how an atheist found God.

[Galant]

This reminds me of a saying I've heard christians say many times: "god helps those who help themselves"...

If they're saying it, they're mistaken. Some Christians may quote it, but it's not actually a Christian saying.

[aidanjt]

I very much doubt you actually believe that.

If you read the rest of the post, you'd know that I do.

[Galant]

If you read the rest of the post, you'd know that I do.

I did read it, and I still don't believe it. I understand your point about the complexity of actions and decision making, however, if you truly believe free will does not exist, at all, then in your world there is no such thing as guilt. Culpability can never be awarded for any wrong, no matter how heinous, nor achievement rewarded for any good done. Mother Theresa, Ghandi or whomever you might consider as exemplary are no better than Pol Pot, Stalin or some serial murdering rapist. By taking away choice, freedom of will, you begin to render every human action as meaningless. Do you really believe that?

[G4Z]

But they don't - at least, no more than any other age group. Go to a town like Cambridge and you'll find more courses aimed at adults, like Christianity Explored, many of which are tailored at people just wanting to know more, rather than conversion.

Erm... yes. So they do go after kids, which you just denied then admitted all in the same post. with that kind of doublethink abillity I am not surprised you have converted to theism while remaining as intelligent as you undoubtedly are.

[aidanjt]

I did read it, and I still don't believe it. I understand your point about the complexity of actions and decision making, however, if you truly believe free will does not exist, at all, then in your world there is no such thing as guilt. Culpability can never be awarded for any wrong, no matter how heinous, nor achievement rewarded for any good done. Mother Theresa, Ghandi or whomever you might consider as exemplary are no better than Pol Pot, Stalin or some serial murdering rapist. By taking away choice, freedom of will, you begin to render every human action as meaningless. Do you really believe that?

Nonsense. Guilt is an emotion, it influences decision making. Reward/punishment for behaviours influences decision making, that doesn't make the universe any less deterministic, the influences are factors in the series of equations. Causality doesn't excuse bad behaviour, bad behaviour is discouraged so the causal result is good behaviour decisions instead of bad ones.

[Alex]

Hi Galant, I’d like to try to clarify what I’ve been trying to get at all along in this, albeit not explained very well. I also, as I said in my last post, don’t want to get hung up on this because it’s a very minor point in terms of whether people will believe in a certain God or religion, but here goes anyway:

Any perfect being cannot create an imperfect world. Imperfection would not be able to spontaneously appear in a perfect world, or that world would not have been perfect in the first place. Therefore, God could not have created an imperfect world if He was perfect in the first place. In a perfect world we would not have the ability to sin, and more importantly we would not be exposed to the temptation to sin. This is rather how the Christian idea of Heaven is presented.

What I have been wondering is why, if God can create this world (as He described Heaven will apparently be in the Bible) and this world is the way He meant things to be, did He not create it this way in the first place?

I understand that the standard answer is the necessity for free will. I don’t buy this for two reasons . Firstly, that free will is a good thing has not been established at all. In fact, free will is the way in which imperfection is apparently put into the world by a perfect being. Free will is the cause of, according to you, all suffering – if we didn’t have free will we would never sin and therefore never suffer the punishment for it. Free will is somehow not necessary in Heaven – as we can apparently never sin there. I hear sometimes that maybe we will have the ability but not the temptation to sin in Heaven – but then that is an even better picture of how a perfect God could have created a perfect world that imperfection could never have entered into.

My second point about free will is about making a decision with free will. How many times do we need to make a decision that we will accept God? How many times do we need to make this decision before God will accept us? Take for instance the story of Adam. Adam was created with the ability to sin. Every time he was tempted to sin there was a chance he would. He was destined to live for ever – it was therefore in his nature that eventually he would sin. He was created in such a way that he would inevitably sin. Before he did, however, he ‘walked with God’ – he fully accepted and loved God. Why wait until the inevitable before taking him to Heaven? Just so with us now – why wait until we sin before taking us to Heaven? Is this so we can get to the point where we can understand our decision? If so then is this because we need to make an informed choice? Because if we need to make an informed choice then we would need a lot more than a book and some convinced Christian friends to make a decision – most don’t reject God because they know of Him and reject that – they reject Him because they cannot see convincing evidence that He even exists. If He did, and wanted people to make an informed decision, He would at least appear to them in unambiguous terms so that they could be sure of what the decision was they were making – rather than deciding on this based on a 2000 year old book. This is often left so that we could have room for faith – but again this seems a rather imperfect notion incompatible with a perfect God – judging us for an ability to suspend rational thought and to ignore a lack of evidence for the truth of something.

My point therefore is twofold – firstly that creating us with an ability to sin would have been to create us imperfect as it would inevitably lead to sin – which would not be possible for a perfect being. A perfect being cannot create something imperfect – or such a being would not have been perfect to start with. Secondly, free will is neither necessary, nor is it all that is required to make an informed choice about whether to follow a God. In order to make an informed choice you need to both have free will to make that choice and a full knowledge of all the facts – and what we ‘know’ about God, if based on the Bible, is based on very shaky historical grounds and therefore it cannot be said we are making a fully informed decision.

On this basis either judging us for sin which was inevitable because of how we were created, or for rejecting a God which we only have flimsy evidence for, is unjust.

[Galant]

Nonsense. Guilt is an emotion, it influences decision making. Reward/punishment for behaviours influences decision making, that doesn't make the universe any less deterministic, the influences are factors in the series of equations. Causality doesn't excuse bad behaviour, bad behaviour is discouraged so the causal result is good behaviour decisions instead of bad ones.

I was using 'guilt' not to refer to the feeling of guilt but to mean 'culpable' - as in 'responsible', or as how we might consider a person 'guilty' of wrongdoing. The basic premise of the justice system is that people are punished or pronounced 'innocent' according to their involvement in an activity. The person's attitude or will are often crucial in determining the sentencing if not the overall outcome. If no-one has any free choice, at all, then no-one is responsible for anything - their actions are always the result of outside forces. Having said that, if there is no free-will, then there is no 'outside' or 'inside', but only matter and energy bouncing around. Even 'You' and 'I' being to lose their meaning. But perhaps that's beyond the scope here.

Perhaps another way to approach this is to ask - when you say,

Causality doesn't excuse bad behaviour, bad behaviour is discouraged so the causal result is good behaviour decisions instead of bad ones.

, how, without will, do you account for 'bad' and 'good' as existing as relation to behaviour? Also, what is the use of trying talking about 'influence' when both those who are doing the 'influencing' and those being 'influenced' aren't actually 'doing' anything - they're just living out the results of the cosmic calculator. No?

[kalniel]

Erm... yes. So they do go after kids, which you just denied then admitted all in the same post. with that kind of doublethink abillity I am not surprised you have converted to theism while remaining as intelligent as you undoubtedly are.

Well one or other of us is clearly confused. I'm suggesting religions, Christianity at least, don't especially target people who don't think critically. They target everyone more or less equally - that's not doublethink or any kind of comment on intelligence is it?

[Alex]

I’d also like to share my opinions on what you were discussing with aidanjt about whether free will exists at all. Your rejection of the notion of causality seems to be that this removes all responsibility and guilt from our lives.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it comes from the point of view that there is an external source of what is wrong and right. Guilt comes from the recognition that we have gone against this external sense of what is right. This may seem obvious if you believe in a God, but if you imagine for a minute that there wasn’t one then suddenly there is no absolute wrong and right.

We cannot and should not ignore the fact that we generally believe in wrong and right, most of the time with some grey areas in between – and we may not agree on some rights and wrongs – abortion for example. If there isn’t a God then where does this sense of wrong or right come from?

The obvious answer to me would be that it is something that we develop as a species, and more specifically as a culture. It came about as we have evolved first biologically and socially to find what works best for the survival of us as a species. Murdering others being wrong is fairly easy to explain this way. Other examples may take longer to think through why they would be bad for the survival of the species, for example rape, but can all be explained in terms of the total damage done to the community in which those members of the species live. Right and wrong is defined as a shared cultural norm – defined as something that members of that community agree on rather than appealing to an external source of right and wrong.

What you’d expect if right and wrong came from an external source would be that cultures over the last few thousand years would agree on the fundamentals. If it came through the development of cultures then you would expect it to change and shift depending on where and when that culture existed. You may note that cultures over the years have though human sacrifice was OK, ownership of another human being was OK, non-consensual sex and marriage was OK, sex with 13 year old girls was OK, etc etc. It is fairly obvious that what is considered right and wrong depends on where and when you were born, rather than appealing to an external source of right and wrong always being constant.

With this framework, which reality seems to hold up as being apparent rather than the religious view of absolutes, guilt and responsibility are easy to explain. We feel guilt when we have done something that we know the society we live in thinks is wrong. We feel a responsibility to do what society thinks is right. We have evolved biologically and socially for this sense of guilt and responsibility based on the shared experiences of thousands of generations of our ancestors – those who collaborated survived and reproduced.

Guilt is still a neurological response dependent on how our brains have developed. This is useful in society – it is what prevents us from doing things harmful to society as a whole. Our actions are still determined by neurological processes in our brain, more complicated than we can understand, but we do not have free will beyond this. We still have the experience of making that choice, but the choice, as much as our personality, is defined and made by the chemical processes that make up how our brain works.

So no, no-one is better than anyone else as a person. To say so would be to compare them to an external source, which we do not have. What we can say is that some people have been a lot better at fitting in with what society deems is good, and others the opposite. Because of the way we have developed we experience this as love or hatred for these specific rather polarising people.

[aidanjt]

I was using 'guilt' not to refer to the feeling of guilt but to mean 'culpable' - as in 'responsible', or as how we might consider a person 'guilty' of wrongdoing. The basic premise of the justice system is that people are punished or pronounced 'innocent' according to their involvement in an activity. The person's attitude or will are often crucial in determining the sentencing if not the overall outcome. If no-one has any free choice, at all, then no-one is responsible for anything - their actions are always the result of outside forces.

No. They're still responsible because punitive measures discourages bad decision making. The existence of the justice system itself is a causal factor. I've already explained this. You have higher brain function, it's used to evaluate choices and aid decision making, you also have the physiological functions to exert your decision on the environment in a limit means.. You have 'will' as it were, but it isn't free, it's shaped by your environment as you shape it, genetic inheritance, and other physically tangible factors. As with all higher order animals.

Having said that, if there is no free-will, then there is no 'outside' or 'inside', but only matter and energy bouncing around.

Now you're starting to get it. The universe is an entire system. What gives us an 'inside' is perception from our own conciousness and cognitive processing. But the physical interactions of the universe are all part of the same cosmic proscenium.

If someone fires a gun the stimuli triggers a cascade of evolved pre-programming, your brain floods the body with adrenaline, your muscles tense up and starts releasing and burning sugar, your breathing becomes more rapid, your heart beats harder and faster, your senses are sharpened, and you instinctively evaluate your options to either fight or run.

You evolved this physiological reaction because if your ancestors didn't attempt to fight or run from scary things they wouldn't survive long enough to reproduce. It's all a causal sequence of events. And another example of your environment controlling your will.

Even 'You' and 'I' being to lose their meaning. But perhaps that's beyond the scope here.

Not at all. Your assemblage of atoms is discrete and unique, as is mine.

Perhaps another way to approach this is to ask - when you say, , how, without will, do you account for 'bad' and 'good' as existing as relation to behaviour?

'Good' actions enhance human survivability, 'bad' actions get humans killed. Morality is a kind of artificial selection which aids the perpetuation of our genome. As does scientific research. Digging out natural resources. Working 9-5 to support the family. Dating. Even exploration is inseparable from our drive to find new breeding space.

Also, what is the use of trying talking about 'influence' when both those who are doing the 'influencing' and those being 'influenced' aren't actually 'doing' anything - they're just living out the results of the cosmic calculator. No?

You're still thinking of the individual as an independent unit separate from the calculation. It's not. What the Sun is doing is fusing hydrogen atoms together to produce helium and energy, at a reasonably predictable rate, it's not a concious entity, but it can still do. It influences the sustenance of life on the planet by providing radiant energy, and regulates our sleep cycles by illuminating the gases our atmosphere is made up of. Again, demonstrating that will isn't free from external influence.

I'm sorry if you think the lack of free will bulldozes your understanding of everything. But it's really not that drastic at all.

[Noxvayl]

Considering the length of the discussion I won't pretend to partake, but I thought I'd share an interesting talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson that some of you might enjoy:

First Part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV1r4fxaZsE

Second Part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH0LU...eature=related

EDIT: Complete talk found here> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrpPPV_yPY

[malfunction]

Philosophically speaking the idea that we don't have free will is an interesting one.

I agree that both nature and nurture mean than we are certainly pre-disposed to specific characteristics and actions and I certainly don't believe humans have an intangible soul - something that makes us different from the other animals or something that lives on after we die.

But to be conscious, to be self aware on one hand but for it to be a complete illusion on the other? To reduce everything we do to a pre-determined pattern that only has bearing on how well our genes survive and propagate? What about the things we do that are purely selfish and have little or no impact beyond our own selves?

You can say that my career is about providing for my family (and I consciously rationalise it that way) and about my standing in the community (and by extension my family's) ... That I'm dressing to attract / retain a mate... That my choice of car is likewise. But the subtler things - the less relevant things... Are those random? Sub-concious misfires? Unintentional aspects of my unintentionally developed intelligence and self awareness?

I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, nor do I find it a particularly depressing idea as such (I think I should, but I don't - the illusion is pretty good after all) but it does seem rather overly reductive.

[Alex]

I suppose it depends on what you mean by free will. We weigh up decisions in our minds, we make choices, and we do not experience any pressure in making those decisions. They are still, however, fundamentally chemical reactions in our brain - far too complex to understand fully (at least currently, I don't know about whether it's theoretically possible to understand these processes) and certainly far too complex to have predictable outcomes - but chemical reactions nonetheless.

The fact that these chemical reactions are so complex as to be able to allow us to experience choices and their consequences without the need for a 'spirit' or 'soul' is mind blowing - but all the evidence we have suggests it's true.

Interestingly, free will is not a very biblical idea, see here for a list of bible quotes about free will - two suggest we do have free will and eight suggest we don't.

[fuddam]

So you, and millions like you, had a purely direct and personal discovery of God without *any* communal/inherited exposure to Judeo-Christian ideology, right? Some event in your life will have created a memory association with some prior memory of preaching/indoctrination, but that's not really revelation, direct or otherwise. Don't you realise you're using 'revelation' like a marketing buzzword?

why does it have to be without communal/inherited exposure to J-C ideology? Do you suppose your experience of anything in life is somehow 'untainted', or must be 'untainted' to have validity? Seems like you have a problem right there, since the use of language ties you into concepts/ideas from which it's very difficult to even have a thought - lol.

Ironically, you're right in one sense: it's not just me. Hundreds of millions of people testify to the same, life-changing experience, and revelation is exactly what has to happen. It is a revelation too, in that it comes from Him, not from me/us.

A delusion by its very nature is unknowable. The child's imaginary friend is equally unknowable, and the child is as certain that their friend exists.

ah, you miss my point. you have some proof that God is not knowable?

[fuddam]

It's not 'simples' at all - I think you're rather missing the point I'm making. In a perfect world, even if we had the ability to sin we would not have the temptation. We would never come across that choice.

Even, as I said, given that, what is the point in giving us the free will in the first place? God would have known all along it would never work. The Bible says that no-one has ever (save Jesus) managed to always make the right choices, so why make us make the choice, knowing how wrong it would go?

Let's assume you're a father. You have children of your own. Someone gives you a magic pill which you can feed to your children. This will make them into the 'perfect' children - always obedient, always loving, always delighted to see you, always keeping their rooms tidy.

Would you give them the pill?

God chose not to. Which is why God loves you AS YOU ARE. If you behaved perfectly and never sinned again, He wouldn't love you more. He loves you beyond comprehension, but He hates sin.

So, He gives us a FREE method of being cleansed from the sin, a free pass, and does everything to convince us to CHOOSE him.

Your argument stems from not seeing the bigger picture, i.e. where it all ends. (I'm not meaning that in an insulting way). The whole point of Christianity is what the future holds.

As I said before, how will the world be different in Heaven? Will we still sin in Heaven? Will we have the ability? Will we have the temptation?

No sin, no temptation. Like the best day ever with your best friends ever, without end - it's the way I like to picture it

BUT the choice to go there has to be a choice, so that it is done consciously, avoiding the need for the 'pill'.

The Christian faith stands on the authority of the Bible (together with - as you say - the 'Holy Spirit' which I'll address below). The Bible is simply not corroborated enough within the historical record to reliably establish that the man Jesus was in any way a Son of God, or that he rose from the dead. That he lived is fairly well established. The stuff that makes the foundational tenets of the Christian faith is just not.

Of course not. Even if He appeared today, in the clouds, visible to millions, within a very short time it would be described by those not present to be a mass hallucination brought upon by hysteria and willful self-delusion, lol. There is no way any books will even be able to prove my existence after my DNA disappears.

I'll come to this more thoroughly below, but to turn your point on it's head - what does the direct experience of God from other religions tell you about their God? Does that provide evidence of their religion?

Well, I ask a lot of believers of other faiths that question, and while I will not/do not/cannot discredit their experience, I can ask about how that experience impacts their lives, and what it says about their god/gods.

The reason Christianity is breaking out all over Iran after 30 years of being the pinnacle of the Islamic state is precisely because millions of Iranian muslims have had an experience of Christ which they never experienced in Allah (their words). Fact.

[fuddam]

I came to realise that the Bible, which I had revered as the source of all truth (I even went through a creationist phase!) was no more or less authoritative than any other book of the same era. We have more contemporaneous books about the polytheistic Egyptians faiths than we do about the initial origins of the Christian faith. I think that, when I think back now, the main thing that shook my faith in the Bible as an authoritative book was when I was trying to read up on how the Canon was established - how the books that went into the Bible were chosen and how those that were rejected were rejected. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that the books were chosen that the choosers felt said what they wanted the Bible to say. Any books that disagreed with the message they wanted to put out were discarded. The people who established the Christian Canon - which stories about Jesus should be and which should not be included in the Bible - had no direct experience of either Jesus or the founding fathers of the church.

First off, I want to thank you for explaining your background. Much appreciated.

When it comes to any discussion of which books were included in the Bible, I always separate the discussion into Old Testament & New Testament. Why? Because while the OT is truthful and useful, it is the NT that impacts on us here and now - the message to the world. The OT is about the building of a nation and for/about the Jews; the NT is about all people. The OT is continually being verified as more and more fragments are uncovered (which is why the British Museum now has scripture on its walls to explain a pottery shard!), yet it is the NT which holds the mother lode: the birth, death and resurrection of Christ.

With the NT, there are 85,000+ corroborations of the scripture dating back to the early church fathers, showing the current NT we have today being all accounted for, aside from 11 insignificant verses, and all 45 additions accounted and noted (which incidentally do not detract or contradict the rest of the NT).

The current content of the NT has nothing to do with any council convened 300 years after the fact. It has nothing to do with old men sitting in a room and arbitrarily deciding what to include and reject. It is the most historically authenticated document on the planet, by far, in terms of consistency / accuracy with its original texts.

I can dig up exact details but after just having a brief look at 11 o'clock at night, have decided I need my bed. I've been more than a little ill for the past week.

More than that, if we can take the positive experiences as evidence of God, we have to take the negative experiences where God seems absent as evidence against. If you take only one set of evidence and ignore the other as it's simply part of a bigger plan, then of course you come to the inevitable conclusion - but what dawned on me was the question of how the world would look different if there wasn't a God guiding my life. The only answer I could come to was that it would look remarkably similar to how my life did already.

I don't doubt the sincerity of what you describe. I have a friend who I once prayed alongside, who now is a 100% mantra-chanting Buddhist.

I'm responding to your paragraph because of your statement "we have to take the negative experiences where God seems absent as evidence against".

There's a strong line in Christianity about what we receive from God, and when. An example would be 1 Corinthians, 3:2 - I had to feed you with milk, not with solid food, because you weren't ready for anything stronger. And you still aren't ready

Young Christians (not age thing) tend to receive a lot of the warmth and nurturing they require - a more touchy-feely experience, if you will. As the Christian matures, it's common to experience periods of absence of His presence, ESPECIALLY in times of suffering. In a nutshell, these are the moments when one is being kicked out of the proverbial nest. These are the moments when one's faith is tested, and most unexpectedly, when one can have the most joyful (!) experiences of His love. Is very freaky - to see someone joyful and praising God in the midst of great suffering. Anyone can be joyful when things are going great, but during pain/disease/persecution/torture, that is where Christ's reality shines.....

It seems to me that you feel you were let down by God at some point, right when you were really counting on Him, and as a consequence, 'rationalised' Him into a fiction.