1. We cannot "conjure up" God. If there is a God--a Supreme Being of some sort--we would not define His characteristics any more than we get to decide what the stranger moving in next door is going to be like. God defines Himself.
2. It is wrong to try to convince ourselves to believe in God. If there is a God who is all-powerful and interested in humanity, He would be able to communicate with us. He would be able to prove His own existence to us. We don't have to pretend to believe in a God that has no real power to connect with us on an intimate level.
3. If there is a God that is all-powerful and all-knowing, we, as limited beings that exist within time, would never be able to comprehend everything about Him. We would only be able to understand what He enables us to understand.
4. If God exists and if God is perfect, He would also be changeless. Perfection cannot be improved upon. Therefore, God would have no need to change Himself (i.e. His nature.)
5. If God is perfect and if God loves us, nothing we could do would ever make Him love us any less and nothing we could do would ever make Him love us any more. If perfect love exists, it would be a changeless love.
6. If there is a God who made me and who is all-knowing, He would know my innermost thoughts and desires. I would be, in some way, accountable to Him. He would want to have some kind of influence in my life. He must, therefore, also be, in some way, accessible to me.
7. If God is truly good, He would be extremely grieved by the evil that is so prevalent in our world. He wouldn't be able to sit by and do nothing; He would have to do something about it.
8. If God is truly perfectly good, there is no way I, in my imperfection, could ever be with Him or figure out how to reach Him. If there is a way, He must have provided it. I could not come up with it on my own. It would be foolishness to think that, in a relationship between a perfect being and an imperfect one, the perfect being would expect the imperfect one to do all the work, make all the decisions and figure out on its own how to attain perfection. It would be like asking your newborn baby to build a vehicle out of the junk in your garage, get behind the wheel and drive to Malaysia. It's just not going to happen. We can't reach God--no matter what we do (or don't do). He has to reach us.
9. If a relationship with God is possible, the start of that relationship and the maintenance of that relationship would be strictly between God and the individual. In other words, no one else--not a pastor, a friend, a family member or a religious institution--could handle the responsibility of maintaining it. You are not spiritually accountable to anyone but God (unless you choose to be).
10. For the biblical account of the origins of the earth and humanity to be true, they cannot contradict proven scientific facts. If God set up the world and nature and science, His account of it, if taken seriously, would help explain things, not cause greater confusion.
6 comments:
1. We would not be able to dictate what characteristics he ought to have; we might be able to define some of them if we found out about them - if, for example, he told us a bit about himself.
2. Agreed.
3. Agreed. Typo: "what".
4. I don't know; "perfect" hasn't been defined. Maybe perfection changes with the times? I would say that God is changeless because God created time, and therefore does not experience it; only something experiencing time can change, since change happens over the course of time.
5. I don't know. Maybe perfect love is love that is felt towards others in perfect proportion to their relevant qualities. As the qualities change, so does the love.
6. Know innermost thoughts and desires: yes. Accountability: why? Influence: possibly, but possibly not. I make things whose "lives" I don't want to influence. Even if God is all-knowing, what's to say he wants to influence each of his creatures?
7. We need definitions of "good" and "evil".
8. I think I more or less agree.
9. I think that depends on one's intellectual abilities and independence of mind, among other factors. I'm not convinced that people who have never really learned to think for themselves can be expected to "go it alone" in forging their relationships with God. Maybe I'm underestimating people. Regardless, I think this statement will necessarily be true of different people to varying degrees.
10. I don't think someone can be expected to believe a document that claims something that modern science has convincingly shown to be false. What is a "proven scientific fact"? This requires some personal judgment. For example, is 15 billion years (or thereabouts) being the age of the universe a "proven scientific fact"? I think the jury's still out. That's part of what my post is about (the one you commented on). I don't think your second sentence is necessarily true. God may have intentionally written the Bible in a confusing way, perhaps for the following reason: if the Bible obviously had information that only God could have known all along, it would be too obvious that the Bible was, indeed, divine. Rational people in the modern age would look at how well the Bible's account was corroborated by modern science and would see no other conclusion to draw. Individual human free will would be hampered: right and wrong would be too obvious, because the Bible would be too obviously true. A more confusing Bible would allow an "out" for people wanting to believe something else.
Thank you, Mr. He Who Must Not Be Named, for your very thoughtful and thought-provoking comments. I will try to further clarify here. By the way, I love Spock. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a Trekkie myself.
1. I see what you mean, but I think I made that point clearer when I added point number three. As I'm sure you agree, there is a vast difference between knowing or even discovering qualities about God and actually "defining" Who He is. Knowing implies that we have learned of Him. Defining implies that we have created Him. I'm sure you agree that none of us created the true God (though many of us have created our own gods).
3. Sorry. I'll fix it.
4. I appreciate your depth here. I agree with your final reasoning.
5. I think here lies part of the problem that religious sects have in their reasoning. They are so afraid that if people felt like God truly loved them no matter what, that they would then go off and commit mass atrocities without any kind of remorse. My point here is that God's love is perfect, not man's. God's perfect love loves despite man's failures, but that does not mean that He tolerates them. I love my son deeply--so deeply that I cannot express it well in words, but I do not tolerate it when he tells me lies. I don't tolerate his failures--not because I love him any less, but truly because of my deep love for him. The love hasn't changed; the response has. One further extrapolation here is this: If God's love is perfect and changeless, He would see beyond our outward failures into our hearts and be able to meet us where we are. In other words, He wouldn't expect us to fix ourselves up before coming to Him. He would accept us as we are and then He would do the fixing.
6. My father (a pastor) read these and mentioned that one of them was a little simple. He didn't say which, but I think this is it. I suppose I did make a bit of a philosophical jump here. I suppose the motivating factor in God wanting to influence us would not be His creating and knowing us so much as His love for us. I think, though, that from our point of view, just having been created by God makes us accountable to Him. That's something that many would rather not believe. Not because it's unreasonable so much as because they simply want to be in control. Thanks for helping me make this clearer.
7. I think the traditional definitions of good and evil suffice. Part of our trouble these days is that we see everything in shades of gray. We have taken God's pure gifts and have maligned them to such an extent that they are barely recognizable. Take love, for example. Love is good, right? The Bible even says that God is love. I saw part of a very disturbing TV show once (I have since cut way back on my television watching) where there was a pedophile talking about how what he was doing to the young boy was okay because they truly 'loved' each other. Well, is love still good? Yes. Is it good enough to make child rape okay? No. Love, like all of God's gifts, though perfect, can be contaminated by our sinfulness. This is why God does not allow us in His presence unless we, too, have been made perfect, sinless, pure. Because evil contaminates good. It is its nature. God's nature, being wholly good, cannot, therefore, allow Himself to be contamintated by evil--even shades of gray. And, since we are imperfect and unable to fix ourselves, He sent Jesus (Himself) to pay the penalty for our sins so that we would have the option of recieving His righteousness in place of our own shortcomings. As I said in my statement, a good God would have to do something about the evil in the world. And He did.
8. I have to admit that I was surprised that you agreed with this, even more or less.
9. I didn't intend to say that people won't benefit from wise, godly guidance. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that they will. My point was to show that ultimately our relationship is between us and God--a direct line of communication. We, therefore, aren't really "going it alone" if God is guiding us directly. Still, you are right that a solid & godly fellowship of other believers is very helpful. I wanted to expose the failures, though, of religion for religion's sake alone. Too many people leave their spiritual health in the hands of a pastor or a 'living prophet', a priest, the pope or in some distant religious institution. That is a mistake, to say the least. By doing that, you have traded what could be a dynamic, growing, living relationship with God for nothing more than a warm pew in church.
10. I think I agreed with most of your point on your site. My point remains the same, though, seeing how most people who think that the Bible contradicts proven science haven't read it (and possibly don't really know what proven science is.) You're right about the date thing not necessarily being a proven scientific fact. As you said before, the Bible/Torah isn't clear on that point and, therefore, in my estimation, who cares? As long as they don't contradict each other, there's no problem. Take the Big Bang Theory, for example. (Remember, it's a theory.) The Bible doesn't say that's how it happened, but neither does it deny it. I think maybe God created the world using the Big Bang Theory. Why not? Ultimately, though, who cares? As far as my second sentence goes, I both agree and disagree with you. I think the problem lies in the fact that many people try to read between the lines of the Bible instead of simply recognizing that it is clear on some things and vague in others--on purpose, as you say. If the Bible doesn't make a comment on something, maybe science can fill in the gaps. If it doesn't, though, who's to say that we really need to know? Though it's very interesting, I don't think we need to know exactly HOW God created the earth to know that He DID and that He loves us and that we can have a relationship with Him.
Again, thanks so much for your help. I enjoyed reading your thoughts.
Susan-- I agree with most of the statements... if there is a God, then those things would have to be true. He would have to be perfect in all ways. It's hard to disprove any of this, of course, but I think that's outside the point you're trying to make.
I do think we can conjure up God. At least, we can define who and what He is and does. If we can't, there's no religion. If we can, the definition has to be made up.
I think there are plenty of people who say they have a relationship with God that did not come to it on their own. They learned about God in church or through a friend/family member, but their bond is as strong as can be.
Interesting post, in any case. :)
-- Hemant, www.friendlyatheist.com
Hemant,
Thank you so much for your thought-provoking response. I would like to make one observation about your comment on "conjuring up God". I can understand why you would think as you do. As an atheist, you, naturally, believe that all religion is a result of conjuring up God. In most instances, in fact, I would agree with you. Even Christians forget that there is a real Being out there Who is more than capable of defining Himself, and yet we try to put our human characteristics on Him. This is often where we end up getting misled and confused and end up turning into hypocrites.
But let's consider for a moment that if there truly was a God--a Being not controlled at all by humanity--who would define Who He is and what His characteristics are? Only Him, of course.
When you find out that you're going to have a new neighbor moving in next door, do you get to decide what he (or she) is going to be like? Do you get to decide that he's going to be a jovial, laid-back, generous fellow who will loan you his grill and new ferari? No. He's who he is, even if that means he's a lazy know-it-all who walks around on his porch in his underwear. You, unfortunately, have little input on the matter. So, if God is a true Being, then we don't define Him, He defines Himself. (Because, as you already know, if we defined Him, he wouldn't truly exist at all. We'd be following a figment of our imaginations.)
Once again, thanks so much for your feedback. It's truly appreciated.
Susan
Susan-- To try and carry on this analogy... As an atheist, it's not that I moved away from that neighbor and chose to ignore him. I still live in my house. Rather, I don't believe there's a neighbor there at all. The lights are off in the house. There's no car in the driveway. I can speculate on who my neighbor could be, but I don't really know.
I guess my issue here is that we have no proof of God being seen or heard (though some might claim otherwise), so we're left trying to figure out what God's characteristics are.
On the other hand, a neighbor is someone we see and hear and talk to... in that sense, you're right. We're stuck with the neighbor we have.
-- Hemant, www.FriendlyAtheist.com
Hemant,
Thanks again for responding. You are right, of course. If there is no neighbor there at all, though, why bother speculating about what he or she is like or could be like? It would certainly be a waste of time. On the other hand, if you happen by and see lights on in the house and hear music coming from the window, you might begin to wonder if there might be somebody in there after all--even if you didn't actually lay eyes on him or see the moving van. What I'm trying to say is that, while speculation gets us nowhere, there is some very reliable information available that points us in the right direction. I invite you to respond to my last comment on spirituality above, for I believe the beginning of the question lies there.
Thanks again.
Susan
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