If God exists, why does He hide from us?

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I think altruism is logical. But one would obviously need to construct the same frames as the christian religion makes - and by that way making altruism good. Just done in a more rational way, without the bad sides of religion.



Are there any New Agers here?

I wasn't meaning for that to be a proper argument because that wasn't what was asked for. I was explaining why I personally believe in Hell. From the point of view of already considering life to be a trial of one's faith, it stands to reason that different levels of success and failure would cause different results.

If the people on this forum are right, a lot of contradictory things are simultaneously true. Also just taking their word for it is kind of lame. Besides, I'm not really sure what you mean. It's to some extent necessary for people to have some motivation to do the right thing, if social control is what gets people to act civilized, what's wrong with that?

I guess that's reasonable. I suppose it would also depend on how strongly someone's religion figured into their upbringing, now that I consider it some more.

Yes, and it was something of an inside comment.

Ok, it seemed like you meant that this was an argument between christians and new agers



That leads to even more questions, but I get your point.



It depends what the system encompassing the social control consists of. And if this system is hidden, like if people aren't supposed to know about it, or if it's not. And the nature of this system, which in religion's sake, can be bad. So you have to study the ideology/mechanisms behind social control to reveal its actual form, and then think about whether or not it is good. For example, what would North Koreans think, if they could reach the stage of being able or even allowed to think.

And yes, there are many factors that fits the equation.

On the issue of altruism, my personal opinion is that altruism as a pure concept never actually exists because in the end, people do things with the expectation of a personally rewarding result.

An atheist may donate money to a cause and take no tax benefit from it. (I tend to do this because I like to keep my taxes simple) But I do get a reward; specifically the good feeling I have for having done something good. I also hope to get the reward of the donation helping to make the world I live in a better place. So while this might be altruism by some definitions, I tend to think of it as just me doing stuff in the hopes that I will end up happier as a result so I really don't equate it with altruism.

And I have to assume there are a number of religious people who operate in the same essential manner; doing good work because it makes them feel good and they believe the world will be better for it.

I think it is fair to say that if a person does good for the primary reason that he thinks he will get comfier chair in heaven as a result, then it can hardly be called altruism. In fact it comes across as cynical maneuvering for a personal gain. I think that's primarily why atheists tend to regard that sort of religious "altruism" with some contempt. While the atheist might do good deeds in the hope of having a better world to live in, it's something that tends to uplift everybody. A great deal of what makes the atheist feel good is the knowledge that others will benefit. The religious do gooder comes across as doing good primarily in order to get a specific reward and if it helps others, well that's a nice side benefit.

But this isn't a black and white issue. I think most people on both sides of the issue try to genuinely do good. I don't think most religious do gooders are merely cynically maneuvering for position, but it seems like the teachings of religions tries to coerce good deeds with the cynical expectation that people will only do so with a specific personal reward.

Of course, in the end, is a good deed done out of selfish motives any less good? Probably not. I think the issue here isn't the good deed but the character of the person doing the good deed. I guess where there is a valid concern is that if a person only does good deeds with the expectation of a reward, we have to wonder what they will do when no one is watching. And if a person does a good deed so as to get good with god, is it because they've been doing something bad that they are trying to make up for?

On the other hand, the atheist, who has no expectation of punishment should he choose to be a horrible person, also has no need to get good with god. So if the atheist does a good deed, it is less likely to be done as penance for a crime. From that perspective, the good deed of an atheist is more likely to be seen as a purer good deed than the good deed of the religious.

I couldn't agree more. I can see why people would think that the religious mainly do kind things for a reward, though that's not how it rolls for everybody! I don't immediately think of going to Heaven just because I did a favor for somebody.

Because he/she is a made up concept to explain what science and logic have not explained yet, a concept before science has ever been thought of a concept in the same levels of magic spells alchemy and witchcraft!

Err... the 'God of the gaps' is probably one of the weakest arguments out there. It requires all non-physical intelligence to be denied, all experiencers of miracles or breaks in the facade to be called idiots (often times on knee-jerk without seeing just how much of a battle it is to shove these under the carpet), and it also takes forcefully denying a whole list of things such as the random number generator/world event phenomena, psychic ability, Jungian connectivity via the subconscious to larger interconnected realms, and while increasing numbers of scientists would state that time and space are both illusion, that the universe is holographic in nature, or where the implications are that what we call reality even oozes and drips with the effects of consciousness, we have to keep herding every bit of evidence that goes against reductive materialism and try to beat it back under the carpet.

I think one great example would be this: Fatima. In 1917 you had 70,000 Portuguese witnesses to a female apparition (which from what is said, personally, I'm not as inclined to accept was Mary). It had apparently been raining on one of the occasions before the sighting, thousands of people up to their ankles in mud with umbrellas, and when the apparition showed up the sun seemed to swoop in so close as to dry the ground around their feet. The effect of the sun descending was seen as far as 20 miles away. Now, the sun is 93 million miles away right? Right. Makes absolutely no sense. Could a sort of lensing have been created in the atmosphere? Possibly, that might explain such an effect in terms of how a sun 93 million miles away could be given such a local and nondestructive effect but says still nothing about natural causes. Could 70,000 people have reverted back to being bumbling cavemen? Not completely impossible, astronomically unlikely perhaps, but this was early enough that they had the word of three children saying they saw something - I'd venture to guess their skepticism was likely at resonable mast. Mass hallucination? What does that term mean? It there's such a thing a spontaneous shared hallucination that would imply that the 'sharing' already broke every rule of materiality (including suggesting a collective unconscious) that such a rebuttal is meant to protect - ie. its closer to an admission of the failure of materialism with some post-hoc damage control.

That's one of the more shocking examples but its just the tip of the iceberg. Suggestions that everyone prior to 1800 were such bumbling churls that they couldn't discern reality whatsoever or that evidence presented by them regarding events is equally pathetic, in fact the notion that anything that happened prior to television can be thrown aside with ease and that eye witness account or collective historic data doesn't matter is even more magical and radical than the claim that nonphysical intelligence and consciousness exists.

Essentially what happens is devout reductive materialists will throw things out, no matter how well documented - everything from the event above to the new testament to random number generators spiking on 9/11 - not on the degree of evidence but because its too insulting to their model of reality.

Here is an interesting write up on the Miracle of Fatima:


skeptoid.com/episodes/4110

The linked photographs in the article are interesting in that they show something quite different from what you describe.

Also I think you mis-understand the concept of the "god of the gaps" fallacy. It does not require non-physical intelligence to be denied. It just says that you cannot assume non-physical intelligence in the absence of scientific explanation.

rationalwiki.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

Roughly stated, the "god of the gaps" fallacy is when you assume that if science doesn't have a specific explanation that the answer must be supernatural. The problem here is that simply because science doesn't have an answer does not mean that no scientific answer is possible. It only means we haven't figured it out yet. Before the exact nature of comets and meteors etc was understood, some people took them to be supernatural events. The fact that there was no scientific explanation at the time did not make these events supernatural.

Now the answer may in fact be that there is an intelligent creator, but the absence of evidence for a conscious creator cannot be proof that a conscious creator exists.

You claim that "...the notion that anything that happened prior to television can be thrown aside with ease and that eye witness account or collective historic data doesn't matter is even more magical and radical than the claim that nonphysical intelligence and consciousness exists." You seem to be assuming that "eye witness accounts" are inherently accurate. It has been shown that "eye witness accounts" can be extremely unreliable. They may be useful in certain situations, but they should never be believed without corroborating evidence. To suggest that a non-physical intelligence is a more reasonable claim than people being mistaken about what they saw or having just flat out made stuff up is so logically insupportable as to be laughable.

What any intelligent person must do is look at the evidence available and draw only conclusions that are supported by the evidence. To draw conclusions based on what you would like to believe is the truth is just bad thinking.

This is the standard that gets applied to pretty much everything though. It also does a wonderful job of pointing out three young children - a wonderful reason for all of these people not to be the least bit surprised if absolutely nothing happened rather than being somehow so compelled to believe it true that they'd hallucinate in unison.

As usual of how these things go its more than a little needy.


People also make the assertion that since primitive old-fashion cave-ish or bronze-age sorts were too feeble or had too little in the way of science to know anything about the world they made up spirits and ghosts in flailing attempts to explain the world. Thus the notion goes - since we've advanced in science we're closing the gaps, proving there's no such thing as spooks, fairies and gods as these were all plug figures created by scared and primitive peoples, nothing more. To suggest the next step of 'god of the gaps' under its definition might not be as essential but it is seen as a leg of 'proof' of sorts for atheism as its also the kind of thing that anti-theists generally like to brandish.


Great, but, there really isn't absence of evidence. You had an intensely corroborated bit of history with a man they called the Christ both dying and being resurrected three days later. You had a prophet named Isaiah describing the event hundreds of years earlier, you can time-stamp the description of Jesus to the Septuagint authored by 70 scribes under Ptolemy. Really when people try to get to the nuts and bolts to debunk the whole thing its the attempt that falls apart. Might that be the case for some of the other world religion? I can't be sure albeit it wouldn't shock me either.

When people envoke there being no proof of a god, they're generally saying there's no proof of anything noncorporeal - ie. its far more often than not a reductive materialist commentary, mainly because once you accept the possibility that there is noncorporeal intelligence it fits into the schema and particularly if you start communicating with such intelligence its a straight-shot to the finish line which is yes, there is a supreme deity. Much like Christians have the trinity, many pagan religions as well as Gnosticism, even some pantheistic outlooks, still boil down to 'the One' or the 'All That Is' - ie. a single source. You also have all kinds of NDE's people are having of all ages all over the world that are matching on things that aren't fitting the local cultural norms, sometimes its kids too young to know, and in general this idea of 'the one', the 'all that is', etc. keeps showing up in such experiences. Now, many Christians would call that part of the 2 Thessalonian's 2:11 'strong delusion' - regardless there's a current in how these things happen that shouldn't be there based on the information that the person has, ie. a young boy in a tribal part of Africa has no idea who Valentinus or Plato were so having a Greek or New Age NDE makes little or no sense whatsoever in context with the culture. We generally have the theory that someone can hallucinate something that's been shoved in their heads, when it hasn't been and seems out of skew with what has that presents an oddity of sorts even if that oddity can't be shoved in a test tube or set on a gram scale.


There's a rhyme, reason, and limit to that however as well as a limit to how fantastic the stories will be. Quite often the dismissals of such stories are stretched out beyond reasonable comprehension - great example, the apostles found it worthwhile to fabricate the resurrection out of whole cloth and the people around them were feeble enough to go along with it? With some ten other attempted messiahs at the time that never happened and suffice to say if he had simply died they would have gone right on to one of his brothers, some other messiah figure, or given it up altogether. When you also think about how their whole world, without scientific experts to do their thinking for them, hinged on their ability to make sense of what they were seeing - ie. they were more alert and lucid than we are because their way of life demanded it.

Claiming that perceptual frame-shutter or shaky-cam in witnesses disqualifies all such eye witness (at least as far as things a reductive materialist can't take in) as evidence, again, seems both grabby and needy.
The term 'evidence' unfortunately is only worth as much as the biases and proclivities of the person who's deciding what's admissible and what isn't. 'Intelligence' can also just as easily mean 'anyone who agrees with me'. What changes between evidence considered in physical science vs. evidence as deemed valid in history or evidence in a court room is that they all have different metrics and thresholds. All of these for their rigor have both type I and type II errors, and while certain systems find more accuracy by making more rejections of positive hits than acceptance of negative hits the experiments are still in a rather isolated framework, meta-studies have made that a bit better but its still a work in progress. It gets sadder still however when science itself, when done as asked, gets thrown out because it doesn't meet the normative beliefs - that is presently happening and its another way where 'evidence' sort of falls off the map when one sets peer review by very specific types of peer reviewers as the standard.

Now, I can't affirm that I'm intelligent - maybe that's the problem. I can offer though that things that never happen to me, life long one-offs, have occurred in such ways to prove to me quite thoroughly that reductive materialism is an optical illusion that seems to pull people in the more they stare at it but nonetheless has no real basis unless perhaps by caging the energetic faculties of those so enthralled. The fact that the road is a bit fuzzy and difficult to trace for other people can be annoying but, it is what it is so I'll discuss it as such.

Agreed.

And, also, the Fatima incident wasn't even that outstanding. It would've been outstanding had it actually been testable and repeated at least a few more times and in front of critical thinkers and true scientists for inspection.

Same with the new Pope announcement date & time thingy. Had there been such a neat and similar pattern that kept occurring with the announcement of every new Pope, then it would have been something to seriously consider.

The approach I tend to take in these sorts of discussions is one of mostly trying to carefully lay the frame work for a critical understanding of what we can know and what we can't know about reality and the supernatural. I do not claim to know that there is no god although I find the likelihood of one to be vanishingly small. It is impossible to absolutely establish that there is no god and so I do not claim that there is not. (Apart from the occasional snarky remark when it seems warranted.). But also I have seen no evidence, here or elsewhere, for a god that could not be more reasonably explained by natural phenomenon, wishful thinking, or misinterpretation of experiences.

What I do try to do is to encourage careful critical thinking about the topic. If what we care about is the truth about reality the ideas we present can only benefit from an unflinching critical examination. If there is a god, that truth should become evermore clear and obvious as we understand more about the world. As another WP member's signature line reads, "Truth fears no trial". If Christianity is correct, it should welcome science and critical thinking.

But what I see here is a Gish Gallop of rather dubious "facts" whose only corroborating evidence is the writer's insistence that they are indeed facts. The reality is that many of these "facts" are completely unknowable since too much data has been lost in the many years since the events took place.

There are some things that we can know with a high degree of certainty. There are other things that we can only guess at and hope more evidence is found that might help to clarify the questions and shed some light on a possible answer. If we wish to know the truth we must look at what we know carefully and critically and never make the mistake of claiming something to be a fact simply because it would support our preferred conclusion were it true.

My argument is really that to try and shrink this to Newtonian physics or organic chemistry you're not going to get very far. I see forensic examination of historical info and threads of data working best. A test tube and a Bunsen burner probably won't be the right tools for the job.

Who is that? Charleton Heston?

ruveyn

Frankly I think the question of "does a god exist" will never be answered to a degree that will satisfy everyone. But if answers are to be found, I see more utility in studying physics than I do in history. The problem with relying on history to understand the these questions is that it is a bit like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle from pieces found in an unlabeled box where clearly more than one puzzle has been thrown in and many of the pieces are missing.

History is an important field of study in this question, no doubt about it. But so is physics. But to suggest that Newtonian physics is the pinacle of scientific examination of reality suggests you may not be aware of some very valuable advances in the understanding of the universe. Today the tools commonly used are high energy particle accelerators, deep space telescopes, super computers and advanced mathematics rather than bunsen burners and test tubes. Certainly the field of history has greatly benefited from modern advances in physics. The ability to accurately date artifacts often relies on physics that has only been discovered in the past 100 years. The ability to photograph documents using non-visible light to reveal erased or faded text is a result of post Newtonian physics.

At any rate, to arrive at a full answer we need to use ALL the tools we have available. Relying on history as the only way of understanding the truth behind religion is a bit like trying to tune up a car engine with only a pair of pliers. You might be able to do a bit of the necessary work, but you are going to run into a point where you just can't finish the job with your limited tools.

I think we stand a better chance of understanding the true nature of the answers by using the harder sciences such as physics. Studying history always runs into the stumbling block of lost data. The only conclusions you can make about the past are those that are well supported by evidence. If information is missing, you can only guess. And guessing is not knowing.

In physics, we have the universe all around us to study. Building tools to study it is incredibly hard and expensive, but it can be done. There are still similar problems to history such as we cannot see things that are so far away that its light has not had the time to reach us. As yet, we don't have a way of seeing outside the universe (although there are ideas of how to infer what might be happening). Anyway, physics, too, has its share of questions that may never be fully answerable. But ultimately it provides a tool set that helps us understand the inner workings or reality.

Combining the tools of physics, history, chemistry, etc. we are slowly coming to a clearer picture of reality. To say that we should favor only one tool when we have many tools that help to elucidate the problem comes across as fearful of the answers that those other tools might provide.

I think physics is actually wide open for a much larger reality than what Newtonian materialists wish to adhere to, especially in the area of QM. When you start looking into quantum physics, all of a sudden the Seth material really starts opening up (while I'm not a fan of channeled entities Seth did offer an incredible amount of depth regarding that juncture). Your subconscious is essentially your connection to pretty much everything else, ie. past that gate the illusion of time and space collapse.

As for 'never' - I don't think that will play out in a practical sense, ie. I'm sure there's still a lunatic fringe and always will be who might believe that the earth is flat or that we have a giant 360 planetarium rotating around us and that claims of the vastness of space are a conspiracy. Similarly you could have a literal apocalypse and I'm sure there would be people who'd sing "lalalala - not-there-not-there-not-there", they'd be a reasonably small percentage (hopefully for their sake).