.
what i'm saying is simply that I believe without a Creator there is no science...there is no mind to discuss. i'm also saying that the Creator is intensely more personal than a flood story. at least I find Him to be. you have a different view of divine inspiration than I do, as well. no one i know claims that the Bible wasn't written by human beings and prone to some human error....the inspiration isn't in the detail. the Bible is not a science text. the inspiration is in setting up the need for a savior...very flawed characters doing amazing things not through their own will and strength but through the will and strength of this Creator I speak of. i'm not convicting the scientific method...and perhaps i'm using an incorrect term of art by using the word "science." what i mean to say is that our society has been conditioned to accept certain theories as if they've been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, even if that's not the case. things we have evidence of, but have not literally observed. where those holes are, we have what can be called nothing but faith to assume and accept those findings as "gospel" truth, so to speak. so if you're right that science ultimately doesn't answer questions because the answers are always illusive, then we need not compare science with religion at all. they seek two entirely different things. and i believe that is ultimately true. i'm not seeking to explain the creation of the universe with my faith....it's not about that. but I am convinced that the One who created me is also the One who created this universe. i don't see randomness...i see purpose, even in a universe that otherwise moves toward entropy, i see great order...detailed order. as for "blatant inconsistencies in scripture", suffice it to say I disagree. a holy God is not one who says, "oh...you were just a pedophile a little while...oh, well that's great...you're a charter member of the heavenly choir." that's not to say there's no room for salvation for those who turn away from their sin. at the same time, this holy God watches mankind over the course of eternity destroy itself over and over again by following their own way instead of following the owners' manual. he sees them put self above all else over and over and over again...and he becomes incarnate and makes himself to be a real "fleshy" example of self-sacrifice and a very real sacrifice for the failings of a species that can't fix itself. we see very real emotions from this God...as we might expect if we were "made in His image." we see anger...we see sorrow...we see frustration...and then we see absolute perfect love. we see God reaching to man to bridge the gap...not man reaching to God, which is one of the key differences between Christianity and the world's religions. i totally disagree on the idea that He can't be omnipotent, omnescient and beneficient. if you said that in a deposition i would object based on facts not in the record. because the fact is, you're only viewing what is beneficient (is that really a word?) in your own human view. for example, we look at death and see it as a horrible consequence...i'm not sure an eternal God sees it in that same way. let me close by saying we have a nice streak of keeping these conversations quite civil here. save a few on both sides who like to make constant jabs to the other, we have had some pretty good discourse on the topic of God lately here. you certainly fall in that mode, aghast. and i appreciate that.
Manny, I would like to point out that you missed the Daniel story just a tad, as i understand it. Archaelogists said for years that the king of Babylon noted in that story was not there....that there was no historical record of him at all. They flailed at the Biblical account because of that....but then they kept digging and discovered that there were all sorts of records that put this guy in as an interim while the real king was out at war. Multiple backups to support it. Relics with his name inscribed...all dating back to the time of the account.
Okay, I did not know that but I appreciate you letting me know. But the point of my post was still that minute details about who really the king was back then should not matter (and I say that respectfully, not sarcastically). It is the lessons that are learned from reading the stories in the Bible that should count.
I tell you what it is for me. The concepts of helping the less fortunate living in harmony, just and equality or part of all of them, and I can understand and relate to that. But Christianity has one thing that those others don't. The sermon on the mount where Christ says if somebody steals from you, to give them more. If somebody hits you to turn the other cheek, to love your enemy. To me that is the one thing that is beyond human and such an amazing concept that I have complete faith that it is divine. Christ says not only to ignore your enemy, but to actually love your enemy. Am I capable of loving Osama Bin Laden? No but the idea that in the ideal I would is love so far beyond the norm for humans. In fact some Christians don't even go for that concept. But that kind of love really is divine, and an ideal that I believe is an excellent goal. It's something to have faith in.
An all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful god is a logical contradiction. Unless the Christian god is beyond logic, then it cannot possibly exist.
