Dontaskme wrote: ↑Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:45 pm
But what if your belief is the same belief adopted by small children, in that they will basically believe just about everything they are told, and they do this because they haven't got the life experience to doubt or know otherwise anything they are told. It's obvious that the child is born totally innocent of knowing anything, and that the child's brain is being programmed to react to a knowledge that has been imparted into it by it's teacher of knowledge. And those teachers of knowledge have also gone through the same process when they too were once innocent children.
I have two thoughts about that, DAM: one philosophical and one personal. On the philosophical side, I understand the appeal of the question, but I think it's not very philosophically sound. After all, if you think about it, you'll realize it's a possibility that BOTH sides of the Atheism-Theism debate are guilty of the same thing. After all, if Theism can be guessed to maybe be no more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy, as Freud said it was, then so can Atheism.
Just as a child can wish there would be a God, a child can wish there were no God, when in fact, there is.
Why would a child do that? Well, for exactly the same reason a child wishes his parents to leave the house: so he can eat ice cream for dinner, put his feet on the coffee table and watch whatever he wants to watch on TV. It's childish, of course, but it's natural. The "no-God" belief grants us utter freedom to do what we want...morally, socially, personally, whatever. But it does so at this expense: that we also have to believe that our "parent" is not just gone for a time, but permanently dead. God is not going to "return." So from now on, there will be no truth, no morality, no justice, no answer to why we suffer and die, and no hope beyond the grave.
This honest way of facing up to Atheism is too much for most people. They can't do it. Nietzsche tried, but even he fell short. It's too grim, too nasty, too Nihilistic and hopeless. So what Atheists do is to grab onto hopes their Atheism simply cannot warrant. So, for example, they believe it will be enough to be remembered by future generations...or to have contributed to the course of human evolution...or even to rest peacefully in oblivion. But all these are obviously just the evasions of a child: for there is no memory, no "great story," no "rest" to which they can possibly aspire. What waits, they must believe, is just nothing. Nothing forever. And since that's the case, no story they can tell themselves, no grand narrative, no illusion of meaning or purpose or achievement can fully escape the gravity of that pit. It pulls all down into eternal darkness, to an end without any "win."
No wonder, then, that they wish it not to be so, and wish to evade the logic of their own beliefs. I would, too. But you can easily see that the "childish wish" critique works equally well for both sides. That's the philosophical angle.
Now the personal angle. I did not slide into my Christianity from a comfortable position of belief. When I came to Christ, I was a huge fan of Thomas Hardy, at the time. I just loved his writing. I bought as many books of his as I could get my hands on, and read even some of those that nobody today reads. I also loved his poetry. And I was soaking myself in Atheistic authors in a Humanities program at a secular university. So I was definitely not the sheltered child seeking to hold onto the faith of his youth.
However, it is quite true that some Theists have done that. I can't give you specific cases, but I'm sure that many have been raised with Theism, and just never questioned it, or questioned it briefly but pulled back in fear. That may well be so. I won't give you my whole spiritual bio here. Needless to say, though, the road I took was not the one you outline at all.
But the same can be said of Atheists; namely, that many of them have simply been raised Atheist, and have never questioned it. Others have thought briefly about God, but become terrified and withdrawn from thinking about it. Others came to their Atheism through other psychological routes, such as hatred of their fathers, or anger at some tragedy that came into their lives, or just out of a laziness that doesn't want to think about God and would rather dismiss it. Some may even have come to their Atheism because it permits their lifestyle or their moral failures. There can be many reasons for such a choice. Not all of them are good, and many are childish.
But so what? What is that to the point? If some people come
irrationally, then the question is, can someone come
rationally?
And that's all that matters.
I'm not saying I know the idea of God is all wrong, I'm saying I DON'T KNOW anything, except what I make up about reality.
I don't think that's quite true, DAM. After all, you're writing to me, and taking for granted that I'm here to respond. You didn't "make me up," did you?
But it's more complicated with the God question, isn't it? I mean, for many reasons, I think, God has chosen not to speak to peope directly, but to wait until they seek Him seriously. And it's natural to want to understand before we take a leap, isn't it? Unfortunately, we don't get to God that way: we don't get to say to the Supreme B
eing, "Prove yourself to me, and I'll believe." Rather, He says to us,
"Seek me, and you shall find me, when you seek me with all your heart." That's not to say that we can't know God
after we seek...it's only to say that until we seek, we will not.
Anselm said, "
Credo ut intellegam," meaning, "I believe
in order to know." There are things we can know before we trust, and there are things we will never know UNTIL we trust. The important thing is to decide which kind of knowledge the knowledge of God is.
Maybe human imagination just conjured the whole God story up out of boredom using the knowledge that evolved as and through the human brain to comfort and pacify what is essentially a meaningless existence with no absolutely no purpose to be.
Maybe. But is that what you think happened? And if it is, what advantage do you have in embracing that view? You end up with "a meaningless existence with no absolutely no purpose to be," if you do that. So, if I might put this tongue-in-cheek, what have you got to lose by embracing some delusion? You might even be happier if you did.
Maybe that's why so many Atheists do. For in spite of its basic Nihilism, most Atheists prefer to pretend that, say, conventional morality can still exist, or that a person can just "make meaning" out of a meaningless universe, or that "living on in the memory" of other dying creatures somehow brings transcendent value to their animal death, or that serving an ideology like Socialism, Fascism, or even campaigning for Atheism can import meaning and value into their empty universe somehow. But you and I can see all that for what it is: childish evasion. For Atheism itself will not sanction any such moves; they are artificial and illegitimate overlays on an inherently meaningless process of birth and decay. No more.
Maybe at the end of the day we're all a little bit like children. We come into this world with less knowledge than we'd like, can't find all the answers we want to demand, know we will die before we get all our answers, and then have to figure out what to put our faith in, because the answers are not all guaranteed beforehand.
That's worth thinking about, isn't it?