Posted by Bob on November 13, 1999, at 21:54:17
In reply to Re: Depression, Evolution (CC), posted by Elizabeth on November 13, 1999, at 15:56:08
First of all, the most profound thing I've got to say about everything between this and my last post is "wow!". Might as well keep it simple -- no extended description would do it justice.
Thanks CC and A on the H&H info.
E, I wouldn't limit atheists by decribing them all as empiricists (testable hypotheses as the path to all that is knowable). Then again, I've known a number of atheists who give empiricism a bad name, and it certainly doesn't need any help on that.
It's not that faith is incompatible with empiricism, but that they are incommensurate systems. Their "primitive" assumptions are rooted in non-intersecting aspects of our experience.
I'd go farther than others here, I think, in just how divorced from "proof" true faith is. If what I hold true by faith has any correlation to what is taught by any book or any minister, I cannot accept that external source as corroboration for what I believe. If anything, pardon me for the hubris, I'd say the reverse is true -- that the traditional teachings still have validity because the faith of contemporary individuals who look inside provide the evidence. Not so much that we invent god, but rather that god is continually renewed and reinvented through us.
Along the same lines, I'd say those who need to demonstrate proofs of the literal interpretations of religious texts have no faith whatsoever. Knowing the exact date of creation does nothing to explain why it works as it does, just as achieving a grand unification theory of everything [sic] cannot explain why it is in the first place.
But CC had a question:
do you think "man" is capable of solving the problems currently facing us?If god poses questions for us to which god already knows the answer, then what's the point? If god "cheats" and helps us answer those questions, then why bother with us? My wager is that god has no idea whether we can solve the problems we face, and that's why god put us here in the first place. I think god took his best shot, cut us loose, and if we can ascertain just in what aspect of god's image we have been created and if we can stick with it, we have a pretty good shot.
I mean, if you were god (and I'm not talking just to Adam here =^P ), would you jump ahead to the end of the book, or would you let the mystery unfold?
Who says the end is even written, anyway?
(Yeah, I know, Saint Augustine for one...)Bob
poster:Bob
thread:14368
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19991108/msgs/15164.html