Also omniscience and omnipresence seem to me to be assertions without any logical underpinning anyway. So the thing I'm being asked to imagine has characteristics I don't accept.
They're not assertions. "There is an omnipotent God" would be an assertion. Discussing the nature of a hypothetical omnipotent God is not an assertion, any more than Russel's Teapot asserts that there is a teapot orbiting the sun. The question in play is "if there is a God, and he is omnipotent as Christianity claims, then can he be the ground of being at all physical scales?"
It's fair enough for an atheist to say I don't accept X, where X is a spiritual attribute, for example eternal life. But I've never found that it gets anywhere, since the atheist usually sticks to a physicalist scenario, in which such things are impossible.
It was St. Augustine who said “If you think you understand God, then what you understand is not God.”
It seems to me that limiting God to something we can imagine is also encompassed in this.
This is my problem with both systematic theology and nearly all bible-based discussion. It starts from the axiom that God is directly readable, either from the human intellect or from a product thereof, the biblical text. This is idolatry. We have many sources, primarily our own incarnation, but only one God. We have to stop reading the latter as if He were the former in disguise. Starting from here, Kerygmania is impenetrable, because my axioms are constantly up for dispute and nothing ever gets beyond that point.
It's fair enough for an atheist to say I don't accept X, where X is a spiritual attribute, for example eternal life. But I've never found that it gets anywhere, since the atheist usually sticks to a physicalist scenario, in which such things are impossible.
I am not sure that the atheist is at fault for sticking to a scenario there.
I think physicalism is dubious because it can't explain how we perceive colour or other qualia(*), and materialism is dubious because it can't explain why mathematics consistently models reality nor why scientific laws have general application; but it's a long leap from mathematics and colour to eternal life or other spiritual attributes.
(*) sensory appearances that aren't reducible to length, weight, or other physical measures.
I don't think atheists are at fault. I had many fun but fruitless arguments with them, round about the Dawkins era. But I can see looking back that one reason that the arguments were fruitless, was that we were coming from a different Weltanschauung, I suppose translated as world view. "Where's the evidence", they would cry, which for them meant physical evidence. Older but not wiser now, (me).
I don't think atheists are at fault. I had many fun but fruitless arguments with them, round about the Dawkins era. But I can see looking back that one reason that the arguments were fruitless, was that we were coming from a different Weltanschauung, I suppose translated as world view. "Where's the evidence", they would cry, which for them meant physical evidence. Older but not wiser now, (me).
I don't think atheists are at fault. I had many fun but fruitless arguments with them, round about the Dawkins era. But I can see looking back that one reason that the arguments were fruitless, was that we were coming from a different Weltanschauung, I suppose translated as world view. "Where's the evidence", they would cry, which for them meant physical evidence. Older but not wiser now, (me).
Each to their own, I suppose. I don't think any of those things happened, and yet Christianity exists. Indeed it seems to me that the existence of Christianity is independent of whether anything happened.
Yes, it exists, but as @Arethosemyfeet says, that existence is tied to beliefs about Jesus.
I think much depends on what is meant by “true.” King Lear may not be “true” in the sense of “historically factual.” But I would say it is “true” in the sense of coveting truth about the human condition.
Isn't discussing the meaning and ideas which flow from texts more important than discussing historical events?
In the case of the Bible, if one approaches it as a record of God’s interactions with humanity, or a specific set of people’s perceptions and experiences of God’s interactions with humanity, maybe but maybe not. There are many things in the Bible that I think can carry meaning even if they’re not historically factual as we would think of history. (Indeed, I’d say that in some instances, insisting on a reading that presumes literal historical accuracy has the potential to obscure the meaning that the writers were trying to convey. Others’ mileage may, of course, differ.)
But when it comes to Jesus, if he didn’t really live, if he didn’t say the things he’s recorded as saying and do the things he’s recorded as doing, if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then we’re talking about a radically different Christianity from the one we know, if indeed there can be such a thing as “Christianity” at all.
As an autistic person we're built for solid, concrete concepts. I'd love it if scripture was able to support one, but for me it just can't - because I just can't ignore the massive uncertainties.
I’m going to push back on this a little. I do not in the least question that this is the case for you, and I completely respect that. But I know autistic people, including autistic family members, for whom this isn’t really an accurate reflection of their experiences.
Of course not. If you've met one autistic person you've met one autistic person, as they say.
Yes, I was just responding to your use of “we’re.”
Yeah, overgeneralisation and all that, probably an example of the intolerance of uncertainty and dichotomous thinking which is evident in many autistic presentations and definitely a part of mine.
Understood, and apologies for making more of the “we’re” than was intended.
Each to their own, I suppose. I don't think any of those things happened, and yet Christianity exists. Indeed it seems to me that the existence of Christianity is independent of whether anything happened.
Yes, it exists, but as @Arethosemyfeet says, that existence is tied to beliefs about Jesus.
I think much depends on what is meant by “true.” King Lear may not be “true” in the sense of “historically factual.” But I would say it is “true” in the sense of coveting truth about the human condition.
Isn't discussing the meaning and ideas which flow from texts more important than discussing historical events?
In the case of the Bible, if one approaches it as a record of God’s interactions with humanity, or a specific set of people’s perceptions and experiences of God’s interactions with humanity, maybe but maybe not. There are many things in the Bible that I think can carry meaning even if they’re not historically factual as we would think of history. (Indeed, I’d say that in some instances, insisting on a reading that presumes literal historical accuracy has the potential to obscure the meaning that the writers were trying to convey. Others’ mileage may, of course, differ.)
But when it comes to Jesus, if he didn’t really live, if he didn’t say the things he’s recorded as saying and do the things he’s recorded as doing, if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then we’re talking about a radically different Christianity from the one we know, if indeed there can be such a thing as “Christianity” at all.
As an autistic person we're built for solid, concrete concepts. I'd love it if scripture was able to support one, but for me it just can't - because I just can't ignore the massive uncertainties.
I’m going to push back on this a little. I do not in the least question that this is the case for you, and I completely respect that. But I know autistic people, including autistic family members, for whom this isn’t really an accurate reflection of their experiences.
Two things: stories are not preserved because of belief about the proponents in the story. They are preserved and repeated and embellished and valued because they are good stories.
I’m not sure it’s that simple. I think it’s likely a pretty difficult argument to make that beliefs about Jesus led, at least in part, to the writing and preservation of the Gospels.
Second, I think there are two interesting but divergent focuses in the Jesus story, as someone who is only vaguely familiar with it. First there's a lot of magical and other impossible things. Then there's a bunch of ethical teaching which seems at odds with the magic.
Whereas I think that in the minds of the Gospel writers, those to two things—the “magical bits” and the ethical bits—are not divergent at all, but rather are inextricably connected and related to each other. I would also say that the Gospel writers assume a fair deal of familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures on the part of their audiences, and attempting to understand what the Gospel writers were trying to communicate without also understanding that Hebrew scriptural context is going to be challenging.
Christians presumably would put the crucifixion at some way in the heart of their beliefs. And yet when Jesus is asked what is most important he is quoted as saying that it is denial of self and sacrificial love of your undeserving neighbour.
Why is it impossible to reject the former whilst accepting the latter? I don't understand why there is so much micro discussion about impossible magic and almost nothing about the implications of living a life of love.
Who said it’s impossible to reject the former while accepting the latter? I wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think anywhere here has said that.
What I would say and have said is that that kind of reading of the Gospels doesn’t appear to me to be consistent with the intent of the writers. Rather, it seems to me to require a fair deal of mental editing and even outright ignoring some of what they wrote.
It was St. Augustine who said “If you think you understand God, then what you understand is not God.”
It seems to me that limiting God to something we can imagine is also encompassed in this.
I think it’s likely a pretty difficult argument to make that beliefs about Jesus led, at least in part, to the writing and preservation of the Gospels.
Well, I botched that. It should have read “I think it’s likely a pretty difficult argument to make that beliefs about Jesus didn’t lead, at least in part, to the writing and preservation of the Gospels.”
I am a scientist and also a Christian. I sometimes feel like observing, experiencing and making sense of the world is an optical illusion like this - I can have the same input and see the world as explained scientifically, or see it as explained spiritually - flipping between the two. But I can’t perceive both at exactly the same time, and both perceptions seem in an important sense true when I am engaging with them.
I don’t know if this chimes with anyone else’s experience ?
I am a scientist and also a Christian. I sometimes feel like observing, experiencing and making sense of the world is an optical illusion like this - I can have the same input and see the world as explained scientifically, or see it as explained spiritually - flipping between the two. But I can’t perceive both at exactly the same time, and both perceptions seem in an important sense true when I am engaging with them.
I don’t know if this chimes with anyone else’s experience ?
Yes, I've had this double vision for a long time. I think with me, it's about seeing the world intellectually, so this fits the science model. But also there is the spiritual, which for me is more intuitive. They don't clash really, that would only happen if I take one pov as a foundation.
I am a scientist and also a Christian. I sometimes feel like observing, experiencing and making sense of the world is an optical illusion like this - I can have the same input and see the world as explained scientifically, or see it as explained spiritually - flipping between the two. But I can’t perceive both at exactly the same time, and both perceptions seem in an important sense true when I am engaging with them.
I don’t know if this chimes with anyone else’s experience ?
Not at all with mine I'm afraid. I sometimes think my spirituality consists of wishing I had any.
It kind of does with mine. I don't exactly flip between the two, but I can hold them both as true simultaneously. Answering different questions, transmitting on a different frequency - something on those lines. Either way, the religious frequency is exploratory, provisional and in some sense metaphorical. There may or may not be an ultimate truth at the bottom of it all, but in the meantime we are all exploring, using different means. No one will lead us to the whole truth - Jesus Christ is the ultimate point at which they meet. This is only a problem if any given frequency claims to be transmitting the whole, exclusive truth.
I take it @Basketactortale that you self-identify as an atheist. But, if there is a God, why should he be constrained by whether he fits in with what you think you could believe about him?
I take it @Basketactortale that you self-identify as an atheist. But, if there is a God, why should he be constrained by whether he fits in with what you think you could believe about him?
1. One could easily say the same about your claims and beliefs about the deity
2. It's not "constraint" so much as using the mental faculties I have to assess things. And I don't believe in the claims about deities.
It's not even that I wouldn't and couldn't imagine a situation where I had to accept that a deity existed. I just don't believe in the Christian god. Other stories are available, some are much more engaging although none really seems necessary to me. If you take out the idea of a personal deity, the difference between a deity existing or not existing is largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
Also I'd just like to apologise for sidetracking this discussion. It wasn't my intention to make this about me and my thoughts on the ideas of a deity.
I'm not sure I have much else useful to say so I probably will check out now.
Also I'd just like to apologise for sidetracking this discussion. It wasn't my intention to make this about me and my thoughts on the ideas of a deity.
I'm not sure I have much else useful to say so I probably will check out now.
Don't be - it's made for an interesting discussion.
Going back to the original question - the four categories (literal, symbolic, historical and figurative) are not mutually exclusive, and indeed usually overlap. "Answering different questions, transmitting on a different frequency - something on those lines." as @ThunderBunk just said.
To take a more recent event to illustrate this, rather than delve into ancient religious texts. In the summer of 1940 RAF Fighter Command took on the Luftwaffe over the skies of England in what has become known as the Battle of Britain. This was a historical event, there are records of the battle - down to details of each sortie (from both British and German sides), the number of aircraft and names of pilots, the target of the raid, how many aircraft were lost etc. These records are rather dull and dusty and except for dedicated historians not easy to assess, and may be incomplete or in error on details. Built on these records there are a large number of literary accounts which take that data and present events in a more generally accessible way, movies and books and TV documentaries that give the overall picture or focus on parts of the battle, and thousands of family stories of "what granddad did in the war". These literary accounts aren't produced in a vacuum, they have a purpose and inevitably have some form of spin, and that purpose can often directly overlap with symbolic: Britain standing alone against the Nazi horde (ignoring that Britain had an empire, and a large proportion of pilots were from other nations including conquered nations in Europe), the plucky Few, the iconic Spitfire. Then, from where we are the symbolism can take the fore, and be contradictory - think of people people taking those events and saying "we fought fascism before, we need to fight the fascists within our own nation" or "we kept the foreigners out before, we need to keep them out now". And, finally, we have those figurative phrases that stand in for the long stories - the very words "Battle of Britain", "the Few" etc. and take on all the various meanings of the symbolism and selective narratives built upon the historical data.
We all quite naturally appreciate that for recent events all those aspects are there, and generally don't have problems recognising that there a symbolism attached to the narrative, and that the narratives are themselves different presentations of actual historical events. We recognise that we apply different interpretations and meanings to what actually happened. Yet, somewhere along the line we find ourselves struggling to do the same when it comes to religious texts.
Going back to the original question - the four categories (literal, symbolic, historical and figurative) are not mutually exclusive, and indeed usually overlap. "Answering different questions, transmitting on a different frequency - something on those lines." as @ThunderBunk just said.
To take a more recent event to illustrate this, rather than delve into ancient religious texts. In the summer of 1940 RAF Fighter Command took on the Luftwaffe over the skies of England in what has become known as the Battle of Britain. This was a historical event, there are records of the battle - down to details of each sortie (from both British and German sides), the number of aircraft and names of pilots, the target of the raid, how many aircraft were lost etc. These records are rather dull and dusty and except for dedicated historians not easy to assess, and may be incomplete or in error on details. Built on these records there are a large number of literary accounts which take that data and present events in a more generally accessible way, movies and books and TV documentaries that give the overall picture or focus on parts of the battle, and thousands of family stories of "what granddad did in the war". These literary accounts aren't produced in a vacuum, they have a purpose and inevitably have some form of spin, and that purpose can often directly overlap with symbolic: Britain standing alone against the Nazi horde (ignoring that Britain had an empire, and a large proportion of pilots were from other nations including conquered nations in Europe), the plucky Few, the iconic Spitfire. Then, from where we are the symbolism can take the fore, and be contradictory - think of people people taking those events and saying "we fought fascism before, we need to fight the fascists within our own nation" or "we kept the foreigners out before, we need to keep them out now". And, finally, we have those figurative phrases that stand in for the long stories - the very words "Battle of Britain", "the Few" etc. and take on all the various meanings of the symbolism and selective narratives built upon the historical data.
We all quite naturally appreciate that for recent events all those aspects are there, and generally don't have problems recognising that there a symbolism attached to the narrative, and that the narratives are themselves different presentations of actual historical events. We recognise that we apply different interpretations and meanings to what actually happened. Yet, somewhere along the line we find ourselves struggling to do the same when it comes to religious texts.
I think we struggle because we know the Battle of Britain is a real event, even if some of the details are tweaked in some accounts and the stories are spun, elaborated and interpreted.
This isn't the case for a lot of Biblical stories. Some of them are, I'm sure, mythological in character.
Secondly, no-one links your views on accounts of the BoB yo your eternal destination.
I am a scientist and also a Christian. I sometimes feel like observing, experiencing and making sense of the world is an optical illusion like this - I can have the same input and see the world as explained scientifically, or see it as explained spiritually - flipping between the two. But I can’t perceive both at exactly the same time, and both perceptions seem in an important sense true when I am engaging with them.
I don't know about flipping between the two, but they do remain distinct. And I'd say that they are only two of several possible perspectives. The extent to which one "pays attention to" (or maybe "centres" ) a particular perspective depends on the context, which might be one's own situation, or that of another person who you are engaging in conversation (for example), in which being able to relate to their perspective can be quite useful.
Meanwhile, I wonder if something like Manichaeism could illustrate Alan's point.
I am both a scientist and a Christian. I am not even a mildly a scientist and mildly a Christian, but someone who could have been professionally chartered as a scientist, I decided it was more hassle than it was worth, and I also hold a doctorate in theology.
Maybe it is the fact that I am a mathematician-statistician as a scientist, and therefore someone who deals with the models that underpin much of the research within science, but I do not find this conflict. The conflict only occurs if we think that science is necessary, complete and sufficient as an explanation. Science never makes this claim. Indeed, it deliberately does not offer certain explanations.
It is useful to consider that science normally* treats a "Why" question as if you asked a "How". Or try and offer a scientific explanation as to why we find the World intelligible? Just saying because our brains are wired that way is circular in my opinion.
*Less so among the social sciences, but then you enter the debate about whether social science is science due to the inclusion of meanings and interpretations of situations.
IME, it's people who aren't practicing scientists (or, who were at some point in the relative recent past) that fail to understand the scientific method and think we somehow deal with objective and complete facts and explanations. Anyone who has been directly involved in scientific research should be very aware of the limits of science, which extends to both limits in what is known about the material universe (and, limits to what we can conceivably know) and limits to the sort of question that science is an appropriate tool to use to address.
Scientists are used to handling uncertain data, not letting gaps in knowledge stop progress, faith* that a reasonable extrapolation beyond the observed is still likely to be fruitful and make progress in understanding or applying physical models.
* and, I use that word deliberately. We have faith that we can trust information we ourselves have not personally checked, even if that trust is a bit more tentative than the trust we have in information we have personally checked. In everyday life we all do that. Does anyone conduct measurements of the materials and check the calculations to determine if every bridge they need to cross is going to take their weight? Of course not, we just drive across the bridge having faith in the engineers who designed and constructed it and do regular inspections of the integrity of the materials.
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time. I don't think being a mathematician or a scientist means that a religious idea is any more or less believable. As you've all stated, the tools you use in science are not the same ones you use in religion.
Much to my own chagrin, I have over the decades interacted with quite a lot of academics including mathematicians and scientists of various kinds. Some, but my no means all, believe some shocking nonsense.
Don't forget that it was very eminent statisticians (as we would call them today) who were proponents of nonsense science called eugenics. I'm old but not that old enough to have known them myself, however some of these (Fisher, Galton, Pearson) are still taught in fundamental statistics university classes today. Some of the work they used to develop the ideas we today call fundamental statistics was directly collected in dubious ways to support their theories of eugenics.
I feel like I might have ranted here about this before so I had better stop now.
Also I would say that it feels like post-Enlightenment Christianity seems to have a lot of similarities to Platonism, which in turn has a lot of influence on experimental science and in particular pure mathematics. It's therefore not a great surprise when Christians (and those raised in an environment where Platonic concepts are a normalised part of the cultural language) find that scientific philosophy seems to fit.
You need to have a vision that there is some kind of "correct answer" in order to build experiments attempting to find it, even if you also accept that for various reasons your attempts to get to "the truth" will fall short.
Going back to the original question - the four categories (literal, symbolic, historical and figurative) are not mutually exclusive, and indeed usually overlap. "Answering different questions, transmitting on a different frequency - something on those lines." as @ThunderBunk just said.
To take a more recent event to illustrate this, rather than delve into ancient religious texts. In the summer of 1940 RAF Fighter Command took on the Luftwaffe over the skies of England in what has become known as the Battle of Britain. This was a historical event, there are records of the battle - down to details of each sortie (from both British and German sides), the number of aircraft and names of pilots, the target of the raid, how many aircraft were lost etc. These records are rather dull and dusty and except for dedicated historians not easy to assess, and may be incomplete or in error on details. Built on these records there are a large number of literary accounts which take that data and present events in a more generally accessible way, movies and books and TV documentaries that give the overall picture or focus on parts of the battle, and thousands of family stories of "what granddad did in the war". These literary accounts aren't produced in a vacuum, they have a purpose and inevitably have some form of spin, and that purpose can often directly overlap with symbolic: Britain standing alone against the Nazi horde (ignoring that Britain had an empire, and a large proportion of pilots were from other nations including conquered nations in Europe), the plucky Few, the iconic Spitfire. Then, from where we are the symbolism can take the fore, and be contradictory - think of people people taking those events and saying "we fought fascism before, we need to fight the fascists within our own nation" or "we kept the foreigners out before, we need to keep them out now". And, finally, we have those figurative phrases that stand in for the long stories - the very words "Battle of Britain", "the Few" etc. and take on all the various meanings of the symbolism and selective narratives built upon the historical data.
We all quite naturally appreciate that for recent events all those aspects are there, and generally don't have problems recognising that there a symbolism attached to the narrative, and that the narratives are themselves different presentations of actual historical events. We recognise that we apply different interpretations and meanings to what actually happened. Yet, somewhere along the line we find ourselves struggling to do the same when it comes to religious texts.
I think we struggle because we know the Battle of Britain is a real event, even if some of the details are tweaked in some accounts and the stories are spun, elaborated and interpreted.
This isn't the case for a lot of Biblical stories. Some of them are, I'm sure, mythological in character.
I think that’s certainly part of it.
Relatedly, I think part of it is a view of inspiration prominent in some quarters that the writings in the Bible were in some sense dictated, and that therefore it’s problematic if not blasphemous to apply the literary frameworks and understandings to biblical writings that we would apply to other ancient and contemporary writings.
*Less so among the social sciences, but then you enter the debate about whether social science is science due to the inclusion of meanings and interpretations of situations.
Or to put it another way, you have to explore whether science there is used in the older sense to mean “collective knowledge or learning” or in the more modern sense that restricts science to natural and physical sciences.
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time.
Which supposes that ideas are actually conflicting. I don't have any problem holding science and Christian faith together in my head at the same time because I do not see them as conflicting.
There's an often repeated saying. '"The Bible says..." is the start of a discussion, not the end'. Whether one takes a particular passage as being a literal account of what actually happened or a pious fiction, the actual words don't function as a text book that gives a definitive answer but as a prompt to get one thinking. It is, after all, a library of books trying to describe the infinite God, who that God is and what they have done, and how people have responded to that ... to produce a text book that gives definitive answers to questions about the infinite would require an infinite number of words.
Part of the problem is the modern tendency to regard "The Bible" as a book, when it's really a library or anthology, written by many different people over a very long stretch of time in several different genres (including at least one that's not longer in common use). The pretense of the unitary Bible often leads people to overlook obvious disagreements between the various authors and assume that "The Bible" speaks with one voice and the various authors never disagree with each other about anything.
Second, I think there are two interesting but divergent focuses in the Jesus story, as someone who is only vaguely familiar with it. First there's a lot of magical and other impossible things. Then there's a bunch of ethical teaching which seems at odds with the magic.
Whereas I think that in the minds of the Gospel writers, those to two things—the “magical bits” and the ethical bits—are not divergent at all, but rather are inextricably connected and related to each other. I would also say that the Gospel writers assume a fair deal of familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures on the part of their audiences, and attempting to understand what the Gospel writers were trying to communicate without also understanding that Hebrew scriptural context is going to be challenging.
Like @Nick Tamen, I'm skeptical of trying to force modern taxonomies of ideas onto ancient writings where they may not belong and likely would not have made sense to the authors. There have been various discussions on the Ship about why only some of the teaching of the First Testament. The usual dodge is that moral teachings are still valid but ritual teachings are not. This is an extra-Biblical schema that doesn't appear anywhere in the First Testament, and it gets pretty arbitrary once you start examining the rules up close. For most advocates of this distinction mostly turns out that the ritual rules are "stuff I don't want to follow" and the moral teachings are "stuff I want to force other people to follow".
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time.
Which supposes that ideas are actually conflicting. I don't have any problem holding science and Christian faith together in my head at the same time because I do not see them as conflicting.
Yes. Somehow there's a level of acceptance in the brain which means that the things we would accept in mathematics (formal proof, working through examples) is different to the things we'd accept in science (experimentation, publishing record) which is different to the things we might accept about religion and philosophy. Somehow we don't commonly want to see these things as contradictory, and instead just label them as different spheres of thinking.
And we might say "well we can't test philosophical ideas", which is true except that we also can't test fundamental mathematical axioms.
It's also true that one cannot question everything all of the time. When I cross the road I have to accept certain concepts about physics linked to my experience of objects in motion in order to avoid cars. Mostly it works, sometimes tragically it doesn't.
The question for me then is why this specific philosophical or religious idea is untestable.
Do you see what I mean? If I meet someone in the street, who I can see, who tells me that they have amazing powers to do magic, I'm probably going to expect some testable proof if I'm going to believe them.
So why would I accept other claims that look equally ridiculous if I met someone in the street saying them without testing them? If you say your religion gives you power to heal the sick, then do it. There's a sick person, heal them.
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time.
Which supposes that ideas are actually conflicting. I don't have any problem holding science and Christian faith together in my head at the same time because I do not see them as conflicting.
snip
Do you see what I mean? If I meet someone in the street, who I can see, who tells me that they have amazing powers to do magic, I'm probably going to expect some testable proof if I'm going to believe them.
So why would I accept other claims that look equally ridiculous if I met someone in the street saying them without testing them? If you say your religion gives you power to heal the sick, then do it. There's a sick person, heal them.
So if I meet a quantum physicist in the the street I should expect them to demonstrate their knowledge to me - there's some stuff, now prove your assertions.
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time.
Which supposes that ideas are actually conflicting. I don't have any problem holding science and Christian faith together in my head at the same time because I do not see them as conflicting.
snip
Do you see what I mean? If I meet someone in the street, who I can see, who tells me that they have amazing powers to do magic, I'm probably going to expect some testable proof if I'm going to believe them.
So why would I accept other claims that look equally ridiculous if I met someone in the street saying them without testing them? If you say your religion gives you power to heal the sick, then do it. There's a sick person, heal them.
So if I meet a quantum physicist in the the street I should expect them to demonstrate their knowledge to me - there's some stuff, now prove your assertions.
My daughter works in a laboratory with physicists. They are literally proving their assertions with large, expensive pieces of equipment.
It's true that I don't understand it, but it isn't true that the assertions are not being proved.
Proof being a tricky word here, of course. In one sense only pure mathematics can be proven. Experimental science is demonstrated rather than proven, in another sense.
We are all capable of compartmentalising ideas and holding more than one conflicting idea in our heads at the same time.
Which supposes that ideas are actually conflicting. I don't have any problem holding science and Christian faith together in my head at the same time because I do not see them as conflicting.
snip
Do you see what I mean? If I meet someone in the street, who I can see, who tells me that they have amazing powers to do magic, I'm probably going to expect some testable proof if I'm going to believe them.
So why would I accept other claims that look equally ridiculous if I met someone in the street saying them without testing them? If you say your religion gives you power to heal the sick, then do it. There's a sick person, heal them.
So if I meet a quantum physicist in the the street I should expect them to demonstrate their knowledge to me - there's some stuff, now prove your assertions.
My daughter works in a laboratory with physicists. They are literally proving their assertions with large, expensive pieces of equipment.
It's true that I don't understand it, but it isn't true that the assertions are not being proved.
If you don't understand something in what sense it is being proved to you?
Except, of course, those physicists working with large, expensive pieces of equipment aren't actually proving anything. No more than I proved anything when I worked with large, expensive pieces of equipment. Or, that I prove anything using the smaller and less expensive pieces of equipment that I currently play with. Karl Popper (who famously proposed that the best science can do is disprove something - which he later retracted because a disproof is itself proving something to be wrong, and so if you can't prove something to be true you equally can't prove it to be false) produced an analogy of science as being people working on a swamp ... somewhere deep below them there would be the solid rock of objective truth, but the best scientists manage is to probe into the swamp driving piles of imperfect knowledge into the shifting ground beneath them; some of those piles eventually rot away, to be replaced by new stronger piles, with science and technology built upon this imperfect foundation of piles in a swamp that never quite reaches the bedrock of objective truth, but the foundation is good enough to build on while still also constantly being improved as piles get driven deeper or into new parts of the swamp.
The advance of science is a mixture that includes mathematics that follows formal steps, experimentation and theorising based on observations, postulating and testing ideas to find the best (but never complete) descriptions of the physical universe, philosophical reflections of what we as scientists are doing, and even our religious beliefs (eg: if we believe in a faithful God we might expect order to be observed, if we believe in a pantheon of capricious gods we might not expect order).
And, to pick up another point from earlier. My religion doesn't heal, my faith is that God heals - but also, that in the vast majority of cases God heals by calling people to be doctors and nurses, or to conduct research into medical sciences.
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They're not assertions. "There is an omnipotent God" would be an assertion. Discussing the nature of a hypothetical omnipotent God is not an assertion, any more than Russel's Teapot asserts that there is a teapot orbiting the sun. The question in play is "if there is a God, and he is omnipotent as Christianity claims, then can he be the ground of being at all physical scales?"
It seems to me that limiting God to something we can imagine is also encompassed in this.
I think physicalism is dubious because it can't explain how we perceive colour or other qualia(*), and materialism is dubious because it can't explain why mathematics consistently models reality nor why scientific laws have general application; but it's a long leap from mathematics and colour to eternal life or other spiritual attributes.
(*) sensory appearances that aren't reducible to length, weight, or other physical measures.
What other evidence would you offer?
I wouldn't. There's no point.
I’m not sure it’s that simple. I think it’s likely a pretty difficult argument to make that beliefs about Jesus led, at least in part, to the writing and preservation of the Gospels.
Whereas I think that in the minds of the Gospel writers, those to two things—the “magical bits” and the ethical bits—are not divergent at all, but rather are inextricably connected and related to each other. I would also say that the Gospel writers assume a fair deal of familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures on the part of their audiences, and attempting to understand what the Gospel writers were trying to communicate without also understanding that Hebrew scriptural context is going to be challenging.
Who said it’s impossible to reject the former while accepting the latter? I wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think anywhere here has said that.
What I would say and have said is that that kind of reading of the Gospels doesn’t appear to me to be consistent with the intent of the writers. Rather, it seems to me to require a fair deal of mental editing and even outright ignoring some of what they wrote.
To which I will add: Amen.
Sorry about that.
I don’t know if this chimes with anyone else’s experience ?
Yes, I've had this double vision for a long time. I think with me, it's about seeing the world intellectually, so this fits the science model. But also there is the spiritual, which for me is more intuitive. They don't clash really, that would only happen if I take one pov as a foundation.
Not at all with mine I'm afraid. I sometimes think my spirituality consists of wishing I had any.
1. One could easily say the same about your claims and beliefs about the deity
2. It's not "constraint" so much as using the mental faculties I have to assess things. And I don't believe in the claims about deities.
It's not even that I wouldn't and couldn't imagine a situation where I had to accept that a deity existed. I just don't believe in the Christian god. Other stories are available, some are much more engaging although none really seems necessary to me. If you take out the idea of a personal deity, the difference between a deity existing or not existing is largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not sure I have much else useful to say so I probably will check out now.
Don't be - it's made for an interesting discussion.
To take a more recent event to illustrate this, rather than delve into ancient religious texts. In the summer of 1940 RAF Fighter Command took on the Luftwaffe over the skies of England in what has become known as the Battle of Britain. This was a historical event, there are records of the battle - down to details of each sortie (from both British and German sides), the number of aircraft and names of pilots, the target of the raid, how many aircraft were lost etc. These records are rather dull and dusty and except for dedicated historians not easy to assess, and may be incomplete or in error on details. Built on these records there are a large number of literary accounts which take that data and present events in a more generally accessible way, movies and books and TV documentaries that give the overall picture or focus on parts of the battle, and thousands of family stories of "what granddad did in the war". These literary accounts aren't produced in a vacuum, they have a purpose and inevitably have some form of spin, and that purpose can often directly overlap with symbolic: Britain standing alone against the Nazi horde (ignoring that Britain had an empire, and a large proportion of pilots were from other nations including conquered nations in Europe), the plucky Few, the iconic Spitfire. Then, from where we are the symbolism can take the fore, and be contradictory - think of people people taking those events and saying "we fought fascism before, we need to fight the fascists within our own nation" or "we kept the foreigners out before, we need to keep them out now". And, finally, we have those figurative phrases that stand in for the long stories - the very words "Battle of Britain", "the Few" etc. and take on all the various meanings of the symbolism and selective narratives built upon the historical data.
We all quite naturally appreciate that for recent events all those aspects are there, and generally don't have problems recognising that there a symbolism attached to the narrative, and that the narratives are themselves different presentations of actual historical events. We recognise that we apply different interpretations and meanings to what actually happened. Yet, somewhere along the line we find ourselves struggling to do the same when it comes to religious texts.
I think we struggle because we know the Battle of Britain is a real event, even if some of the details are tweaked in some accounts and the stories are spun, elaborated and interpreted.
This isn't the case for a lot of Biblical stories. Some of them are, I'm sure, mythological in character.
Secondly, no-one links your views on accounts of the BoB yo your eternal destination.
Though I wouldn't be so sure of that if one dares to criticise Blessed Sir Winston in some quarters.
Meanwhile, I wonder if something like Manichaeism could illustrate Alan's point.
Maybe it is the fact that I am a mathematician-statistician as a scientist, and therefore someone who deals with the models that underpin much of the research within science, but I do not find this conflict. The conflict only occurs if we think that science is necessary, complete and sufficient as an explanation. Science never makes this claim. Indeed, it deliberately does not offer certain explanations.
It is useful to consider that science normally* treats a "Why" question as if you asked a "How". Or try and offer a scientific explanation as to why we find the World intelligible? Just saying because our brains are wired that way is circular in my opinion.
*Less so among the social sciences, but then you enter the debate about whether social science is science due to the inclusion of meanings and interpretations of situations.
Scientists are used to handling uncertain data, not letting gaps in knowledge stop progress, faith* that a reasonable extrapolation beyond the observed is still likely to be fruitful and make progress in understanding or applying physical models.
* and, I use that word deliberately. We have faith that we can trust information we ourselves have not personally checked, even if that trust is a bit more tentative than the trust we have in information we have personally checked. In everyday life we all do that. Does anyone conduct measurements of the materials and check the calculations to determine if every bridge they need to cross is going to take their weight? Of course not, we just drive across the bridge having faith in the engineers who designed and constructed it and do regular inspections of the integrity of the materials.
Much to my own chagrin, I have over the decades interacted with quite a lot of academics including mathematicians and scientists of various kinds. Some, but my no means all, believe some shocking nonsense.
Don't forget that it was very eminent statisticians (as we would call them today) who were proponents of nonsense science called eugenics. I'm old but not that old enough to have known them myself, however some of these (Fisher, Galton, Pearson) are still taught in fundamental statistics university classes today. Some of the work they used to develop the ideas we today call fundamental statistics was directly collected in dubious ways to support their theories of eugenics.
I feel like I might have ranted here about this before so I had better stop now.
You need to have a vision that there is some kind of "correct answer" in order to build experiments attempting to find it, even if you also accept that for various reasons your attempts to get to "the truth" will fall short.
Relatedly, I think part of it is a view of inspiration prominent in some quarters that the writings in the Bible were in some sense dictated, and that therefore it’s problematic if not blasphemous to apply the literary frameworks and understandings to biblical writings that we would apply to other ancient and contemporary writings.
Or to put it another way, you have to explore whether science there is used in the older sense to mean “collective knowledge or learning” or in the more modern sense that restricts science to natural and physical sciences.
Part of the problem is the modern tendency to regard "The Bible" as a book, when it's really a library or anthology, written by many different people over a very long stretch of time in several different genres (including at least one that's not longer in common use). The pretense of the unitary Bible often leads people to overlook obvious disagreements between the various authors and assume that "The Bible" speaks with one voice and the various authors never disagree with each other about anything.
For example, the book of Ezra tells us about how awful mixed race marriages are and that the only God-approved solution to this "problem" is a forcible mass divorce of all mixed race couples and banishment for all former wives and their mixed-race kids. The book of Ruth, on the other hand, is essentially a reply to Ezra saying "let me tell you a story about one of those no-good, unholy mixed race marriages".
What does "The Bible" say about mixed race marriages? Depends on which bits you read.
Like @Nick Tamen, I'm skeptical of trying to force modern taxonomies of ideas onto ancient writings where they may not belong and likely would not have made sense to the authors. There have been various discussions on the Ship about why only some of the teaching of the First Testament. The usual dodge is that moral teachings are still valid but ritual teachings are not. This is an extra-Biblical schema that doesn't appear anywhere in the First Testament, and it gets pretty arbitrary once you start examining the rules up close. For most advocates of this distinction mostly turns out that the ritual rules are "stuff I don't want to follow" and the moral teachings are "stuff I want to force other people to follow".
Yes. Somehow there's a level of acceptance in the brain which means that the things we would accept in mathematics (formal proof, working through examples) is different to the things we'd accept in science (experimentation, publishing record) which is different to the things we might accept about religion and philosophy. Somehow we don't commonly want to see these things as contradictory, and instead just label them as different spheres of thinking.
And we might say "well we can't test philosophical ideas", which is true except that we also can't test fundamental mathematical axioms.
It's also true that one cannot question everything all of the time. When I cross the road I have to accept certain concepts about physics linked to my experience of objects in motion in order to avoid cars. Mostly it works, sometimes tragically it doesn't.
The question for me then is why this specific philosophical or religious idea is untestable.
Do you see what I mean? If I meet someone in the street, who I can see, who tells me that they have amazing powers to do magic, I'm probably going to expect some testable proof if I'm going to believe them.
So why would I accept other claims that look equally ridiculous if I met someone in the street saying them without testing them? If you say your religion gives you power to heal the sick, then do it. There's a sick person, heal them.
So if I meet a quantum physicist in the the street I should expect them to demonstrate their knowledge to me - there's some stuff, now prove your assertions.
My daughter works in a laboratory with physicists. They are literally proving their assertions with large, expensive pieces of equipment.
It's true that I don't understand it, but it isn't true that the assertions are not being proved.
If you don't understand something in what sense it is being proved to you?
The advance of science is a mixture that includes mathematics that follows formal steps, experimentation and theorising based on observations, postulating and testing ideas to find the best (but never complete) descriptions of the physical universe, philosophical reflections of what we as scientists are doing, and even our religious beliefs (eg: if we believe in a faithful God we might expect order to be observed, if we believe in a pantheon of capricious gods we might not expect order).
And, to pick up another point from earlier. My religion doesn't heal, my faith is that God heals - but also, that in the vast majority of cases God heals by calling people to be doctors and nurses, or to conduct research into medical sciences.