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However, I have felt Him, heard His voice and I have seen with my own eyes, His deliverance during my own trying situations. He has made Himself known to me personally so I cannot deny that He exists.
Interestingly enough, eerie feelings of religious euphoria and fervor have been observed for thousands of years during the polytheistic epochs that pre-existed the introduction of the concept of monotheism.
How do you know "He" (or SHE) isn't Zeus, Aphrodite, Ra, Hera, Odin, or any of the thousands of other deities man has worshipped (or hasn't even heard of)
My answer to your statement can be answered with a question/example of my own, which I LOVE to demonstrate to fundies:
DrummerBoy: "Hey, didja know I have an invisible friend on my shoulder who acts as a spirit counselor to me and guides me and talks to me?"
Fundie: "Horse Puckey." You don't have any such thing. You're nuts!"
DrummerBoy: "Can you prove he doesn't exist?"
Fundie: "No, but....."
DrummerBoy: "See? You can't prove he doesn't, so I reckon he really does!"
Fundie: "You're going to hell. That's sacreligous."
DrummerBoy: "Naw..my invisible friend will save me."
Interestingly enough, eerie feelings of religious euphoria and fervor have been observed for thousands of years during the polytheistic epochs that pre-existed the introduction of the concept of monotheism.
Does this mean that those gods existed as well?
DD
All the elements are ultimately created by the fusion of hydrogen in stars. If I understand the science hydrogen was not recognized as a discrete substance until after the discovery of heavier elements like nickel. There are efforts to unify the four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear weak, nuclear strong) and I believe they've succeeded in all but gravity.
This is not a strong or exact analogy. I'm not saying Zeus is what happens when you put God in a high energy particle accelerator or something. It's just that our understanding evolves. Some Greek philosophers had veered toward a form of monotheism on their own. The Jews perhaps reached this earlier, or were simply in a better position on the borderlands of both Africa and Asia, so God revealed himself to them.
Therefore the religious experiences of Greeks is perhaps a primitive groping toward the real thing through reason and experience. Or perhaps Zeus represents something significant about their culture's psyche. Or there may have even been an actual person, or compilation of several persons, in their pre-literate history who inspired the idea of Zeus. Or an actual angel that they became confused about later and so his story developed various corruptions or accretions.
All the elements are ultimately created by the fusion of hydrogen in stars. If I understand the science hydrogen was not recognized as a discrete substance until after the discovery of heavier elements like nickel. There are efforts to unify the four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear weak, nuclear strong) and I believe they've succeeded in all but gravity.
This is not a strong or exact analogy. I'm not saying Zeus is what happens when you put God in a high energy particle accelerator or something. It's just that our understanding evolves. Some Greek philosophers had veered toward a form of monotheism on their own. The Jews perhaps reached this earlier, or were simply in a better position on the borderlands of both Africa and Asia, so God revealed himself to them.
Therefore the religious experiences of Greeks is perhaps a primitive groping toward the real thing through reason and experience. Or perhaps Zeus represents something significant about their culture's psyche. Or there may have even been an actual person, or compilation of several persons, in their pre-literate history who inspired the idea of Zeus. Or an actual angel that they became confused about later and so his story developed various corruptions or accretions.
This is veering towards where atheism and theism meet at the cutting edge of agnosticism where 'God' sometimes loses the capital letter and becomes the god of Pantheists, in both senses - Intelligent nature or god of everything and everyone, which is pretty much the same thing, when you think about it.
It is the god of Einstein, the invisible computer that runs the universe. The god which we cannot know about and therefore can only surmise its existence through the First cause arguments.
They are interesting, but not really a lot to do with the gods in which atheists do not believe. They are the personal gods. The gods that believers of all faiths believe they are communing with when they meditate, pray or, indeed, get high on mescalin. They are the gods who cannot all be true as personal gods as they are all different and give different messages (1). They are the gods which can effectively, be disproved. The Abrahamic God has been argued about for decades and the argument is over and lost. The difficulty is getting the believers or those who make money out of to admit it. All we can do is keep presenting the arguments and hoping that people, wanting to appear as though their beliefs are reasonable, will come to correctly distinguish between logical, evidence based arguments and fallacy and faith -based ones.
To bring the personal gods together in the way that is an inevitable sequence where amorphous gods tend to gell into trinities, Aums and brahmas, and the demigods or enlightened humans such as Krishna, Buddha or Jesus become bigger and bigger until they take over the cosmos(2), is to get back to the remote unknown god of the Deists, einstein and agnostics and those who do believe in personal gods, miracles or Holy Books. We are back in the realm of the pantheist god, and that is not really what the debate is about.
(1) Convergence of Human moral preferences aside.
(2) Yes, Buddha, too, becomes elevated in Mahayana to Adi - Buddha, the intelligent cosmos from which all the Buddhas came and to which they return.
This is veering towards where atheism and theism meet at the cutting edge of agnosticism where 'God' sometimes loses the capital letter and becomes the god of Pantheists, in both senses - Intelligent nature or god of everything and everyone, which is pretty much the same thing, when you think about it.
It is the god of Einstein, the invisible computer that runs the universe. The god which we cannot know about and therefore can only surmise its existence through the First cause arguments.
It's also a good example of how gods of the gaps keep getting pushed into smaller and smaller gaps as our knowledge gets larger and larger. Gods used to be all over the place - dragging the sun around, causing weather & seasons, and so on. Now that we've found natural causes for them, they've been pushed back into the first minute fraction of a second that we don't quite understand yet. This is a sort of natural selection among ideas of gods. The ones which don't do anything other than provide warm fuzzies are relegated to the dustbin of history as we find that they're not pushing the planets around or hiding out behind a solid dome in the sky.
The actions of the god concepts that have survived this selection are indistinguishable from random chance. "You can't test god" afterall - why would you need faith. Or is it that when people in the past came up with testable ideas of gods those gods failed the test? In any case, this does allow believers to hang on to the "but you can't disprove god with absolute certainty" idea, but at the expense of their gods actually doing anything measurable in this world.
Well there's that. Gods that are intended to explain natural phenomenon became unnecessary and anachronistic.
The Judaeo-Christian God was, from my perspective, never really such a God. In the Wisdom of Solomon 13:1-9 gods of air or wind or stars are specifically rejected.
The functions of God or religion in the modern age, and perhaps always the ideal function, is about answering questions that are not scientific questions. The reductionist answer might be that there is no such a thing as a question that is not a scientific question, but this is unsatisfactory for most people of most eras. In particular religion or God is equipped to answer questions of "why?" Science is mostly or entirely about how. "This is how a planet formed", but why there is matter or existence or what purpose we have if any is not really the domain of science. At least not as "science" is normally understood.
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