Hello everyone!
It’s been over 1 year since I started my journey outside of a christian fundamentalist cycle, guided by crises of faith.
Now I’m an theist, and I really want to know why you are a theist also, what convinced you that there’s something outside that we call God?
Greetings, @Alamini . I know that God honors your honest seeking!
Maybe could you tell us more of why you came to the point you are?
For me, I often hope that God exists. I don’t have a lot of proof. I think humans are mostly abstract thinkers, and need a cause that explains something–a reference point. @DOL Dr Lamoureux noted in one of his books, I think, that God is the ultimate in righteousness, justice, grace, etc.
If He is that way, then I think that He affirms our honest questioning–and takes joy in it. There are some who have gone through so much that they have had to come to an atheist conclusion. I think that He approves of that, too–though hopefully He will bring all tears to joy eventually.
If God were not just, it’d be our duty to oppose him; and He would not be what we can really think of as God, I think.
So, kind of like Puddleglum, in “The Silver Chair,” I hope for God’s existence, though I don’t have a lot of proof.
Thanks.
Hiii thanks for the insightful reply, @Randy !
I wanted to say something more related to why theism is more likely than atheism, and not necessarily a proof of God.
Thank you for your attention!
Hello, Lucas - and thanks for your question!
I approach this question differently now than I would have thirty or even twenty years ago. Which may be to say … I don’t approach it much at all any more or have (in a very deliberate way) decided to take less interest in it for myself. That is to say, the whole “let’s prove to stubborn skeptics that God exists” game is one that I used to be more involved with, but have found my own faith moving on from that question; not because I have “conquered it” or succeeded at it or assembled some body of scientific assertions that I deem to have satisfied me at least. For me it’s now more about my (and others’) way of being in the world. That is - I look for the testimonies of lives (and in my own life) for the fruit of Christ. So I find the vagaries and seasons of my own faith more attuned to relationship - especially my own personal relationship with God. And I just accept that as my ground of life/truth without much worry about whether or not any empirical proof can be supplied.
All that said - I realize that this is not where others are, and I apologize for how the above could be taken to be demeaning to your question. I don’t mean it to be - and I now recognize about our culture and myself how steeped we are to approach all such things with scientific mindsets (just witness the obession of ‘creation science’ advocates here who are barely able to recognize - if at all - how deeply they themselves have been conditioned to bring all their questions to the sacred altar of science as if it was the arbiter of all truth, even while they would hotly deny this very thing. And yet their quest betrays the truth about themselves that everybody else can see.)
I can still play the game, of course. And if someone is stuck there and finds it helpful - I’d even indulge. But I would do so in the full knowledge that there is nothing I or anybody else has brought to that game which has not been successfully answered or dismissed by an equally (or even more) adept game-player from the atheist side. And that realization - when accepted - might be understandably discouraging to someone who wants their faith to rest on those sorts of arguments. I’m content to let my faith - such as it is - be in Christ’s hands instead. And if I’m a fool in the eyes of others for doing that, so be it. The evidence of Christ’s work on me and the lives of others that I watch, and the (also compelling to me) evidence of what happens to others (especially cultural Christians right now) when we part from Christ’s ways - those are the “written books” of our lives that are evidence enough for me now. And I still can and do join the psalmist in seeing how the heavens and creation itself sings its own praises to God. I just don’t try to “start there” and attempt to turn those praises into some sort of evidence of court. My faith (or love, more importantly) both begins and ends with Christ - or it should. Not with Genesis. Not even with the Bible - even as essential as that collection of testimonies is for helping us to know Christ.
-Merv
It is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians.
-Simone Weil
If you strip away theology, and the bible or other formulae for faith is there a reason to believe in (a) God?
I would say that, although I was brought up with God from a Christian perspective I can see reasons for His existence.
ironically enough, I find that studying nature and the order of physics leads me to think that it is all too orderly to just happen. The whole notion of a cosmic fluke would seem to be contrary to what is seen. The idea that chaos or chance could produce order would seem to be a paradox. * see God the order of things. II see (Him) as the author of the lasws and principles that it has taken so lonf for us to identify and accept.*
Historically humanity has shown either a need or at least an attempt to identify God or gods. We looked at things we did not understand and as respect for their power we deified them. or else we humanised (Anthropmorphisised) them. Most of the ancient pantheons reflected human drives and traits and basically ignored humanity apart from as play things or pets.
The idea of an interacting or even shepherding God is different and tends to come from human experiences or witness. In that resoect they would appear to demand more credance as the characteristics of God not only do not match human characteristics, but you get scriptures like
My ways are not your ways.
whereby we are encouraged to aim for or at least acknowledge higher values
S o, yes, I think you can identify theism outside religion but the focus and response to God is less clear.
Richard
Like others have said, I fall into the theist category as someone who does not think there is any serious evidence for God or for the supernatural in general. But there seems to be this hope in all nations of the world that there is something more than just what we can experience in the natural world. The supernatural takes on very different forms and stories throughout the world. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes silly and sometimes terrifying. But the same can be said for a Boogeyman. I mean I don’t believe in monsters under my bed despite every nation having kids terrified of them. Yet most of these same kids stop believing in monsters but keep on believing in a god.
It also seems that sometimes things happen that just seem to coincidental and unlikely to be by pure chance. So while I don’t believe in most stories, some I do. Or rather, the collective experience of there being something more what I believe in.
So I choose to faith in it. I choose to have faith in Jesus.
Thank you! Can you clarify the difference for me? Thanks
Hi Randy,
I agree with you that the word “proof” is too strong a word to justify the existence of God. But I think the legal term “beyond a reasonable doubt” is more accurate. As well, my experience of signs and wonders supports there is a God. And yes, the Lord is not frightened by tough questions. In my experience they lead me to him. Merry Christmas, Denis
Thank you. Merry Christmas, Dr Lamoureux!
From what I have experiences it is when we try to pin God down, identify or even prove His existence that problems arise
There are pragmatic reasons fr God being a God of faith, that I and others have outlined elsewhere, but if you are grounded in the empirical, faith is a hard card to find.
I think some people want to see God but are frustrated b the fact that He stays hidden from view… It throws up all sorts of human values about why something should not want to be seen yet want to be worshipped. or at least to have a relationship. That relationship is not based on the empirical but on trust and hope and all things ethereal. In a physical world, such things can be hard to accept.
Richard
No grand philisophical treatise here. I’ve had a lot of supernatural experiences related to the Christian God. He’s real.
Whoops, accidently responded to RichardG instead of making my own post.
I remember spending a year or so in that space.
That was one of my “convincers”.
I’ll echo that one, too.
That’s pretty much where I started. There was a year in which I read three different books written by three different jurists in three different centuries and under three different legal systems, all of whom started out agnostic or atheist and who set out to either examine the evidence for or prove impossible the Resurrection of Christ, and all of them concluded that under their rules of evidence there was more than sufficient evidence to “convict” Jesus of having risen from the dead.
Having some Christian professors, when first in college, who had all gone into science because they believed in God/Christ was also significant, but it always comes back to the Resurrection. More than a few times I’ve been in a doubting space, doubting not just God but whether there’s such a thing as love or friendship, and my mind threw up intellectual reasons for not believing any such thing, but I always eventually slammed into the massif of the Resurrection.
Adding to that was when in an honors course we addressed the question of how people would react (in the twentieth century) if God showed up as a human I concluded that as a society we would treat Him pretty much the same as Jesus got, though minus the execution; He’d probably have ended up in a mental hospital (or a classified government research facility trying to duplicate his powers). Though if He did get executed, I figured God wouldn’t put up with it and so concluded that the Resurrection was an inevitable outcome from the Incarnation, which just took me back to that massif.
I’ve known some who read the Old Testament and ended up Christian; for myself, I didn’t much care about the OT (except for King David) until I saw Jesus in it all over the place; for me Jesus has been the starting place.
I wish to acknowledge that i think this might be the first time in 3 years on these forums that i have agreed with every single response.
I find that humbling and of great comfort.
I have a number of reasons for theism, however, like my reason for not smoking, i like to focus on the “kaput” option…
If there is no God, then its “kaput” and given my life experiences in the following, that really urges me to seek God:
Just musing–in my case, I have difficulty with both quantifying the sense of design, and with identifying a miracle. I’m not sure that is necessary for me to hope for God, however.
In Adam’s note, I think that it’s a good reason to hope for meaning beyond suffering.
I can see how some would say that the suffering is evidence of God not existing, too.
I appreciate George MacDonald’s note, “You doubt because you love truth.”
Thanks.
I wish I could remember the source . . . anyway, an Orthodox theologian argued that suffering is evidence that God is real. If I could remember the source I could say more.
Here’s something worth pondering:
Notice that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is a deeper cause for that order.
– Richard Swinburne in Is There a God?
This would have resonated well with that informal intelligent design club when I was at university; none of them found any creation science arguments worth much at all, but the idea that there must be order behind the profound order seen in cosmology, evolution, geology, physics, etc. drove most to conclude there must be a Designer. Of course that wasn’t enough to point to Christ; it was only a step to theism.
The problem is not with God, it is with us. We see suffering as cruel or unnecessary. The rose coloured view is that there could be life without it. Just as the view of there being no death is unreal and / or impractical.
The freedom to live or die is the hardest one to accept, especially when the death is of someone important to us. The notion that there must be a place of sanctuary after death reflects the idea that this life has no real meaning or importance other than a prequel, or worse still a rite of passage.
I guess the idea of a God who does not (always) interfere or stop evil is hard to fathom against human values and ethics. Saying that God’s ways are not ours only deflects. It does not solve or even comfort.
Whatever the human concept of the ideal God might be, He rarely matches up to it.
Richard
that is such a valid statement Richard and I find it equally frustrating, indeed it even angers me.
I think its an argument used in the absence of a desire to really seek God. I think its a demand of the human condition to lay blame for the reality of suffering and death that coincides with an innate desire to reject that inevitable outcome.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.
