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Elok's excellent post on Christian Faith ( http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=97655 ) has been bouncing around my head for a while so I thought that I might as well honor with with an atheist responce. I'm going to try to make this a responce instead of a rebuttal since I don't want this to become yet another atheist vs. theist slogging match and because I agree with some of what he says and think its one of the better and more honest pieces of Christian apologism that I've run across on the internet.
Strictly logically speaking (I'm going to basing this bit loosely on Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ), there are two kinds of belief, Strong and Weak Belief (Hume uses different terms but I like these two better). Weak Belief is basically the adding up of the available evidence and thinking about it and deciding provisionally that a given proposition is probable but by no means certain and that new information that may chance things is always welcome. For example, I have Weak Belief that there's no such thing as God since I think its quite improbable that she exists, but if the stars rearrainge themselves to say "Hey Boshko, its God. Start believing in me!" tomorrow, I'd start reevaluating things.
Then there's Strong Belief, which is thinking that something not being true is absolutely impossible and a logical impossibility. The only way for Strong Belief to make any sense is if our Strong Beliefs are if/then statements grounded on a whole range of axioms (since we have no idea we're not brains in jars being manipulated by alien scientists, completely insane etc. etc. etc.). For example it doesn't make any sense to say that I know that 2 + 2 = 4 since that statement by itself doesn't even make any sense. However, it does make sense to say that IF I'm not insane and IF all the fundamental axioms of mathematics are correct etc. THEN I KNOW 100% that 2 + 2 = 4. So to make any sense logically, you've got to base all your Strong Beliefs on axioms that are themselves unprovable Weak Beliefs. So in other words, to be logical, everything you think you're sure of is built, at least to some extent, on sand.
This is why you can't justify Christian faith on purely logical grounds. As far as I've ever heard having real faith in Jesus means being absolutely sure or at least seeing doubts as a bad thing. So it doesn't make any sense from a Christian perspective to have a Weak Belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ and whatnot, since that just doesn't cut it (or at least isn't what you should be shooting for). But having a Strong Belief in Jesus doesn't make sense from a purely rational perspective since there's at least a chance (not matter how small) that you're crazy and hallucinate every time you look at the Bible and its really the chronicle of Fred's Athelete's foot, or that the Bible is a pile of BS, etc. etc.
This means that there's a disconnect between Atheist and Theist points of view and that Atheist beliefs make more sense on a purely rational ground since Atheists only lay claim to Weak Belief, (except for a handful of remarkably stupid Strong Atheists who believe that God is a logical impossibility) while Christians bite of more than they can chew when they aim for Strong Belief (ie complete certainty). This also turns the common Christian argument "but you have just as much faith that God doesn't exist as I have in his existance so we're in the same boat" into a straw-man (except in the case of those moronic Strong Atheists) and puts the Christians into a bit of sticky situation logically.
There's two ways that Christians can get out of this mess. The first is to rewrite the rules of logic, which is called Presuppositionalism. This is what CivNation believed in and its unbelievably nonsensical and incoherent and has been adequately rebutted elsewhere (Jack the Bodyless wrote an excellent one a while ago) so I won't get into that.
The other way of that is to come up with extralogical reasons to have a Strong Belief in Jesus. In other words, reasons to make a Leap of Faith. All Christian Theologians worth their salt agree that you can't justify Faith by reason alone, so I think I'm still on the same page as Christians at this point. The problem crops up in the fact that there aren't many good extralogical reasons to make this leap of faith.
As Elok points out two of the favorite reasons to make a leap of faith aren't worth much:
I completely agree. There's a couple more bad reasons to make a leap of Faith:
-Tradition. If it was good enough for my forefathers its good enough for me. The problems with this should be pretty apparent.
-Morality. The morality presented in the Bible is so sublime and makes so much sense all by itself that you've got to subscribe to the Faith bit in order to take the morality bit seriously. I was in this boat when I was young. Apart from the morality in the Bible having some serious flaws (don't want to get into that argument here), if a code of morals makes sense and seem like a good bunch of follow without any outside justification why does it make sense to get so attached to them that just because someone else happened to also like them that they have to take his claims of divinity seriously?
-Jesus died for you sins, which was somewhat uncomfortable. He loves you that much! How can you be such an ungrateful bastard as to not Love him and believe everything he says? Pretty silly arguement really. Someone having something bad happen to them doesn't make them any righter.
-I'm sure you can think up several more. There's been huge lists of these things compiled on the internet.
So we're left with one just one good reason to make the leap of faith, the one that Elok presented (although I think of it in slightly different terms). Basically if you think of Faith as a mystical communion with God in which (to use a Sufi analogy) the believer is like a moth that flies toward the candle of God and comes so close that you can't draw a line between where the fire that consumes the moth when it flies too close ends and the fire of the candle begins, then Faith is something that means something and is worth leaping at. Thinking of achieving perfect faith for Christians is then the same sort of thing as achieving Enlightenment for Buddhists, which makes Faith make sense. Faith becomes a fundamentally transformative experience and there's a REAL difference between those that get into Heaven and those that don't, the Heaven-bound have experienced a mystical connection with God and have reached a point where God is an imtimate part of their life while the rest of us haven't tried or haven't gotten the knack of it and are thus separate from God and thus it makes some sense for us to not end up in a position of basking in the presense of God for all eternity.
But then Christians run into problems again. In absolutely every religious tradition (except for some strains of Protestantism and some of the more annoying and philosophically juvenile bits of the New Age movement) the number of people who have even claimed to have any kind of mystic or have a mystical connection with God was pretty miniscule. They were/are mere handfuls of Monks in monasteries, Gurus on mountain tops, shoeless wanderers, shamans running around in the woods etc. This goes for every culture with a mystical tradition I can think of from Sufi Muslims, to Shi'a Muslims, to Buddhists, to Hasidic Judaism, to Animists right on down the line.
The second problem is Hell. Everyone who doesn't get the hang of this Faith thing gets fried painfully for all eternity. Ouch.
So basically just about everyone agrees that getting a real meaningful mystical connection with God is damn hard and rare but Christians say that everyone who doesn't have this connection with God (ie doesn't have Faith and get transformed) gets tortured forever. Seems a bit harsh. Christians have number of ways of dealing with this seeming contradiction.
-Acknowledging it. In Late Medieval Catholicism it was said that the ratio of people going to Heaven to the Hell bound was about equal to the number of people who ended up in Noah's arc to those to drowned. Sounds about right. But then you've got the vast majority of even those who honestly try to be good Christians going to Hell, which makes God a sick sadistic bastard. Bah!
-Ignoring it. This is what happens most of the time. Doesn't do much good.
-Mysticism For Dumbies. Basically if everyone's got to have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" to get into heaven, then damn are we going to have a lot of people with "personal relationships with Jesus Christ." In other words the entire community of believers becomes mystics who have been Enlightened (ie Born Again). I just don't buy this, it all seems too easy and too fake. Do you really think that all Pentecostals who speak in tongues have been "baptised in the holy spirit" and that all people who are "born again" have a meaningful mystical connection with the Divine and have reached the Christian equivalent of Enlightenment? It just doesn't square with what I've seen or with what EVERY other religious tradition with a mystical component says about mysticism.
-Separate the Visible from the Invisible Church. Basically Christian doctrine is more suited for small sects of pretty much full-time and really committed believers for whom cultivating a relationship with God is their #1 priority and what they spend most of their time doing. Christian doctrine makes sense in this kind of context (since this was what the early Church was like). But then you've got the vast majority of self-professed Christians (even those who honestly try to be good people and good Christians) being tortured for all eternity after they die, which again makes God a sick sadistic bastard.
-Getting rid of Hell and giving those without Faith oblivion or something. Something that makes sense and something that I don't mind at all. I like sleeping in on Sundays and I don't especially want to spend all eternity basking in God's presense in any case. But then this involves scrapping a pretty central piece of Christian doctrine.
Other religions deal with this sort of thing a lot more gracefully (and without making God a sick sadistic bastard). Sufism says that all you have to do is follow the rules of the Sharia to get into Heaven (or at least the lower bits of heaven where you get the wine and the women) but what mysticism does is helps provide you with the reasons behind the rules and/or gets you into a higher level of heaven (beyond all the wine and the women) where you are consumed by the presense of God or something along those lines. Sikhism and Buddhism give you unlimited second tries until you finally make it, which seems like a pretty fair set up. In Hasidic Judaism and Shi'a Islam the mystic acts as more or less and intermediary between the common believers and the divine (at least I think that's how it works, I'm not an expert on their group) so everyone ends up more or less OK.
So unless I'm missing something the only way Christianity can avoid making God evil or not making any sense is to scrap a pretty central bit of doctrine (Hell). And because of this (and a couple other reasons) Christianity seems even less appealing to me than its competitors.
Or am I missing something here? I'm sorry about the length of this post but I would really appreciate some thoughtful replies from Christians (or anyone else).
Strictly logically speaking (I'm going to basing this bit loosely on Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ), there are two kinds of belief, Strong and Weak Belief (Hume uses different terms but I like these two better). Weak Belief is basically the adding up of the available evidence and thinking about it and deciding provisionally that a given proposition is probable but by no means certain and that new information that may chance things is always welcome. For example, I have Weak Belief that there's no such thing as God since I think its quite improbable that she exists, but if the stars rearrainge themselves to say "Hey Boshko, its God. Start believing in me!" tomorrow, I'd start reevaluating things.
Then there's Strong Belief, which is thinking that something not being true is absolutely impossible and a logical impossibility. The only way for Strong Belief to make any sense is if our Strong Beliefs are if/then statements grounded on a whole range of axioms (since we have no idea we're not brains in jars being manipulated by alien scientists, completely insane etc. etc. etc.). For example it doesn't make any sense to say that I know that 2 + 2 = 4 since that statement by itself doesn't even make any sense. However, it does make sense to say that IF I'm not insane and IF all the fundamental axioms of mathematics are correct etc. THEN I KNOW 100% that 2 + 2 = 4. So to make any sense logically, you've got to base all your Strong Beliefs on axioms that are themselves unprovable Weak Beliefs. So in other words, to be logical, everything you think you're sure of is built, at least to some extent, on sand.
This is why you can't justify Christian faith on purely logical grounds. As far as I've ever heard having real faith in Jesus means being absolutely sure or at least seeing doubts as a bad thing. So it doesn't make any sense from a Christian perspective to have a Weak Belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ and whatnot, since that just doesn't cut it (or at least isn't what you should be shooting for). But having a Strong Belief in Jesus doesn't make sense from a purely rational perspective since there's at least a chance (not matter how small) that you're crazy and hallucinate every time you look at the Bible and its really the chronicle of Fred's Athelete's foot, or that the Bible is a pile of BS, etc. etc.
This means that there's a disconnect between Atheist and Theist points of view and that Atheist beliefs make more sense on a purely rational ground since Atheists only lay claim to Weak Belief, (except for a handful of remarkably stupid Strong Atheists who believe that God is a logical impossibility) while Christians bite of more than they can chew when they aim for Strong Belief (ie complete certainty). This also turns the common Christian argument "but you have just as much faith that God doesn't exist as I have in his existance so we're in the same boat" into a straw-man (except in the case of those moronic Strong Atheists) and puts the Christians into a bit of sticky situation logically.
There's two ways that Christians can get out of this mess. The first is to rewrite the rules of logic, which is called Presuppositionalism. This is what CivNation believed in and its unbelievably nonsensical and incoherent and has been adequately rebutted elsewhere (Jack the Bodyless wrote an excellent one a while ago) so I won't get into that.
The other way of that is to come up with extralogical reasons to have a Strong Belief in Jesus. In other words, reasons to make a Leap of Faith. All Christian Theologians worth their salt agree that you can't justify Faith by reason alone, so I think I'm still on the same page as Christians at this point. The problem crops up in the fact that there aren't many good extralogical reasons to make this leap of faith.
As Elok points out two of the favorite reasons to make a leap of faith aren't worth much:
So far as I can tell, there are two popular but nonsensical views of salvation. The first is popular among evangelicals like Chick and seems to be based on the concept of salvation through faith. Under this system, Heaven is something like a divine mob protection scheme, or a gang membership. Come judgment day, Jesus is going to bust the cap of damnation in the collective rears of humanity, with the exception of his designated holy homeys, who signed up to be part of his crew, took the membership oath, and support the group by giving cash to guys on TV with bad suits and excessive hair-gel. Provided you are on the ok list, all your sins are redeemed. Aside from not making a lick of sense, this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the Mark of the Beast, and makes you wonder how exactly the road to salvation is supposed to be as hard as the Book of Matthew makes it out to be. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to spout some babble about accepting Jesus as his personal savior and get in on the outfit. Um, no.
Then there's the even more popular works-based fallacy seen in Dante's Inferno(I really hate that book!), in which the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto an income-tax form. Come Judgment Day, God will measure each man's sins, make deductions for every sacrament he has taken part in, give credits for helping old ladies cross the street, and add all the numbers up and see if the balance is positive or negative. Thankfully, we can all clean up our credit history via confession. I don't know why exactly the king of glory who knows the hearts of men is required to add up numbers like a calculator to determine their worth, and if so why he was so harsh on the Pharisees for showing good fiscal sense.
They are both popular conceptions of heaven, and both pretty much completely wrong.
Then there's the even more popular works-based fallacy seen in Dante's Inferno(I really hate that book!), in which the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto an income-tax form. Come Judgment Day, God will measure each man's sins, make deductions for every sacrament he has taken part in, give credits for helping old ladies cross the street, and add all the numbers up and see if the balance is positive or negative. Thankfully, we can all clean up our credit history via confession. I don't know why exactly the king of glory who knows the hearts of men is required to add up numbers like a calculator to determine their worth, and if so why he was so harsh on the Pharisees for showing good fiscal sense.
They are both popular conceptions of heaven, and both pretty much completely wrong.
-Tradition. If it was good enough for my forefathers its good enough for me. The problems with this should be pretty apparent.
-Morality. The morality presented in the Bible is so sublime and makes so much sense all by itself that you've got to subscribe to the Faith bit in order to take the morality bit seriously. I was in this boat when I was young. Apart from the morality in the Bible having some serious flaws (don't want to get into that argument here), if a code of morals makes sense and seem like a good bunch of follow without any outside justification why does it make sense to get so attached to them that just because someone else happened to also like them that they have to take his claims of divinity seriously?
-Jesus died for you sins, which was somewhat uncomfortable. He loves you that much! How can you be such an ungrateful bastard as to not Love him and believe everything he says? Pretty silly arguement really. Someone having something bad happen to them doesn't make them any righter.
-I'm sure you can think up several more. There's been huge lists of these things compiled on the internet.
So we're left with one just one good reason to make the leap of faith, the one that Elok presented (although I think of it in slightly different terms). Basically if you think of Faith as a mystical communion with God in which (to use a Sufi analogy) the believer is like a moth that flies toward the candle of God and comes so close that you can't draw a line between where the fire that consumes the moth when it flies too close ends and the fire of the candle begins, then Faith is something that means something and is worth leaping at. Thinking of achieving perfect faith for Christians is then the same sort of thing as achieving Enlightenment for Buddhists, which makes Faith make sense. Faith becomes a fundamentally transformative experience and there's a REAL difference between those that get into Heaven and those that don't, the Heaven-bound have experienced a mystical connection with God and have reached a point where God is an imtimate part of their life while the rest of us haven't tried or haven't gotten the knack of it and are thus separate from God and thus it makes some sense for us to not end up in a position of basking in the presense of God for all eternity.
But then Christians run into problems again. In absolutely every religious tradition (except for some strains of Protestantism and some of the more annoying and philosophically juvenile bits of the New Age movement) the number of people who have even claimed to have any kind of mystic or have a mystical connection with God was pretty miniscule. They were/are mere handfuls of Monks in monasteries, Gurus on mountain tops, shoeless wanderers, shamans running around in the woods etc. This goes for every culture with a mystical tradition I can think of from Sufi Muslims, to Shi'a Muslims, to Buddhists, to Hasidic Judaism, to Animists right on down the line.
The second problem is Hell. Everyone who doesn't get the hang of this Faith thing gets fried painfully for all eternity. Ouch.
So basically just about everyone agrees that getting a real meaningful mystical connection with God is damn hard and rare but Christians say that everyone who doesn't have this connection with God (ie doesn't have Faith and get transformed) gets tortured forever. Seems a bit harsh. Christians have number of ways of dealing with this seeming contradiction.
-Acknowledging it. In Late Medieval Catholicism it was said that the ratio of people going to Heaven to the Hell bound was about equal to the number of people who ended up in Noah's arc to those to drowned. Sounds about right. But then you've got the vast majority of even those who honestly try to be good Christians going to Hell, which makes God a sick sadistic bastard. Bah!
-Ignoring it. This is what happens most of the time. Doesn't do much good.
-Mysticism For Dumbies. Basically if everyone's got to have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" to get into heaven, then damn are we going to have a lot of people with "personal relationships with Jesus Christ." In other words the entire community of believers becomes mystics who have been Enlightened (ie Born Again). I just don't buy this, it all seems too easy and too fake. Do you really think that all Pentecostals who speak in tongues have been "baptised in the holy spirit" and that all people who are "born again" have a meaningful mystical connection with the Divine and have reached the Christian equivalent of Enlightenment? It just doesn't square with what I've seen or with what EVERY other religious tradition with a mystical component says about mysticism.
-Separate the Visible from the Invisible Church. Basically Christian doctrine is more suited for small sects of pretty much full-time and really committed believers for whom cultivating a relationship with God is their #1 priority and what they spend most of their time doing. Christian doctrine makes sense in this kind of context (since this was what the early Church was like). But then you've got the vast majority of self-professed Christians (even those who honestly try to be good people and good Christians) being tortured for all eternity after they die, which again makes God a sick sadistic bastard.
-Getting rid of Hell and giving those without Faith oblivion or something. Something that makes sense and something that I don't mind at all. I like sleeping in on Sundays and I don't especially want to spend all eternity basking in God's presense in any case. But then this involves scrapping a pretty central piece of Christian doctrine.
Other religions deal with this sort of thing a lot more gracefully (and without making God a sick sadistic bastard). Sufism says that all you have to do is follow the rules of the Sharia to get into Heaven (or at least the lower bits of heaven where you get the wine and the women) but what mysticism does is helps provide you with the reasons behind the rules and/or gets you into a higher level of heaven (beyond all the wine and the women) where you are consumed by the presense of God or something along those lines. Sikhism and Buddhism give you unlimited second tries until you finally make it, which seems like a pretty fair set up. In Hasidic Judaism and Shi'a Islam the mystic acts as more or less and intermediary between the common believers and the divine (at least I think that's how it works, I'm not an expert on their group) so everyone ends up more or less OK.
So unless I'm missing something the only way Christianity can avoid making God evil or not making any sense is to scrap a pretty central bit of doctrine (Hell). And because of this (and a couple other reasons) Christianity seems even less appealing to me than its competitors.
Or am I missing something here? I'm sorry about the length of this post but I would really appreciate some thoughtful replies from Christians (or anyone else).
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