Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by Mark , Friday, July 25, 2008, 17:03 (5963 days ago) @ dhw

Part 1 of 3 - Note: As I am about to post all this I see dhw has further posts headed "Sermon..". Hopefully this will answer some of that, but it is not written in response and I will need time to look at those further. - Thanks for all the comments. I will try my best to clarify what I have said, where evidently necessary. - I said:
"...The Christian God could not do this. He could perhaps appear before the panel in some form and perform miracles, I suppose. But there would always be room for doubt from a logical point of view. In my opinion there are two mistakes here." - dhw seems to think I am contradicting myself here in the first two sentences. My point is that God may be able to do the miracles, but he couldn't provide scientifically verifiable proof. Carl partly gets what I mean when he gives the example of the burning bush. Another person's testimony may always be questioned. George's alternative interpretation of my faith is an immediate example of that! - But I meant more. Even if we could all together witness the burning bush and hear the voice it would be possible to say that we should first try to understand this without God. You all should be the first to tell me that it is dangerous to use gaps in our understanding as proof of the existence of God. Long ago a solar eclipse would have been taken as evidence of God. Can you imagine how dramatic that must have been to a pre-scientific culture, especially if there was no memory of such events? So anything which God did by way of miracles could be taken simply as a challenge to science. - dhw refers to various Old Testament characters: "God talks directly to them, and doesn't seem to leave much room for doubt". Firstly, the further back you go in the Bible, the longer the gap between the events reported and the writing; the greater the interpretation; the more we should think in terms of historical novels than documented events. It is primarily the witness of the faith of a people as transmitted and recorded. So we may reasonably take the constant reporting of "The Lord spake" as a retrospective interpretation and shorthand. It is certainly not the case that the Bible suggests that such people did not need to live by faith because everything was made plain to their senses. - Having said that, I don't wish to exclude the possibility of a voice from a burning bush, or Saul's conversion by a light from heaven and a voice. Particularly the latter, where it is recorded within living memory of contemporaries. I also believe that God may use such things at times to encourage faith. But it is still possible to resist. Could not Saul have gone away and looked for alternative interpretations? Was the voice a psychological phenomenon, he could have wondered ... or we certainly could nowadays! - dhw wonders why God doesn't do more, "Not just to prove his existence, but perhaps more importantly (from a humanistic standpoint) to save the innocent from the natural disasters he has created, and to remove human oppressors of the innocent" - He offers 5 possible answers: "1) God doesn't care; 2) God is incapable of action; 3) action would spoil his fun; 4) it's all part of a plan we can't understand (so there's no point in trying); 5) God isn't there." - If I were forced to choose from these I would say a combination of 2 and 4, but with a careful interpretation of what I mean by 2. - ... see part 2