Perhaps this is a place for Pascal’s wager? (Wiki definition)
Pascal’s wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).[1] It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not.
Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell)
It is the epitome of the self centred faith. (or pseudo-faith).
Good points. Roger Olson asked in one of his blogs if we as evangelical Christians would live life any differently if universalism I were true. (The answer is “no” by the way). But I like to pose the question as, would you still be a Christian if there were no heaven? I would like to believe I would still live life as a Christian if there were no promise of eternal blessing, but who knows. The Old Testament Jews had no well developed theology of heaven, but many followed God with no eternal promise but Sheol.
Thoughts from the atheist while reading this. No debate, just questions.
How does this fit with the Holy of Holies?
Exodus 25: 8 And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. 9 Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.
There was also the Exodus itself. For example, there was a pillar of fire or smoke that guided the people through the desert.
Wasn’t Jesus “God on Earth”, God in physical form? Thomas was allowed to touch the wounds on Jesus’ hands and side after the Resurrection. How does this fit into the ideas in the opening post?
Pascal’s wager is the opposite of faith. It shows the same attitude as the rich man in Matthew 19 who looks for the minimum requirements for salvation. So if that is your reason for religion then you have wasted your time and missed the boat completely. Thus Pascal’s wager is a lost bet and all you have really gained for your trouble is payment to racketeers using religion as a tool of power and manipulation, those Jesus named children of the devil.
The idea is that there is a choice of action set X or not X and that you can calculate an expectation for these two action sets given the two possibilities that God exists or not. The premises being
A. If God exists doing X means you get eternal life.
B. If God exists doing not X means you get eternal damnation.
C. If God does not exist then it doesn’t matter what you do.
Pascal’s conclusion is that the positive and negative consequences in A and B outweigh any price you can put on doing X during a finite life.
But then which of the thousands of religious sects do you go by for the specification of X?
If it is Christianity then premise A is already denied by Jesus in Matthew 19, “with men this is impossible.” There is no X which can get you eternal life. And in Romans 10, Paul explains that faith means you don’t even ask any the question of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. That will only lead to entitlement which has always turned religion into a thing of evil. Christianity calls upon people to live by faith, which is believing and doing without entitlement – and that means believing and doing for its own sake just because it is right.
Can the thesis survive these exceptions? It seems rather contradictory to say that God would never come to Earth because he loves us, and then in the very next breath say that God loves us so much that he came down to Earth as Jesus.
I don’t see why not. If God could appear to people in the past and still love them, then why not now? If Jesus could perform miracles and still love people, then why not now?
I remember reading an author who said he would rather have the Bible than to have been a follower during Jesus’ three-year ministry on earth, the reasoning being that we have a more complete picture in The Book than then.
On a slightly different tangent, it’s worth remembering that none of the emotions or traits we consider Divine are actually visible to the human eye. You can’t see love (though you can feel it). You can’t see trust (though you can feel it). You can’t see gratitude (though you can feel it). And so on. You can see the visible results of love and trust and gratitude, but you can’t see the quantum energy of the Divine Heart.
We’ve become used to the idea that things are only real if we can see them with our eyes or measure them with our instruments. But the Heart knows what the eyes can’t see (as anyone who is visually impaired will tell you).
Also, Mother Father God is just, well, just really, really big compared to us, and asking us to “see” God is pretty much like asking us to see the entire universe in one glance. Theoretically, it’s a nice idea, but realistically speaking, we can’t do it. The best we can do is feel the truth of Divine Love, which fits rather neatly and mysteriously into our human hearts despite the differences in scale. You have to wonder how that happens – how the heart seems to have no limits on its capacity to love – but God shows us this truth about the heart again and again, so it’s probably important.
At this point in time, the bible is a matter of faith not proof. We can corroborate some of it, even the physical existence of a man called Jesus (Known as Christ). But the conclusions are still a matter of faith.
Signs and portents? Still faith. The God Delusion factor can be applied to anything that is perceived by us as supernatural, and many so called "miracles have human explanations now, if not at the time. How does not prove who (which is the ultimate view of not worrying about Evolution)
Perhaps this is the point to suggest that
For a sceptic no proof will be enough, and for faith no proof is needed.
Unless God is physically perceivable beyond doubt, there will be both believers and sceptics.
I don’t know if I would still be a Christian in the religious sense but moral and philosophical sense yes and I would lean more heavily to being a Stoic which I somewhat am and enjoy Stoic philosophy and their call to virture and good living which I see as compatable with Christian ethics.
Interestingly Sheol has nothing to do with reward or punishment and doesn’t seem like the sort of place where one can go on being oneself. More like a place of dissolution, an end to walking in the light. The only thing worse would be never having walked in the light at all. Consciousness is great but like a battery or a light bulb they must eventually be replaced.
Bokonism, the made up religion in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, seemingly promotes a similar belief. Life for a human is being the kind of sitting-up mud that gets to see and love what there is and even express it in words. And death for a human is lying back down and rejoining the mud, grateful for the opportunity. Does there need to be more?
This is the Bokonist creation myth from Cat’s Cradle:
“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
I will definitely take exception to that. God’s motivation in creating the universe was not loneliness.This is something I frequently post to YECs with regard to animal death and their demand that ‘very good’ is synonymous to ‘perfect’:
You may be right but after having been exposed briefly to Christianity through a Methodist church early on, that is exactly how I imagined God in my naive child’s mind before I decided against belief in the supernatural. But honestly I think the only safe way to handle God conceptually is as a mystery. Everything some dumb kid dreams up or which is written in a holy book or explicated by a scholar is necessarily speculation. Some of it will accumulate more popularity than the rest but then you have to evaluate the epistemic reliability of popularity as a metric for truth. I recommend asking the mystery what it thinks.
Yes, his relationship to time is wonderfully mysterious (I don’t subscribe to Molinism), and the Bible says that he is inscrutable – certainly in some respects, anyway.
That was premature. You seemed to have forgotten my earlier post about his interventionism in his people’s lives – and mine in particular – termed ‘God’s providence’, or simply ‘Providence’ (but I find that less personal).
It is good that life has given you that opportunity. But I think you underestimate the capacity of the natural world to account for what you experienced. I find plenty of room for soul and meaning and being a child of God without resort to a magical realm.