God is Imaginary
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Your comments trivialize this issue and are simply false. I’ve never argued that I know God exists only “because the Bible tells me so.” I take the position of St. Thomas Aquinas. The existence of God is a “preamble to faith.” We can know the existence of God through reason. The proof of this is that most people have a fundamental openness to belief in God. There are things about the world and human experience that points us to God’s existence.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.0 -
I just realized that I was reading this statement too literally, Wineplease.There is proof of God, through the life of Jesus, in the bible.
Again, I think you are wasting your time trying to "prove" the existence of God. Yet, you didn't say what I thought you said, that the Bible proves the existence of God. I disagree that it's "the life of Jesus, in the Bible" that shows me that God lives and moves; it's my experience of God's life and movement that shows me the authors of the Bible might be talking about the same experiences.
But I can see that you were saying something more subtle than "the Bible says, I believe it, that settles it."0 -
I was only making the observation that most people find it reasonable to believe in God. From this I inferred that there must be some basis for this nearly universal tendency. Good philosophical arguments can be made for God’s existence and are based on fundamental insights people have into reality based on their experience. Even if most people have trouble articulating the reasons for their belief, there is a basis for such belief in reason. I do think that universal tendencies support some objective basis for those tendencies.I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.0 -
From this I inferred that there must be some basis for this nearly universal tendency.
One fairly obvious potential reason, from my point of view, is that belief was evolutionarily advantageous to humans. The things that come along with religion (shared culture, traditions, guidelines for behavior, etc.) could have helped believers pass on their genes.0 -
I was only making the observation that most people find it reasonable to believe in God. From this I inferred that there must be some basis for this nearly universal tendency. Good philosophical arguments can be made for God’s existence and are based on fundamental insights people have into reality based on their experience. Even if most people have trouble articulating the reasons for their belief, there is a basis for such belief in reason. I do think that universal tendencies support some objective basis for those tendencies.I'm not sure I understand what you mean, so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting. But I could not disagree more that the tendency of people to be religious is proof (you said God, specifically, but I expanded to just mean religiousness). 99% of the world could believe it (or anything), but that alone doesn't mean it's real.
Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was flat and if you sailed long enough you would fall off. Ignorance does not equal proof.0 -
Well, the earth certainly appears to be flat and that everything else is moving around the earth. There are bigger considerations that show these perspectives are relative and need to be modified of fitted into a bigger framework. The fundamental experience, however, is a real one. With respect to God, human beings tend to have a desire to integrate our experience and find meaning in it within a larger framework that includes a supreme meaning-giving reality (God). Just like our experience of the flatness of the earth and its centrality to everything else is something that is real and should be taken seriously (in fact, that experience is a basic one that is only modified by more extensive attention to our experience), so we should take our experience of God and searching for meaning seriously. Again, just because people did not have a big enough framework to properly interpret their experience does not mean the experience was meaningless or not helpful. Our experience of a "flat" earth is the fundamental building block of eventually discovering that it is actually a sphere.Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. Most people found it reasonable to believe that the earth was flat and if you sailed long enough you would fall off. Ignorance does not equal proof.0 -
Our experience of a "flat" earth is the fundamental building block of eventually discovering that it is actually a sphere.
That sounds like something you just made up.0 -
Really? No, actually it is simply a description of how we learn. If not for our experience of the world, we could not develop more extensive and all-embracing explanations of it. There is a reason why the world appears flat to us. Expanding that experience leads to modifications of our explanations or inferences from it.That sounds like something you just made up.0 -
And expanding from our experience of a supreme meaning-giving reality (God) may lead to a theological Copernican revolution in which there is nothing like what we call God.0
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The analogy between the two cases doesn't work. My experience of the flat ground I'm standing on is still valid with the concept of a spherical earth. Consequently, it still makes sense for me to talk about the ground being flat only that the whole planet cannot be described that way. In the case of God, however, you would have it that the basic desire for a supreme ground of meaning/God is not only too limited to capture a far greater truth but you would have us deny there is such a supreme meaning altogether. If you understand what is meant by "God" you will understand that the denial of God is the denial of meaning. The spherical earth is not a denial of my experience of flat ground. The denial of God and supreme meaning is the denial of a basic human desire and experience. In short, the two cases are not equivalent. If anything, one would be led to the conclusion that the supreme ground of meaning (God) is even greater than any conception we have. I would agree with that. What I cannot agree with is that the supreme ground of meaning is fundamentally nonexistent.And expanding from our experience of a supreme meaning-giving reality (God) may lead to a theological Copernican revolution in which there is nothing like what we call God.0 -
What I cannot agree with is that the supreme ground of meaning is fundamentally nonexistent.
That's more or less what I think. The only meaning to our lives is what we give it ourselves. Life doesn't have its own inherent meaning.0
