Do I think religion is always nothing but superstition? No. Are there some believers who might be described that way. Yes surely, just as there are some nons who who can fairly be described that way too.
But is there something about religious positions that are intrinsically more deserving of that description? I don’t think so. From some disembodied, Martian perspective it may seem that way. But any reflective person with sufficiently wide education or life experience must acknowledge that there is a sacred dimension to life. Does that mean the supernatural and miracles must be real or that there is any being who brought it all into being or orchestrates it still. Not in my opinion. But those are ways the sacred have traditionally been understood. And no one can show which beliefs regarding the sacred are true, including the belief that nothing exists but states of matters and the playing out of natural laws.
Many people on both sides could do a better job of owning the uncertainty inherent to the weak epistemic position we all share.
Well said. The only thing I would dispute is classifying “Jewish and other fables” as infinitely lesser. Of course God incarnate, the Word in the flesh, is infinitely greater than any written document. But for those of us who didn’t have the benefit of seeing and hearing him, we have to rely on the written testimony of those who say they did. (1 John 1.) You have to admit this 2,000-yr-old, oft-disputed collection of NT documents that we possess is infinitely lesser than seeing and hearing Jesus in the flesh. (Thomas had something to say about that.)
If God is the ground of being, yet he reached out to humanity in the form of Jesus’ incarnation, it’s not much of a stretch to believe he began reaching out to humanity in many other forms (including fables and prophecy) prior to the Christ-event. YHWH laid the groundwork in every tribe and tongue, so to speak, and began his “reclamation project” in an unexpected backwater.
Amen.
Edit: I should have said “the prophets” instead of “prophecy” above, but I’ll let it stand. What I had in mind wasn’t any specific prooftext. Rather, Jesus drew his ethics of “justice” (care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger) from the Hebrew prophets, and I’d suggest his self-understanding as Messiah came mostly from Isaiah’s “Servant Songs.” And don’t read Leviticus or the Torah if you’re allergic to Jewish fables and “do unto others” nonsense that influenced Jesus.
That would depend on how you choose a random series of numbers.
I am confident that if you extended this to copies of all people then they would not be same in the case of all people. The point being that true randomness is possible in the universe but that doesn’t mean that this is the case with everyone choosing what they call a random series of numbers.
Identical computers in identical worlds asked to produce a random series of numbers will give the same numbers.
Why?
If I make a film of you choosing the numbers, is that person on the film no longer you choosing the numbers?
I have observed something else under the sun. The fastest runner doesn’t always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle. The wise sometimes go hungry, and the skillful are not necessarily wealthy. And those who are educated don’t always lead successful lives. It is all decided by chance, by being in the right place at the right time.
I’ve lived long enough to see faithful people plagued by horrible circumstances and horrible people rewarded by “time and chance.” It’s a regular theme in the Psalms. Those who are superstitious are those who think calling out the “prayer warriors” will heal congenital defects or cure cancer.
God’s omnipotence and omniscience only means that God CAN control things and know things if He chooses, NOT that He must do so. Thus God can arrange events according to His providential timing as Dale claims, but He can also have sorrow and regret when events do not go as He would choose because He has chosen NOT to control and know everything. God wants a real relationship with us where we write the future together. But when we are slaves to sin, our free will has been discarded, and only God can set us free.
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Proverbs 16:33
Did I imply that Christians are all healthy and wealthy or should be? I don’t differ with Ecclesiastes except where Ecclesiastes at first glance appears to differ with Proverbs, so I’m not sure what your point is.
It’s as if you can’t do haven’t tried the thought experiment.
It’s odd how quickly people in these kinds of discussions begin to equate their ability to choose to a program that can only as to yet mimic that ability.
Computers utilizing nuclear decay rates as a means of generating random numbers is conceivable, but to say that a person’s ability to choose is based on some kind of quantum indeterminacy, that would look a lot like some kind of scientific solipsism.
This one strikes a real chord for me… I’m just going to repost something I wrote about this previously:
In Acts 2:14-36 there is a most overlooked apologetics passage. Peter supports his conclusion of “therefore know for certain” with three types of evidence: OT prophecy, eyewitness testimony, and a self-evident work of the Spirit.
The book of 1 John also seems to have this threefold witness: the fulfillment of OT prophecy “it is the last hour,” eyewitness testimony “we have seen,” and the Spirit’s self-evident testimony “you have been anointed by the Holy One.”
Or how blessed (anointed?) will be those who have not seen and yet have believed.
So you cannot or will not answer the question I asked. And the following reply shows why you can’t or won’t.
Are these worlds identical or not? If the the quantum fluctuations in these worlds are different then how could they be identical? And if they are identical to such a degree, then how are they different from a film of the same world?
But here I did answer the implied question regardless of the problems with how you have posed it. Because we can look at the possible worlds of the future, which are identical up to present and only different in the future. But then looking at the versions of myself in those possible futures as not being myself is just plain ridiculous.
Regardless you have made an incorrect assumption which I have not made and it is that your selection of random numbers are truly random. It is not that I think this is impossible, but only that the assumption of a particular person that it is truly random in his case might be a little naïve. Scientific studies of whether people can do this give contradictory results demonstrating that it depends on the people who attempt this.
And the assumption that one can do this better than a computer is worse than just naïve – it only demonstrates quite a lack of comprehension of what computers can do compared to people.
I certainly made no such claim. Quite the opposite, I said we cannot assume any such thing. I only said that it is a possibility.
Is “scientific solipsism” something you have just made up? But I certainly see no connection between the assumption you talked about and solipsism which is defined as the claim that you are the only conscious being in existence. Conjoining this with “scientific” is incoherent since science is all about getting beyond our subjective experiences to the truths which are the same for everyone – thus it implicitly rejects solipsism.
I am proposing no such thing. And you are using the wrong terminology. Particles do not decay at different times because of some imaginary decay rate property of individual particles. All neutrons are identical (demonstrably indistinguishable) and there is only one decay rate for all of them. Your implicit suggestion that there are hidden variables determining these events is demonstrably incorrect.
What I did was ask you a questions about what you mean by identical worlds. How can they be identical if they don’t have the same history? And they cannot have the same history unless all quantum events are the same. But if these are the same then they are not different worlds at all but the same world… no different than a making a 3-d film of it.
NO, IT IS NOT!!!
I don’t know what strange understanding or premise you are holding which make you equate these two, but I certainly reject it. There is NOTHING solipsist about the idea of quantum fluctuations having some impact on human behavior. It is crazy to imagine that quantum fluctuation cannot affect human behavior the way they affect everything else, and it is even crazier to think this would validate solipsism in any way whatsoever.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
53
There’s no comparison Jay. There is no basis for believing in God just based on the TaNaKh. And it gets worse : ) there is no rational, intellectually honest basis for believing that even if Jesus is God incarnate that He was prophesied. None: Jesus is Cinderella’s shoe… even Isaiah 53 is an Ugly Sister’s foot by comparison.
Jesus’ mainly Jewish chroniclers and even Jesus Himself may well have made them fit Him. His actually being God incarnate doesn’t make them work forward. It doesn’t have to. The only thing that possibly works going forward and the greatest feedback loop of all time, is His death-and-resurrection.
By anachronistic rationalist criteria they and He were… superstitious. Which does not invalidate the proposition that He was God incarnate. If good Greek Dr. Luke’s unique second hand story is true, then Jesus continued to knowingly work with that ‘superstition’. That ancient epistemology. He continued to play pragmatically fast and loose with Jewish religion. Jewish ‘superstition’.
Just pointing out that if “luck” (or “chance”) is part of Qoholeth’s vocabulary, I see no reason why it can’t be part of the Christian’s vocabulary. I can have “bad luck” or “good luck” on the golf course, but I don’t believe God directs my perfectly struck ball into a divot in the fairway or even cares what I shoot. (If he truly wanted me to be happy, I would be on the Senior Tour right now.) My point is this: From our end of the microscope, most of life/reality appears “random,” which simply means “unpredictable” from our perspective. I’m sure it looks different from God’s side of things, but I don’t really want to get into a debate on the nature of God.
What I objected to was your language. “Infinitely better than Jewish fables” (paraphrasing from memory) is like saying Christianity is infinitely better than Judaism. That may be how you feel, but many Jews would find your wording infinitely offensive. Personally, I find Christianity more intellectually and spiritually satisfying, but that’s nothing more than saying, “I’m a Christian.”
On your second statement, if Christianity weren’t an option, would I be a theist based solely on the Hebrew Bible, or would I be an atheist? I can’t really answer that question. The flipside is this: If I had been born to Jewish parents (or Muslim or any other religious tradition), would I have converted to Christianity or become an atheist? Can’t answer that one, either. We have to play the hands we’re dealt.
Dang it! I knew I should’ve edited out any mention of prophecy. It’s triggering to too many folks who grew up in fundamentalism. Haha. Did you see my addendum?
I’m not talking about Josh McDowell-style apologetics. I’m mainly raising an objection to your apparent disregard for the Hebrew Bible and answering it from two angles: God’s revelation isn’t limited to the written word, and the relationship of the incarnation itself to the time, place, and culture that Jesus was born into.
I think the first point is fairly obvious. God can speak through general revelation (available to everyone through nature, experience and reason) and special revelation. The latter can include many things: theophany, vision, inspiration, etc. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that if the ground of all being was interested enough in humanity to manifest as one of us, then God’s purpose included “preparing a body” for Jesus (through evolution) and a group of people (through culture) ready to understand the significance of the Christ-event.
Second, Jesus wasn’t dropped out of the sky into the wilderness as a fully-formed human ready to face Satan’s temptations and start his mission. He was born into a certain time, place, and culture. Was he born with an awareness of his divine origin and mission? That would make no sense. He was born a normal infant of humble background and questionable parentage. The rest was learned (he “grew in wisdom and stature”).
Skipping to the conclusion, the kernel of all the major themes of Jesus’ ethical teaching is found in the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophets. If you want to understand the Teacher, it helps to understand his source material. Jesus was also born at a time when Judea was gripped with messianic fever. Upon Herod’s death, three different messianic claimants popped up. All of them were tax protestors; one of them became the founder of the Zealots. Their understanding of the Messiah centered around political deliverance. Growing up in this environment, Jesus certainly thought about the subject as a young man, and he came to a radically different conclusion – God’s kingdom wasn’t political, and the Messiah’s mission was self-sacrificial. Those themes come primarily from the prophets, the latter especially in the Servant Songs of Isaiah, which wasn’t considered a messianic text prior to Jesus.
As far as when that happened in Jesus’ life and what role the Holy Spirit may have played, I can’t answer that question. All I know is the first question posed to him by the Devil, “IF you are the Son of God …”
That’s the thing. It is a very minute part of the vocabulary of scripture – that particular word appears to be used only twice overall and only once with that connotation. Maybe there is a little more in the whole of scripture about God’s sovereignty that we should be paying more attention to than a word used all of once that can be translated as ‘luck’? That was rather my point with the verse from Proverbs cited above:
Most of Ecclesiastes is written from a human-centric, temporal perspective and all is futility. Maybe we should be above that.
Tell me that you think that Maggie thought she was just lucky and God had nothing to do with it.
I hope there is something more important for his kingdom and more deeply satisfying for you.
I’m an atheist and I don’t think praying is stupid. Again, this is something people sincerely and honestly believe in, so I respect it.
As to irrational? That’s a bit tougher. I do irrational things. As a human, I am regularly irrational. From a human perspective, I don’t think being irrational is inherently bad since it is part of the human condition. Not everything we feel or believe needs to be solidly based in logic or rational thought.
More to the point, atheism doesn’t require someone to be rational. Atheists can be as irrational as anyone else. Again, atheism is just a lack of belief in deities. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why? Atheists are humans just like everyone else, so why can’t we talk about our emotions just like everyone else? You don’t have to believe in deities in order to have emotions.
From my understanding, brain activity occurs much too slowly and at too large of a scale to be affected by quantum effects.
From my understanding, brain activity is somewhat analogous to weather. For weather you have inputs and outputs, and the current state of the atmosphere. The conditions are always changing so you get different outcomes at different times. With the brain, you have sensory input coming in from the world around you, and this interacts with the current state of your brain to produce the outputs we experience.
I probably used the wrong terminology. The question is whether a particle would decay at a different rate if the conditions could be reset or if we could go back in time. And like verifying the speed of light travels the same speed in both directions, it’s something that may be practically assumed, but nevertheless defies observational verification.
I’ve read something that may also fall along this line with verifying wave function collapse theory. But I could be totally off.
If in your view quantum fluctuation cause your fingers to snap, but you are mistaken into thinking you are the one acting, then this conversation has been a long time coming
