To some extent I agree, but I think there is more to this. We certainly have our own reason to wade through the claims of others, or is this of no value when facing the claims of our parents? If our parents say "The sky is green, the ocean is blue" we accept the arbitrary difference? Hopefully not.
I imagine you had your own faculties of reason, and if those faculties noticed what seemed to be a problem, you asked your instructor. If your instructor's reply is unsatisfactory, you can read a book, ask another teacher, ect. Similarly, your patients have their own faculties of reason and can ask questions of you, or have a second opinion.
Also, isn't their a hierachry of concern? If someone says, for example, "I met a guy named James in England; he was a nice fellow." why should I reject this? I'm not sure I'd care enough to explore a rejection, and even if I did, what could I do? Go look for James? But if someone says "God is here!" or "God is there!" this is very serious, and important - worth a great deal of investigation, and careful consideration. Further, there is no reason to accept something until you are certain about it when the matter is so significant. For James, who care? For God, great care should be taken.
I doubt it. Paul's Gospel was the last written Gospel, much to late to influence the earlier works of Mathew or Mark, or even Luke. Not to ignore the influence of Paul and his Gospel - from that text, many concepts were adopted by mainstream Christianity which are not found anywhere else in the Gospels.
For James, who care? For God, great care should be taken.
How come? People make individualistic claims about God and about the world all the time. Every single presidential candidate, regardless of beliefs, panders to people by invoking God -- so do you need to even consider their statements at all?
When people make assertions about Jesus, I don't even pay attention let alone explore those assertions. Why? Because I'm Jewish, and Jesus is not part of my religion. He has great importance to other people, and I respect other people's belief systems insofar as I respect other people in general -- but as far as I'm concerned it's not relevant to me.
So I don't agree with you that an assertion about God MUST be something important that we have to investigate -- because by the time we reach the point of making this judgement at all, we're already biased by a long and complex process of being taught.
If you're firm in your faith, then why would you bother to investigate some new claim about God?
If I'm firm in my general indifference to claims about God, then why would I bother to investigate any further?
Well, I think that if by God or by natural processes the basic operations of the universe remain consistent, then we should judge all things rationally or no things rationally. If God operates inconsistently (like establishing laws of nature and then violating them with miracles), then we'll never know when to be rational and when not to. The third possibility is that it's our own reason that's faulty, and we must always question what we think we understand.
Jesus, as with any other figure, is as much a part of your religion as you make him. Jesus was a Jew who preached to Jews. But I think I see your point - if Jesus does not play a role in your considerations, why should you consider explaination that involve him?
My problem is that if the belief, or even lack of belief, is made on an irrational basis, and a rational basis is not built, the belief is arbitrary, of no use. What good is a belief you do not understand?
But, I guess my question is, if you are indifferent, why are you discussing the matter with me?
I would start by saying that I can't think of any reason (other than that it might offend me) that God could/should not create an ordered universe and then involve Himself in its affairs as time goes on. it is His own choice as to when and how He will act... And I wouldn't say that if he chooses to create exceptions to those laws that this would be "violating" them since He created them for His own purposes in the first place, and they do not rule over Him.
And since I believe that one of His purposes in creating was to have relationship with humanity, I am not surprised if He uses His creation to relate to them. As far as how that affects our reasoning... well, I agree that that's kinda tricky. One thing though is that from a theistic point of view, logic/reason/mind is only a part of who we are. We can not live solely based on reason (and that's true no matter what your belief system is), it is a tool (and an important one) that we use as we go throughout our human experience.
I agree; but at the same time I'm more of a skeptic than you about the degree of understanding that we can achieve.
Isn't it better to look, and find that you cannot know, than to walk blindly? I'm not sure there is much we can know; I'm not even sure if there is much to know - how much understanding can I expect us to find? But regardless of how much we can find, if we can do better than we are, we probably should.
I really do enjoy reading your input on these various subjects. Your replies are well informed and well considered. Thank you.
But then they're not really universal laws, are they? If they don't rule over everything, then they're not universal. Think of God as a landlord writing a lease that the universe has to sign: "All actions will be met by an equal and opposite reaction. The undersigned LANDLORD, however, reserves the right to enact an exception with no prior notice."
Is there any reason that what you're saying isn't reasonable? Other than that it might offend or confuse us, I haven't been able to think of one... From a Theistic standpoint those laws are for the natural universe, they are not laws for God.
Those things that are not material (usually called spiritual) may follow a whole set of universal laws that we simply can't measure.
Whether it's inherently reasonable to a theist does not make it rational, because a theistic point of view holds reason secondary to God -- unless you feel that God is beholden to the laws of nature.
If our ability to understand life rationally is marginalized by the fact that apparent laws can be changed by God at his discretion, then our experiential understanding of the universe just crumbles apart. I mean how can you ever tell the difference between an ordinary new experience and a miracle? When is something simply different from what you've seen before (but still beholden to the laws of nature) and when is something a miracle by God?
I mean this by way of analogy, not offensively: People with schizophrenia have great difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not real -- so they hear voices, they think that the radio or TV are talking directly to them, or that animals are talking to them, and the distinction between thought and experience gets blurred. Because of this, their thought becomes disorganized and they can have great difficulty functioning.
For us to presume that the universe does not submit to reason because some power ("God") can capriciously make exceptions to apparent laws -- yet we can never know when he's doing it -- means that we no longer have any basis to discriminate the rational from the irrational.
If so, then there's no point in even trying. Reason and empirical experience are then meaningless.
I basically agree with you. What it boils down to, I guess, is that if you're not a theist, the whole idea of a "miracle" is a rationalization of things that we simply don't rationally understand. So what differentiates a "miracle" from a new discovery or a new experience? Nothing other than the convenience that what's called a miracle is that which supports a preexisting belief system.
So if I look at a cloud and it resembles the face of Jesus, and not 5 minutes later I come 2 inches from being killed by an icicle that falls from a roof, it must be a miracle. But if the face in the cloud resembles Bart Simpson or Elvis, then that near miss is just a coincidence.
I might ask why people add rational to religion when religions have only added prejudice to the rational.
As a coincidence, I offer that I knew a man nearly killed in the fashion you suggested. And absolutly no lesson can be learned from it. It just happened, and then it was done.
Have you read Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche? Reason, or to be reasonable or rational, is one of the most unquestionably prized attributes in our society. To be rational is good, to be irrational is bad. That hasn't been appropriated by religion so much, but most other prized attributes like kindness, generosity, altruism, piety, humility, do have religious overtones.
I think many people in religion, including the main thrust of medieval philosophy (scholasticism), feel that anything worth its salt has to be rationally sound. And so thanks to Maimonides, Aquinas, and the scholastics, reason has been incorporated into theology, which is basically just philosophy within the boundaries of a religious tradition. Of course this is not the only school of thought, and everyone from mystics to philosophers (Spinoza and Kierkegaard are good examples) deny that religion must be rational or that it can be rational.
Yup. Coincidence + free association = meaning in our "rational" minds.
Does religion necessarily include the belief in "god"?
