Message #2723

[Martin]

So are you saying that, when you wondered about who was going to collect you from school when you were at primary school, you didn't rely on your experience to tell you who would?

There is no way that you could construe that this is what I'm saying from what I wrote.

The fact that you need to use arguments like this, as if they were reasoned responses, gives away the insecure footing of your faith, not its foundation in experience.  You need to compare faith in God to things like parents picking up children from school, because, for most children, that is a reasonable expectation from experience, and you want to paint belief in God as similarly evidenced.  Yet belief in God (as a hidden, supernatural, other person looking upon us from outside - rather than an integral part of human makeup) has nowhere near the same evidential basis. 

For a start, you can't see God.  When you talk to God it's not like talking to your mum or dad who responds in words and body language.  When people say that God has responded, it's because something has happened - for example they prayed for guidance about which career to choose and, someone offered them a post in a company, or something.  People talk about 'answers to prayer', but when you delve into what they mean by that, it can be very unclear that any external force or personality has been involved in providing that answer.  People talk about healing from illness, but when you delve, there is no statistical basis for believing that an other-being has done anything to effect the healing. All in all, the basis for many of the beliefs that Christians hold has very little basis in evidence, and much, much more basis in their own yearnings and desires.

I'm not saying that faith is necessarily a bad thing, mind. But I am saying that to pretend that faith comes close to knowledge is an unnecessary, and harmful, self-deception.  It leads to a sort of dogmatism that obscures the truth, it feeds prejudices and makes people believe that they can prescribe what is best for others.

A wiser faith is one which takes everything as provisional, works simply on working assumptions and is keen to improve on those assumptions where evidence suggests it should.  A wiser and deeper faith comes not from a forced, inflexible trust in precepts and proscriptions, but from the quest to follow Love, wherever it leads.

IMO.