Christian Theological/Philosophical Book Club discussion

Many of us have different notions of what "faith" means.

Christians can say: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752...

But I think this guy nails it in a less slippery, less smokescreeny way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4WU...

And just for the heck of it:
https://www.facebook.com/thescottisha...

(That last one was just for you Rod.)

I like that last one. Because what you miss Stuart is that biblical faith is knowledge, heart knowledge.

Christians are witnesses of an experience, an encounter with God. We all treasure the moments when God touched our lives with His love.

Knowledge is when you can demonstrate independently verifiable evidence that, for example as Ned has done, the biblical Hittites existed.

Faith is when you cannot demonstrate independently verifiable evidence that the biblical Yahweh deity exists, or that Yahweh is "God" with a capital G - but you pretend that you can. or you dodge the issue through the numerous means we've seen here.

Hope is when you desire that Yahweh exists.

"Heart knowledge" is utter nonsense. Hearts pump blood. Faith and hope in talking serpents and virgin-born god-men do happen inside your head though.

I know that years ago I took a walk in the bush and climbed a rock.

Now could someone please provide independently verifiable evidence.

How sad that you have no heart. I hope you can remedy that.

Funny you should ask such a question as the podcast Unbelievable actually had that guy on to discuss the definition of faith a while back. They did a poll and found that Christians and atheists basically have different definitions of faith:
https://www.facebook.com/Unbelievable...

Who is right? I suspect it depends on where you are sitting.

I do think the emphasis on knowledge is wrong, and influenced by the modern philosophy period. Stuart, I know you hate philosophy, but bear with me :) I think with the onset of modern philosophy (Descartes to Kant) and modern science Western culture emphasized reason and rationality in a new way. So knowledge (independent, verifiable) became the most important thing. Christians bought into this and began to argue that you can have such knowledge of God. In other words, rather than questioning the definition of faith, we began to speak in such a way that faith was mere belief.

So, on a practical level, Christianity ends up being defined on belief. Person A believes (has faith) in God's existence, the Trinity, the resurrection and is thus a good Christian while Person B doubts such things...but Person A is a jerk while Person B is kind and loving.

I have come to see faith as much less concerned with knowledge or belief. When I say I have faith, there are certainly beliefs included but the beliefs exist as a part of a whole way of life. I see faith in the alcoholic who gives up drinking and is reconciled with his spouse and credits God for his strength, in the people who take time off work to do a fundraiser for the local womens in crisis center, in people who orient their lives so making as much money as possible is less important then caring for those around them. I see faith in a room full of people who would never all be together - conservatives and liberals, wealthy and borderline poor, english and spanish speakers - who are doing life together in community.

I recognize I haven't defined faith and maybe this all sounds like mumbo jumbo to Stuart. But, at least in my church community, we don't care whether you believe in a talking serpent or not. I guess, at base level, faith is recognizing you need help, that you cannot do life on your own strength, and you find that help in both God (vertically) and in other people (horizontally). As Christians, we see God clearest in the person of Jesus, so we begin and end with his teaching (again, couldn't care less about the talking serpent).

OK, Joshua, I will bite on this one. There is no need to seek verifiable proof that you walked anywhere because no one is being asked to buy into an entire worldview and morality system on the basis of where you walked. No one is banning gay marriage or changing science curriculums based on your hiking habits. We can believe you, or not believe, on the basis of whatever trust you have earned in this forum, but if we get it wrong there is no real consequence.

Also, people walk and climb things every day. You are not asking us to believe in something miraculous or supernatural here, so, um, who needs evidence? I will take your word for it.

If we did need evidence, though, we could ask when and where you walked and then seek satellite photos, witnesses, footprints, DNA traces, etc., because if you were there you may well have left verifiable, objective evidence.

David wrote: "Funny you should ask such a question as the podcast Unbelievable actually had that guy on to discuss the definition of faith a while back. They did a poll and found that Christians and atheists ba..."

That was a nice post.

My basic viewpoint on faith is outlined in the Socratic dialogue here.

If anything in my statements below seems obscure, it will have been explained in that linked passage that you probably won't have read. Apologies for the inconvenience. Sometimes it's worth sticking to one's best expression of a concept rather than trying to water or boil it down.


Boghossian says:

"People of faith are viewed as good people. This is not true. Faith has nothing to do with being moral."

Here, he's wrong. Religious faith, whether right or wrong, is isomorphic with faith in other people whom we love and 'believe in.' People who can bootstrap a self-fulfilling prophecy of amity are good people. That doesn't make them always right. The person they proffer confidence to may turn out to be a scoundrel. The deity they proffer faith in may be factitious. But these people are relationship builders and community builders. Their goal is intrinsically connected to morality.

Morality is the discipline of building good, life-sustaining mutual self-fulfilling prophecies with other people. It's based on the faith that those other people are in some way worth being good for. Without that faith, the other people may seem to be manipulable objects.


Boghossian says:

"My talk begins the process of creating a counter-cultural tide against the wedding of faith with morality."

This proclamation of a 'cultural tide' reveals that Boghossian's speech is political rather than academic. His citation of a cultural swell is a good example of the crudest type of political self-fulfilling prophecy tactic, a prior statement of crowd support. If Boghossian were content to be a philosopher, he could say that "My talk begins the process of taking apart the idea that there is a wedding of faith with morality." But no - he has to appeal for crowd support as part of his credibility. He's an atheist politician.


Boghossian says:

"I've argued one should abandon faith and replace it with reason."

Firstly, faith IS reason. It is a reasoning process about a self-fulfilling prophecy: I proffer love to you because I posit that you (do, would or could) proffer love to me. Secondly, reason has no traction other than faith to make you extend your confidence of love to another person who will always remain an essentially unknown quantity (since you will never be a mind reader).

Boghossian says:

"The current definition of faith is 'belief without evidence'"

'Belief' is an inadequate description of the profferal of a positive approphetic (self-fulfilling prophecy-related) bootstrap. If I extend love to a stranger and a tentative confidence that he or she will mean well by me, that is not a belief, in the sense of an absolute grant of credibility. Likewise, if I proffer credibility to a loving God based on what I see in scripture, community, and internal revelations about spiritual blessings in my own life, that is not a 'belief' in the sense of having the feeling that I control the evidence for God's existence. On the other hand, I frankly believe in evolution, in part because there is abundant evidence for it, and in part because, where the evidence gives out, inference supports it strongly. That's a valid belief, but in no way a faith. I can't make a self-fulfilling prophecy compact of faith with evolution because it is not a lectic (choosing, free-willed, innately unpredictable) agent.


Boghossian says:

My definition of faith is 'pretending to know things you don't know.'

No pretending to know things is involved in faith. Because approphetic bootstrapping is not something we can express in conventional terms that everyone understands, though, people may take verbal short-cuts about faith that sound like claims to know things they don't know. To uphold that God truly exists and loves isn't the same as claiming to 'know' that in the usual, evidence-controlling sense - but the difference is likely to be too subtle for everyday language. The 'knowledge' of faith involves a bootstrapping process, while defensible claims of worldly knowledge are most often based on reproducible evidence.

Boghossian says:

"It's definitive of faith that these are cases of pretending."

Not quite. Consider this debate: 'How do you know that your spouse really means well by you?' 'I have faith that he/she does.' 'Then you are only pretending.' 'No, my friend, not to any greater extent than YOU are pretending with the negativism of that statement.'

This last exchange, in fact, is isomorphic with all of my exchanges with our poster Stuart.

Boghossian defines hope as:

"Wanting something to happen, but knowing there's a chance it might not happen."

Hope is a process that relates to the future. It is not the same as according a person or a religious tenet (a word literally meaning a hold-on) with a positive bootstrap profferal. The positive bootstrap profferal is a working-decision about an existing state. Since those in whom we have faith are dynamic, we can certainly hope that the reciprocal good faith we accord them will extend into the future. But the existence of that meaningful reciprocity is not just a conjecture about a felicitous future, that is, not just a hope.

When I say, "my spouse is a good man who loves me," that is a faith-based knowledge claim, not merely a hope. It isn't an assertion I can prove and I'm aware any evidence I produce for it can be adversely reinterpreted along the lines of 'he's just buttering you up because he's using you.' It's a classic statement of faith and I stand by it even though I know that Hume's fallacy of induction applies to it at every moment.

*****************************************************


Speaking of lectical tactics, one of the notable tactics of power is called 'reinitiation.' I noticed this tactic first during the Anita Bryant campaigns. Speakers would assert that gays were not happy, and, in debates, hear out all manner of evidence to the contrary. At the end, they would simply begin again with 'gays are not happy' as if nothing had transpired at all.

Reinitiation, used this way, is a kind of bear-baiting. It isn't actually discussion. Serious debaters, people genuinely interested in ideas and discussion, need to limit the amount of time they spend responding to someone practicing blank-slate reinitiation repeatedly.

(post edited May 21)

I didn't receive any response here, maybe because the discussion had already tapered by the time I saw this thread.

Therefore, I set up a Twitter account and tweeted the link to Peter Boghossian himself: https://twitter.com/MarrikRajjarsen/s...

He hasn't yet responded.

I suspect I'm too low on the poobah totem pole and use too many unfamiliar words to immediately seem to be a serious contender.

I predict it will be at least ten years before he discovers that his undoing was posted here.

Steve wrote,

If we did need evidence, though, we could ask when and where you walked and then seek satellite photos, witnesses, footprints, DNA traces, etc., because if you are there you may well have left verifiable, objective evidence.


You are quite right of course. Previously I have posted that I know doctors who document the miracles that occur in some of our churches. Would that be independently verifiable?

This is why I say that Christians are witnesses. Like the early apostles were witnesses of the resurrection Christians continue to witness the work of the Holy Spirit.

With regards to faith. You may note in scripture the apostle John never uses the word faith.

He speaks of knowing.

Joshua wrote: "Steve wrote,

If we did need evidence, though, we could ask when and where you walked and then seek satellite photos, witnesses, footprints, DNA traces, etc., because if you are there you may well ..."

If they show their work and fakery can be ruled out, perhaps.

Joshua wrote: "Steve wrote,

If we did need evidence, though, we could ask when and where you walked and then seek satellite photos, witnesses, footprints, DNA traces, etc., because if you are there you may well ..."

To be independently verifiable, a miracle would have to be supported by evidence that anyone without skin in the game can check and verify, and that can't be explained by some non-miraculous way. Having a doctor say "Yep, that was a miracle, all right" would be of no evidentiary value without such supporting evidence.

To be independently verifiable, a miracle would have to be supported by evidence that anyone without skin in the game can check and verify, and that can't be explained by some non-miraculous way. Having a doctor say "Yep, that was a miracle, all right" would be of no evidentiary value without such supporting evidence.

Quite agree.

And even if a miracle were to have occurred in one's local church, you would still need to prove that it was Jesus or the Holy Ghost behind the miracle - and not, say, the Buddha helping you out anyway because you're nice guys who don't know any better.

Or if a bunch of folks claimed their Leader turned water into wine at a knees-up, you'd really want more than just the say-so of the faithful followers to be sure, before you became all overcome with faith and devotion yourself and started handing over the first tenth of your income to the people who make their living out of these fables.

I think we need to accept that it's a stated corollary of faith that spiritual discernment will be required to evaluate and apply it.

To have such a dramatic foil for this reality is really a godsend.

haha

Mark wrote: "I think we need to accept that it's a stated corollary of faith that spiritual discernment will be required to evaluate and apply it.

To have such a dramatic foil for this reality is really a go..."

How does one differentiate between "spiritual discernment" and "wishful thinking?"

Spiritual discernment (meta-level).

But so that there not be a dangerous lack of external standards:

"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. "You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? "So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit."

That still seems woozily potentially unobjective, but at some point in life, you're going to have to make some arbitration of what's good and bad, supportable and insupportable. What standard do you recommend?

If it's adept, it should apply to all.

Mark wrote: "Spiritual discernment (meta-level).

But so that there not be a dangerous lack of external standards:

"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenou..."

I recommend the standards of science, logic, reason and faith buoyed by experience.

Most governments have a judicial system based on witnesses. Would you apply the same logic to the law courts?

Or is it just that the claims seem in-credible?

There is a reason Jesus didn't waste time trying to prove things. There are witnesses everywhere.

Joshua wrote: "Most governments have a judicial system based on witnesses. Would you apply the same logic to the law courts?

Or is it just that the claims seem in-credible?

There is a reason Jesus didn't waste ..."

Joshua: I hope that if I claimed to have seen a dragon fly over my house this morning, you would decide you needed more evidence than that. And I hope if I had a dozen other witnesses, you still would need more evidence -- because there is no evidence at all that dragons live in our world, and people have been known to lie, or to delude themselves, or to delude one another. When it comes to Biblical miracles, we need more than a handful of accounts written well after the events depicted by people who have vested interest in the story. If someone believes in the Biblical miracles, I am fine with that. But if they think they can make a strong evidentiary case for their veracity ... um, they're going to need more.

When the events claimed are outside human experience, you really need to bring it.

you demonstrate a point I have made before, belief governs reason.

Your case is based on the premise that these things are outside of human experience. Your scenario displays your prejudice.

To me supernatural occurrences are not unusual, if you had your own experience then witnesses would be sufficient since your disbelief would no longer preclude the possibilities.

We testify what we have seen and heard, but who has believed our report? I don't really need to bring it. If you seek Him, you will find Him.

I recommend the standards of science, logic, reason and faith buoyed by experience.

As do I. But can you express how any of these standards arbitrate the good from the bad, the supportive from the destructive?

If something is determined to be good, science can establish whether it is happening or not. I work in science; we never consider how our fungal biosystematics can be used to distinguish good from evil. If you have any actual experience of determining good -- I mean, determining what is good -- through the practice of science, I'd love to hear about it. Logic of the mathematical kind has no symbol for good or bad that I am aware of. I don't recall anything from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I confess was the last bit of mathematical logic I read diligently. I remember Aristotle citing the good numerous times, but I don't recall a definition. What you have in mind as 'reason,' above and beyond science and logic, isn't immediately clear.

A student of self-fulfilling prophecy (approphecy) cycles might hazard that the good is that which leads to the furtherance and optimization of felicitous approphecies among people (or 'virtuous cycles' as some professionals call them). Enjoining goodwill but checking for default on that good will; promoting a sustaining balanced diet of good rather than the mere fast food of instantaneous pleasure, when the latter comes only at the expense of falling short of some moderately attainable utilitarian harmony. With allowance made for a splay of diversity so that people can exercise their creativity on their own behalves and on behalf of all others who can be enjoined as potentially cooperative.

Still, all those quickly knocked-off ideas are essentially straight out of the gospels, so judicious commitment to them might be a matter of spiritual discernment.

Joshua wrote: "you demonstrate a point I have made before, belief governs reason.

Your case is based on the premise that these things are outside of human experience. Your scenario displays your prejudice.

To m..."

These things are outside human experience as far as we know, Joshua. That's why they are considered miracles. No prejudice here, sir. I'd like to believe in whatever is true, and I am comfortable with leaps of faith. But I KNOW I am making leaps of faith, and I won't pretend that weak evidence is giving me any certainty.

Mark wrote: "I recommend the standards of science, logic, reason and faith buoyed by experience.

As do I. But can you express how any of these standards arbitrate the good from the bad, the supportive from ..."

Hmmmm ... determining good through the practice of science. I will have to ponder that. But in critiquing my comment, you made no reference to one of my pillars, faith guided by experience. That probably is a better guide to what is good than science, in my opinion.

And I am still unclear as to how one can distinguish "spiritual discernment" from "wishful thinking" or even from simply being wrong.

Joshua wrote: "you demonstrate a point I have made before, belief governs reason.

Your case is based on the premise that these things are outside of human experience. Your scenario displays your prejudice.

To m..."
If supernatural occurrences are not unusual, I think you and I must disagree as to the definitions of "supernatural" and "unusual."

As Einstein said

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle"

Joshua wrote: "As Einstein said

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle""

That's a fine quote, but it is useless in terms of determining what constitutes objective evidence. I rather like thinking of everything as a miracle, but that does not mean that things that didn't happen, um, happened, or that all claims are therefore true.

Good luck on getting a straight answer here Steve.

Your points and questions are always simple, straightforward and clear.

I find that the closer certain people are to "God" the less you can trust them to be honest with you when it comes to their "faith".

Smokescreens, deflections, clichés and "philosophy" are popular however, when it comes to avoiding admitting you don't have a shred of independently verifiable evidence to back up a single magical/miracle/supernatural claim you are now trying to sweep under the altar because you too recognise it's just pretend.

Stuart wrote: "Good luck on getting a straight answer here Steve.

Your points and questions are always simple, straightforward and clear.

I find that the closer certain people are to "God" the less you can trus..."

We shall see. I won't accuse anyone here of dishonesty, though; it is possible to be wrong without being purposefully dishonest.

For Joshua:

https://www.facebook.com/unitedhumani...

Stuart wrote: "For Joshua:

https://www.facebook.com/unitedhumani..."

That seems to be a comprehensive list.

For Stuart.

You speak as though the scriptures are scientific documents. Jacob saw a ladder to heaven, but it would be a misunderstanding to assume there is a literal angel ladder in Israel.

The scriptures are the testimony of the ancients and as I see it we are all learning together.

Why should the bible disprove science? I think the point is redundant. I like to hold them together, there is more to life than science.

Joshua wrote: "For Stuart.

You speak as though the scriptures are scientific documents. Jacob saw a ladder to heaven, but it would be a misunderstanding to assume there is a literal angel ladder in Israel.

The ..."

You really don't read my stuff if you think I speak as though the Jewish mythology, allegory and propaganda were "scientific documents" - I would be the last person under the dome of the biblical Heaven to even think for a moment that they were (FFS).

And now you're saying there wasn't a real Angel Ladder - even though the Word of Your God said there was ...?

Maybe Yahweh siring Jesus on a human virgin wasn't literal either?

Maybe there wasn't a literal flood.

Maybe a bush didn't literally catch fire and talk to Moses.

Maybe Jesus didn't literally come back to life.

Maybe there wasn't even a literal god-man Jesus - maybe he was just a fictional character in political propaganda. You know, the way writers mingle fictional characters in with independently verifiable historical Herod and Pilate type characters when they write historical novels.

And with the ever-growing list of non-literal things true Christians find in their Bibles these days, the closer they come to turning into honest atheists.

I was just answering the reference to scientific claims in your previous post is all.

scripture is a mix of allegory and history, with no official commentary to say what's what. fun huh..

Joshua wrote: "I was just answering the reference to scientific claims in your previous post is all.

scripture is a mix of allegory and history, with no official commentary to say what's what. fun huh.."

Joshua: I agree, the Bible is a mix of allegory and history (I would add mythology as well), with no official commentary to help us sort it out. Given your point, how then can you KNOW the miracles depicted happened? What tools can you use to determine what REALLY happened? Or are you CHOOSING to believe some things even though you know you can't prove they happened? If your knowledge is based on experience, that's fine as long as you realize YOUR experience can't be OBJECTIVE evidence for somebody else -- and therefore someone else who has not had your experiences can be forgiven for doubting.

You have just illustrated what I see as a big problem with interactions between theists and atheists. Theists often speak of Biblical miracles as if they are proven facts, then get upset when asked for evidence. They offer inadequate evidence, then fall back on vague phrases such as "heart knowledge" or "spiritual discernment" when their attempts at evidence are found to be lacking. This is sometimes paired with accusations against the atheists, for instance, claiming that they have some prejudice against seeing the truth (as you did with me in this conversation). Other accusations include such bunk as saying atheists have no reason to be moral, have no foundation for determining right and wrong, just want to party and rape all the time without being held accountable, hate God, etc.

Theists often also go the extra mile of insisting we ignore science they don't like (consider your incredibly low standard as to what constitutes evidence of a Biblical miracle, compared with your refusal to accept the idea of human evolution despite decades of rock-solid evidence and the agreement of the vast majority of scientists). Also consider that some theists would like to deny rights to homosexuals or others on the basis of what they read in your mix of allegory and history.

Weighing all that, I think it becomes vitally important to realize A) none of us has all the answers and B) going about and trashing others because they believe differently when it comes to theology is a dick move.


Yes, some of us make leaps of faith. Yes, some of us believe things we can't prove. That is not really a problem as long as we aren't trying to screw up science education or trying to enshrine our unproven beliefs into the law to deny rights to others or insisting that those who believe differently are somehow idiots or lacking in discernment.

I pray, I believe in the possibility of miracles and divinity and in a universe full of things we may never understand -- but that does not mean I have to buy every claim out there, it does not mean I am a dick for being skeptical and asking for evidence, and it does not mean I need to pity an atheist who does not want to follow me in my leaps of faith. I totally understand why someone would dismiss my leaps of faith.


I hope all that made sense. I have to go do some errands, so I won't be back here for a while.

Joshua wrote: "Most governments have a judicial system based on witnesses. Would you apply the same logic to the law courts?

Or is it just that the claims seem in-credible?

There is a reason Jesus didn't waste ..."

Most governments have judicial systems that use witnesses -- witnesses who can be cross-examined, questioned about weak spots in their stories, have their backgrounds examined, etc. Judges and juries can see them and talk to them and weigh their testimony against physical evidence and get a handle on whether to trust them or now. We can't do ANY of that with the purported witnesses to Biblical miracles. All we have is the fact that someone wrote that there were witnesses. That would not fly in a courtroom.

Steve said: But in critiquing my comment, you made no reference to one of my pillars, faith guided by experience. That probably is a better guide to what is good than science, in my opinion.

I didn't mention that because I think it's our common ground.

And I am still unclear as to how one can distinguish "spiritual discernment" from "wishful thinking" or even from simply being wrong.

I should have asked you to clarify whether you meant "how spiritual discernment can be distinguished from wishful thinking" by an outside observer evaluating someone's claims, or introspectively as one reviews one's own mental content on a question.

The outside observer, if he or she doesn't claim access to spiritual discernment, should fall back upon the 'by their fruits you shall know them.' This may require sophistication - i.e., to be able to satisfy oneself that the Lutheran church is superior to the Branch Davidians - but it is not impossible to judge that some types of politics are despotic and destructive and others are more life-sustaining. We have to make these choices as voters, also, in democratic states, so we can handle this process, including the risk of getting our evaluations wrong some of the time.

Internally, an instance of spiritual discernment is an interaction with the holy spirit, and there's a state similar to inspiration about it, experienced differently by different people. States of inspiration are not by any means universally reliable, but let's look at the purely artistic versions. The fact is that some inspirations lead to the production of very high quality thoughts and works, 'great' novels and the like, whereas others may be underdeveloped or juvenile, distorted in various ways, or, in people with mental health problems or drug influences, completely delusional. One simply has to live with the knowledge that some inspirations are the great ones, and that those who strive to produce great art may learn to discern the true inspirations from the deformed. Likewise with spiritual discernment - though the holy spirit is an independent agent, one must recognize seir intimations as best one can. If one doesn't accept God, then one probably precludes or repels all such contact, so the point becomes moot.

It sounds all very elitist or otherwise self-gratifying, but actually, spiritual discernment can be a pain. One winds up with true knowledge that one cannot justify having, and simply has to watch painful consequences unfold as one's counsel is logically ignored. For example, via a process that felt to me like spiritual discernment, I could see vividly in 1982 that AIDS could only be caused by what we now call a retrovirus, and that vaccines and operative native immunity were extremely unlikely. You can't believe the shaming I got at one university party when a vaccine researcher heard me tell people that there would not be an AIDS vaccine in the next few decades, and maybe never. She went through all the processes of how antigens could be unmasked, and you name it. What could I say? I'm not an immunologist - she had the science on her side. And yet, over 30 years later, here we are.

Mark wrote: "Steve said: But in critiquing my comment, you made no reference to one of my pillars, faith guided by experience. That probably is a better guide to what is good than science, in my opinion.

I did..."

I did mean the introspective version of distinguishing discernment from wishful thinking, but I appreciate you taking time to address such from the vantage of an outside observer as well. Thanks.

Mark wrote

For example, via a process that felt to me like spiritual discernment, I could see vividly in 1982 that AIDS could only be caused by what we now call a retrovirus, and that vaccines and operative native immunity were extremely unlikely

that's fascinating

Steve wrote

If your knowledge is based on experience, that's fine as long as you realize YOUR experience can't be OBJECTIVE evidence for somebody else

quite right.


In my experience there are people everywhere who have experienced miraculous things. The work of the Holy Spirit testifies to Jesus Christ. It seems most of our society is biased toward dismissing such events, the witnesses I speak of are the people around us.

Christians are witnesses for those who have not yet had their own experience. As Jesus said "be careful how you hear, to him who has more will be given, to him who does not have even what he has will be taken away."

He is a God who hides himself. To the seeker he can be found.

I apologize for the wordiness of what is about to come, because I've actually been reading about beliefs lately; specifically, Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain and Michael McGuire's Believing. (I assume by "faith" we include "beliefs," but correct me if I'm off!) It seems to me that beliefs are simply the way we explain gaps in our knowledge. We all walk around acting on (and forming) intricate, subconscious or conscious beliefs - yes, even skeptics. There are different types of beliefs, however, and they should all be approached differently. One group that I will use as on one end of the belief spectrum are scientific beliefs. Shermer outlines the history of our understanding of the universe and how when we were limited in how far we could see and how much we could measure, our explanation was colored with more beliefs than scientific fact to fill in the gaps and create a cohesive picture of what all that stuff was and how it was arranged. Because we now have the ability to improve our understanding of the universe (so excited for the TMT project on Mauna Kea to move forward!), we continue to replace now-unnecessary beliefs with discovered fact. That means that either our beliefs are confirmed and we hold onto them, or they are contradicted and we adjust them accordingly. God gave us access to this universe and big, beautiful brains to analyze it - surely He means for us to use them.

The kind of belief on the other end of the spectrum (the one that is probably the real subject of this thread) is spiritual belief, or belief about the supernatural - aka, what we cannot measure. There are certainly ways to evaluate our religions' historical claims (and they should be held up to the same measures or standards as our scientific beliefs above), but the existence of Heaven or even the existence of God can never be proven here because by nature they are beyond what we can measure. So we form beliefs about them, believing they do exist, that they do not exist, that they have quality x or require y. We find reasons for believing, and while I absolutely think reason and logic help us locate truths (even if we can't know with 100% certainty that those claims are true), ultimately beliefs fill in the gaps of what we know and what is possible to know until we have access to the thing itself. When we are presented with newly-discovered facts that fill in gaps, beliefs should be adjusted accordingly.

I believe in Heaven, and I believe that when we are in Heaven we will no longer believe at all because we will have Truth itself.


Wow, that was even more long-winded than I expected.

Jana L. wrote: "I apologize for the wordiness of what is about to come, because I've actually been reading about beliefs lately; specifically, Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain and Michael McGuire's Believing...."

Don't apologize for long posts. You certainly aren't the only person around here guilty of that, and these topics and thoughts require some room to develop.

I think your post was quite excellent, and I love meeting people who are able to handle both science and spirituality.

Mark wrote: "Steve said: But in critiquing my comment, you made no reference to one of my pillars, faith guided by experience. That probably is a better guide to what is good than science, in my opinion.

I did..."

Oh, and I agree with your assessment of our common ground.

Thanks, Steve.

Jana, the literature you've got into there is the kind of thing that says to me that our society is still profoundly pre-lectical in how it looks at its own thinking.

I have to explain that the word 'lectical' is a coinage of mine, deriving from a Greek word associated with choice. Part of the systematic analysis of our choices is the consideration of two types of self-fulfilling prophecy: 'material,' where our statements about reality cause it to materially change form over time (for example, when a new president says 'Business can now safely prosper in our country' and his attitude causes business confidence to rise, causing business, indeed, to prosper) and 'epistemic,' where our prior interpretations of reality deform our subsequent interpretations (for example, a notion that 'ethnic group X members are lazy and disorganized' causes us to misinterpret most normal actions done by members of that group as less competent than they really are).

Your summary of beliefs mainly relates to static beliefs interpreting observable reality, either phenomena considered without their time dimension (e.g., the cat lineage 'tigers' seen as tigers and not as an evolving lineage that may someday still exist but no longer contain tigers) or phenomena with their time dimension seen stereotypically, such as 'volcanic eruptions' - things that are seen as processes with a time dimension, but as typically repeating types of processes.

What's missing is all the beliefs that actually restructure the reality they pertain to, the self-fulfilling prophecy beliefs. These beliefs tend to take the world via unpredictable pathways to places that, sometimes, can scarcely be anticipated. They are appropriate to our forum because Jesus, so far, has been the only great exponent of self-fulfilling prophecy. Joshua, in fact, just quoted his most profound statement about them: " to him who has more will be given, to him who does not have even what he has will be taken away." Faith in a loved one, which can be seen as a belief in the person's good will and goodness, tends to self-reinforce itself as a reality, if the loved one indeed has and fulfills the potential to respond to love with love. Faith in God also is not simply a matter of interpreting God in the same framework as one understands, for example, stellar constellations, but also depends on enjoining good will and goodness to God, notwithstanding lingering questions that may be left by jarring biblical texts here and there, and being open to the ongoing possibility that happenings that seem to be dispensations of grace truly are answering acts of God - notwithstanding the universe's business-as-usual producing earthquakes, airplane crashes, divorces and despots as part of the run of phenomena.

You worried about being long-winded. Talking about self-reinforcing systems makes one convoluted, which is an even worse problem. That's because the logic involved is fundamentally recursive, always represented in popular speech by spiralling concepts like 'spin' and 'vicious cycle/circle' and 'being on a roll.' R.D Laing wrote his masterpiece Knots about some of these spirals in human psychology.

You simply can't have belief without walking through these whirlpools, the 'snakes and ladders' of upward spin and downward spin, the beliefs that make reality change and that elucidate realities (like love) that otherwise might never be seen to manifest.

This dizzying logic needs to be integrated into civilization. The gospels are a good place to begin studying it.

If you can understand that 'if salt shall lose its savour, what can restore it?' is a question about epistemic self-fulfilling prophecy, then you're a top student of this topic. The savour of the salt is an optional belief that makes the salt salt.

Mark wrote: "Thanks, Steve.

Jana, the literature you've got into there is the kind of thing that says to me that our society is still profoundly pre-lectical in how it looks at its own thinking.

I have to ..."

Hi Mark,

Interesting! What I read you saying (and correct me if I'm wrong!) is that current conversations about beliefs fail to take into account time and how things change over time - what was true at time x may not be true at time y. Did I interpret your comments correctly? Of course, your main point is the ever-interesting idea of "self-fulfilling prophecy" and our agency in "making" some beliefs true.

I definitely agree that we are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Your example about stereotyping a culture or race is apt, as if we see a demographic as "lazy" and treat them as such through interpersonal, political and social allowances/demands, not only may they come to exhibit what we interpret as laziness purely because of situational or circumstantial forces, but we choose to see only those actions that confirm what we have already decided to believe about that group. However, I disagree that the original belief that that demographic is lazy can be considered true even if that demographic exhibits laziness. When anyone makes a claim like that, they are asserting something inherent to the group. Just because a demographic acts in seemingly lazy ways because of circumstances in which they may have no or little choice but to be lazy (or in which they lack the same incentives given to other groups to be decidedly not-lazy), it does not prove that they are inherently lazy like the original belief claims. It proves an entirely different point about societal expectations and opportunities and how marginalized groups work/behave within those confines.

Your example of how the president's claim of nearing economic prosperity can help bring about economic prosperity doesn't seem to me to be a compelling example of belief bringing about change. Maybe the president believes that economic prosperity is coming and maybe a public statement to that effect helps bring it about. However, you seem to assume that the president knows all of the unknown variables affecting economic prosperity, or that because he lucked into a situation in which none of those variables negatively affected economic prosperity (like, for an extreme example, the terrorist attack on 9/11) that his belief made his belief true. Yes, his belief was true, but it was not true because his stating the belief made it true. His belief was true because of the chain of events that ended up making his belief true. His belief and his statement of his belief were links in that chain of events, but there are far too many other links in the complete causal chain for us to say that the president made it so.

Now, whether the president's belief was always true or whether it was made true - the question of how time fits into truth and whether or not determinism is true - is a slightly different question. Maybe that's part of what you're getting at.

I definitely agree with you that understanding of beliefs - of how, why and what we believe - is generally poor. There are many intricacies, like the ones you mentioned, that get overlooked because the intricacies may be uncomfortable or difficult.

Oops, there I went, being long-winded again. :-) (But hopefully not too convoluted!)

FAITH: Pretending to know things you don't know.

BELIEF: Accepting things you don't know.

It's quite simple really.

I BELIEVE Jesus created the universe.

I accond (accept conditionally) the Big Bang Theory.

I have FAITH that Jesus can cure my cancer.

I have independently verifiable evidence that surgery can successfully remove cancer.

I BELIEVE Homo sapiens were created from mud and a rib by Jesus' father, the Jewish deity Yahweh in 4004 BCE.

We know the evolutionary alternatives ....

I have FAITH Jesus will rapture me and take me to Heaven when he returns to dissolve the world in ashes.

And so forth.

I think we all know why faith communities will not stay focussed on simple, straightforward, down-to-earth examples and disappear off into all sorts of protracted distractions.

I like to keep things frank and simple.

And honest.

FAITH: being persuaded.

that's actually what the word means, if you look it up.

In the interest of honesty accurate history and correct definition of words would help.

Well Stuart, I can't say for certain the motives of others on this thread (though they all seem sincere), but I am keeping things frank and honest. I think belief and faith are complex, however, so sometimes discussions about them require complexity. I really enjoy the twists and turns and explorations - I'm sorry it is not your cup of tea.

Hi Jana - I too enjoy twists and turns and explorations - that's why I'm a theologist.

Faith, belief, hope and so forth can indeed be complex.

What I find in many forums, however, is that complexity (or feigned complexity in the form of "philosophy", for example) is nothing more than yet another smokescreen to divert and dodge away from honestly admitting that there is not a squeak of independently verifiable evidence to back up, for example, the belief that Jesus created the universe, or faith that he's going to rapture Christians up to Heaven (I saw you believe in Heaven).

(Biblically speaking, Heaven is the dome of air we now live in under the hard as a mirror canopy Jesus opened up in the water of the biblical universe in the first creation myth. Not so honest in my book Christians, have distorted the KJV to cover this up.)

Christian beliefs are very simple - we learn then in Sunday school, and they were taught to the illiterate.

Today, Christians sieve and sanitise, and dilute and distort and discard many of the simple Christian beliefs we used to have, and still call themselves true Christians - and I've caught a number of them out here doing just that.

I say they are simply part-time atheists who pick and choose the bits of the biblical writings they like and don't like to believe - and I say they're knowingly dishonest about it.

A number of so-called Christians I've connected with on this site are far from frank and far from honest in my view.

It's a very simple matter to focus on just one belief - Jesus as the son of Yahweh for example - and stay focused on it (I know how evil the atheist Stalin was) and present the evidence you do have. Or admit there is nothing outside the writings of his followers.

But no one ever presents.

And no one ever admits.

I present the fact that I have no evidence for Jesus being the son of Yahweh.

If I did have evidence that Jesus was the son of Yahweh, I would admit to it - and not keep admissions hidden behind a bloviated smokescreen because I'm heavily invested and trapped in an all-versions-of-god-are-make-believe belief system and community from which I can't escape without severe social consequences that I don't want to face.

Stuart,

In a court of law evidence is based on witnesses. You can't do science experiments to prove events. Forensics is a modern field but it's hard to do forensics on an event that happened over two thousand years ago.

The proof of events has always been witness. There are many witnesses to Jesus Christ, but since you think them liars what more can be done.