How God works (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 24, 2013, 15:34 (4111 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw (to TONY): You have agreed that belief is a matter of faith, and yet you get frustrated when someone tells you that your subjectively interpreted "evidence" requires faith to be believed!-DAVID: Your discussion and mine with Tony is frustrating. He thoroughly believes that what he considers evidence is 'real' truth. It isn't. It requires interpretation of ancient texts, based on hearsay, and then an interpretation of the future events which may or may not have been foretold. The Jews in exile certainly planned to get back to Jeruselem, and they expressed wishes for that event, and they did get back. So? We all wish for things that finally come true. You are right to ask for a scientific proof. That is what I am attempting to show.-Thank you for this post, which is important for me since it comes from someone who is an avowed theist and like myself was raised in the Jewish tradition, tied to the Old Testament. It's difficult for all of us not to get frustrated when others apparently refuse to see what seems to us an obvious truth. However, I would like to think that the exchanges do help all of us to sharpen our thinking, and certainly in my case they have broadened my knowledge considerably.-While on the subject of frustration and your own "scientific proof", there continue to be misunderstandings over my own agnostic position. In my post to Tony a couple of days ago, I made a point which I'll repeat here in the hope that it might make my views clearer to you and others as well:
 
Your scientific argument against chance creating life leads you to the subjective inference that no matter how unlikely it may be (even you can't come up with attributes or an explanation other than the nebulous "first cause"), some form of intelligence you call God must have done it. The atheist argument that there is no scientific evidence to prove that God exists leads him to the subjective inference that no matter how unlikely it may be (even Dawkins admits the improbability), chance must have done it. Confronted by two unbelievable theories, I decline to draw a conclusion, and so if either theory is presented to me, I can only explain why I accept the negative arguments (no evidence for chance v. no evidence for God), but do not accept the positive (chance did it v. God did it).-One very important qualification here is that I do NOT believe that science has or ever will have all the answers, and I know you don't either. But since experiences from other areas of life (not just psychic, but also connected with our everyday consciousness) still prove nothing either way about "God", I remain - as you know all too well! - on my fence.