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I've listened to many Christians who describe their belief system as based in faith (belief without tangible evidence), personal experience, revelations, tradition, training as a child, tangible, testable, evidence, and/or something else. I would like to know what your level of belief is on a scale from 1-100 from weak to strong, and what your belief is based on, with possible percentages.
93.6% based onthe Spirit of Agape best presented by Jesus. For those who don't know "agape" is one of the Koine Greek words translated as "love," and is basically about concern for the well-being of everyone in any situation.
93.6% based onthe Spirit of Agape best presented by Jesus. For those who don't know "agape" is one of the Koine Greek words translated as "love," and is basically about concern for the well-being of everyone in any situation.
Do the presentations of the Bible character Jesus require some amount of belief as well? If so, could you provide the basis for this belief also?
Both faith and belief has to be BIGGER than any one individual. Both have to be INDIVIDUALLY applied to life and rarely would it seem possible for any two individuals to have the same FAITH or BELIEF and still be honest and altruistic.
I've listened to many Christians who describe their belief system as based in faith (belief without tangible evidence), personal experience, revelations, tradition, training as a child, tangible, testable, evidence, and/or something else. I would like to know what your level of belief is on a scale from 1-100 from weak to strong, and what your belief is based on, with possible percentages.
I would rather stick with Richard Dawkins scale (from 1 strong theist to 7 strong atheist) because it is better described. On that scale I am a 1.5 theist (between his Strong Theist and Defacto Theist). This is because I do question -- intelligence requires this. But I reject the definition of knowledge as justified true belief being nothing but hot air because nobody believes anything without thinking it is true and justified. The question is how do we live -- that is the real measure of knowledge. I know God exists as well as I know anything and it is how I choose to live my life.
basis (i.e. why)
Well there are two ways to answer this: historical and rational. There is the actual path we took to belief and there is the reasoning by which we justify belief.
Historical: I was pretty much an existentialist coming out of high school and starting at university as a physics major. I came to the conclusion that the most fundamental existentialist faith was the faith that life was worth living. I then realized that the faith in God played the same role in the lives of theists, so I entertained the proposition that these two faiths were equivalent. This gave me my first concrete basis for a definition of the word "God" in order to give it any meaning for me. The question I then pursued was what sort of God to have faith in best served this purpose of providing a faith that life was worth living. That was my thought path into belief in God.
Rational:
As a scientist I am well acquainted with scientific methodology just as I am fully cognizant about how rare are the cases when proof and objective evidence are actually available for the conclusions that people make all the time. Rhetoric frankly has a much bigger role in everyday life than scientific methodology - it is the tool of trade for lawyers, preachers, politicians, philosophers and used car salesmen. Subjective participation is the essence of life and thus imagining that one can restrict life to the objective observation of scientific inquiry is nothing less than delusional. So I don't adopt such idiotic pretense and know full well that science is one thing and life is something else entirely.
As a physicist I have to ask myself as other physicist have asked themselves whether life as we experience really can be summed up in the mathematical equations of physics. My necessarily subjective conclusion, the same as many others, is that the very idea is absurd. Science puts our experience through the filter of mathematical glasses and to be sure this methodology has proven marvelously successful at not only explaining many things but discovering new things about the world that we never expected. But this is just looking at life in one particular way and I think it is quite foolish confuse this way of looking at things with the reality itself.
Thus the point is that I have already decided that reality extends beyond what objective evidence can show. And this includes the God that I believe in. He is a spiritual being and that means that He has no part in the mathematical relationships of time and space that are the physical universe and which make objective evidence a possibility. Thus in my case, there never could be any expectation of objective evidence for the existence of God. Indeed from my point of view that is kind of the whole point of a belief in God at all. I believe that there is a reality beyond what can be measured, tested, manipulated and controlled. The human body and mind may be physical things subject to coincidental external forces that may distort or destroy them at any time, but the human spirit is a matter of our own personal choices and untouchable by things external to it. Thus I reject unprovable assumptions about the limits of reality and assert that God and the human spirit are quite real, even if they are not quite what many religions claim them to be.
I have considerable sympathy with the sentiments of the eastern mystics that logic is stultifying trap for human thought and consciousness. The result is that even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them for the sake of our own liberty of thought. We need a belief in something transcendent in order for us transcend the limitations of logic and mundane (or material) reasons to give our uniquely human ability for abstraction more substance and life.
I feel there are profound pragmatic reasons to reject the idea that reality is exclusively objective because it immediately takes any conviction about reality to a conclusion that the people who disagree with you are detached from reality and delusional or in some other way defective, I don't believe that this is at all conducive to the values and ideals of a free society. The plain fact is that our direct contact with reality is wholly subjective and it is the objective which is the abstraction that has to be fabricated. Now I certainly think there is very good evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but I see nothing to support taking this to the extreme of presuming that reality is exclusively objective.
Meanwhile, in the studies of my major, physics, we got to the punch line in our examination of quantum mechanics, hearing some of the smarter students stand up and cry in outrage - "but... that doesn't make any sense!" For in quantum physics we find that the physical evidence forces to accept some basic facts that seem to contradict the logical premises of physics and scientific inquiry itself. Its discovery was such a shock to many great scientists that they resisted the ideas and tried to find a way around it to no avail. The evidence was conclusive. Physical causality is not a closed system and we had to accept that there were certain events which have no cause within scientific world view.
So hearing all the reports of shock and incredulity among the physicists that this should be so, it occurred to me, that there was something that would make sense of it to me. If the universe was the creation of a deity who wanted keep his fingers in events then these facts of quantum physics would be a back door in the laws of nature through which He could do so. I am not saying that any such conclusion is necessitated by the scientific facts; only that on this subjective level where quantum physics created such cognitive dissonance for so many physicists, that this idea would make sense of it -- to me.
That was only the beginning of long road, because I certainly didn't jump from there to embracing Christianity and the Bible. The writings of Scott Peck played an important role on that road with his psychological approach to spirituality. Also the study of the history of philosophy gave me some tools to build up my own ideas about the nature of reality, particularly in the ideas of Aristotle. I also found in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Pierce, some insight into the questions of epistemology that were helpful.
However, even fifteen years later I had some serious obstacles in various theological ideas like atonement, assurance, the Trinity and the resurrection. I worked through these primarily during discussions on the internet. And on several of these I didn't accept the more popular western positions on these subjects but saw in the Bible reasons to take a slightly different approach. It amazes me that I still came out with a fairly orthodox stand on them though I do admit that my refusal to parrot the usual rhetoric does send the more black and white, intolerant Christians into rants about heresy. So if you want to know what sort of Christian I should be called. I am in the liberal end of the evangelical spectrum and neither fundamentalist or Calvinist, though I lean more towards Eastern Orthodoxy on a couple of theological questions rejecting the typical western approach as a bit too irrational for my taste. Also, like some other scientists that have become Christian, I am an open theist (you can look up the writings of John Polkinghorne for example).
P.S. This was quickly patched together from previous responses so I can only hope it all fits together well enough.
I would rather stick with Richard Dawkins scale (from 1 strong theist to 7 strong atheist) because it is better described. On that scale I am a 1.5 theist (between his Strong Theist and Defacto Theist). This is because I do question -- intelligence requires this. But I reject the definition of knowledge as justified true belief being nothing but hot air because nobody believes anything without thinking it is true and justified. The question is how do we live -- that is the real measure of knowledge. I know God exists as well as I know anything and it is how I choose to live my life.
basis (i.e. why)
Well there are two ways to answer this: historical and rational. There is the actual path we took to belief and there is the reasoning by which we justify belief.
Historical: I was pretty much an existentialist coming out of high school and starting at university as a physics major. I came to the conclusion that the most fundamental existentialist faith was the faith that life was worth living. I then realized that the faith in God played the same role in the lives of theists, so I entertained the proposition that these two faiths were equivalent. This gave me my first concrete basis for a definition of the word "God" in order to give it any meaning for me. The question I then pursued was what sort of God to have faith in best served this purpose of providing a faith that life was worth living. That was my thought path into belief in God.
Rational:
As a scientist I am well acquainted with scientific methodology just as I am fully cognizant about how rare are the cases when proof and objective evidence are actually available for the conclusions that people make all the time. Rhetoric frankly has a much bigger role in everyday life than scientific methodology - it is the tool of trade for lawyers, preachers, politicians, philosophers and used car salesmen. Subjective participation is the essence of life and thus imagining that one can restrict life to the objective observation of scientific inquiry is nothing less than delusional. So I don't adopt such idiotic pretense and know full well that science is one thing and life is something else entirely.
As a physicist I have to ask myself as other physicist have asked themselves whether life as we experience really can be summed up in the mathematical equations of physics. My necessarily subjective conclusion, the same as many others, is that the very idea is absurd. Science puts our experience through the filter of mathematical glasses and to be sure this methodology has proven marvelously successful at not only explaining many things but discovering new things about the world that we never expected. But this is just looking at life in one particular way and I think it is quite foolish confuse this way of looking at things with the reality itself.
Thus the point is that I have already decided that reality extends beyond what objective evidence can show. And this includes the God that I believe in. He is a spiritual being and that means that He has no part in the mathematical relationships of time and space that are the physical universe and which make objective evidence a possibility. Thus in my case, there never could be any expectation of objective evidence for the existence of God. Indeed from my point of view that is kind of the whole point of a belief in God at all. I believe that there is a reality beyond what can be measured, tested, manipulated and controlled. The human body and mind may be physical things subject to coincidental external forces that may distort or destroy them at any time, but the human spirit is a matter of our own personal choices and untouchable by things external to it. Thus I reject unprovable assumptions about the limits of reality and assert that God and the human spirit are quite real, even if they are not quite what many religions claim them to be.
I have considerable sympathy with the sentiments of the eastern mystics that logic is stultifying trap for human thought and consciousness. The result is that even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them for the sake of our own liberty of thought. We need a belief in something transcendent in order for us transcend the limitations of logic and mundane (or material) reasons to give our uniquely human ability for abstraction more substance and life.
I feel there are profound pragmatic reasons to reject the idea that reality is exclusively objective because it immediately takes any conviction about reality to a conclusion that the people who disagree with you are detached from reality and delusional or in some other way defective, I don't believe that this is at all conducive to the values and ideals of a free society. The plain fact is that our direct contact with reality is wholly subjective and it is the objective which is the abstraction that has to be fabricated. Now I certainly think there is very good evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but I see nothing to support taking this to the extreme of presuming that reality is exclusively objective.
Meanwhile, in the studies of my major, physics, we got to the punch line in our examination of quantum mechanics, hearing some of the smarter students stand up and cry in outrage - "but... that doesn't make any sense!" For in quantum physics we find that the physical evidence forces to accept some basic facts that seem to contradict the logical premises of physics and scientific inquiry itself. Its discovery was such a shock to many great scientists that they resisted the ideas and tried to find a way around it to no avail. The evidence was conclusive. Physical causality is not a closed system and we had to accept that there were certain events which have no cause within scientific world view.
So hearing all the reports of shock and incredulity among the physicists that this should be so, it occurred to me, that there was something that would make sense of it to me. If the universe was the creation of a deity who wanted keep his fingers in events then these facts of quantum physics would be a back door in the laws of nature through which He could do so. I am not saying that any such conclusion is necessitated by the scientific facts; only that on this subjective level where quantum physics created such cognitive dissonance for so many physicists, that this idea would make sense of it -- to me.
That was only the beginning of long road, because I certainly didn't jump from there to embracing Christianity and the Bible. The writings of Scott Peck played an important role on that road with his psychological approach to spirituality. Also the study of the history of philosophy gave me some tools to build up my own ideas about the nature of reality, particularly in the ideas of Aristotle. I also found in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Pierce, some insight into the questions of epistemology that were helpful.
However, even fifteen years later I had some serious obstacles in various theological ideas like atonement, assurance, the Trinity and the resurrection. I worked through these primarily during discussions on the internet. And on several of these I didn't accept the more popular western positions on these subjects but saw in the Bible reasons to take a slightly different approach. It amazes me that I still came out with a fairly orthodox stand on them though I do admit that my refusal to parrot the usual rhetoric does send the more black and white, intolerant Christians into rants about heresy. So if you want to know what sort of Christian I should be called. I am in the liberal end of the evangelical spectrum and neither fundamentalist or Calvinist, though I lean more towards Eastern Orthodoxy on a couple of theological questions rejecting the typical western approach as a bit too irrational for my taste. Also, like some other scientists that have become Christian, I am an open theist (you can look up the writings of John Polkinghorne for example).
P.S. This was quickly patched together from previous responses so I can only hope it all fits together well enough.
I'm sure you've heard this before: Doesn't this view of God make any claim about the supernatural possible? I think this discussion is better for the Philosophy forum, but thanks for the response.
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