h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Someone had sure "done a number on you" if you thought that about (I assume) Christianity! My mother would have said "You"ve been had!" ...

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Or - equally likely, you simply don't *want* an answer ... you judge the answers of your conversation partner on that basis..





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You're also (presumably) mature enough to know that there's no comparison between what you're talking about and religious faith!

I was right.hhhhg

(I expect I'll regret this as well.)

Della:

You don't really do your God or your Faith much of a service by acting like such a dismissive, judgemental shit.

I've spent years sincerely seeking and asking. In that time I've recieved nothing other than empty platitudes, meaningless sophistry, and sincere (although Carlin-esque) statements of 'it's a mystery'.

I don't particularly want a Faith (such as yours, apparently) which lets me say 'I know the Truth and I'm not going to trouble myself with teaching anyone else about it (since I can't actually put it into words, anyway) -- screw them.' I'm not interested in dismissing sincere questions with deliberate cherry-picking of explanatory background. I'm quite happy with knowledge that I can explain in such a way that any reasonably intelligent person can understand.




No. When it comes right down to it, I don't think that atheists can tal to theists. I don't really expect that theists can have much of a conversation with fellow theists for that matter.

I am sorry if you took what I said as " such (a) dismissive, judgemental shit"...

I am used to bitter and angry sarcasm from (many of) the atheists here.

It's much harder to exlain, especially to an angry person, than you might think. All I can do, and all any of us can do, is to talk about our own experience, and if that's not enough - well, I am sorry, that's all I have to offer.

A conversation face-to-face would be infinitely easier than this, because with voice involved the degree of sincerity is easily judged.

What you said implied that you had been taught from the very start, that it was all an old fairy-tale, thoroughly debunked in the 19th century.

You should read C S Lewis' "Mere Chritianity". He thought the same thing!

'You should read C S Lewis' "Mere Chritianity"'

I have. Along with an awful lot of his other stuff (no, not just the Narnia books). He has never struck me as a particularly deep thinker (most extremely in the Narnia books).

'What you said implied that you had been taught from the very start. . .'

I'm sorry if you inferred that. I was not taught from the very start -- I deduced, based on the evidence before me: the Law and the Prophets, etc.

Well a great many theologians make fairly explicit that rationality is either insufficient or entirely useless for understanding divinity, may as well believe them on that point.

Faith can be used as a synonym for belief, or as a synonym for trust, and the two usages are not the same.

When it means 'belief', it can mean the leap of faith. For some theists, this is the gap between the evidence that their own experience and their own perception of the world gives them for the existence of God and the conclusion that God exists. For some theists, the existence of God is as certain as the existence of France, and for some even more certain. For others, there is good evidence for the existence of God, but not to the level that would allow such certainty.

The leap of faith is based on a gap between the evidence and the conclusion, but *not* between no evidence and the conclusion. As I have said before, the theist typically has plenty of evidence that God exists, but it's evidence that only has persuasive force for them.

The other use of the term 'faith' is as 'trust'. Theists are not committed to the view of God as a provider and benefactor on Earth. Theists (well, deists) aren't even committed to the view that God knows we exist. Christians also are not committed to the view that Anhaga ascribes to them - the belief that God listens to prayers and brings about miracles, or even that believing in God will help them in any way on Earth, other than give them strength and courage. In fact, I find it hard to see any other interpretation of Christianity. Anyone who thinks that being a Christian will give them a better life, favoured by God, has rather misunderstood.

'Evidence' is one of those tricky terms.
If it comes to deciding between two or more possible ideas, the only worthwhile evidence is evidence that allows the ideas to be distinguished.
Evidence that is equally consistent with all ideas is of limited value, and evidence which is consistent with an idea, but which is readily explicable as the idea merely being written to encompass the evidence is also of limited value.

For instance, if a holy book goes into detail about a deity creating humans as bipeds, the fact that people have two feet is not worthwhile evidence that the book is correct.
Even without examining a holy book, both the 'human author' and 'divine author' interpretations would suggest the book is unlikely to be hugely incompatible with reality, so consistency with reality is actually of zero evidential value - at best it's evidence for the nonstupidity of the authors.

However, if a book is largely consistent with reality as human authors would have been expected to understand it, but less accurate on other matters, that could be considered as circumstantial evidence in favour of a human origin.

>>I would add having 'faith' that we (and others)will still be alive the next day - not something that evidence can really bear on - my ex-husband's new woman woke up one day with a bad headache and was dead by midday, and she was only a wee bit older than me. It was an aneurysm she had known nothing about until it blew...

See, that's just the kind of example I mean. That's *not* faith. It's simply a convenient extrapolation from experience. We're *usually* still alive the next day...until we're not. This is somewhat different to the faith that requires acceptance of something for which there is *no* evidence.


And I'm also somewhat puzzled by the high regard given to Lewis's theological writing. To me some of his sleight-of-hand tricks to convince people to believe look laughably amateurish. Worse, though - what he wants people to believe *in* strikes me as disgraceful. I've always wondered why his views were regarded as 'modern'.