Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 9:46 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 1:57 pmImmanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 12:50 am...you have to really
want to know Him. He does not come and perform tricks to satisfy cynics.
That doesn't make it any "different" from regular faith, the kind needed in ordinary relationships.
I'm sure that if you have a wife she is a fine and doubtless long suffering human being, but as a member of a fallen species, your faith in her is based on hope.
Not just hope, though that obviously forms a part of my attitude to her. I have more than that, and I was suggesting what "more" I had -- her word, her previous actions, her facial expressions, her little touches of kindness...and so on. So there's evidence involved, and it need not be weak evidence, either: but it's still all probabilistic, not absolute proof.
That's the nature of relationships: they're based on a probabilistic calculation that the evidence I have is sufficient to warrant belief in that fact. Rather like all of empirical science is, but with additional features, as well.
If your faith in God were based on the same hope, then it would be the same "regular faith, the kind needed in ordinary relationships."
Yes, that's right. And it is.
But relating to the Eternal God is somewhat different, at least for the present, from relating to other human beings, since we do not visibly see God at the moment. It does require an additional use of faith and hope, for sure.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 1:57 pmWill Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 6:13 amYour faith in God has limits to how you can test it;
So does one's faith in a wife.
Granted there will almost certainly be a limit to a wife's patience, but unlike God's, it won't be zero.
The Bible says God's patience is very great. And the evidence suggests that's right. After all, we're pretty frustrating creatures to relate to, and we've done some pretty awful things in our history. It's rather surprising that a holy and just God has not already intervened...one might expect He should be less patient.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 1:57 pmWill Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 6:13 amYour faith in your God is unfalsifiable...
It depends on what "falsifiability" is taken to entail, in the particular case in which relationship is the goal.
Falsifiability was designed by Popper to apply to scientific theories rather than personal relationships.
Yes, I know. So I'm not sure why you mentioned it, in the context of our relationship to God. To me, its relevance didn't seem obvious. Maybe it will become so.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 1:57 pmOne's faith in one's spouse is also "unfalsifiable," in the sense you are invoking.
It absolutely is not; you really don't know what you are talking about. A theory is unfalsifiable if there is no conceivable test that could give a negative result.
I do know about that history. And what would be right to say is that there is no conceivable test that can negate the existence or character of God Himself. Agreed: tests do not change the nature of reality itself. They merely show whether one's thinking about it is correct or not. So there is no test I could run that would make God other than He actually is.
But that does not mean there's no test that could ever falsify one's relationship with God. If God were other than He is, for example, that would give one reason for not trusting Him. Everything in our relationship, then, depends on what we believe He is.
Not for no reason have theologians said:
"The most important thing about any person is his or her idea about God."
Here's the difference:
Could your wife do something that would destroy your faith in her?
"Faith"? "Destroy my
faith?"
Yes, sure. Any man's "faith" in his woman can be undermined, if conditions are right. And so could faith in God, if conditions were sufficient. But the problem might well be in me, not in my wife, if I were a suspicious type. It might not be in her, at all.
Could your God do something that would destroy your faith in him?
It would be a lot harder for that to happen now than when I first started to know Him. But in theory, such a thing would be possible. "Faith" is always a probabilistic thing; it co-exists with doubt, and actually depends on doubt.
One can only "have faith" in a thing that is capable of being doubted. I don't "have faith" in the times table, because there's nothing in that closed system of symbols that is amenable to doubt. It depends on self-referential proofs, on the way symbols "add up" within the system itself, not on empirical realities. But my relationship with God is associated with the empirical, not really the mathematical.
"Faith" also exists in dialectical tension with doubt. One's confidence in God grows as one faces and overcomes real doubts. In contrast, the thing that will make one's faith infantile and immature is to refuse to face doubt. But what we need to recognize is that doubt makes-or-breaks faith. It is not the denial of doubts that sustains faith, but rather the experienced utility of thoughtful, reasonable, honest faith in facing and dealing with doubt that is the most powerful existential reinforcer of faith itself.
For a Christian, as Browning noted, life is a story of faith punctuated by doubt. For the Atheist, it's a life of doubt troubled only occasionally by moments of incursion by moments of existential epiphany, new evidence, and creeping suspicions of faith.
One chooses one's lifestyle and one's goals: but one does not actually ever escape the cycle of faith and doubt, either way.
No.
Why did you feel you wanted to answer for me?
I have a different answer from what you imagined, do I not?
Because as far as you are concerned, whatever God does, it is consistent with "the nature, character and revealed will of God, who is the Supreme Being and the grounds of reality of all things." In other words, nothing your God could do will make you question your faith.
As you can see, that deduction is incorrect. The fact that God is the reality and grounds of all things is not a mathematical or certain matter; it's a judgment of faith, premised on the strength of available empirical evidence. But once I have understood that God is the reality and grounds of all things, it of course affects my understanding of the whole world, as well. It's a pretty 'watershed' realization.
So faith in God is not "unfalsifiable." It might be hard to falsify, as the evidence in favour of it accrues, but that doesn't mean that it's super-strong at the beginning, nor that it does not remain, in principle, possible for it to be falsified. It's just darn hard to find sufficient evidence for somebody who has known God to be disuaded.
But the same would be true of, say, Portugal. I have never been. I hear it's beautiful. I've seen pictures. But I've never been there. So I have, at the moment, a basic faith in the real existence of Portugal. But it would be a belief that could be falsified -- if I found out, for example, that a conspiracy of cartographers had been afoot, and my geography teachers had all been colluding against me, and that all the pictures of Portugal were photoshopped...but realistically, what are the chances of me finding out all those things? Possible, yes; probable, definitely no.
But if I had ever been to Portugal myself, it would be considerably harder to shake my faith in it, would it not? And what would you think of the wisdom of somebody who had actually been to Portugal, and had some experience with part of it, and had then started to doubt its real existence?
Faith comes in different grades of strength, depending on the evidence and experience that supports it. In principle, it always remains possible to falsify...but in practice, one sometimes gets to a point where the prospect of that becomes vanishingly remote.
