Kyle asks (hopping on the big unfinished thought):
If we have no “proof,” why do we believe that he exists? Before you can come to God, you must first believe that he *is*, but I’ve never thought of this kind of belief in the same category as saving faith. At some point, there must be a rational foundation for belief to build upon, and that foundation had better not be “I just made this up.”
this was in response to:
The faithful do not believe because they have a secret hidden “proof” of God’s existence (although many claim to have been touched by God … which helps them of course).
Below the fold, I’m going to try to start on this notion in more detail, starting with the dreaded bullet list (alas) … but this time at least followed by a short discussion.There are a number of propositions on which the notion of God and Creator come up in our world. These include:
- Math is too effective This is not a proof, but a discussion, however the counter argument (Hamming) noted has a lot of flaws. Quickly:
- The first is ok, except the Fourier/uncertainty point is in error. On this one as well, the problem with the Special Relativity example is … General Relativity.
- The next#2 is in error, it’s not that mathematics is not partially driven by observation but that it so often works far better than it might be reasonably expected.
- this next one is right, i.e., a valid criticism but not exactly to the point. Wigner never makes the claim that mathematics is the solution for everything, just that it works better than we might reasonably expect.
- #4 is a stretch.
- The problem of abiogenesis.
- The problem of the moment (and setup) implicitly in Creation, as well as things like the fine-tuning problems associated with current notions of understanding the Physics related to the beginning [as an aside, for an excellent "lay" introduction this purely from a Physics standpoint the excellent book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
by Lisa Randall would be my recommendation.]
- Revelation. The problem with revelation, as I see it now (that is today), is how we view the epistemological value of words (spoken or written). Almost everything we learn today (and arguably for any anthropological setting) is not by experience or by repetition of experiment, but we are taught by dialectic, rhetoric, and other methods of instruction. Conversation and learning from the same does not depend on our validation of the existence of the speaker, but instead more often on a judgement (rational or otherwise) of the current content and the past history of how we’ve found the reliability of that speaker in the past.
- Is man different from the other animalia in type or kind. Can we find artistic genius or creativity for example in any similar fashion in the animal kingdom?
This is a start, and not a complete list. The point is, to my thinking, a Creator and God viewed as an ansatz acts as a simpler explanation than His absence. This, when coupled with two notions from Christianity, acts as a spur toward doing science and understanding the universe not the reverse. Those two notions have been mentioned before, but to reiterate, as Augustine points out in his Confessions, God’s creation might worship its Creator as Man unfolds its wonder and also that following Umberto Casuto and Leon Kass, that Genesis 1 teaches us that the observable Universe is comprehensible to Man as made in His image. This then, gives us an expectation (via revelation!) that our mission to understand the Universe is achievable.
But the point is, that one can take this (and other similar) observations of our world and come to either the conclusion that God is a simpler more rational conclusion or not. The point is faith is not required to come to the belief that God exists. Faith is required for other aspects of Christianity, e.g., that belief in that notion, be it folly or scandal, that a man in the 1st century (Jesus) was God. But that is a different topic for discussion.
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