On Faith and True Knowledge

[Hierophant]

There is something I have been pondering lately, well, it has always been there I just did not realize what I was dealing with at the time. I have been considering the difference between faith claims and what we can ascertain to be true knowledge. When I say true knowledge, I do not necessarily imply we have a complete understanding, but we could reasonably say it matches reality as humans understand it because it has an existential element to it, i.e., we can test it, observe it, or verify it to some extent.

 

I mention this because I am struggling to get a grasp on faith claims (in this case, explicitly the Bible or tradition passed down the church) and how they are to be understood.

Even more specifically, there are a lot of different faith claims floating around in different denominations and I can reasonably say, almost none are able to be verified or placed in a category of true knowledge as I described above. I have an example from today, I ran across this Linkedin profile where this gentleman had wrote a whole blog on the different types of people who are going to be in hell. 

 

Women who wore hoop earrings

People who listened to secular music

Women who wore trousers

Couples who have sex with the woman on top (no kidding, this was actually stated)

 

The list goes on but I am sure everyone here gets the idea. Contrast this with another idea floating around in Christian thought that all you need is to believe in Christ and you will be fine. My point is, both of these are faith claims that are unable to be validated in any way shape or form (at least that is my understanding, perhaps I am missing something, and if so, please share). I suppose these different groups would claim the Bible as their authority, but there are a lot of different ideas and interpretations of what the Bible teaches. Not only that, the Bible does not have what I consider a divine stamp. It has human hands all over it, we are unable to actually verify if it is indeed inspired by God, therefore the authority of the Bible becomes another faith claim.

 

One of my questions would be, if God truly does love us as so many claim, why would there not be evidence for the Bible or claims within Christianity that could be subjected to the scientific method or any other verifiable method to determine what exactly we should believe and how we should live? Do modern humans demand too much so far as evidence goes?

 

Tying into the previous question, if we all lived in the first century, would we find the claims for the Christian faith compelling, and if so, why? I ask this question because perhaps modern humans do not see the world as the ancients did and that is why a lot of us end up leaving the faith.

 

The reason for my post is because I do have a lot, and I mean a lot of doubts about the Christian faith but I am always plagued by the "what if." What if the answer is really obvious but I missed it and end up regretting it after I die and I end up standing in front of the Christian God. Am I being unreasonable for wanting to verify the claims and to truly understand what is expected?

 

I know a lot of you have put the idea of Christianity to bed, but I am not sure how you did it. How plausible is it our first example is actually correct and God has what we consider very extreme and/or outrageous expectations. How plausible is the second example? How plausible is it any of it is true by either modern day or historical reasoning?

 

Curious to hear different takes on it because I am losing my mind over it. As much as I would like to say "this is not true and I have nothing to fear," I am afraid I do not know how to disprove any of the faith claims just as I am unable to prove any of them.

 

 

[mymistake]

You seem like a science and philosophy oriented guy who was raised in a Christian home and sent to church as a child.  If I am wrong, then I guess I am just seeing myself in you.

 

I would recommend looking into cultural anthropology.  Christianity looks quite impressive when it is standing by itself and you have been saturated by Christian apologetics.  But when you study other primitive cultures and notice how they all created gods you start to see a pattern.  Put Jehovah next to Odin, Zeus and Osiris and suddenly they all look silly.  But then when you realize that humans have created thousands of gods then it becomes clear that the Christian god is just one more of the same.  It is human nature to create gods.  We still do it today but modern gods are called "superheroes" and they live in comic books.  Really it is the same thing.

 

Christians should not be allowed to get away with special pleading.  They should demonstrate that their god had earned an exception or else their god should be dismissed the same way Christians dismiss all the other gods people have invented. 

 

 

 

 

[sdelsolray]

[LogicalFallacy]

@TinMan

There is something I have been pondering lately, well, it has always been there I just did not realize what I was dealing with at the time. I have been considering the difference between faith claims and what we can ascertain to be true knowledge. When I say true knowledge, I do not necessarily imply we have a complete understanding, but we could reasonably say it matches reality as humans understand it because it has an existential element to it, i.e., we can test it, observe it, or verify it to some extent.

 

A read through of BAA and Dude's thread on Complete vs Limited Understanding might be a start. This was a very interesting topic on understanding, truth etc

 

 

I mention this because I am struggling to get a grasp on faith claims (in this case, explicitly the Bible or tradition passed down the church) and how they are to be understood.

Even more specifically, there are a lot of different faith claims floating around in different denominations and I can reasonably say, almost none are able to be verified or placed in a category of true knowledge as I described above. I have an example from today, I ran across this Linkedin profile where this gentleman had wrote a whole blog on the different types of people who are going to be in hell. 

 

Faith claims are not isolated to the bible. Thus a great thing to bring up with religious people is that people from other religions also have faith claims. Why doesn't (say a Christian) accept the faith claims of a Muslim or Hindu? Once they can answer that then they know why you reject their faith claims.

 

Women who wore hoop earrings

People who listened to secular music

Women who wore trousers

Couples who have sex with the woman on top (no kidding, this was actually stated)

 

I wouldn't say this is a faith claim. Rather its someone's opinion. Stupid, illogical opinion at that.

 

"Hell exists" is a faith claim. You are going to hell because of x y or z is an opinion.

 

Not only that, the Bible does not have what I consider a divine stamp. It has human hands all over it, we are unable to actually verify if it is indeed inspired by God, therefore the authority of the Bible becomes another faith claim.

 

Actually I would say we are able to verify some of the claims made. And because they do not past the verification test we can reject them.

 

One claim is how the world was made in Genesis - we can reject that. The Exodus, we can reject that. The flood story, we can reject that. These are things we can test, and find out that they fail the test. Jesus promise of "returning soon". We can reject that.

 

One of my questions would be, if God truly does love us as so many claim, why would there not be evidence for the Bible or claims within Christianity that could be subjected to the scientific method or any other verifiable method to determine what exactly we should believe and how we should live? Do modern humans demand too much so far as evidence goes?

 

No, considering there are 2 billion Christians, and most just believe on faith I would say there is an extreme lack of demand for evidence. If people demanded evidence Christianity would fall over tomorrow.

 

Tying into the previous question, if we all lived in the first century, would we find the claims for the Christian faith compelling, and if so, why? I ask this question because perhaps modern humans do not see the world as the ancients did and that is why a lot of us end up leaving the faith.

 

That would depend on our level of scepticism I guess. It can be shown that if you are inclined to believe one false thing, then you are more susceptible to believe other false things.

 

The reason for my post is because I do have a lot, and I mean a lot of doubts about the Christian faith but I am always plagued by the "what if." What if the answer is really obvious but I missed it and end up regretting it after I die and I end up standing in front of the Christian God. Am I being unreasonable for wanting to verify the claims and to truly understand what is expected?

 

No, you are not being unreasonable. No just God would judge any honest investigation. However if there is a God and he is a prick then I wouldn't want to worship him anyway. But let me suggest that you do not have these worries about meeting any other God apart from the one you were brought up to believe in. Think of that. Do you worry about running into Hades? Or Zeus. Anubis?

 

I know a lot of you have put the idea of Christianity to bed, but I am not sure how you did it. How plausible is it our first example is actually correct and God has what we consider very extreme and/or outrageous expectations. How plausible is the second example? How plausible is it any of it is true by either modern day or historical reasoning?

 

Curious to hear different takes on it because I am losing my mind over it. As much as I would like to say "this is not true and I have nothing to fear," I am afraid I do not know how to disprove any of the faith claims just as I am unable to prove any of them.

 

One of the first things is to be comfortable with not knowing 100%. Can I give you a gift wrapped 100% guarantee that the Christian God doesn't exist? No. But I can't do that for my transcendent unicorn either.

 

What we can say, is based on everything we know, all the information we can currently gather, the existence of God is very unlikely. 

[disillusioned]

 

Quote

 

One of my questions would be, if God truly does love us as so many claim, why would there not be evidence for the Bible or claims within Christianity that could be subjected to the scientific method or any other verifiable method to determine what exactly we should believe and how we should live? Do modern humans demand too much so far as evidence goes?

 

I think the answer to this question is an emphatic and resounding "no". When I look around the world, mostly what I see is people who will take any excuse to believe whatever they are told, sans evidence. A sad fact about humans is that, in general, we quite like to be told what to do. We like having someone in authority over us. We like the idea that someone who knows what they are doing is in charge, and if we just listen to them then everything will be alright. So no, in general we don't demand too much evidence; we're more than happy to believe just about anything.

 

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Tying into the previous question, if we all lived in the first century, would we find the claims for the Christian faith compelling, and if so, why? I ask this question because perhaps modern humans do not see the world as the ancients did and that is why a lot of us end up leaving the faith.

 

Maybe. Maybe not.

 

It is true that history has affected the sorts of baseless claims that many people are willing to believe. We do, as a species, know quite a bit more now than we used to. We don't need to attribute plagues, earthquakes, and floods to the wrath of God. We know what causes them. Yet, there are still many people in the world who do just this, and some of them profess to be quite civilised. Even today, many people are ignorant, and some are wilfully so. But clearly it would be wrong to conclude that in the first century everyone would have found the claims of Christianity compelling. Some people did, and some people didn't. Which group we would have been in is difficult to ascertain.

 

Quote

 

The reason for my post is because I do have a lot, and I mean a lot of doubts about the Christian faith but I am always plagued by the "what if." What if the answer is really obvious but I missed it and end up regretting it after I die and I end up standing in front of the Christian God. Am I being unreasonable for wanting to verify the claims and to truly understand what is expected?

 

Well, the fact is that the Christian faith is mainly non-sense. The very fact that you have to wonder what is expected of you is evidence of this.

 

Quote

 

I know a lot of you have put the idea of Christianity to bed, but I am not sure how you did it. How plausible is it our first example is actually correct and God has what we consider very extreme and/or outrageous expectations. How plausible is the second example? How plausible is it any of it is true by either modern day or historical reasoning?

 

This is possible. No can assure you with authority that it isn't. But the thing is, there is no reason to believe that it is true. None whatsoever. It also isn't consistent with the Christian message. So there's that.

 

Quote

Curious to hear different takes on it because I am losing my mind over it. As much as I would like to say "this is not true and I have nothing to fear," I am afraid I do not know how to disprove any of the faith claims just as I am unable to prove any of them.

 

Ah, see the thing is, you don't generally have to disprove faith claims. The person making the claim has a duty to convince you that they are correct. If they can't do this, then you are under no obligation to accept the claim. The importance of this grows with the absurdity of the claim. Christianity is an absurd claim. Very absurd. So unless there is a reason to accept it, we are well within our rights to simply dismiss it as silly.

 

There is much more that can be said about this. It's an interesting topic. I'm glad you brought it up.

 

Welcome to ExC!

[pantheory]

Hi TinMan,

 

Welcome to this forum.

 

On Faith and True Knowledge. (only believe some of what you read below)

 

"True knowledge" can sometimes be certain, like 2,000 + 2,000 will always equal 4,000. Not because you would count it, but because you have knowledge of the principles of math involved. True knowledge is not involved if theory is a part of it. Some theories have shown to be false in the past. Knowledge can be tricky, however, like you think a person is someone you know but you find out it is their twin. Few things that we call knowledge can be absolutely certain.

 

Religions, on the other hand, necessarily must involve faith for one to believe in them because their foundation books are literally unbelievable to most educated people. And, if you take my advice, you can be certain that little or none of it is true concerning its stories,  and none of it is true concerning its teachings concerning a God or gods, heaven or hell. These are called theistic religions. Some others, like Buddhism, are philosophical in nature and are based upon a human perspective concerning how to live a "good and productive" life. One could adopt some philosophies of religion, such as from Buddhism, principles of Christianity such as the Golden Rule, or principles of other religions, as long as one realizes that the stories are nearly all made up, a type of allegory developed for the purpose of teaching desired moral behavior,  obedience to religious authority, and fear of excommunication and eternal torment.

 

The bottom line is that one understands that all religions that have ever exited are all BS. You can prove this to yourself concerning the Christian bible by reading the first ten pages of Genesis, then the first ten pages of Revelations. If you can believe any of this, I have some great snake oil  that can help you with your religious doubts and truly make you feel great according to its producers (Rattle-snake oil, as a lineament and to create spells of magic). It sells for $79.95 US, for a 2 oz. bottle. Buy several bottles. Little mark-up is involved. 20% of the profit will be spent on advertising to inform all of its benefits. We donate to children's charities. An e-mail address will be provided for questions and orders upon request, as well as a certificate of authenticity and details of its other beneficial ingredients sent with all orders. Free shipment upon advanced payment for 3 bottles or more. Limited quantities. Get yours now.

[Joshpantera]

On 1/22/2018 at 9:06 PM, pantheory said:

The bottom line is that one understands that all religions that have ever exited are all BS. You can prove this to yourself concerning the Christian bible by reading the first ten pages of Genesis, then the first ten pages of Revelations. If you can believe any of this, I have some great snake oil  that can help you with your religious doubts and truly make you feel great according to its producers (Rattle-snake oil, as a lineament and to create spells of magic). It sells for $79.95 US, for a 2 oz. bottle. Buy several bottles. Little mark-up is involved. 20% of the profit will be spent on advertising to inform all of its benefits. We donate to children's charities. An e-mail address will be provided for questions and orders upon request, as well as a certificate of authenticity and details of its other beneficial ingredients sent with all orders. Free shipment upon advanced payment for 3 bottles or more. Limited quantities. Get yours now.

 

This is just an aside, pantheory, but I'd like to apologize for the harsh tone I've taken with you in the past. You're clearly one of us and you're not just here trolling or whatever I asserted in past discussions. No hard feelings?