I grew up a christian fanatic. All I knew was that Jesus loved me and I loved him and I thought I was one of the few people that was living the way God intended. Through the years my highly inquisitive mind kept bringing me to a wall. The wall was the question "WHY"! After writing down everything I believed regarding my faith in christ and my understanding of theology, I ended up where you will end up if you do the same thing I did, or if you ever have a conversation with a very intelligent non-believer who knows exactly why THEY DO NOT BELIEVE what I believe and can communicate their argument very effectively. I ended up having to explain "Why do I believe this?" [1 Peter 3:15] Well, most christians will say they believe that Jesus Christ is who he claims to be because that is what the bible teaches. And we cannot be certain that what we learn from the bible is accurate unless we believe that our source itself is accurate. Thus the belief in the truthfulness of the bible is the basic presupposition. I dare you to try to "logical explain how do we know if the claims of the Bible are true". A number of Christians have tried to answer this question. Unfortunately, not all of those answers have been as cogent as they might hope. Some answers make very little sense at all. Others have some merit but fall short of proving the truth of the Bible with certainty. You can not argue this by pointing to the positive changes in your life. People might experience positive feelings and changes by believing in a position that happens to be false. Even an atheist might argue that his belief in atheism produces feelings of inner peace or satisfaction. This does not mean that his position is true. When asked how they know that the Bible is true, some Christians have answered, “We know the Bible is true by faith.” While that answer may sound pious, it is not very logical, nor is it a correct application of Scripture. Faith is the confident belief in something that you cannot perceive with your senses (Hebrews 11:1). The act of believing in something doesn’t necessarily make it true. Some have cited 2 Timothy 3:16 as proof that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. This text indicates that all Scripture is inspired by God (or “God-breathed”) and useful for teaching. That is, every writing in the Bible is a revelation from God that can be trusted as factually true. The problem with answering the question this way is that it presupposes that the verse itself is truthful—which is the very claim at issue. This is a vicious circular argument. It must first arbitrarily assume the very thing it is trying to prove. Circular reasoning of this type is not useful in a debate because it does not prove anything beyond what it merely assumes. After all, this type of argument would be equally valid for any other book that claims to be inspired by God. The only proof of the Bible christians have is that unless its truth is presupposed, they couldn’t prove anything at all. [answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/03/22/bible-is-true#fnList_1_8] I gathered those thoughts from a christian website. It confirms that you can not use the scientific method to prove that God exists. However, you can not use the scientific method to prove that God does not exist either. So what do you do? Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others for thousands of years. In conclusion, I somewhat concur with Bertrand Russell, "these arguments for the existence of God does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies." I also some concur with Biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, he rejects the arguments as "infantile". Noting that he is "a scientist rather than a philosopher", he writes: "The very idea that such grand conclusions should follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically." Also, he feels a "deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world." This shit almost drove me crazy! --------------------------------------- While reading thoughts on the necessity of faith over reason, I came across this . . "These critics note that people successfully use reason in their daily lives to solve problems and that reason has led to progressive increase of knowledge in the sphere of science. This gives credibility to reason and argumentative thinking as a proper method for seeking truth." "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei On the other hand, according to these critics, there is no evidence that a religious faith that rejects reason would also serve us while seeking truth.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 09:44:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015