The previous post (by vjtorley) featured a video by a YouTube Christian apologist, IMBeggar, in which he attempts to defuse the problem of evil. It’s riddled with problems as you can see by reading the OP and the comments.
Out of curiosity, I visited IMBeggar’s YouTube channel and watched some of his other videos. One of them, titled “Why doesn’t God just show Himself?”, tackled the problem of divine hiddenness. It was even worse than the one that addressed the problem of evil. I was surprised to find that I disagreed with every major point.
The problem of divine hiddenness, in a nutshell, is this: God supposedly loves us and wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4). Salvation requires that we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior (Romans 10:9-10). To accept Jesus, you have to know about him and believe in him. God, being infinitely wise, knows the best way to get the message out and persuade people to become believers. Being omnipotent, he’s able to do it. Why then does he seem to botch it so badly? To me, the answer is obvious. God doesn’t exist, or at the very least he doesn’t have the characteristics attributed to him by Christians.
Perhaps he doesn’t want everyone to be saved. Perhaps he’s not smart enough to do a decent job of communicating with us. Perhaps he isn’t powerful enough to pull it off. Maybe he’s being thwarted by Satan, who is more powerful. Maybe the dog ate his homework. None of those reasons will appeal to Christians, because they all clash with the Christian view of God.
Thinking Christians are thus faced with the problem of justifying, to themselves and others, the fact that the all-powerful and omniscient Christian God does so poorly at this task, plus the fact that the evidence for his existence is so scant and unpersuasive. In other words, the job is to explain why he remains hidden from so many of us (hence the term “divine hiddenness”). In his video, IMBeggar (henceforth “Beggar”) attempts to spell this out for us. I address his main points below.
Could God simply reveal himself to everyone in all his glory?
Beggar says no, because he claims that we couldn’t withstand it. It would overwhelm us. He illustrates this in the video with a dramatic scene where there’s a blinding light in the sky, with people running around dazed and confused on the ground, screaming.
But if God is omnipotent he could easily modulate his appearance so that it didn’t overwhelm us, yet was spectacular enough to convince us of his existence. Or he could design humans with the ability to withstand the sight of him in his full glory.
Beggar is underestimating his omnipotent God’s abilities, which ironically is something Christians often do when searching for excuses for their deity’s behavior.
Couldn’t God reveal himself through “cosmic signs and wonders”?
Beggar says “These would probably work for a while, but let’s be honest – people are fickle, and after the 20th or 30th cosmic wonder we’d be like ‘Oh, good. The sun disappeared again as I’m driving to work. In the dark. Again.’” Once again, he’s underestimating the power of an omnipotent God. First, God could make the “cosmic wonders” impressive enough that he wouldn’t need 20 or 30 of them in a row in order to convince people of his existence. Or, if he did want to use a long series of cosmic wonders, he could arrange for each one to be more spectacular than the previous one, so that people would be rapt and waiting to see what would happen next. The whole world would be fascinated and everyone would be talking about it. God could even limit himself to a single spectacular cosmic wonder but make it absolutely unambiguous. An example I’ve used in the past is that God could rearrange a bunch of distant galaxies so that when viewed using earthbound telescopes, they would spell out something like “I, Yahweh, am God, and Jesus Christ is my only begotten son.” It’s unlikely that any entity other than God could pull off a stunt like that. Who else would have the power to move galaxies around that are millions or billions of light years away? It would certainly make me sit up and take notice.Why couldn’t God do that or something similarly convincing?
Beggar also complains that there’s nothing personal about cosmic wonders, but so what? If he was seeking personal relationships with people, nothing would stop God from staging cosmic wonders and additionally communicating with people individually. See the next point.
Couldn’t God reveal himself to each of us individually?
Beggar scoffs, asking “Doesn’t this seem a little… door-to-door salesman?” as if there were something cheesy about it. What’s cheesy about personal encounters with God? What about all the Biblical figures who had such encounters? Should they have felt insulted? At this point in the video, Beggar has already claimed that God wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. What better way to establish such relationships than by interacting with us as individuals and having a conversation with each of us?
Beggar also asks “And when would he do it? At what age? For how long?” as if that were a problem. Does he really think that his omniscient God couldn’t figure out the right time and duration for each of his creatures? And why would he limit himself to one encounter, if multiple encounters throughout life were more effective? Beggar has once again underestimated what an omniscient, omnipotent God is capable of.
Note to Christians: If you want to claim that your God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then think about what that means. Stop underestimating him. I realize that it’s convenient to underestimate God at times because as Beggar demonstrates, that allows you to make excuses for him. But you aren’t being consistent if you do that. God is either omni or he’s not. Which is it?
Doesn’t it make more sense for God to reveal himself to everybody at once, versus to each of us individually?
No, it doesn’t. This is yet another underestimation by Beggar. It isn’t like God needs to conserve his energy. He’s omnipotent, after all. Revealing himself to each person individually is no more taxing than revealing himself to everyone all at once. Plus, he can’t reveal himself to everyone at once, because not all of us are alive at the same time. Some people are inevitably going to miss out on this one-time event.
That problem goes away if he engages us as individuals. If he does that, every person from the dawn of time until now will have a direct, persuasive, personal encounter with God at the appropriate age, in the right place, and for the appropriate duration. What’s not to like about that?
What if God revealed himself to everyone by “infusing” knowledge of himself directly into their brains?
Beggar claims that this would deprive us of our freedom, but why? If God merely infuses knowledge of himself into our brains, that doesn’t force or obligate us to respond to him in some fixed way. We still can choose how to respond to him. Our freedom isn’t impacted.
If God interacts with us physically, he’s still infusing knowledge of himself into our brains. It’s just that he’s doing it indirectly via our senses and our thought processes. What difference does that make in terms of our freedom?
He could become one of us
Beggar says that God could “cross over into our time and space” and become “one of us”. He’s obviously thinking of Jesus here, and as you’d expect, he claims that this way of communicating with us is superior to the others he’s discussed. I’m not sure why — he doesn’t really explain it in the video.
I think it’s a terrible way for God to reveal himself, because if he becomes human, it’s very easy (and in fact sensible) to doubt that he is God. Much smarter for God to reveal himself in such a way that he appears unambiguously divine. Beggar anticipates this objection and addresses it in his next point.
As a human, he can’t just tell people that he’s God
Beggar notes that people will rightly think you’re crazy or lying if you tell people you’re God, so how does Jesus get around this problem? Beggar offers two solutions: 1) arrange a bunch of prophecies at various times and places, foretelling your arrival; and 2) perform miracles.
The problem with the supposed prophecies predicting the arrival of Jesus is that they’re not at all convincing to someone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid, but that’s a topic for another thread.
The problem with miracles is that they need to be something that can’t be faked using magician-style tricks. Also, few people will witness them firsthand, so those of us who aren’t there at the time are stuck with secondary accounts which are notoriously unreliable. There is every reason to doubt that Jesus was God, and a book written by a believer, who himself hasn’t witnessed the supposed miracles and has only heard about them secondhand, shouldn’t be convincing to anyone without a lot of corroborating evidence.
Once again, we’re talking about an omniscient God here. Does Beggar really think that an omniGod can’t come up with a better way of getting the word out? Are dubious prophecies and secondhand accounts of miracles really the best he can do?
Is showing himself once, 2000 years ago, really sufficient?
Beggar says “I know what some of you are thinking: ‘Yeah, but that was 2000 years ago. I wasn’t there.'” His response is a non-sequitur: “Do you think God is bound by space and time?” My answer: No, but we are. God, being timeless, can appear at any time or at all times, but each of us humans is only around for a lifetime, and all but a tiny fraction of us weren’t around when Jesus was. And of those who were living at the time, only a tiny fraction in one corner of the world encountered Jesus. If God really wanted to get the word out he could have done a much better job than that.
Beggar also asks “Do you think your mind and your soul is bound by space and time?” My answer: I don’t think we have souls, but our minds are certainly bound by space and time. Even if we had souls, and our minds and souls weren’t bound by space and time, so what? In order to be saved, each of us has to get the message while we are here on earth. Jesus isn’t around anymore, so we have nothing to rely on other than dubious biblical accounts (which contradict each other anyway). If that’s the best God can do, he has really dropped the ball.
Beggar wraps up the video with the assertion that God “walked on the face of this earth as a human being” in the form of Jesus. There’s more to critique, but I’ll leave that for the comments.
Hi keiths,
Thanks for a first-class post. I have to say that I found the video by IMBeggar unconvincing, and I agree with most of your criticisms. I’d also like to add that IMBeggar needs to spell out what he means when he talks about the Creator becoming one of us and living among us. What model of the Incarnation is he envisaging? The most straightforward model would be a Divine Mind in a human body, but that’s regarded as heresy by most of the world’s Christians: it’s called Apollinarianism. Apparently, IMBeggar is a Catholic, so I presume he’d go for the orthodox model: one Divine Person with two minds and two wills (one divine, one human, with the latter subordinated to the former). However, he needs to defend this model against the obvious criticisms: (i) does it even make sense to speak of one person having two minds? (ii) if God can make Jesus’ human nature sinless and yet still free, then why doesn’t He do the same for the rest of us?
IMBeggar also seems to think that God’s directly revealing Himself in all His glory would overwhelm us and freak us out, but the testimony of NDE subjects who claim to have met God shows otherwise. What most of them report is feeling love, not fear.
I also agree with you that the alleged prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament would never convince a modern-day non-Christian seeker after truth. The “best cases” (Isaiah 7:14, Micah 5:2, Psalm 22, Isaiah 53) have all been called into question by Biblical scholars. And whatever one thinks of the miracles of Jesus, the testimony we have in the Gospels would never convince someone who wasn’t already disposed to believe. Such an interior disposition is commonly referred to by Christians as “grace,” but a non-Christian objector might reasonably ask: what’s the difference between this alleged “grace” and God revealing Himself to each of us individually (an idea which IMBeggar pooh-poohs)?
For my part, I find the existence of religious and moral confusion deeply perplexing, given that there’s a God Who desires to reveal Himself to human beings. It’s interesting that some people who have had NDEs propose a completely different answer to this puzzle to the traditional Christian one: first, souls often choose to be reincarnated in a state of religious ignorance (one person I saw in a video even described choosing to be born and raised as an atheist); and second, God wants us to figure out the answers for ourselves. That’s an interesting proposal, but if that’s the case, then why has He been dropping so many hints, lately, via people’s NDE reports? And even more perplexingly, why do people who have had NDEs offer contradictory accounts of the afterlife? There are people who say hell isn’t real, others who say that it is but that it doesn’t last forever, and still others who uphold the traditional fire-and-brimstone account of hell. Whom am I supposed to believe?
keiths sums things up in the beginning of his post: “To me, the answer is obvious. God doesn’t exist, or at the very least he doesn’t have the characteristics attributed to him by Christians.”
I do not understand how Christian apologists try to marshal rationalizations for things that are obviously illogical and without evidence.
The only reasonable thing to say is that the situation is beyond human understanding and that they have to believe by pure faith. To try to come up with rationalizations to fit human understanding is demeaning to the God they believe in, and just adds evidence to the non-believer that it is all made-up.
Dylan, in one of his good Christian-era songs (there were many), “Precious Angel”, wrote,
“You either got faith or you got unbelief
There is no neutral ground”
So, I say the apologist, just declare your faith and don’t try to think that attempts to come up with rational arguments for the inexplicable and ineffable will have any impact on the non-believer.
aleta:
I think it’s driven by emotion. They want Christianity to be true, so they set out to argue for it instead of simply seeking the truth and letting the chips fall where they may.
The rationalizations are pretty blatant, aren’t they? Suppose IMBeggar believed in God but had never heard of Jesus or Christianity, and suppose he was pondering the question of divine hiddenness. Does anyone actually believe that he’d pick “God coming to earth as one of us” as the very best way for God to get his message across?
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
You wrote:
It does seem to be the most straightforward model, with fewer issues than the orthodox model. Looking into it, I see that there are two main objections: 1) it requires that God suffer, and thus clashes with the doctrine of divine impassibility, and 2) it negates the atonement, because according to the critics, Christ’s redemption of us is only effective if he is fully human.
These objections strike me as odd. If it is only Christ’s human nature that suffers, not the divine, then why is Christ able to redeem all of mankind through his grisly death? Joe Sixpack is human, but crucifying him doesn’t lead to salvation for everyone, even though he suffers as much as (the human aspect/component/nature of) Christ does.
Also, Scripture is replete with references to God responding emotionally to humans with anger, love, pleasure, grief, and so on. How do proponents of divine impassibility reconcile their doctrine with this fact?
It raises the question: If Christ has two minds, which mind is in control of his body? When Jesus prays to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane…
…it must be his human mind that is speaking since he distinguishes his will from God’s. Yet at other times it is clearly God who is speaking. Are there handoffs between the two? What is it like for each of the minds when the other one is in control? Are they just along for the ride? (The problem vanishes if you simply accept that Jesus was fully human, not divine.)
Yes, if sinlessness is compatible with free will, then the standard defense against the problem of evil — the free will defense — is rendered ineffective. And if the freedom to sin is an essential part of being human, then Christ’s “human nature” isn’t really human, which should nullify the atonement according to critics of Apollinarianism, as noted above.
It certainly seems that the Christian God isn’t particularly concerned with getting his message across. I commented on another thread:
Instead we just have this self-contradictory mishmash of books called “The Holy Bible” — hardly a credible source for answers to our religious and moral questions.
That’s interesting. What would be the motive behind that?
And if the knowledge is important, why doesn’t God impart it to us directly? What’s the benefit of figuring it out for ourselves?
It certainly suggest that NDEs aren’t veridical and that they simply amount to illusory experiences created by the brain when death is near.
I think one thing driving apologetics is insecurity such that one feels one has to convince the non-believer in order to justify holding the beliefs oneself. It’s a lack of faith in faith.
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not singling out vjtorley. I respect the tone, balance, and sophistication he brings to his posts. But, on the other hand, I do think apologetics in general is all philosophical reflections on a made-up system, so it can be twisted and turned around all the contradictions without bumping into evidence or any questioning of the foundational unprovable assumptions of the system.
This is harsh, but I offer another Dylan line from a very good religious song, “Trouble in Mind”. He meant these lines to support his Christian belief of the time, but I think they work in reverse:
“The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie
Then you’re all the time defending what you can never justify.”
In my opinion (supported by lots of evidence, I think) all religions are made-up stories embedded into cultures so they are held in widespread belief by members of the culture, but that they are not ontologically true. Whether or not there is some immaterial aspect beyond the physical world in unknown, and unknowable, but whatever might be the case one or the other of human religions does not know what it is.
I don’t want to call religions “lies”, but they are fictions, and can never be justified without limiting oneself to a particular religious framework and ignoring all the rest, so it’s a fruitless task to try to defend them.
In law there is the concept of duty to know, responsibility to exercise due diligence. When you are in a given position, then you have responsibilities that come with that position. This concept in law is rather weak. Very often corporate leaders and official highups say “I wasn’t informed” and they get away with their negligence and crimes this way.
In most theological moral systems the duty to know is far stronger. “I wasn’t informed” or “I didn’t know” is self-incrimination, not an excuse. God may seem very much hidden, but rational human beings have a duty to figure out why this seems to be so, whether it is really so and what to do about it.
The video-making Beggar dude may not have explained things to your satisfaction, but you say you have an obvious answer anyway: God does not exist. The truth is that if God does not exist, then there are way too many things that have no explanation, such as the concept of truth itself and human urge and ability to arrive at truth more or less reliably.
On atheism (of the Darwinian evolutionary type), there is no concept of truth. What matters is the survival of the fittest, and the fittest are those who survive, be it by might makes right or hook and crook. There is no duty to know on atheism. There isn’t any duty of any sort. Everything is just fine if you survive.
Atheism is irrational because it blames stuff on God even though God does not supposedly exist. The irrationality runs very deep: If atheism were true (which is an irrational proposition because there is no concept of truth on atheism), then God does not exist, so obviosly there is nothing that could be blamed on God, yet the problem of evil and divine hiddenness are blamed on God, as if they were some serious problems, even though on atheism the world would remain exactly the same as we see it now, namely with exactly the same evil and divine hiddenness. Do these somehow cease to be problems then by some rationale?
With the removal of the creator of the world you also remove the entity who to blame the problems of the world on. Rationally you should stop the blame and you should take the world with all of its problems as entirely natural. The world is the way it is because this is how it has sprung into being by itself. Some atheists have taken the next logical step and deduced that fundamentally there is no truth, meaning, and morality in existence (and there are further corollaries to this), but this discussion board will probably never get that far.
Erik writes, “On atheism (of the Darwinian evolutionary type), there is no concept of truth.”
I’m not concerned with “of the Darwinian evolutionary type”. Looking at human beings as they are now, without reference to any kind of God, of course there is truth. There is a tree in my front yard. All societies have religions. The earth is approximately spherical. Truths are not some perfect abstraction, but rather statements about the world for which evidence accessible to all human beings can and has accrued.
Erik also says, “Some atheists have taken the next logical step and deduced that fundamentally there is no truth, meaning, and morality in existence.”
No, those are not “the next logical step.” Making meaning and making moral judgments is something humans do. They, again, are not abstract things existing out there someplace, independent of individual human beings.
In all these cases (truth, meaning, moral judgments), Erik and others who believe likewise base their sense that God must exist on a correlated idea that truth, meaning, and moral judgments must have an absolute independent existence which are imposed on us rather than being a imperfect product of the nature of human beings.
As I understand it, the argument that Erik is trying to make here is the popular one stating that, if we are the result of mindless evolution, then there is no reason that our brains should lead us to beliefs that correlate with reality. Kinda obviously wrong, and that’s before you even consider the scenarios where what we perceive is not consistent with that reality. Exhibit one: size constancy.
Good grief. People responding to your theodicy are indulging in reductio ad absurdum. Atheists are not blaming God for anything, they are pointing out how lame-ass your purported tri-omni being is. Can’t even fix San Filippo.
I know, isn’t it great?
Nope, that’s a total non-sequitur; we are social animals capable of empathy. It, too, is adaptive.
Erik:
Because IMBeggar is a Christian, my OP concerns the Christian God. Suppose you’re a Native American who lives and dies a thousand years ago without once hearing about God or about Jesus. As a result, you don’t believe and are never baptized. Have you failed to do your duty?
Obviously not. Yet according to the Gospel of John, Jesus himself says that you will be refused admission to heaven:
John says:
You’re screwed, according to John and Jesus himself, and through no fault of your own. You just had the bad luck to be born in North America, where there was no possibility of hearing the Christian message.
Yet Christian scripture claims that God wants everyone to be saved:
So God, who is omnipotent, both a) wants everyone to be saved, and b) requires you to believe in Christ and be baptized as prerequisites for eternal life in heaven. If all of that is true, God should ensure that every person on earth hears about Jesus and has the opportunity to be baptized. Yet he doesn’t do that for you, because you had the misfortune of being born in North America a thousand years ago. Too bad.
It makes no sense, and it gives you every reason to believe that God doesn’t exist, or at least that he doesn’t posess the characteristics that Christians attribute to him.
DNA_Jock,
Why do you think the is “kinda obviously wrong”?
Regarding my previous comment, Christian apologists recognize the unfairness and immorality of this and try to dance around it in various ways. Christian philospher J.P. Moreland, who happens to be a biblical inerrantist, somewhat surprisingly says this:
Lol. He wants us to believe that the people who lived a thousand years ago in present-day Argentina somehow had the message of the gospel sent to them? How exactly did that work? Or that God doesn’t do what he said in the Bible, which is to reject people who don’t believe and aren’t baptized, but instead judges people on what they would have done? That’s pretty bold for a supposed inerrantist.
Jesus doesn’t say “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they’ve been born of water and the Spirit, or would have done so if they’d had a chance.”
In the video, IMBeggar claims that God would be depriving us of free will if he were to “infuse” knowledge of himself directly into our brains. I refuted that claim in the OP.
I often hear a similar excuse, which is that God doesn’t want to supply us with evidence that is too strong because such evidence would compel belief and thus essentially deprive us of free will. We wouldn’t be free to disbelieve. We’d have no choice but to believe.
This strikes me as absurd. To begin with, belief isn’t generally voluntary. Neither is disbelief. I didn’t simply choose to believe that the sun rises in the east – I was convinced of it. Likewise, I didn’t choose to give up my Christian faith – it vanished on its own because evidence and argument convinced me that Christianity was false. If belief isn’t voluntary to begin with, then for God to supply overwhelming evidence cannot rob of us of the freedom to choose to disbelieve. We never had that freedom to begin with.
On the other hand, if belief actually were voluntary, we could choose to disbelieve despite overwhelming evidence. It might be perverse to do so, but we could make that choice. Our free will would remain intact.
Here is Christian apologist William Lane Craig’s take on the issue:
It isn’t conjecture, and I can illustrate that with a geographic argument. Christians make up 86% of the people in Alabama but only 1.3% of the people in Mongolia. Does Craig really want us to believe that God provides evidence to every single person in Alabama and every single person in Mongolia that is strong enough to rationally convince them to become believers? That it’s only the Mongolians who overwhelmingly do the irrational thing by rejecting Christianity, despite the fact that the evidence is there for everyone? It’s ludicrous. God is clearly failing the Mongolians, and he could definitely increase the number of Mongolian converts by providing better evidence.
Also, most people who convert to Christianity do so for emotional, not rational, reasons, so it isn’t just evidence that God needs to supply. He also needs to provide the right emotional stimulus to those who require it. But the problem is the same: are we really expected to believe that all Alabamians and all Mongolians receive the necessary emotional stimulus, but that Alabamians are overwhelmingly receptive to it while the Mongolians are stubbornly resistant? It’s a ridiculous notion.
To be clear, you appear to be asking me why the argument
is kinda obviously wrong.
Okay. I hope that we can agree that evolution will promote attributes and behaviors that are adaptive, that is, which lead to more surviving offspring.
So moving away from toxins and towards food sources is adaptive for bacteria. In anything with a nervous system, these behaviors can get quite complex. Being able to correctly distinguish between predators and prey will be adaptive.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Now the correlation need not be perfect, what matters is that the beliefs produce adaptive behaviors. A wonderful example is Size Constancy:
Answer:
So you don’t bump into things.
It’s easier to navigate through 3D spaces if your brain uses apparent distance to adjust apparent size. It. Is. Adaptive.
Of course, it isn’t perfect. Your brain tells you that the moon on the horizon is bigger than the moon overhead, and that just is not true. But it’s not particularly maladaptive. We are also wired to detect patterns, even when they aren’t real — this leads to superstitious behavior. Evolution’s criterion is whether the belief correlates well enough with reality to be adaptive. Now there are some situations where the correlation with reality is not needed for the belief to be adaptive. Religion comes to mind. 🙂
Question: if we are the result of mindless evolution, then there is no reason that our brains should lead us to beliefs that correlate with reality
Reply: if so, we’d all been dead, as a species, long ago.
Kinda obvious. 🙂
Theists who peddle the evolutionary argument typically don’t realize that it backfires on them. They’re correct that if naturalistic evolution is true, we can’t guarantee the veracity of all our beliefs. What they’re missing is that the veracity of our beliefs isn’t assured under theism, either.
There’s no guarantee that God will provide us with a dependable faculty of reason. Theists tend to assume that he will, but it’s just an assumption — and an unwarranted one. He might not want us to have such a faculty, or he might not be smart enough or powerful enough to bestow it upon us.
In fact, we already know that we don’t have perfect cognition — people make mistakes, after all, and some of them are systematic — and that is true whether or not God exists.
Theists and atheists are in the same boat. We can’t “step outside” in order to validate our cognition. We have to do it from the inside, and that makes us subject to error.
Good post, keiths. No matter what we believe, those beliefs are inside us and subject to whatever testing we are able to do. Believing that some metaphysical validation outside of ourself exists does not make it so: thinking that it does is just another “inside” belief subject to all the same sorts of possible error, and possible support, as all the rest of our beliefs.
I dunno, aleta. Is belief a choice or is it determined by design, evolutionary or otherwise. As Jock says, we are social animals, and those roots run deep back into evolutionary time. The shift from extended family to cooperation beyond kin group to village and tribe, settled locations, husbandry, agriculture, city state, empires all make sense in an evolutionary context.
Keiths mentions emotion. Here I agree. Belief is certainly harder to discuss in any rational way than facts that we can subject to the scientific method and test. Why can’t we settle questions about the Turin shroud with new tests? Facts can be inconvenient.
But is wishful thinking harmful? Colewd seems to refute that, though Vladimir Putin is a contrary example. Just observing recent threads and recent comments, it seems most of us are restating long-term views. The fascinating process is seeing Vincent honestly addressing belief sustained against inconvenient facts.
Let’s hope we can resolve things before the twilight of the gods and the coming apocalypse.
More stream of consciousness, while I have a moment. Religious zealotry of any sort seems a far worse problem than cultural belief. (Assuming folks agree that cooperation if preferable to war). I find difficult to separate the boundaries of philosophy, politics and economics. Everything is connected (Pullman’s Oxford and dust). Why are the doves so vulnerable to exploitation by demagogues? (Apologies to Jock for the Dawkins reference). Must get on.I have shelves to out up.
All this is so as long as you make up God in your own image, instead of acknowledging God as God is.
People make mistakes but they are able to acknowledge it as a mistake. They are able to acknowledge that it is a mistake to err against truth. This is completely different from atheism where there is no difference between truthfulness and lie, no concept of erring against truth.
On (consistent) atheism, there is simply behaviour — that’s it. And if behaviour is to be evaluated against anything, it is survival. Behaviour is good if it helps you live longer or procreate more. Otherwise it’s not good. Truth or non-truth does not enter the picture.
The problem in this discussion is that we do not have any consistent atheists here. We have people who care about facts and evidence, but on consistent atheism we should not care about facts and evidence or about winning an argument. We should rather care about what helps live longer and procreate and proliferate.
And we do not have consistent theists here either. A consistent theist would know that there is this world and the other world and that this world matters little. This world is where all the problems are, such as death, the problem of evil, suffering, and ignorance of the true nature of God. This world’s problems are particular to this world, and inherent to it, unfixable given this human civilisation. Whereas in America among Christians it is normal to call for a theocracy right here right now, even though this is not biblical nor is it the way for a consistent rational theist. An average Christian is not a consistent theist nor a rational one.
Anyway, who cares. Carry on.
Erik:
You don’t know how God is. All you have are your beliefs about God, and those might not be correct. For example, God might be fooling you into believing certain things about him that aren’t actually true. You cannot take for granted that your cognition is reliable — not even if you are a theist.
Only if they’re aware of it. You can’t acknowledge a mistake if you don’t know it’s a mistake, and we certainly fail at times to recognize our mistakes as mistakes. Otherwise no one would ever fail a test.
Sure there is. Truth is the way things actually are, and it’s therefore independent of God’s existence. Theists don’t have a monopoly on truth.
Truth does enter the picture because it is useful. It matters whether there is truly a truck barreling down a street I’m about to cross. It matters whether it’s true that today is a sunny day, because that allows me to decide whether I’ll need my sunglasses. Truth remains useful even if there is no God.
Truth isn’t just useful. We also desire truth for its own sake, which is why we have pure science and pure math. It’s why we read books about subjects that interest us but will otherwise never impact our lives.
Why shouldn’t we care about facts and evidence? Facts are truth, and evidence helps us discern the truth. Truth is useful, as noted above, and we also seek truth for its own sake.
There’s nothing about theism per se that requires the existence of another world. A transcendent God needn’t be located in an “other world”. He could be completely independent of space and time, with no need of a world to reside in. There needn’t be a heaven or hell, either, because an afterlife is not a necessary component of a theistic worldview.
We will never solve all our problems, it’s true, but not every problem is unfixable. Humans have successfully addressed many problems.
On that we can agree. Christian orthodoxy isn’t self-consistent, and it isn’t rational to believe it.
Erik writes, “On (consistent) atheism, there is simply behaviour — that’s it. And if behaviour is to be evaluated against anything, it is survival. …
The problem in this discussion is that we do not have any consistent atheists here. We have people who care about facts and evidence, but on consistent atheism we should not care about facts and evidence or about winning an argument. We should rather care about what helps live longer and procreate and proliferate.”
Baloney, on two counts. First, as a theist, you are considering atheism in terms of how it lacks what you consider as essentials. You do not, and probably can’t, understand what a real atheistic perspective is. The second related error is that part of your stereotypical misunderstanding is to think that atheism has to to be seen in an evolutionary context (it doesn’t) and that you know what the necessary philosophical implications of an evolutionary perspective are (you don’t).
You misunderstand and misrepresent what atheists, including myself, believe. You have made up a stereotypical foil to pit against your own beliefs rather than working to, and being able to, understand a range of other philosophical beliefs about what humans are.
But luckily we have you to tell us what we should be believing and just how silly that would be. LOL!
Corneel makes my point also, in a different way. 🙂
DNA_Jock,
I agree you have made a good argument given the assumption we are the result of mindless evolution.
The problem is that evolutionary theory explains how species adapt but what it does not explain how species gain new function as reproductive advantage and new function are not necessarily the same.
A conscious brain is a novel function.
Corneel, to Erik:
Perhaps we should return the favor and tell him what his theism “requires” him to believe.
Actually, the OP shows him that his theism is so rife with contradictions and preposterous claims that the obvious conclusion is that the God he believes in doesn’t really exist.
Quite. They are not necessarily the same. But if they are correlated, then (by the same logic that you just agreed with) that’s all that is needed. And they are.
Likewise, a neuron is a novel function. A yeast cell that can mate as alpha and produce a diploid that still mates as alpha is a novel function.
Correlation can be weak or strong. There is no evidence of a strong correlation with a gain of function but a stronger correlation of breaking of function.
What is the novel function of a single neuron?
I’m not quite convinced by this. I think of novel functions as evolutionary experiments, and the successful experiments are determined by any reproductive advantage they confer. I don’t think of experiments as being conceptually different from their results. The results are an inherent part of the experiment.
As for religions generally, I understand these to be a necessary outcome of the human propensity for pattern matching – even if the pattern observed is coincidental or projected to force-fit it to satisfy our propensity. We cannot avoid “seeing” patterns whether they are objectively “real” or just superimposed onto unrelated sets of observations.
And then, I think, we reify these imaginary patterns by decorating them with often fantabulous narratives, informed by our daily experiences, and we see quasi-human “gods”, and confect elaborate rationalizations, histories, personalities, motivations, and similar human characteristics to assign to the anthropomorphized patterns we think we have observed.
And so we find that some people have bought into these elaborate confections to the point where they regard them as “obviously true”, and those who can’t internalize their particular fictions (in remarkable detail) must be deliberately blind or unknowingly deluded!
Are you suggesting there is a strong correlation of reproductive advantage with the breaking of function? That’s like a whole lot of watches that start running better as more and more parts break. Paley would have been so confused 😉
Corneel,
There is lots of evidence for this. Breaking certain genes can help survival.
Flint,
Novel function = evolutionary experiments?
Flint,
Science is the first system of thought to break through religious thinking, and it requires a community, because individual scientists are susceptible to superstitious thinking.
I suspect nothing much would get done if we were unable to make spurious connections. They are the mutations of thought. Without them, nothing new would emerge.
Just watched a video by Christian apologist Gavin Ortlund on the problem of divine hiddenness.
He offers three counterarguments:
1. Proponents of the divine hiddenness argument are making assumptions about how a perfectly loving God would act, but the infinite God might not behave the way we finite humans expect him to. We shouldn’t be presumptuous.
My response:
This is really just a “God moves in mysterious ways” claim, and such claims can be used to excuse any seemingly undesirable behavior on God’s part.That makes it useless as a defense. It’s a way of insulating the claim that God is perfectly loving from any disconfirming evidence. It makes the claim unfalsifiable, in other words.
God does something seemingly bad? That doesn’t mean he isn’t perfectly loving. It’s just that he moves in mysterious ways that we finite humans can’t comprehend.
You can use the same logic in order to defend the claim that God is perfectly malevolent:
God does something seemingly good? That doesn’t mean he isn’t perfectly malevolent. It’s just that he moves in mysterious ways that we finite humans can’t comprehend.
If the same logic can be used to defend both a claim and its opposite, it’s bad logic.
There’s also a pretty serious problem here for most Christians, who believe that faith in Christ is the difference between eternal bliss and eternal torment. If someone ends up going to hell because God didn’t provide them with sufficient evidence, that’s a huge deal. “God moves in mysterious ways” isn’t going to cut it as an excuse when God’s negligence ruins someone’s eternal afterlife.
2. Divine hiddenness is a problem only if there are nonbelievers who remain nonbelievers despite being open to being convinced — “nonresistant nonbelievers” is the term of art for these people. Ortlund thinks that proponents of the argument overestimate the prevalence of nonresistant nonbelief.
My response:
The prevalence isn’t an issue unless it’s zero. As long as it’s nonzero, Christian apologists have a problem: Why doesn’t God convert every nonresistant nonbeliever into a believer by providing the right evidence? Even just one nonresistant nonbeliever consigned to hell should be one too many for a perfectly loving God. And good luck to anyone trying to demonstrate that there have never been any nonresistant nonbelievers anywhere in the world, throughout history.
Referring back to this comment, are we to believe that among the 98.7% of Mongolians who aren’t Christian, not a single one of them is nonresistant? Seems pretty farfetched to me.
3. God may have morally sufficient reasons for the half-assed way he has revealed himself (my phrasing, not Ortlund’s).
3a. It’s somehow better for us that God doesn’t make himself obvious. Of Pascal and Kierkegaard, Ortlund says “But both of them ultimately say that’s what we need. A partially veiled and partially unveiled revelation of God creates the best conditions for genuine relationship with God in the long run”. And: “For both Kierkegaard and Pascal, life is not just a philosophical problem to be solved. Life is better understood as a drama, or romance, or adventure which must necessarily have angst and struggle. Life is the coming to be of the soul. And a full unveiling would not meet that need; in fact, sometimes it would be counterproductive.”
My response:
Does “angst and struggle” include eternal angst and struggle in hell? Because that’s what lies in store for the nonresistant nonbeliever if God’s partial unveiling is insufficient. Will God say “Sorry about the eternal torment, but I had to stay partially veiled in order to make sure everyone else got their fair share of angst and struggle. It’s good for them, you know. Tough break for you, though.”
3b. Ortlund says: “So think of someone who absolutely hates God; they want nothing to do with God. Is God obligated to overpower their rejection of him by raining down miracles? This would not be a desirable state of affairs.”
My response:
For God to reveal himself convincingly isn’t the same as forcing someone to accept him. You could be aware that God exists, aware that Jesus is his son, aware of the whole plan of salvation, yet continue to hate and reject him. Isn’t that what Satan does?
3c. Ortlund suggests that partial revelation is more in line with God’s nature. He quotes Kierkegaard: “…it is not that an objective revelation of God by God would be misleading — the problem is that it would not be God revealing Godself. What would it be like for the absolutely different to reveal itself as such?” Ortlund goes on to say that transcendence implies hiddenness.
My response:
Transcendence doesn’t imply hiddenness. It just means that revelation can never paint a complete picture of God within a finite human mind. That’s OK. Proponents of the argument from divine hiddenness aren’t claiming that a complete picture is required — just that the revelation be sufficient to induce belief in all nonresistant nonbelievers.
TLDR
What’s a “non-resistant non-believer”?
Alan:
I explained that here:
To which I respond “not really lots” and “yes, in certain specific instances” respectively.
But I do not wish to derail this thread. Glad to see you are still going strong.
Well, indeed! 🤓
Alan Fox,
An agnostic?
If we are honest, we are all agnostic. None of us know about the ultimate cause of this universe, whether gods exist, or what happens when we die.
Alan Fox,
Hi Alan
I agree if absolute knowing is the criteria we are all agnostic.
We can only look at the evidence we obtain over our lifetime and decide what is most likely to be true. Faith as I see it is trust in a truth claim. Faith is required no matter which side of the various worldviews we fall into.
colewd,
Bill, for what it’s worth, I regard you as a gentle soul. Go with God if it works for you.
Yes, of course. Evolution is a continuous process of trial and error, and every trial is an experiment. Why, did you think there was some kind of divine plan behind neutral or deleterious mutation (by far the majority)? Or just those that worked?
Remember “trust but verify”? Truth is relative at some point, but verification is a real thing. The better the verification, the less we need rely solely on faith.
The real danger is deciding in advance what we believe is true, and cherry-pick the evidence to ratify it. This is dangerous because one can “look at the evidence over a lifetime” and never once notice that the evidence fails to support the faith. We encounter this danger, for the most part, by the age of 6 or 7, after which evidence doesn’t much matter.
Came across an interesting response to the problem of divine hiddenness, which is to claim that we can have a personal relationship with God without believing in him. It’s a strange notion.
It isn’t relevant to the present discussion, though, because we’re talking about Christianity. Belief is a prerequisite for salvation in Christianity, so if God fails to provide sufficient evidence to convert nonresistant nonbelievers into believers, he’s denying them the possibility of salvation. That’s hard to reconcile with the claim that God is perfectly loving.
I think it is possible to have a personal relationship with a fictional character. In fact I think it is common. My parents have been dead for 15 years, and I still consult with them.
By age two we are having conversations with toys, and by five, with imaginary playmates. This is just something we do.
Any philosophy that doesn’t acknowledge the normality of this is incomplete.
petrushka:
I agree, but God isn’t a fictional character in the context of the divine hiddenness argument. He’s assumed to be real, and the question is whether it’s possible to have a relationship with a real God if you don’t believe that he actually exists. And if it is possible, is it the kind of relationship that a perfectly loving God would be satisfied with, so that he wouldn’t feel the need to provide more or better evidence in order to convince you of his existence?
Since we’re talking about the Christian God in this thread, I think the answer is no, he wouldn’t be satisfied. That’s because belief is a prerequisite for salvation in standard Christian theology, and a perfectly loving God would want to provide every nonresistant nonbeliever with a shot at salvation.