Posted on 04/26/2012 7:47:20 PM PDT by lbryce
Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicates that belief may be a more malleable feature of the human psyche than those of strong faith may think.
The cognitive origins of belief — and disbelief — traditionally haven't been explored with academic rigor, said lead author Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
. . . that Socrates was right
Well, he envisioned gravity, and insofar as gravity may have a quantum nature, this was part of his vision, however inchoate. ( I love that word. )
After procrastination.
“Well, he envisioned gravity, and insofar as gravity may have a quantum nature, this was part of his vision, however inchoate.”
Yes, and this is what I’m getting at. He/we believed there was more to it, but could not/did not know how to define what it was. He did not have that knowledge. The knowledge that led to our current and still incomplete understanding was beyond his ability as there was nothing for him to draw from/learn from.
A scientist today has the hindsight of all that came before on which to help solve his problem. Pre-Srodinger (random example), no one pondered cats in boxes. They couldn’t grasp the whole live/dead cat thing. It never occurred to them to ask if a cat can be alive and dead simultaneously. Then he did and knowledge developed from his question.
We IMO are still unable to grasp the God questions “Where did God come from” and such. We, like Newton think there’s more to it but simply lack the ability at present, to formulate/ask the kind of questions that would advance our understanding.
The article and your summation proceed from the assumption: 1) Man was confronted with phenomena he did not understand. 2) He developed god and religion as an answer to his limited knowledge. 3) Religion is a Psychological-cultural product of man's intuition, his gut feeling.
The premise includes also certain unstated assumptions: 1) There is no god 2) god is a metaphor for forces in nature that are given personal spiritual properties out of man's imagination. 3) Reason destroys this construct.
The assumptions are false.
Rather: 1) God is, by definition in the Christian faith, a transcendent being above the phenomena and everything else, the stuff of the universe, is creature. 2) God, by definition, is not mute, incapable of communicating to man his word in a form to be understood. 3) He has done so. 4) Man's problem is he is a sinner who does not want to hear God's speech but stands at enmity with God like a four year old with his fingers in his ears going la, la, la. 5) Man turns from the truth of God to worship powers and forces in the creation in the place of God not by evolution but willful devolution, He is an idolater. 6) that other false or religions exist does not demonstrate there is no true God or religion. 7) the Christian faith is rational, analytic and can be and has been stated systematically. But it starts with the principle, we know God because he has first spoken. 8) Scientific so-called empiricism is by definition doctrinal atheism. It excludes God and then cannot find him. Its staring point is a religions one based on the false notion that man's reason is a god in his own understanding. It is based on a gut feeling that does not want a god to begin with.
That’s what I say, that some things, such as The Resurrection, and The Acsendence, and all of the miracles of Jesus and His disciples, will require faith. So do the unfulfilled future prophecies (though the past ones, naturally, have been proven). True Bible-believing Christianity will always require faith-many verses in the Bible call us to the innocent, trusting faith of a child, or as small a faith, at times when its all we can muster, as that of a mustard seed, because it can yet move mountains. God has always held back on proving His existence to us and asking us to have faith, to trust Him.
Trayvon! What were you thinking? Use your gut, for heaven’s sake!
” How did God emerge out of nothingness?? “
Spirited: Either the living, personal supernatural Creator has always existed or impersonal, non-lifebearing primordial matter has as naturalists (i.e., ancient and modern pagans) believe.
In the first instance, an eternally existing living Creator transcendent to and discontinuous with His creation created everything including all life-forms. In the second, everything— including all life forms— evolved over time out of non-lifebearing primordial matter that itself emerged out of nothingness.
The former accounts for life, consciousness, mind, conscience and will. The latter does not, nor can it ever.
The first makes sense and can logically account for science. The second cannot account for science since it cannot account for consciousness, mind and will and is therefore nonsense.
1 Corintians 2:14
Pretty much sums it up.
14. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
1 Corintians 2:14
Pretty much sums it up.
14. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
“Where did God come from? How did God emerge out of nothingness?? “
In order to even ask that question intelligently, one has to understand the qualities of “nothingness”...even science has no asnwer for that one. Scripture says that God made both the qualities of light and he had to make the darkness as well. It stands to reason he had to make fullness and emptiness as well.
If the God we worship ever had a cause, then we should have to reject that God and worship that which caused God!
To even ask those questions actually shows a LACK OF study, not “too much thinking”.
To answer them though - God has no cause, God is ever-existing (”ever” being a non-applicable concept anyway, as God made time), and made everything else out of nothing by His spoken word.
Actually, it wasn't meant to be an insult. I've met and/or seen online a number of atheists whose essential argument against "religion" is that because something bad happened to them when they were a child, often something fairly trivial, therefore God cannot exist, because otherwise He would have stopped it from happening. Often sounds more like an excuse, than anything else.
Funny how God always gets the blame for bad things, but never the credit for good things.
It’s rare to see people thanking God for allowing man to have the knowledge and ability to, say, cure smallpox or figure out how to chlorinate water so that people don’t die from typhus by the thousands. But, when man does something bad, like the Holocaust, suddenly it’s all completely, 100% God’s fault, with no real culpability on the part of man himself.
Fixed that headline...
Ah, the old “Problem of Evil”...
I call it the “Excuse of Evil”. Because that’s what it is - an excuse to reject God.
I think you meant typhoid. Typhus is a richettsial disease which is transmitted by an arthropod vector, not water. But I take your point.
Of course. About this much I think Norm is right: whether we believe religiously or liberally, we believe there is more to it. We have to. Otherwise we're left with trying deny the reality of future time and be entertained by existentialist artists who color up or color down angst and dread and nothingness, arrogating the absurd waiting for Godot over coffee and cigarettes.
Why would an atheist complain about 'something bad' that happened to them? "Bad" cannot exist in an atheistic universe. It is simply an event of determinism. It cannot be purposeful. If something is bad, its is purposeful. In the atheistic universe there are no objective moral absolutes and therefore, though there may be an opinion that something is 'bad', the atheist has no point of reference to make the assertion, and he certainly cannot account epistemologically for a value of an event....only an opinion, and if thought out, an opinion which is without foundation. He continually contradicts himself by complaining about anything. To complain about the inainity of the theist is, on its face, complete nonsense to the atheist. This is because without God there is only brute material. This material is ONLY responsive to the laws of nature and therefore everything, even what the atheist says is bad, is determined by those very laws which he champions as exclusive. Therefore the atheist can only say an event 'just is'. Any complaint about child torture, lack of civil rights and civil rights 'injustice', murder, rape, or any other 'event' is simply a determined occurance.
However, in a theistic universe, the God of creation is the creator not only of the material universe but that which is unseen....immaterial abstract universal entities. He is the creator of those absolute objective moral truths and therefore those with the JudeoChristian worldview can begin to make sense. In the atheistic universe those moral truths do not, yea, cannot exist. Now, we begin to see why the atheist says something is bad...because even the atheist has written in his conscience those laws, and this is why the atheist calls upon those moral truths, even while requiring logic and reason requires denial that the possibility of that moral truth even exists.
One of the atheists on this thread said the nonatheist cannot even formulate a formidable question for the 'atheistic scientist'. Consider this question.....'If God does not exist, why is there anything at all'? Aristotle said, NOTHING is what rocks dream about. So,...out of NOTHING, came everything? I wish some atheist would explain the epistemology and ontology of this claim.
Shoot, I probably meant cholera, for all I know.
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