I hope you’re feeling in the mood to question existence.
I was reading an interesting debate the other day, which is available to watch (sort of) on YouTube. Anyway, it didn’t take too long for the idea of circular reasoning to come up – here’s a quick summary:
The Christian worldview starts with the assumption that the Bible is the highest authority. If something disagrees with the Bible it must be discounted as an anomalous result. The conclusion, of course, will be that the Bible is true because all the valid evidence agrees with it.
Clearly circular reasoning.
The atheist worldview starts with the assumption that human reason is the highest authority. If something disagrees with human reason it must be discounted as an anomalous result. The conclusion, of course, will be that human reason is the best approach because all the valid evidence agrees with it.
NOTE. The two summary paragraphs above are almost identical, just replacing ‘the Bible’ with ‘human reason’, yet somehow taking the Bible as ultimate authority is seen as a step of faith, yet taking human reason as the highest authority is seen as just sensible.
The real issue here is that human reason is clearly and demonstrably full of flaws. Using human reason I am very aware that my mind is not perfect, so how can I ever trust any conclusions that are drawn using human reason?! It is an ultimate authority which undermines itself.
I don’t agree that the atheist holds human reason above all things. Have you read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_program
The first three are (some of my favourite) thinkers, all of whom argue that, while human reason is vital to our understanding of the world, it is not the be all and end all. The second two were atheists, I imagine the first was catholic. The third link is for the so called ‘strong program.’ It investigates scientists as a social group, without allowing for any claims that their method of discovery is `better’ at discovering knowledge than any other. One of the more fascinating aspect is destroying the canonical view of the scientist. He is not a cold calculating machine, using reason and logic to save the world, but an ordinary man, engaged in as strange a rituals as any other.
Hi Anonymous
Thanks for the links, I had a look and suppose I’ll return to the original purpose of my post. I think everyone to some extent has some concept of ‘truth’, and endeavours to understand that as best he/she can (I definitely include in here people who claim ‘there is no truth’, perhaps the most ridiculous statement ever).
For a Christian, the yardstick by which we measure ‘truth’ is the Bible, which inevitably leads to clearly demonstrable circular reasoning. For an atheist, the yardstick by which he/she measures ‘truth’ may be human reason or may be some other presupposition, but whatever it is it must also demonstrate circular reasoning. Human reason is the easy example because the most aggressive atheists have to claim that ‘we use reason because it makes sense [using human reason] to do so’, which is so clearly circular reasoning. But equally I could claim that my emotions are the best way to judge truth because ‘it just feels right’ to do so.
Anyone who uses a different method to justify their choice of how to measure truth (e.g. using human reason to justify the Bible) is undermining their claim and therefore proving it to be false (showing a different sort of circular reasoning). So, in conclusion, I guess I’m acknowledging that Christianity uses circular reasoning but just pointing out that everyone else does too, unfortunately including Friedrich Hayek.
I guess I would draw a distinction between reasoning and … call it meta reasoning, or reasoning about reasoning. People try to avoid circular reasoning when applying thinking to the world. You start by stating your suppositions, then you do some analysis, then you state your conclusions. Does the same problem exist for meta-reasoning? I’m not certain that it does. The main reason for this is that, what logic would you use to analyse logic? You end up with an infinite regression.
Up from Aristotle.
I believe that the difficultly with this sort of discussion stems from Aristotle, (approximately) the founder of modern thinking. In his conception of the world, he defined classes objects that he saw to be ‘part of nature.’ They existed independently of time and space. They just were. For example, he defined different taxa in which animals exist, birds, fish etc. Obviously, he noticed that there were different species within each taxa, but he said that their ‘essence’ was the same. It was also common thinking, pre Darwin, to see variation in a population as imperfection, since every species was an essential ‘type’.
Up from Darwin.
).
Since Darwin, a great deal of work has been done to extinguish ‘classes’ form biology, though this has taken a rather long time. Classes such as ‘life,’ ‘species,’ ‘taxa,’ are still used to denote certain entities, but it is done knowing that these things do not really exist, they are simply linguistic tools. The mystical taxa adds nothing to our understanding of life (one of those words
Why am I talking about this.
I suspect that ‘meta reasoning,’ is simply a case of reasoning about a class of objects, reasoning, that does not really exist. We talk about it, since we must use the language that we are given, but what actually *is* it. Can we think of a situation where we are *not* acting logically. You might say, when we are acting instinctively, to which I reply, isn’t it sometimes logical to use heuristics and just go with what you think, perhaps you are short on time?
Christian logic seems to be closer to Aristotle. God, sin, truth and miracle are all words used to denote things about the world that just are and cannot be moved. The task, according to the Christian, is to attempt to discover and better understand these classes (hopefully I’m not selling you short here).
I think you get (and perhaps agree?) with what I’m saying, but that we have different concerns…I suppose your use of the word ‘reasoning’ would answer the question ‘How?’ and ‘meta reasoning’ would answer ‘Why?’
So, I’m currently looking at my coffee cup: reasoning can explain how it is remaining stuck to my desk, but not why. And, ultimately, I don’t actually care how anything happens other than to provide intellectual stimulation…but the important questions have to be ‘why’, don’t they?
So, reasoning answers one question, but always leaves at least one more question unanswered; in the example I’ve given above it suddenly asks ‘how do I know that my reasoning has given me the correct answer?’
In terms of thinking logically, I could give plenty of examples where I’ve thought long and hard about something, acted ‘logically’, but in hindsight have realised that I should have acted/spoken differently…I’m not saying that logic is bad, in fact I think logic is good, but to use logic as justification for doing anything (even using it to justify not using it as you showed) constantly begs the question ‘why?’
My answer: atheists have faith in logic in the same way that Christians have faith in God. My issue is that, as a Christian, I have faith that God is perfect in every way, conceivable and inconceivable. He is the definition of perfection. But logic has limitations.
(I’ve gone on far longer than I planned) SO…I’m happy to accept conclusions drawn by logic, but if they disagreed with the Bible (and I’d be surprised if they did!) I’d have to go with what the Bible says. I think that’s where the real difference here lies; an atheist would probably call me foolish and want to know ‘why’ I trust the Bible over reason, and I’d want to know ‘why’ he/she trusts reason over the Bible…and we’re back at circular reasoning again.
Hope that’s not just me rambling…
That roughly makes sense, but I would change it a little. I’m not sure that Atheist is a sensible class of reasoning, since it does not really denote a positive view of the world, but only something they reject. I’m sure that Christians don’t want to be classed as non-Atheists. When you say Atheist, if you mean those who follow the revered Dawkins, then you need a different name for everyone else. However, if you mean scientists, or sociologists, or philosophers, then you should name those things, since they all have different, and not always compatible, ways of viewing the world, and not all of them are based on the power of reasoning. The three thinkers I posted originally define their positions based on the limited power of reasoning and logic, which is why I highlighted them.
I would like you to reexamine some of your views in light of what we have said here. Are you a Christian because you believe that God is true in the Abstract sense of being, or are you Christian because of the bible and other Christians. Would you be a Christian if there were no other Christians in the world? If so, how would you be one. As a scientist, I should answer these questions myself. I have faith that the scientific method will continue to produce better hypotheses about the world. However, I do not think that the ‘rules’ of science are well defined in the abstract, the best we seem to have is a rough guide to tell us how we should behave in an ideal situation. If there were no other scientists, then I would cease to be a scientist. This is primarily because science *requires* there to be people to disagree with your position. One scientist is no scientists, but also because there would be little or no value in creating hypotheses if nobody is going to attempt to falsify them. Science is not unlike the bible or the church. Partly it is based on philosophy, ‘dogma’, and partly it is based on what other scientists are doing ‘practice,’ so any arguments about Christians being ‘illogical’ can equally be levelled at most (all!) scientists. This issue has been of great interest to philosophers for a number of years now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_epistemology (second part)
I’m sure that Dawkins would disagree with me, good, while he is disagreeing with me, science (or possibly philosophy) is getting done.
I completely agree with you – ‘atheist’ is probably a bad title to tag people with. That said:
1. I know several people who call themselves atheists, some of whom follow Dawkins, some of whom don’t – I don’t mind giving them (or you, or anyone else) any title they’d like!
2. The point about circular reasoning still stands, regardless of whether someone’s ultimate faith is in reason or not. For example, a Muslim would most likely claim that the Koran is the ultimate authority on truth. For the examples you cited each one has some way by which they measure truth. If I asked them, or you, ‘how do you know that?’ about any true statement and kept asking that until they/you got to the point of saying, ‘well, it just is’ (e.g. due to logic, or feelings, or philosophical/religious convictions), we’ve hit the point of circular reasoning. And ultimately, however narrow/broad the circle is, we all operate in this way. For me, for example, someone may show me some archaeological evidence showing that some fact presented in the Bible is wrong. Now I know that the evidence is somehow wrong – interpreted wrong or whatever – so I can discount it, or find some way to interpret it correctly…and, of course, this has happened time and time again throughout history; some evidence has come up to ‘disprove’ Christianity, then some new evidence has come to light showing that in fact it doesn’t.
So, again, whether it’s logic or the Bible or some other point of reference we all have faith in something.
So you are saying that meta reasoning is circular…. I’m inclined to agree with you. In fact, I would go so far as to say that circularity is a vital ingredient, since circularity, in this sense, represents consistency. What I mean by this is that, if you were to turn arguments into precise mathematical statement, as many philosophers do, then you would expect the mathematics to be well defined, or in your language, circular.
I think that the problem is that we both disagree on the nature of the thing called truth. I believe that you share your concept of truth with most of the ‘atheists’ who write on your wall, that it exists and that we can know about it. My position is different. I don’t believe that the concept of truth about the world is a useful concept, so I don’t deal in it. ‘But wait,’ I hear you say, ‘isn’t that an authority claim.’ Yes and no. It is not a statement about the world, it is an assumption that I make about the world. There is no way to measure the ‘truth’ of an assumption, so it is internally consistent. Secondly, I believe that the class of ‘truth’ is rather like the Aristotelean class of species. We cannot prove or disprove it, it is just assumed to be. My point is not that we can logic out of existence, but does it make our view of the world more or less rich. I believe less, and so do most scientists and philosophers of about the last 100ish years. Does that mean that they won’t return? Who knows, all I can say is that they are not here now, and not likely to make a comeback soon.
Ok…I think we agree on the principle I laid out, so that’s good…but with the greatest respect I’m not convinced you genuinely believe what you say you do, for the following reasons:
1. Your assumption requires you not to think about it; the moment you assume ‘truth doesn’t apply here’ you have to make an exception (the assumption), thereby undermining it.
2. Using this assumption there’s no way to know anything! Do I exist? Does my brain exist? Am I in the Matrix? Is science sensible? Did the world begin 30 seconds ago? Or just now? … Or just now? Or (more importantly) how do you know that we shouldn’t assume truth?
3. I doubt that the way you live your life reflects your claimed belief. Now, of course, I don’t actually know anything about you so that’s quite a claim to make, but here’s a simple example: you’re writing to me in English. Why? If there’s no concept of truth in your understanding then how do you know that the truth isn’t that just mashing the keyboard randomly wouldn’t be a better way of communicating? Without a concept of truth you wouldn’t be able to conclude that…yet you’re quite happy to assume that you understand the truth about this despite the fact it goes against your underlying assumption (which is itself internally defeating).
In other words, the assumption that you say you make about the world requires you to undermine it in the way that you think, speak and act in relation to the world. I’d be very happy for you to correct me, I simply don’t understand!
I can see two ways to proceed here, so I am going to try both. Firstly, I argue that we do not live our lives assuming that know everything, or that we can ever come close to learning everything. We use heuristics to govern our behaviour. English is a great example of this: I can never truly *know* that you understand a word in the same way that I do. Language is one of those things that existed as an Aristotelean class for a long time, people just assumed that they existed. However, we now know that language as a class does not exist. It changes, evolves, and people are not speaking the same language to begin with anyway (try and use irony with an autist).
Since we clearly disagree on the nature of truth, I would go so far as to say that we might experience the world in very different ways. I am happy to accept that. Your position is that there is a correct way to conduct yourself, and an incorrect way to experience the world. I do not accept that position. I would actually go so far as to say that the idea that we *can* experience the world in the same way is an extraordinary claim, and should not be a starting assumption.
However, you are selling me short. I am not saying that there is either perfect knowledge, or complete entropy. There is of course range of states in between them, call it imperfect information. I can communicate to you, but not perfectly, I can pass on my DNA, but not perfectly. Perfect information transfer is a theoretical construct, like infinite, that may or may not be useful. You think that it is, I think not.
I’ve never said that I know everything, or even that it’s possible to know everything. All I’ve said is that the concept of truth is a valid one, and that my understanding of that (and yours) result in some sort of circular reasoning.
Now, your statement around a ‘range of states…call it imperfect information’ is exactly my point! How on earth do you even acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘imperfect information’ without some concept of ‘perfect information’? This isn’t about me claiming to somehow own this absolute truth, it’s about me acknowledging that absolute truth exists, and acting in light of that.
From what you’ve written it seems to me that (a) you agree with the concept of absolute truth (but for some reason want to repress that truth), and (b) you act as if you believe in absolute truth (e.g. you act as if it’s ‘true’ that you and I are different and therefore experience the world in different ways, you act as if it’s ‘true’ that Aristotle existed, you act as if it’s ‘true’ that you and I can use the English language to communicate).
If all that you’re saying is that one human being can never practically understand the entirety of truth about everything, then I completely agree with you! But that’s entirely different from your statement: ‘I don’t believe that the concept of truth [is] useful’ – my issue with this statement is that if there is no concept of truth, you and I have no way of knowing anything, whether it’s the statement itself or simply existence.
What you call ‘acting as if its true’ I call acting under the assumption that we communicate imperfectly. I happily concede the point that there is a perfectly valid concept of a world that is separate from us. Can we ever say that we truly know this world? I think not. Can we say that we experience this world the same way, again, I think not. You are right in that I act *as if* its true, I call it heuristics.
To understand my point on concepts about concepts. Take the example of infinite. We define a set of numbers along with an operation to help us do thing in the world (like add up). When we start investigating this number system, we ask, ‘is there a number that when we add one, we get the same number?’ Logically we would say no, but we can *define* such a number to exist, and call it infinite. We can then use this concept to help us solve all sorts of interesting problems (like differential equations). I don’t see the discussion as to whether infinite *really* exists to be useful, since it is a concept that we made up. Truth seems to me to be much the same. We act *as if* it exists, but that doesn’t mean that it really does. Like all concepts. It is couched in our culture and our understanding of the world. Do you think that concept of the truth exists for bacteria, or slim mould, or rocks? What about pagans and atheists? This is the fundamental issue. You believe that there are somethings that exist in nature. They just are. They are true. They will be equally true today as they will be tomorrow. They do not change. I say that such things only exist in our imaginations. The world changes. The universe changes. Concepts change.
Ok, so I think what you’re basically saying is that we act as if absolute truth exists in order to make sense of the world, but we can’t know for certain whether it does or not? That’s absolutely fine, and that makes sense…sorry if it’s taken me this long to figure out something you said ages ago!
My question, however, is how you actually get to know anything. For example, here is a statement of fact:
Now, I know this statement is true because the Bible tells me to use logic, my senses, and common sense to come to conclusions about the world.
You obviously cannot see my desk, but how would you go about coming to a conclusion as to whether or not the statement above is true?
42. Sorry, I thought you were asking for the ultimate answer
Actually there is a point to be made here that has to do with the hitchhikers guide: the question is not well defined.
On a personal level, using natural language, then of course I could come and look on your desk and see a notebook. In natural language we would agree that it is there. Of course, this is couched in the fact that we at least roughly agree on the category of notebook, desk, the concept of on and so on.
If you were to ask me as a scientist I would also, using natural language know that it is true, because I could come and observe it (unless you accuse me of lying). Now what about the scientific hypothesis that there is a notepad on your desk. Well this is more tricky. Strictly speaking we couldn’t ever be certain that it is there, or that we have ever checked the whole desk. But this is silly because the scientific method is not really designed around things that you can just look at straight away, and singular events. The hypothesis that *all* or *most* desks have notepads is better, since they can be tested. We could also have hypotheses about *why* most or all desks have notepads on. We can never really say that we *know* why, there could be several competing explanations, the best we can do is come up with an explanation that can be wrong.
One method of thinking is formal and one is informal. I can’t tell you exactly why formal science is done like that, because nobody really knows. Again, philosophers, sociologists and other scientists look at the process of science and do there best to explain why, but all of these are of course just hypotheses, and none of them (at least modern ones) claim to be true. Contrast this with positivist views of the world, which were popular 100 years ago, which posited that induction was the key to science, and that knowledge was built from inductive logic based on facts. My guess is that people who used this line of reasoning had no sensible way of resolving disputes, and eventually other scientists got tired of arguments that could never be resolved. But this is only a hypothesis, I don’t claim that I know!
Do you not just think that you’re being a bit over-analytical? For most sane people (who can see well enough) the process would go something like this:
1. QUESTION: Is there a notepad on this desk?
2. Look at desk.
3. ANSWER: Yes, there is.
If I said, ‘Ah, but you don’t know it’s there, do you?’ surely you agree that’s just being philosophical for the sake of it?! And, rightly so, you could say, ‘Ah, but you don’t know that I might not know, do you?’ Good response (if a bit evasive).
But ultimately my point isn’t that one way of finding out whether the notepad’s definitely on the table or not is better than an other. In fact, my point isn’t whether or not it’s even possible to conclude on whether it’s on the table! My point is that the notepad either is on the table, or it isn’t. A true fact exists, whether or not you and I agree on the method to reach the conclusion, or whether or not you and I agree on the conclusion.
Saying that nothing is true doesn’t work, because you have to assume that the statement is false in order to assume it, so you might as well follow the Hitchhiker’s Guide, prove that black is white and promptly get run over at the next zebra crossing.
So I think we both agree that truth as a principle exists. What I think we’re disagreeing on is whether you or I can know something for certain. For example, I know that I exist.
I suppose what I’ve been trying to get to is:
1. whether you actually know anything (that sounds really rude – unintentional I promise! I’m pushing at certainty I suppose)
2. how you know anything
So, do you know that you exist?
You are mistaking two things here. One is informal use of language to describe the world, the other is the formal language of science. Informally, yes, I know things. Formally, no I don’t.
This might seem oddly schizophrenic, but it isn’t really, because science does not require me to understand why I act a certain way, only that I do. You live in a capitalist society, but you do not (I think) claim to know why you use money, it just works. Economists come up with explanations, but you can never say they are true explanations. They are either hypotheses to be tested, or stories to be enjoyed. I assume that your church has all sorts of practices that are alien to a scientist, but I don’t assume that you are acting illogically, or that you truly know why you are doing it, you are simply acting within the tradition of the church. Same goes for any social group. My whole point is that when one group say ‘but we *really* know what the truth is,’ I say that no one does. ‘But can’t you see that football is really, really the best sport?’ No it isn’t.
Re: How do I know that I exist. Most scientist are unwilling to reduce all of their arguments down to Descartes, since there is no resolution to the problem. We generally say, ‘you are welcome to talk about such things if you like, but don’t expect us to listen.’ Likewise, you are welcome to try to define things like the set of all sets, or whether infinite really exists, but don’t expect us to join in.
Um, yes it does seem oddly schizophrenic
I’ll address each of your examples:
1. Yes, I live in a capitalist society. I don’t understand capitalism as a concept enough so can’t really comment…I think this is more around people having differing levels of knowledge/experience in particular areas rather than what level of ‘truth’ is evident there.
2. My church has all sorts of practices…yes it does, and I could give you valid reasons for every single one of them in accordance with the presupposition that the Bible is true. If I just did things because that’s what the rest of the church did it wouldn’t seem that genuine to me.
3. Football? Seriously? No-one who’s a fan of football would seriously claim that it’s ‘really, really the best sport’…ok, I know they would, but they’d know it was a matter of opinion…and even if they did seriously claim that football’s the best sport, I’d be led to ask how they drew that conclusion, and therefore identify their method for determining ‘truth’…and that would inevitably lead us to circular reasoning (probably in this case something along the lines of ‘I’m always right because I know I am’).
So I basically have no idea where any of your examples are going, but your conclusion speaks volumes:
Please tell me you’ve spotted now that this statement is a claim to ‘really know what the truth is’?
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying: I’m not questioning the scientific method here; if science is nothing to do with the discovery of truth then it’s not applicable. My question is: how do you know that you exist? You say that you informally know things – well, how do you know those things?
My points don’t seem to be clear enough. I am trying to say that there are lots of things that people do that has nothing at all to do with truth. Engaging in captialism is one of them. I assumed that you would agree that your church has practices that seem a little strange, but you seem to think that they all make logical sense and can be derived from the bible. I assume that means that all other churches have got it wrong then. My point about football was to take the subject away from grounds that we might feel passionate about and apply it to something silly. Yes, I agree that people who think football is the one true sport are silly, and that if I sat down and listened to their logic, then I would probably disagree. But then I also think that people who claim that their religious practices are correct are equally silly.
You have failed to see that it is not me that has not seen the mistake, but you. I have *never* ststed that statements are either true or false, that is a linguistic and analytical simplification. My knowledge of the world is imperfect, as are any statement that I make. I believe (but I don’t know) that everyone elses knowledge is also imperfect. That does not mean that anything that I say or do contains *no* information, just not *perfect* information. The absence of perfect information does not mean entropy. It is an opinion which I which I have no reason to think exists anywhere but in my head. If I can get you to agree with me then I will have superficially seemed to have pursuaded you, but I would *never* assume that you now experienced the world the same way that I do, or have the same knowledge as me.
Your whole faith is based on the concept of revealed truth (or revelation). So you claim to know things that are true, or perfect. I do not. You are saying that my statement that I do not believe that we can have perfect knowledge is a perfect knowledge claim. But it is not. It is an imperfect knowledge claim, because I do not claim that the statement is true, only that it contains information. Truth and information are *not* the same thing.
Ok, let’s simplify this. You seem to think that churches do silly things – now, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to my church (or one like mine) so this may be hard but please give me one example of an unbiblical thing that churches do.
I think that every institution does silly things, or at least things that might seem silly to somebody not involved.
As to your church in particular, I don’t know. If I were to attack religion on philosophical grounds, I would probably go along the lines of attacking revelation. First of all, I would note that there are many claims to revealed knowledge, not all of which are compatible, and none of which contain any critical test that we can perform to distinguish one from another. Secondly I would attack (as I have already done), the Aristotelean unmovable categories of things that exist and never change. Any attempt to write down the ‘correct and unchanging’ way to live is fraught with peril. How do you deal with groups that are not you? Are they all ‘wrong?’ Pluralism seems to be an answer, until you realise that it undermines your truth claim. You can’t have different truth for different places (notice that my concept of imperfect truth does not have this problem). Finally, on a personal level, I would highlight that you should probably be aware of the effect that people within your community has. If you were following the ‘true’ way, individuals would not matter. Think of a time when you discussed the bible with somebody and persuaded them to change their mind about something. The effect of having you in a group changed their understanding of the world. Was this interaction dependent mainly on you, or the bible? Lastly, I would attack your view that everyone in your church believes the same thing (if you have such a view), or even something close to the same thing (unless you don’t, but if so, why bother with ‘truth’). I saw an anthropological paper recently on exactly this. While church goers believed they were most similar to the rest of the church, they were actually found to be some of the least similar, when compared to businesses and other organisations.
Look, all this might sound offensive, but fear not, I level the same criticism at *any* institution, including science.
But this comes back to my original point. Does, for example, the church’s practice of baptising people in water seem strange to non-Christians? Of course it does! But to a Christian it makes perfect sense based on the Christian presupposition.
Science may have some practices that those outside the scientific community would deem odd (although if you’re claiming to be a scientist but just do ‘scientific’ things without any understanding why, I’d encourage you rethink whether you should either make that claim or act in that way), but again providing you have the ‘scientific’ presupposition these would make perfect sense.
And we’re back at circular reasoning.
And can we please just clarify once again that I’m not claiming that ‘I know perfect truth’. I’m simply stating the fact that truth as a concept exists, and I still haven’t had an answer from you in terms of how you think that you know anything!
For the record, I have been, and am at various times, a mathematician, a biologist and a philosopher of biology. The field that I work on is evolutionary epistemology, which is basically the idea that science, like any species, and culture, is evolving, and that we can theorise about the change in scientific opinion. Not all that popular among other scientist (except sociologists) , who often like to portray themselves as hero’s.
You probably think that science and the church are to opposed modes of thinking, have been for some time, but while physics was ahead of its time, biology only really became ‘scientific’ about 100 years ago. Current biology was derived from a form of thinking that included church thinking, and has kept much the same organisation of the church. Change was slow, but eventually the two organisation speciated to form offspring groups (you were wandering previously how one ‘type’ of thing can change into another in a biological sense. The best theory is that is under the same mechanism that changed biology into what it is today). So in effect, we have not been culturally apart for so long, which is why we still use some of the same technical terms (truth), whose meaning has evolved slightly. One of the major innovations of science was to eject anything mystical that could not be tested. Revealed truth is one of these things. That does not mean that I argue science is ‘better,’ but it does observably change how the organisation acts and what sort of thing it produces.
Now I’ll try to answer you question (but you won’t like it)… I can’t answer your question. The meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ has evolved so far away that I don’t understand what you are asking me. That might seem a weasel answer, but it is the best I can give. If you asked me on in natural language (i.e. without wearing my science hat) , I would probably say heuristics (rules of thumb) based on inductive logic.
No, fair enough answer…but to get something a bit more concrete allow me to ask something about what you said:
How do you know? That’s not a trick question by the way.
Inductive logic. I do this job every day.
Ok. Now, I know you know that we could play this game for a long time; how do you know you do this job every day? How do you know you know? Ultimately, as you’ve just demonstrated, you have faith that inductive logic tells you the truth (even though you don’t like that word).
I have no problem with faith, yes, I agree, I have faith in inductive logic. I would be silly not to. Did I ever said anything to the contrary?
A quick comment: ‘I would be silly not to’ is the best example of circular reasoning; basically you’re saying you have faith in inductive logic because your inductive logic tells you it would be silly not to.
And your opening comment on this post was:
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but ‘human reason’ and ‘inductive logic’ are the same thing, and within the context of this post holding reason above all things refers to understanding the world in light of faith in human reason (as opposed to the Bible).
I should be clearer. Inductive logic is the model of what we do, that is, it is the hypothesis. I do not reason that I know that inductive logic is true based on inductive logic, sense we get back to meta reasoning. I am trying to distinguish two forms of discourse. One using formal language, the other is using informal language. When I answer a question by saying ‘of course’ I am sing informal language. This is simply for ease of communication rather than actually containing my argument. My formal argument is all the stuff produced above, which you said didn’t answer the question. I assumed that you wanted a short answer in natural language about how I ‘actually’ model the world. To be precise, my theory is that we build an engineering style model of the world in our heads and attempt to tweak the parameters until we get something that works. This is *not* the same as a scientific model. Sorry I wasn’t clear about that, i suppose nowhere was it apparent that this what I am doing.
Sorry, perhaps this is a personal thing but I find introducing a difference between formal/informal or actual/’theoretical scientific’ (or whatever you’d rather call it) is incredibly confusing. Saying that a particular statement is ‘of course’ true but then saying that you wouldn’t acknowledge truth even as a concept in a different conversation seems to me to be hypocritical.
This conversation started with the concept of meta-reasoning, and that’s what I’ve constantly been trying to get at; we both use circular reasoning as a start point by which to understand the world. As far as I remember (and please do correct me if I’m wrong, I’m very tired!) I haven’t talked about science as a tool for understanding truth, so I’m actually not sure why that’s relevant.
My point is still the same: you and I both ‘know’ things, and to justify our knowledge both of us use some form of circular reasoning. My circular reasoning is based around the statement that the Bible (the infallible word of God) is true, but your circular reasoning is based around fallible inductive logic. My conclusion, therefore, must be that Christianity gives us the only access we could ever have to truth.
I agree, in fact, I’ve been trying to state the same thing. My detour into science was in fact to help you appreciate the history of thinking, not to try to show you that your thinking is necessarily wrong. Yes, Christianity gives you access to this this thing called truth, unless you are a catholic, or in fact many other sects, but yours may give it to you. The point that I am trying to raise is that other forms of think, though superficially similar to yours, do not hold truth and reason as the most fundamental things. In fact I’m trying to get you to see that most modern scientists think this way, or at least they do when they are doing science. Buddhists and Hindu’s don’t think this way. Your response seems to be ‘yes, but you really are after truth though aren’t you?’ To which I have tried to get you to understand that it really, really isn’t.
The point of dual language is that you must be able to appreciate that a word has different meanings in different contexts, unless you are a language fundamentalist as well as a truth fundamentalist. For example ‘bad’ can mean bad, but it can also mean good. Once you accept this fact, then what I say is trivial. When arguing philosophically, ‘truth’ is the concept that we are discussing, however, it is also part of the language that we use to make an argument. I am writing a paper at the moment where people have the same misunderstanding about the word ‘gene,’ which has different meaning in different contexts.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that you are really after truth. What I’ve been saying is basically this:
1. Without any concept of truth we can’t know anything
2. Therefore, both you and I must have some concept of truth
3. Both of us hold an ultimate presupposition that we hold justifies itself
4. The Christian presupposition is the only flawless presupposition, so should be held
Is truth the ultimate goal? Well, no! But without truth, any ‘ultimate goal’ (if one exists) we ever achieve would be worthless because we’d never know!
Ultimate goal for who. For you? for mankind? How will you measure your achievement? Against some invisible truth that you we’re not really after. The Christian presupposition is not the only flawless one, what about all of the other religions? o they all hold as well just because they are flawless. What about the flying spaghetti monster, is he flawless as well.
In fact he is good for this discussion, because he highlights the social aspect of churches. No argument from logical foundations can be made that accept Christianity, but reject pastafarianism. However, Christians can mark themselves with tradition. That is fine, but you are not doing that, you are saying that you are logically right. As a skeptic, tell me why I should logically accept your argument, and logically reject pastafarianism.
Ah, you see, you’re now perfectly displaying your own presupposition. The answer to your question is that you should logically accept my argument because the Bible is true, and the Bible clearly speaks of the Christian God who died in our place that we can be reconciled to Him forever (not about the flying spaghetti monster).
But of course you simply reject this as an answer, because your presupposition tells you that the Bible isn’t true (because if you didn’t believe that you’d be a Christian). But in order to think that, you’re displaying that you have a concept of truth and that actually for you it does matter! If it didn’t, you wouldn’t have even entered into this conversation because there’d be no reason for it.
And, just for the record, as a Christian I don’t hold Christianity as right because of tradition, I mark it as right because Jesus is the truth. Otherwise, Christians would have to believe in Judaism over Christianity (because it has a longer tradition).
It isn’t enough that you believe in truth, but for some reason you want me to believe it as well. Why? Every time I make a positive assertion, you say ‘ah look, this is you believing in the truth.’ I have already stated that I think the word ‘truth’ is a useful linguistic crutch and nothing more. For you it forms the centre of your world.
I believe in imperfect information: in mathematics, a statistical correlation. You believe in classical mechanics, that, something is either true or false and should be represented from the point of view of the individual. Statistical mechanics does *not* require that things are true or false, only that things correlate.
Well, again, it all comes down to our presuppositions. My presupposition (the Bible) tells me what is true, and tells me that I should tell others. So I will.
Your presupposition is that you should suppress the truth. You are perfectly happy to make a statement that you consider to be true: ‘I believe in imperfect information’. Well, we’ve talked about this before, and if you genuinely believe that statement then you must be instantly ready to believe it’s imperfect and therefore could be wildly inaccurate; in other words my presupposition could very easily be the true one.
The fact that you seem to have an issue with me wanting you to believe in my presupposition is, again, self-contradictory. If I were to stop, then I would be denying my presupposition and submitting to yours. So your presupposition is that forcing beliefs onto others is wrong; nothing I can say would change your mind on that…but again that’s undermined by your statement that you only believe in imperfect information! If you don’t even know what’s true, how can you possibly know what’s right and wrong?
So, my question to you is: why are you even here having this conversation? What’s your goal? I don’t want you to leave this conversation because (a) I find it interesting and (b) I want you to become a Christian, and as far as I know you have no other Christian input. But I can’t reconcile your actions with what you say you believe; you (effectively) believe there’s no such thing as absolute truth, yet for some reason desperately want me to agree with you, as if that in itself is a statement of absolute truth.
*Except mathematical truth, but that is something entirely different.
I do not believe that my statement ‘I believe in imperfect information to be true,’ requires there to be any truth, since I do not have any concept of absolute truth. Does this mean that my statement might be true by your definition of absolute truth? It might be, but since I don’t understand your definition, I couldn’t possibly say.
I’m not trying to get you to submit to my view, but you seem unwilling to accept that there *is* any view that is different from your own. It boils down to ‘you say you don’t believe in truth, but I say that you do.’
Why am I here then. Again, you have failed to understand that there are different views regarding arguments than yours. You *assume* that I am trying to convince you, since that is what you are trying to do to me. I am trying to do no such thing. I am trying to do two things.
1. Sharpen my argument skills for future debates. In my view, the goal of a debate is not to convince the other person, since that almost never happens, and isn’t useful when it occurs, but to build a reputation as a fierce debater. It is verbal fencing. It is a public display of strength. The world seems to value people who are seen as good debaters, so I think that I should become one. You are a good partner.
2. To educate myself about what other people believe. As any scientist should do, I attempt to attack your position to see what stands and what falls, then I boil the idea down to its essence. Yours seems to be ‘I believe in truth, which I define to be true. I believe that I get here by circular reasoning, and am happy with that. I also believe that all other people use circular reasoning as well.’ I believe that my philosophical foundation is different than yours, but in order to test, them, I must make them vulnerable by stating them clearly.
I do not want you to agree with me. In fact, I want you to keep disagreeing with me.
Ok, I’ll do my best
Now, we’ve already established that the statement ‘there’s no absolute truth’ is self-defeating (because if it’s not absolutely true then absolute truth could exist, and if it is absolutely true then absolute truth definitely exists). So, (1) what do you mean when you say you don’t have a concept of absolute truth? I’m fairly certain you’ve already answered this question but I still don’t understand so please humour me, give it another go! And (2) how do you know that you don’t have any concept of absolute truth?
You are arguing that the world can be naturally partitioned into two halves: things that are ‘true’ and things that are ‘false’. This partition is independent of time and space, it just is. How do we know, because Jesus/Aristotle says. You then say, ‘but how can we justify this partition?’ You then posit that the partition that you have made, even though you do not know it yourself, falls into the category of ‘true.’ Then you rightly state that this argument is circular, which you are happy with.
Firstly I acknowledge that the partition might represent a useful linguistic tool, so it is unlikely to disappear. However, in the realm of thinking about the world, science has moved away from the concept of ‘truth.’ Pragmatically, it produces better things if we do not divide the world up into arbitrary categories, but instead have a lucid understanding of categories. Some may be better for certain situations. For example, you talked previously about how no thing that was in the category of ‘non-living’ can ever go into the category of ‘alive.’ However, people studying abiogenesis have made more progress when they drop these categories, and define things operationally. Then it is much easier to understand how one ‘type’ of thing can turn into another.
So yes, *if* the set of all statements can be partitioned into true statements and false statements, then the statement “I do not have any concept of absolute truth” cannot exist as a statement. However, I argue that your partition is not useful. Especially not when investigating the concept of truth itself.
Ok, I think I’m starting to understand…I think :-/ are you basically saying that the universe is not black and white (true or false) but more a series of shades of grey?
I still think that’s logically incoherent; if we can’t place reliance on the definition of truth being true, then we don’t know what truth is, and therefore everything loses meaning (including the definition)…so the definition must be false.
And I’m therefore still left with the question about how you know anything. Now, you said that you do acknowledge mathematical truth, so may I ask how you know, for example, that 1+1=2?
Firstly, not everything looses meaning. Replace the category of ‘truth’ with the concept of ‘information.’ Information is defined in such a way as can be measured (in bytes). It deals in statistical correlation, not with fixed immovable ‘truths.’ For example, when we have a conversation, information is flowing back and forth, and to anyone who is watching. The equivalent of ‘truth’ in this setup is ‘perfect information transfer,’ which we observe doe not tend to occur, but is defined theoretically. This is my model of the world. You are welcome to analyse this model from the perspective of your ‘true’ and ‘false’ categories of the world, but I will not pay it any attention since I do not think that your partition is less interesting than mine.
Now the question of ‘how do I know that information exists.’ To which I answer that I do not, it is something that I just made up, like you made up your concept of truth. You can’t see a byte, you have to define it, and define how you would measure it. I argue not that it is ‘better’ from your concept from rational origins, just that it allows us to explain a greater range of phenomenon. You may disagree, fine, that is the point of an argument. Same goes for how do I know that 1+1 = 2. In the realm of mathematics, it is generally agreed that concepts of true and false are useful (it is called boolean logic). 1+1 is defined to be true. That is, there is no way that it could be false, by the definition 1, and the definition of the operation +. However, this need not be the case. Statistical mechanics does not require that 1+1 = 2, since it requires no such operator as `+’ to exist.
I think maybe I’m just not intelligent enough for this, but I can’t understand your position at all. I’ve been trying hard to work this out but just can’t:
1. I say there is such a thing as objective truth.
2. You say there isn’t, so you are claiming that my statement is false (i.e. ‘No, truth is not objective.’).
3. You therefore must be claiming to know what ‘the truth’ is…but you say you don’t believe in truth.
So, I think we’re both just wasting our time here. You clearly think I’m wrong and I think your position is logically incoherent.
It’s nothing to do with intelligence, it’s a new idea for you. I’ll try and say it again. You believe that the theoretical space of statements that can be made about the world can be partitioned into two categories: call them true and false. Statements that are true have one set of properties, and statements that are false have another. You then note that the partition is itself a statement about the world. Since this is a statement about the world, it must fall into one of the categories, true or false. You say that this partition is true, which is where the circularity comes from.
My assumptions about the world does not include your partition. Applying your partition, you would be saying that I am arguing that my position is ‘true.’ But I am not, because I don’t acknowledge that such a partition exists. At the moment, we are not even talking about specific statements about the world, only how we are going to talk about statements about the world.
Imagine if you will a different partition (I am not offering this as a serious example, just demonstrating the logic). I partition all statements about the world into ‘red’ or ‘green’. ‘red’ statements, by my definition, contain the word ‘the’. Now that you understand what it is to partition the space of statement, tell me what properties a ‘true’ statement has.
i.e. 2 does not follow. I am not saying that your statement is false, since it is not statement about the world, it is an assumption that you are making about the world. Since I am not working from this assumption, there is no way to translate between the two. I need to know what properties a ‘true’ statement has that a ‘false’ statement does not have.
I think you’re missing the point. I’m not stating a theory with criteria that can be tested, I’m stating that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Coming up with a definition for whether a statement is ‘true’ or not wouldn’t answer the issue because that’s not the issue; I’m not claiming that any particular statements are true, just that truth exists. So yes, 2 must follow because if there absolute truth doesn’t exist then it doesn’t exist in statements about the size of the earth, the existence of God, the colour of my hair, or the existence of truth itself.
So, if you’d like to use the example of red and green, where red statements must be logically submitted to and green statements must be ignored, an assumption of a red/green partition must be red in order for it to be logically submitted to; a statement that ‘nothing is red’ assumes that the statement itself is not red, and therefore shouldn’t be logically submitted to.
Your point, however, (I think) is that your statement is that ‘there is no partition’, therefore the concept of red/green is not useful. But that can’t possibly be right. If I say that I work for the CIA but I don’t, I have no right to claim that ‘there’s no such thing as truth so I can say what I like’; I’m just lying! Some statements simply are red, some are green. Some may be in a complex muddy red-green mix but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this argument because red still exists.
“I’m not claiming that any particular statements are true, just that truth exists”
This is exactly my point. I happily submit that there *might* be something called truth, but our statements about the world necessarily cannot contain all of the information about the world. All of our statements are imperfect. Our statements about statements might be perfect, because we define them that way. We usually call this mathematics or linguistics.
So you can partition the space of statements up however you like, and there maybe a surjective map onto the world (i.e. we can talk about anything), but there is not an injective map (i.e. what is ‘true’ for one person may be false for another). If two people do not experience the world in the same way, what is the point of having a concept of ‘truth’ at all (beyond making statements about other statements).
For example. I can say I see a pile of 10 rocks, and another pile of 12 rocks. Now I know that when I combine these two piles, I get 22 rocks. This statement is ‘true,’ because 22 *always* represents what you get when you add 10 and 12. However, is this statement *true* beyond the world of maths? There are many individuals in the world who do not have the concept of 22 because they have not developed a number system. It might go something like 1,2,3,4,5,6,,….. lots. So to them, my statement that there are 22 rocks means nothing. To them, there were lots of rocks before, and there are still lots of rocks. Telling them that there are 22 provides them with no new information.
So actually your issue isn’t to do with philosophy in any way, it’s just a language thing? Your example is a great one – 10+12=22. Statement of fact. Objective truth. Just because someone hasn’t been taught that, or doesn’t understand that, doesn’t simply stop it being true! You might as well say that because I’ve never met someone they don’t exist. This is just a resprayed version of the tree falling in the woods making a sound idea; if no-one hears it does it still make a sound? Yes, of course it does. Our subjective experience (or lack of it) doesn’t change reality.
So, if all you’re saying is that ‘no-one has a perfect understanding of everything’ then why didn’t you just say that? Something tells me that’s not what you’re saying because you would have…so what do you mean?
You don’t seem to have understood what I am saying. *Yes* statements about statements can be *true*, because you can define them that way. The idea that there are 10 and 12 things are statements about the world, they cannot be true. However, 10+12= 22 is true, since it is a statement about a statement and is defined that way. However, no matter how complex our map, its application to the world will never be perfect. That is, there are no ‘basic’ units of truth so to speak. The ‘truth’ of a statement only makes sense relative to other statements, not relative to the world. This is why scientists developed information theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
We are actually discussing something that was a hot topic for philosophy of science in the 1930′s. The area of research is called epistemology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
Ok, the difference here is clearly that you and I have different understandings about the word ‘truth’, i.e. if there are ten things then there are ten things: true statement. But I think you only consider truths to be unquestionable timeless statements (i.e. if I take one thing away, there are no longer ten things, so the statement is only true when it is a statement about the current state of affairs?).
In any case your useful link around epistomology is exactly what this post started with; there are ten things, but how do I know that there are ten things? And how do I know that 10+12=22? Ultimately the whole truth-knowledge-belief dilemma starts with one foundational belief which requires circular reasoning in order to justify it.
In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously measured. In layman’s terms, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
How do you apply your measure of ‘truth’ to this situation? ‘There are ten things’ doesn’t mean anything here. It’s not the tree in the forest situation either, here we have two things that can never simultaneously be known.
Sorry, I don’t think I understand. What’s your point? Does our inability to know something prevent it from being true? Did my wife not exist until I met her?
I don’t know. You still haven’t told me what properties a ‘true’ statement has. We know statements about statements can be true, so don’t bother with 1+1=2 s always true (it is a tautology). Don’t bother with examples, if it is not the statement that is true, then what is it. What does ‘true’ mean.
Well, the definition I just got from Google says that a true statement is:
Is that what you were looking for?
“I’m not claiming that any particular statements are true, just that truth exists”
try again.
If you didn’t get that, you said you weren’t claiming that any statements are true, just that truth exists. When asked to define truth, you tell me it is a statement. Either truth is a statement about the world, or it is not, it cannot be both.
What is fact and reality and what is the measure of accordance. I’m not playing games here, I have a measure if accordance, I have called it information (which is not perfect), what is your definition of accordance? (I’m assuming that it is binary, only right and wrong things)
We’re honestly talking about completely different things here; I’m talking about reality, you’re talking about semantics. You ask me to use a statement to define truth, something I said wouldn’t help this conversation, then when I do go ‘Ha! You used a statement!’
Let’s stop talking about definitions, and let’s start talking about reality. Either truth exists, or it doesn’t. If truth doesn’t exist then coming up with a statement to define anything is a completely pointless exercise because it wouldn’t be true. You and I wouldn’t even exist because that wouldn’t be true. This conversation wouldn’t be anything because anything we said wouldn’t be true.
My question for the whole of this conversation has revolved around how you know anything at all. The way I know anything at all ultimately stems from the Bible being wholly true, inspired, infallible, plenary, and inerrant. That’s my epistomology. What is yours?
The contradiction is not that you used a statement, its that in one moment, you tell me that truth is *not* a statement,
“I’m not claiming that any particular statements are true, just that truth exists”
and then you tell me that it *is* a statement. You can’t define truth as the thing that ‘if it doesn’t exist then nothing makes sense.’
I’ve told you how I view the world. There may be a reality that is separate to our experience. But since we cannot experience it, talking about it is a waste of time. Therefore any statement I make about the world is subjective. Therefore no statements are perfectly true. *However*, this does not mean that we cannot converse, since information can pass between two people through the medium of a statement, but that information will never be perfect. Any statement is necessarily a simplification of the world (you go from analogue world to digital words), so a statement can never be a perfect representation of the world. Therefore, there is no divide between ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements about the world, only statements that carry more or less information.
In contrast, you say that ‘truth’ exists independently of experience (yet you don’t define). That this truth can be captured in a human brain (seems to contradict independent point). And that truth can be communicated using language (through the bible). These all seems like rather extraordinary claims to me, so I’m trying to understand exactly what it is that you thing truth is.
Nothing you’ve said disagrees with my statement: if everything you know is ultimately subjective then you’re essentially saying that you believe what you believe because you believe it: circular reasoning. This is fine, but for me misses out reality from the equation; if you haven’t experienced something then according to your worldview it may as well not exist because it’s outside of your subjective experience.
Now this doesn’t seem to be a big issue, but it really is if you’re a blind man about to be punched in the face. Your subjective experience isn’t sufficient to give you the information you require to react appropriately, but that doesn’t stop the punch being ‘the truth’. So truth must absolutely exist independently from experience: the punch is coming whether you know it or not, or whether you believe it or not, all that matters is that you get out of the way.
So my point isn’t that we are able to communicate objective truth 100% accurately 100% of the time (we clearly can’t and I’m not sure how we got onto that anyway), and it isn’t that human reason is completely unable to determine or communicate objective truth (we clearly can; if there are 10 rocks we can just say that, and it’s true).
My point is that in order to have certain knowledge of objective truth we need something which is inerrant and plenary. In the (probably unhelpful and misleading) example of the blind man above it would be someone else with the ability to see, who could provide that information therefore enabling him to move out of the way.
My issue with the outlook you present is that you basically seem to be saying that ‘we are all that blind man’…and that’s fine, I do sort of agree, but in saying that you’re essentially claiming to be the one who can see everything and therefore make that statement of objective truth. I’m not claiming to know everything, I’m claiming that God knows everything and has communicated effectively through the Bible. Yes, of course that’s an extraordinary claim – if it were ordinary it would be something anyone could do, thereby undermining God’s unique power and authority. But if God is who the Bible says he is then of course it’s easily within his power to achieve it. Because of your presupposition (ie that your subjective experience is the ultimate authority) this must be rejected, therefore strengthening the presupposition. Circular reasoning again.
We seem to be making progress, but we are still not in agreement. You have failed to see the distinction between ‘have not’ experienced and ‘cannot experience.’ I would think that the blind man can experience a punch, but he probably experiences in a very different way to you or me. This is exactly the point that I am trying to make. I don’t deny that ‘something’ has happened, but our experiences of that thing is entirely subjective. This is where we seriously differ. You say that we can clearly communicate ‘objective truth,’ I say that all we can communicate is an imperfect map of the world, and even in that the fidelity is not that high (compared to, say, a computer). i.e our understanding is bounded by language and culture.
What I am not interested in doing is discussing things that cannot be known and understood. That is, if you can’t give me an experiment to go out and test an idea, then I’m not listening. Why? Because there is only so much time in the world and there are a *lot* of people selling ideas that can never be wrong.Take your bible claim. You are saying that there is something that exists independently from us, God, and He has ‘effectively communicated himself through the bible.’ I do not observe a single church, who’s followers all believe the same thing. I observe a variety of different religions. I don’t understand how you can say that God has ‘communicated effectively’ through the bible when so many people disagree. If human communication is so good, why have we not all converged on the same ideas?
I seriously have no idea why you’re so intent on making me talk about human communication, because it’s never been my intention to talk about that. What I’m saying in essence is that objective truth is real and that we can understand it in some form. The best example I can think of this is your faith that my wife exists. I assume that you have never met her so you simply believe she exists because I say that she has. Now I know she exists because I have met her and am in a relationship with her. Someone else may have more concrete ‘evidence’ (e.g. her birth certificate) but I’ve never seen that and don’t need to – I simply know she exists. Now, if you were to ask me to describe her and ask someone else to describe her you’d probably get two different answers which may even have some direct disagreements between them based on our different experiences (for example I may say she has blonde hair while someone else would say she has brown hair – we’re not both right). But for you to simply say ‘you believe different things therefore she doesn’t exist’ is the most ridiculous conclusion imaginable to draw; it would be far more sensible to conclude that she must exist.
The choice of whether or not to further investigate the specifics of any claims I may make about her would be entirely down to you, but I imagine that you don’t particularly mind what colour my wife’s hair is, or even whether or not she really exists, because the consequences of believing in her or not are insignificant for you. But if what everyone who has met God says is true (that it really, really matters that your faith is in him), then it can’t be stated how important your investigation is! Whether you’ve received my imperfect communication correctly or not is completely inconsequential, what matters is whether God is real or not – if he is it doesn’t matter that you’re ‘not interested in discussing things that cannot be known and understood’, because in saying that you are making the active choice to bear any consequences of not believing; you’re gambling that ‘the truth’ is that he doesn’t exist. So the analogy of a blind man being punched is a good one. By choosing not to react he is accepting the consequences of the fist hurtling towards his face; the fact that he could wait to experience it to discover the truth doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t be better off by putting his faith in what others said first.
And your point about everyone believing the same thing doesn’t hold any ground – if every Christian you talked to used exactly the same arguments you’d know instantly that they were fixing their story rather than being genuine! In court if there were absolutely no discrepancies between any witnesses the judge would instantly throw them out because they would be guilty of conspiracy!
You still have not made the distinction between ‘have not’ experienced and ‘cannot’ experience.’ I *have not* met your wife. I *cannot* experience your relationship to God. This is why this discussion is all about communication. You are saying that truth *is* communicated through the bible, and through Jesus. However, there is no way to know whether this ‘truth’ is the same in everyones head.
I am not talking about denying the existence of things that do not know, I am talking about the use of talking about things that you *cannot* know. There are so many religions, all of which claim a slightly (or widely) different truth, yet there is no way to distinguish between them. This is why I don’t see the point in talking about things that we will never be able to understand. Science is organised in much the same way. Individuals belong to various schools of thought, each of which can fundamentally not be disproven. The only difference between a church and a lab is that people in a lab are aware that they might be wrong about anything they say. The truth is impossible to write down.
I know you are fond of telling me that this is a truth claim, but it is not, it is a belief. It is one of those things that can never be known, but is assumed to be understood by everyone else doing ‘science.’ This is why scientists are generally not interested in talking about it (apart from me). It is not, nor is it claimed to be so, it is the tradition of science. We can note that it seems to work better than other types of organisation, and we can theorise why, but we can never know.
This is what I want to help you understand, the reasoning is not circular if you begin from the position that there are some things that we cannot understand or communicate. That is distinguish have not and cannot experience, and distinguish between belief and knowledge.
Hang on, you’re being inconsistent:
You *cannot* experience my relationship with my wife, yet you’re happy to believe she exists. You *have not* met God, yet you could; if no-one could then no-one would be a Christian! I didn’t become a Christian because it was a logical conclusion upon presentation of evidence, it was because I met Jesus!
Now, you may say ‘there’s no way of knowing that’s true’ but you could say that about me having met anyone.
My question for this is how do you know any of it?
1. How do you know that there are some things you cannot understand or communicate?
2. How do you know the difference between something you have not or cannot experience?
3. How do you know the difference between something you know, and something you believe?
Re inconsistency. No, you state that your wife exists. I can think of an experiment that, if holds, I would have no reason to doubt (I could meet her). There is no experiment that I currently know of that would lead me to conclude that you have met God. Therefore there is no point talking about it. If a Hindu comes along tomorrow and say, ‘no, I have met God, Christians have met a demon/imagined it…’ I would have no way to distinguish between these positions, so I don’t bother.
Re how do I know. Read the quote and it answers it. I don’t, it is a belief. How do I know that other people think this. I don’t I only act as if they do, since that seems to work (sometimes it doesn’t). You are projecting your beliefs on to me. I never claimed to ‘know’ anything. I don’t try to convince you that I have ‘correct knowledge’ about anything. That is what you are claiming. I am simply trying to convince you that many people are quite happy talk about things without assuming that what they say ever ‘true,’ just that it gives us some response that we expect.
Here you’re perfectly demonstrating this circular reasoning in action:
So, you can’t think of a way that you could find out whether God exists, therefore he doesn’t exist? That’s absolutely ridiculous! And there absolutely is a point talking about it (apart from this conversation being evidence for that in the first place) because if he does exist then surely our discussing him is the single most important thing we could be doing?!
Think about it like this: if you are falling off a cliff and a tree branch is sticking out that could save your life, it doesn’t matter whether you can imagine a way to see it or grab hold of it, only that you do. If one person shouts to you ‘grab that branch!’ and someone else shouts ‘no, don’t, the branch doesn’t exist!’ none of that matters, providing you grab hold and your life is saved. Simply saying ‘I don’t bother thinking about it’ is as much making a decision as those who choose to believe, because you’re choosing not to grab the branch and are therefore placing the meaning of your life and your eternity into the hands of nothingness, just hoping based on no thought or discussion whatsoever that there is no God. If he exists, that’s the biggest mistake you’ll ever make.
On the other hand, you seem quite happy to acknowledge your own faith in things that you know and admit are faulty (i.e. your comment ‘sometimes it doesn’t [work]‘! If that genuinely gives you a sense of purpose and meaning then be my guest.
Oh, and also can we just clarify that there would be an easy way that you would learn that God exists: you could meet him.
I never said the God doesn’t exist, only that there is no point talking about things that we cannot know.
In one ear I have you telling me one thing and in another I have a Hindu telling me different. Any argument that you make, he can make too. So why listen to either of you?
It goes further than this. Not only do different religions disagree, but different churches based on the same religion disagree. Each of which can say exactly the same thing. Why listen to any of them?
It goes further still. I pick up a history book and learn about the history of monotheism. I find that the God that people believe in now days is a very different sort than the God people believed in the past. At each time, they believed they were correct. How do I distinguish any of them?
So no, it is not ridiculous that I believe non of them. Because if I believe one of them, then I would need to believe them all. Let me turn the question around to you. If the (insert religion here) are correct, then believing in (insert deity here) is the single most important thing in the world. Imagine that you are falling off a cliff and a (insert religion here) is holding a branch etc.
Why don’t you believe in *all* religions?
Ok, where to start?! Claiming that you know which ‘things we cannot know’ is a massive statement of blind faith; how do you know which of the things you don’t know you can’t know, and which you just don’t know yet? Particularly bearing in mind the fact that Christians worldwide do claim to know with certainty that God is real?
Different chuches disagree…yes, of course, but on minor points. Any Christian anywhere will be happy to admit that Christians disagree on things like alcohol, contraception, male headship etc but not about whether or not Jesus is God!
I’d be genuinely interested to hear about this ‘history of monotheism’ – monotheism is pretty much unique to the Bible, and I believe in the God of the Bible, so I’m confident that the God I worship is the same God that Adam and Eve worshipped.
And it certainly is ridiculous to suggest that believing one religion requires you to believe them all, because they’re mutually exclusive! Muslims say that Jesus is a saint and not to be worshipped on punishment of eternal torment, but I believe he’s God. Sikhs don’t believe in a god at all, whereas Hindus believe in many gods, none of whom are all-powerful. Buddhists believe that perfection is nirvana, nothingness, while atheists believe that nothing exists outside of nature – all of these are making significant statements of faith, and all of these interpret evidence based on their presuppositions. For example, a friend of mine was told by doctors she couldn’t have children. We prayed for her, and now she’s pregnant. I can say this is a miracle but an atheist, based on exactly the same information, would by faith claim that the doctors got it wrong or something naturally changed.
So why do I only believe in Christianity? Many, many answers but here are three:
1. I’ve met Jesus; I’m as confident about his existence and my relationship with him as I am about my relationship with my wife.
2. Jesus rose again from the dead, therefore proving that his claim to be God was true and showing that his work on the cross was complete and successful.
3. Christianity provides certainty for eternity and meaning for life. Every world religion says something along the lines of: ‘do enough good stuff and you’ll be rewarded with heaven/reincarnation/nirvana/insert whatever here’ which leaves you constantly questioning whether or not you’ve done enough good stuff, or avoided enough bad stuff. Ask any Hindu what they’ll be reincarnated as and they’ll say ‘I have no idea’. Ask a Muslim where they will be when they die, and they’ll say something like ‘I hope I’ve done enough to get into heaven’. But ask a Christian and they’ll be 100% certain that they’ll be in perfection with Jesus for eternity! The Bible says:
Cannot know: can you think of a critical experiment that we could do to determine whether we ‘knew’ the same God. (like we agree that the critical experiment that we could do to establish that your wife existed would be for me to meet her). Your standards of ‘I’ve met him, you can meet him too,’ are not strong enough this doesn’t help me distinguish your claim from anyone else’s.
“Different churches disagree, but only on minor points.” I can’t catch my breath. Seems that I have read considerably more on this topic than you. No, its not true, groups include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians, Unitarians and Christian Scientists don’t believe that Jesus is God, to name a few off the top of my head.
Read this http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0099273675. Also read this by the same author: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0099524031/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=103612307&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0099273675&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=0JMA4RHD86KFT3ME6NN9. She has some
I know that religions are mutually exclusive, thats my I was arguing Reductio ad absurdum. Based on the arguments, there is no way why I should accept one over the others. Therefore accepting one based on arguments mean I must accept them all, which is absurd. So I’ll ask you again, why should I accept your religion over anyone else’? What argument could you present that is unique to your religion? And how would we know that that we believe the same thing?
Sorry it’s taken a while to post your comment, for some reason it appeared as spam.
It’s clear that your attitude towards belief in Christianity is based on the faith you already have. Jehovah’s Witnesses etc are not Christians because they don’t believe Jesus is God! You interpret the same evidence I have access to through the lens of your faith that God does not exist. What do you say about the miracles I’ve witnessed?
The unique argument to my religion is: Jesus rose from the dead.
No worries.
If you are saying: your understanding of the world is based on your understanding of the world, then yes it is. ‘God doesn’t exist’ doesn’t really form part of my argument, what I am worried about is that, if, like you say, we say we believe in the same God, then how do we know it is the *same* god? ‘Having the same basic beliefs’ doesn’t do it for me I’m afraid, because that seems to be arguing from my position: there is no ‘consensus’, only a population of individuals with different opinions. The concept of God has changed a great deal in the past 2000 years, so much so that you almost certainly don’t believe in the same god as our ancestors.
The same goes for bible stories. Your ‘unique argument’ for Christianity is not unique at all. The death and resurrection of a holy figure was told long before the name of Jesus had ever been heard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-death-rebirth_deity
Maybe it was the virgin birth?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virgin_births
No, that story has been told as well. I am still unconvinced that there is any argument of why I should follow Yahweh (your God) from Baal (the God that Yahweh ‘killed’).
Ok, if ‘God doesn’t exist’ doesn’t form part of your argument then I’ll ask you again: what do you make of the miracles I’ve witnessed?
Once again you’ve claimed that the concept of god has changed over history, and once again I’ll ask: in what way? What did they used to believe that I don’t or vice versa?
When it comes to resurrection/virgin birth myths let me ask: have you ever looked at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? Many individuals throughout history have claimed to see the Loch Ness monster but that doesn’t mean that (a) they were all right, or (b) they were all wrong! When it comes to resurrection stories I don’t know that much but I’d expect that most others are simply myths, and were always thought to be myths…but Jesus of Nazareth was seen to be alive after his death by 500 people at one time!
In your interpretation of what I believe you clearly think something along the lines of ‘a bunch of people believe in something more than the natural world, so how can anyone choose between them?’ but that doesn’t work, because of the reasons outlined in my original post. You ask why I believe in the Christian God, and my answer is that he is real. You ask how I know he’s real, and I answer that every shred of evidence available anywhere points to his existence as described in the Bible.
In the same way I could ask why you believe that the natural world is all there is.
These are just words. ‘Every shred of evidence points to his existence’ Why do we disagree then? Do you think that I am lying when I say I don’t believe you?
You seem to be side stepping the issue here.
‘but I’d expect that most others are simply myths, and were always thought to be myths’
They were no more ‘myths’ than the Jesus myth. Any argument you against level against Baal can be levelled against Yahweh. Any argument levelled in favour of Yahweh can be levelled in favour of Baal. Just saying ‘yeah, but the other one was just a myth’ is a rather hypocritical position to take. Same with miracles, how do you know that it wasn’t Baal who answered your prayers?
Now hang on, I seem to be side stepping the issue? You haven’t answered any of the questions I asked you!
I’m not arguing against anything, if anything I’m arguing for Christianity. As I said I don’t know anything about these other resurrection stories but I do know that, for example, 500 people witnessed the risen Jesus at one time; are there any similar stories relating to the other resurrection stories? If so, they wouldn’t seem to me to fall into the category of myth. Jesus’ resurrection has always been claimed by Christians to be a historical occurence.
How do I know it wasn’t Baal who answered my prayers? Well, we were praying to Jesus so Baal seems to be a bit daft that he’d apparently confirm the existence of another god, doesn’t it?
Again, have you actually looked at the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection?
Other beliefs: Supporters of Baal and supporters of Yahweh were once the same people (there were other Gods too). But you could do the same with any of the popular religions. If you do not know the history of your belief system, I suggest you read some books about it. I’m not recounting the history of Yahweh here.
Miracles: 1 data point means not evidence. Can you recreate the ‘miracle’?
Resurrection: There are so many, it is hard to categorise them all. Look at this if you want to see comparative studies between Jesus and other similar divine beings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Christ_in_comparative_mythology
Fro example:
“The Egyptians of every period in which they are known to us believed that Osiris was of divine origin, that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of the powers of evil, that after a great struggle with these powers he rose again, that he became henceforth the king of the underworld and judge of the dead, and that because he had conquered death the righteous also might conquer death…In Osiris the Christian Egyptians found the prototype of Christ, and in the pictures and statues of Isis suckling her son Horus, they perceived the prototypes of the Virgin Mary and her child.”
Re a bit daft: are you saying you know Gods plan? Or just that he might be bad at marketing himself?
And again, you haven’t answered any of my questions! Out of courtesy, here are the answers to your statements:
Baal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%CA%BFal) is the name of a false god – never as ‘the one God’, so this is not a case of Yahweh vs. Baal, it’s Yahweh the one God vs. Baal some false god of thunder or something. Not omnipresent, not omnipotent, not omniscient, not perfectly good. The only history of monotheism is in the Bible, and I believe the Bible; I worship the same God as Adam and Eve did.
Osiris is a great example; the mystical being of divine origin undergoing some fantastical story. Compare that to Jesus; the man who was born, lived a public life, was publicly tortured and crucified, publicly rose again to life and appeared to many. Public. Eyewitness testimony. Historical facts, not some myth.
Now, please, answer my questions! What do you think about the miracles I’ve witnessed? Of course I can’t magically recreate them, I’m not God! Have you ever looked at the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection? Why do you believe that the natural world is all there is?
You do not worship the same God as Adam and Eve, and you are showing your ignorance of the history of God. A (very brief history of what I can remember). Yahweh and Baal were two of many Gods worshiped by the Isrealites. Baal was the God of storms and rain, Yahweh was the God of war. Yahweh was favoured during times of war, Baal during times of peace. The innovation of Yahweh was that he became jealous, and wanted people to support no other Gods. There was a giant showdown between those who supported Yahweh, and those who supported Baal. Yahweh supporters won and massacred Baalists. Then there was a time of peace, and Baal and the other Gods were again worshiped. Then there was a looming foreign threat (I forget whom), and the priests jumped on the opportunity and blamed people not being holy enough. The covenant was then formed, when a king decided that they would worship the God of war forever, if he would help them beat the invaders.
Do you worship the God of war and destruction? Or do you worship another God?
Re miracles: statistically insignificant datapoints are just that, insignificant. The events may be important to you personally. Do you think that we should forsake medicine and have prayer groups trying to heal the sick, or do you think that correlation between prayer and healing will remain statistically insignificant?
Ok, please give me some evidence of that first paragraph – it’s honestly the first I’ve heard any of that!
I don’t know anything about healing being ‘statistically insignificant’, but I’d welcome you to tell my pregnant friend that the fact she can now have children is insignificant. What evidence would you need to see to convince you that your faith is wrong? Again I’ll ask if you’ve considered the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.
Re History of God.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0099273675
Read this. The concept of God has changed so much over time that it now bears almost no resemblance to the God that most people believe now. Example: omnipresent and omnipotent. Both of these are innovations.
Re statistically insignificant: I knew that would be the reply, which is why I tactfully added “The events may be important to you personally.” I don’t doubt that the event meant a lot to your friend. That is why it is called statistically insignificant: the *vast* majority of cases do not turn out as this one. For it to be a miracle it must be statistically insignificant, otherwise it would just be an everyday occurrence. But what you are saying is that it is *not* statistically insignificant, because miracles correlate with prayer. If that is true, then I guess you are in favour of putting resources into prayer groups rather than doctors?
Either the prayer and miracles correlate, or they do not. If they do, then we should use it to heal people, if they do not, then how do you know that one event had anything to do with the other.
What evidence would I require to believe in Jesus’s resurrection? I would settle on prayer to Jesus significantly correlates with healing sick people. I would require a series of double blind tests.
Wow, ok, so what we come down to now is: I believe the Bible, you believe Karen Armstrong. Why not have a read of the Bible and see?
God’s omnipresence: ‘Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!’ (Psalm 139:7-8)
God’s omnipotence: ‘Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”‘ (Matthew 28:18)
Your points about miracles are ridiculous: by definition they’re out of the ordinary, therefore they shouldn’t be considered. Ridiculous. Only 1.8% of the UK’s population are black, therefore I should ignore every black person in the UK? No, of course not! And no, I don’t condone ‘putting resources into prayer groups rather than doctors’; God has given us an ability to learn how to heal one another through medicine, not using that would be silly.
Ultimately, healing through prayer comes down to faith; I’ve seen people healed through prayer before, so I’m going to keep on praying. I’ve asked you how you respond to one specific example of my friend’s healing, and you don’t answer me except to say that it’s insignificant. As far as you’re concerned you could personally experience a clear miracle and deny it has any relevance because if you tried it again it might not happen. As I’ve said many times before, you interpret the evidence through the lens of your faith.
And you refuse to even consider the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. Allow me to rephrase the question.
What evidence would you need in order for you to deny your presuppositions? For example, you say that miraculous healing would be proof, but you immediately qualify it by saying that this would have to be double-blind tested, i.e. it couldn’t be a miracle it would have to be everyday – I may as well say that I’ll believe in the colour green if you can prove to me that it’s pink. This conversation is a waste of time.
I once rolled 7 sixes in a row. Was that a miracle?
No, I don’t believe Karen armstrong. Yes, I have read the bible. If I could be bothered (since you’ve resorted to rudeness, I so I can’t now) I would dig up parts of the bible which contradict one another.
You seem unwilling to make the distinction between personally significant and statistically significant. ‘Out of the ordinary’ is not clear. The question is, does it correlate with something (i.e. prayer) or does it correlate with nothing i.e. its random. If it correlated with prayer, then more praying means more miracles right. If not, then why bother praying. Saying ‘god has given us medicine’ is saying, no, I don’t believe in the power of prayer, I believe in the power of medicine (didn’t read much medicine in the bible when I last looked).
Yes, in order for me to personally believe something, it must be repeatable, otherwise I would have no way to distinguish it from someone just saying something. God filled my dice with magic and made me roll 7 6′s in a row! Can you do it again? No, god also said that he does things randomly. So it wasn’t God then, it was chance. No, but I prayed. Oh, so you can do it again if you prayed enough. No, God does it randomly. So it wasn’t God then. No, I prayed… Maybe you are right, maybe this conversation is pointless.
Genuinely, if I’ve been rude I unconditionally apologise, that wasn’t my intention. Please show me what was rude, and please do show me a contradiction in the Bible.
Now, to say that you don’t like my idea of objective truth it seems that you have a hard time acknowledging that both medicine and prayer could be good ideas. It’s also a bit odd that you think that prayer is such a mechanical process that must be followed. Please remember that God is personal, which means he makes decisions and responds according to his will. If I say to my friend, ‘Can I have some money please?’ he may say no, or he may say yes. He may say no more often than he says yes, but the one occasion on which he says yes, while a statistical anomaly, came about as a direct result of me asking; if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have got. Saying ‘you can get money from a payday loan company’ doesn’t mean that asking my friend wouldn’t work!
And rolling 7 sizes is certainly out of the ordinary – let’s for the purposes of argument say it is a God-given miracle. Should I change my entire life if that happens to me? I hope you agree the answer’s no. So, why did I change my entire life when I was shown the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection? Because the potential consequences of not putting my faith in Jesus are so significant that I would be a fool for denying it!
And, please, if you’re going to attempt to point out flaws in Christianity stop using a straw man: ‘God does it randomly’ is not a phrase you’ll ever hear a Christian saying. I don’t buy flowers for my wife every time I go to the shops, I buy them when I choose to. Do the times I don’t buy flowers mean I don’t love her any more? No. Do the times I buy them mean I love her more than normal? No! I simply buy flowers every so often to remind her of what she knows already.
Does God answer every prayer the way I want him to? No, of course not, why would he? He knows everything perfectly, and I don’t! If he answered every prayer the way I wanted him to I can promise you the world would be a worse place now than it was 20 years ago. I trust his judgment.
Maybe I misread your tone when I accused you of rudeness. Forgiven, and I offer my apology.
Objective truth does not have to exist in order for medicine to work, only statistical correlation between what it is supposed to do, and what it does. Medicine stands on the edge of science. Researchers often use scientific techniques when making discoveries, but it is actually more akin to engineering. Now philosophy of engineering is very different to philosophy of science, and is generally based around making things that work consistently. An engineer will never really claim to ‘know’ how something works, they only have mathematical models that tells them how a thing would work, if the model were true. But the model is never ‘true’.
So you seem to be saying that prayer and miracles weakly correlate. I accept that, it is very hard to demonstrate that they don’t. I suppose the test might be to go somewhere where they have no God and see if the proportion of miracles are higher or lower. However, since miracles might never happen in a lifetime, one would need more data than is possible to obtain in a lifetime.
I like to see that you admit that we personally do not have perfect knowledge of the world. I agree. Our only difference seems to be that you assume that there *is* something that exists with perfect knowledge. I say maybe there is, but we will never understand it, it certainly can’t be said, or recorded in a book. You seem to be half like me and half not. You believe Man’s infallibility, his weakness, his ignorance, but you also posit something perfect that you think you can at least partly understand. I don’t understand why you need such a thing: just convincing people that they don’t know everything is hard enough.
Bible contradictions:
MAT 27:46,50: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” that is to say, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” …Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.”
LUK 23:46: “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, “Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit:” and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.”
JOH 19:30: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished:” and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”
In terms of why I feel the need to believe in something perfect that I can at least partly understand – it comes down to the significance of the impact of believing or not. In other words, there are some things that I could choose to believe in but I don’t (or don’t care whether anyone does), and that’s generally because the impact of believing or not is insignificant. For example, the Loch Ness monster. I don’t know whether one exists or not, but whether someone strongly believes, or strongly disbelieves, I don’t care! What difference does it make?! But if Christianity is true, then believing it or not is the single most important thing you or I will ever do. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t just believe because of that; I’m convinced that Christianity is true. But it does mean that from a Christian perspective it’s incredibly important to properly consider it.
And your Bible contradictions…I think it’s worth asking why contradictions are important. Surely your purpose is to show me that if the Bible is the Word of God and therefore true, then a contradiction would show that it isn’t (please correct me if that’s not your purpose!). So let’s look at this example. Three eyewitnesses appear to say that Jesus said three different things immediately before dying. Well, three things to bear in mind here.
1. None of the three state that Jesus didn’t say anything other than the words they quote, so it’s perfectly plausible that Jesus said a whole bunch of stuff on the cross that wasn’t captured in one or more (or all) of these accounts – so they’re not actually contradictions.
2. If the three agreed word-for-word with Jesus’ last words it would be obvious that they’d fixed their story – if eyewitness accounts agree on every detail they tend to be thrown out of court, so the fact that they each remember different things that Jesus said just adds to their credibility. For example, if the Queen walked into a room and said ‘Hi Sam,’ then said ‘Hi James’ to my friend, the chances are that I’d tell the story like: ‘The Queen came in and said “Hi Sam.”‘ James would say she’d said ‘Hi James’ – are those two accounts contradictory? No, they’re complementary.
3. The three all agree on the key fact: Jesus essentially chose to die; he said something definitive, then as the King James Version puts it ‘gave up the ghost’.
Also,
EXO 24:9,10; AMO 9:1; GEN 26:2; and JOH 14:9
God CAN be seen:
“And I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my backparts.” (EXO 33:23)
“And the Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.” (EXO 33:11)
“For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” (GEN 32:30)
God CANNOT be seen:
“No man hath seen God at any time.” (JOH 1:18)
“And he said, Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live.” (EXO 33:20)
“Whom no man hath seen nor can see.” (1TIM 6:16)
Now, these are far more important ‘contradictions’! If this is a true contradiction then our very knowledge of God must be called into question! But a cursory glance at the texts in question would answer this. One simple answer is that God is the Trinity – three distinct Persons yet one God, each Person fully God, the fulness of God in each of them; God is three-in-one and one-in-three. If you’ve seen one of the three then it’s true that you’ve seen God, but it’s also true that you’ve not seen God.
That’s not the whole answer by the way, it’s just an easy answer – if you read the context of each of the verses above you’ll quickly see that they’re not talking about the same things (e.g. the Genesis 32:30 quote refers to Jacob talking about having wrestled a man rather than some genuine experience of having seen God in the same way that John talks about it). I’d encourage you to use the ESV translation – it’s a literal translation but a bit easier to read than the KJV.
Come on Sam. Saying that one God is really three Gods is really one God is not.. a serious answer. It is not an answer at all, it is just some words lined up.
I agree, context is important, as is eye witness accounts. Which is why I don’t understand why, you put great stock in them at one time, and then dismiss them the rest of the time as unimportant. You seem to take the bible, if not literally true, at least to be an account of something that actually happened.
It seems incomprehensible to me that you would deny something for which there is a great deal of evidence in favour for (pick any scientific theory which contradicts the bible), and accept something as badly thought out as the bible. I can accept that you think that there is a higher power. I do not accept your need for perfect knowledge, but I understand why you might argue that way. I understand why you might go to church. But I have no idea why you put any stock in the bible. Its a badly written (though the KJV is beautifully phrased) book written 70 years after the events. I suggest that you read the study conducted by Karen Armstrong that I linked for you. If I was arguing that that important, I would want to find out everything that I could about how and why it was written. Its OK to say ‘you just believe different to me, why should I accept you source.’ Which is fine for a while, but that soon gets tiresome. It might be part of the psychology of ‘there is nothing that has authority over the bible, therefore I accept nothing which is written about it.’ But this is a fundamentalist position to take, and I don’t think that it is worthy of you. You might hate the book, or disagree with it, which is good, write against it! But you should at least be aware that there are more subtle arguments out there than ‘the bible is true, 500 people saw Jesus rise from the dead.’ I saw a news story the other day where a whole town in America swore blind that they’d seen a UFO, all at the same time in the same part of the sky, and everyone said that there was no way that it could be manmade. Am I to believe this? Could it have been an Angel? No, probably just a feature of human psychology.
Well, you obviously won’t think it’s a serious answer because of your presuppositions, but a cornerstone of Christianity is that God is three-in-one. Jesus is God the Son, but he is not God the Father. And God the Son sent God the Holy Spirit. Simply saying ‘that’s silly’ is silly because it comes down to ‘I believe this, you believe something different’, and that’s the whole point. In order to use a contradiction to disprove the Bible you have to start by assuming the Bible is true – if you don’t, you might as well say the Bible’s false and leave it at that!
So should I believe in UFOs if 500 people attest to seeing one? I’ll say again (and probably again and again) that it doesn’t matter! The consequences of believing or not are insignificant! But are the consequences of putting your faith in Jesus insignificant? If the Bible’s true, then no, your eternal destiny rests on that one decision – should you take it that lightly to write it off as ‘a feature of human psychology’? So again I’ll return to the question that I’ve put to you and you’ve ignored so often I’ve lost count: why will you not look at the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?
I have looked at the evidence. I have read about it from more than one source than the bible. I don’t believe it. Your argument for being a Christian seems to fall somewhere between having the right to believe what you want (which I accept, but doesn’t make me at all interested), and some version of Pascal’s wager. But you can do that with any religion, set some imaginary cost at infinite and say, if you don’t do this thing, look at the cost. The fact that no one has ever seen anyone bare this cost is yet more reason to doubt it. If there was a God, maybe he hates people that are Christians for personal profit. Show me one thing that is tangible, something that distinguishes you from any other group, and I will pay it some mind. At the moment, you argument seems to be left with ‘I just believe it.’ Which is fine, but not convincing.
If you don’t mind me asking, what is your explanation for the evidence? Some guy claims to be God, ends up getting tortured and killed and is then seen by many people having risen again, including his brother (who didn’t believe before his death but changed his mind), his best friends (the vast majority of whom willingly died for saying they believed he rose again), and 500 people at one time.
If Jesus was clinically insane and genuinely believed he was God he would have allowed himself to die, thinking he’d be fine, but he would have just died. I don’t think that’s a reasonable explanation, not least because the body of someone as historically significant as Jesus would surely have quickly become a shrine.
If Jesus had intentionally lied about being God and had somehow staged the whole thing then he’d have either had to get the Roman soldiers in on the plan or his disciples, neither of which makes sense – the soldiers faced the death penalty for not doing their job properly, and the disciples were willing to die for their lie. Well, I think that requires more faith than simply believing it’s true!
I think it was C.S. Lewis that said that if everything else is impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be true. I can’t think of any explanation for the evidence that works but am happy for you to suggest one.
In terms of what makes Christianity different, I’ve already said this: every religion uses some form of works righteousness: do enough good things/avoid doing enough bad things and you’ll get to heaven/reach nirvana/be reincarnated into something better. Christianity is completely different. Faith in Jesus is sufficient to guarantee your eternal destiny – it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or not done, because Jesus has done it all already! ‘It is finished!’ Ask any Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Bahai, or whoever whether they know for certain what will happen when they die and they’ll say something along the lines of ‘Well, I hope…’ but for Christians, our hope is sure! My eternity is secure in Christ’s life, death and resurrection.
So Pascal’s wager works perfectly for Christianity but not for any other religion; if you don’t believe it means everything, and if you believe it means everything. That’s not true for any other faith, whether that’s faith in the supernatural or only in the natural.
A book written two thousand years ago is not tangible evidence. That like saying that the book written in the 60′s by Hubbard is evidence of scientology. How do you refute the evidence in favour of scientology?
Re answer to whether God can be met. Tell me where in the bible it says that there is a trinity.
Again, you don’t seem to have a grasp on different types of Christians. Take Calvinism as an example. Access to heaven is decided at the moment that the universe was conceived, and nothing that you can do in your lifetime can change this. If you go into heaven, it is because you are elect. That is it. They have some fluff about elect tending to do good deeds, but their fundamental belief is that there is nothing that you can do if you are not elect. I don’t understand how one so committed to Christianity does not know the difference between different denominations. Your reply of ‘but they are the same really’ is nonsense. They are not the same. Some of them are nothing like each other. Your sect of Christianity has nothing unique to it except its history. No unique argument. Having a book is not unique. Having miracles that happen sometimes, but cannot be predicted is not unique. Having lots of people who believe in it is not unique. I’m struggling to find anything here other than it is an established institution with a definite hierarchy, and there is an individual payoff for climbing up the ladder. That is fine, since that is how my field is. And like you, some scientists seem to argue that science is divine. I see little difference between your argument or Dawkins argument against religion, except that his seem to be slightly better researched.
I agree, a 2,000 year-old book is not evidence. But consider this:
1. If the Bible is the infallible Word of God then it is evidence on its own.
2. The Bible is not a 2,000 year-old book, it’s a library of 66 books written by many different authors from many different backgrounds, all of whom agree – we have four eyewitness testimonies of Jesus’ life which are different yet agree. Now we’re starting to get somewhere.
3. All archaeological discoveries have simply confirmed that what the Bible says is true.
4. Non-Christian accounts written at the same time as the Bible all agree with the ‘natural’ facts presented there (as opposed to the supernatural elements).
There are many other factors which make the Bible tangible evidence. Because of your presuppositions I’m confident you’ll simply deny the statements above and any others, but your faith doesn’t stop them being true.
Re: the Trinity. Well, let’s use the whole Bible (the Old Testament [OT] was written before Jesus was born, the New Testament [NT] was written after) and start from the fact that Christians believe that there is one God and that God is perfectly united with himself:
‘the LORD is God; there is no other besides him.’ (OT: Deuteronomy 4:35)
‘Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.’ (NT: Galatians 3:20)
Thousands of years before Jesus is born God talks about having a Son:
‘Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.’ (OT: Psalm 2:12)
And let’s add to that the fact that God refers to the Spirit in the third person:
‘So the Lord said to Moses, “Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the Spirit, and lay your hand on him.’ (OT: Numbers 27:18)
Jesus comes along claiming to have direct access to God, who he calls the Father, and then talks about the Spirit in the third person:
‘And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth,’ (NT: John 14:16-17)
He tells his disciples to ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (NT: Matthew 28:19). At Jesus’ baptism the Trinity is on full display: ‘when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”’ (NT: Matthew 3:16-17)
There are tonnes of other Bible references I could use, but I think these are pretty clear.
Re: denominations. I think you need to realise that Christianity is not a list of beliefs you sign up to, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus. Yes, Calvinists believe that Christians are God’s elect while Arminians believe that we all have free will and therefore choose to become Christians, but neither will say that the others are not Christians. Both Calvinists and Arminians agree that they are saved by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone. Both Calvinists and Arminians would agree that you would be saved if you put your faith in Christ.
I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about in terms of ‘individual payoff for climbing up the ladder’ so please clarify. If you mean what I think you mean then I’d point you toward the biblical example of the criminal who died on the cross next to Jesus; he’d committed a crime serious enough to warrant the death penalty (and crucifixion at that) yet Jesus’ reply to him was ‘today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke 23:43) A cast-iron guarantee when all he’d done was say that he believed Jesus was the Son of God! Who cares about denominational differences when all that matters is a relationship with Jesus? This guy wouldn’t have said he was a Calvinist, Arminian, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, or whatever, he just knew Jesus.
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