Angel believes

[angel]

I was asked to summarize my position about faith.
This thread is open to comments by anybody and I will try to reply to the comments for better rendering my position. Honestly I don't think a real discussion would be appropriate about this issue. As I will say I think faith is a matter of personal relation with God and I am not interested in scrutinizing it with anybody on board. In any event this may help following/interpreting other threads and that is why I accepted to write this.

The first point I want to touch is the relation between faith and reason.
I believe in God. I believe God is a spiritual entity. As any other spiritual entity I know it is not physical.
By definition of "physical" this means that it cannot interact physically with physical entities.
It may sound heretical, though that is what I think: anything interacting with physical world is "within" physical world. Hence considering God separate from the physical world is the only way out I can imagine, unless you want to equal it to a brick (which by the way is as heretical as my position, I believe).

Physics has its own standards on what is the meaning of "exist", "evidence" and "proof".
These standards are not at all adequate for spiritual entities. One needs to produce different definitions on what means that a spiritual entity "exists" otherwise one is in big troubles to provide evidences that God exists at all.

I accept the scientific definitions of the terms above.
Something exists if is observable (which does not mean it can be seen. Antí¬ything we know about the physical world comes to us as a MEDIATED knowledge. We cannot see the sun. We feel the actions of solar photons on our eyes and we infer the sun as the source of these photons. The physical knowledge is obtained by analyzing the actiion of something on a physical object).
If God acted on physical objects it would be fundamentally as a brick, we could know its nature as we know the nature of a brick (no more no less), there would be universal agreement on its existence and nature. Hence there would be no heresies, no different religions, no need of esegesis.

Another important point to be clarified is the notion of scientific knowledge/ truth. I had the strong impression by discussing on this board that many believes that sciences provides (or should provide) absolute truths, absolute factual description of the real world.
"Scientific evidences" are never proofs in the mathematical sense. Science does not provide us with absolute truths. There is no scientific result which can be accepted as ultimate. Most of scientific "facts" are known to be not fundamental or false. Just to mention some of them: gravitational theory, evolution, climate models, ...
One cannot reason about science embracing a all/nothing truth notion.
The only possibility is to consider science as providing evidences weighting the results and the theories. Any scientific result must be weighted against evidences to check how much reliable it is, 'cos strictkly speaking we cannot be sure that tomorrow the sun will rise.

On the other hand we live in ignorance, though not in absolute ignorance. In the last 400 years or so the improve enourmously our knowledge about the world. We know what to expect in a fantastic class of physical/biological/chemical situation. Our ability to forecast the output of experiments is something which cannot be confuted. Despite each single piece of truth is relative, improvable, sometimes known to be aproximate or in contradictions with other science branches
Just to be clear I believe scientific object as a whole is abolute. It is objectively in growth and progress. It cannot be reduced to a sociological/economical enterprise.

Now let me go back to the relation between spiritual and physical world.
There is no physical evidence of any spritual entity. By definition I would say. The spiritual world is not the physical world, it is not the part of the physical world we still don't know. If it were we would be at risk at any time to discover something which contradicts our God.
Historically speaking, there are plenty of examples. There are hundreds of physical notions which when they were discovered were considered to undermine religion's dogmas (eliocentrism, evolution, round Earth, the first men climbing Olympus Mount, etc.).
Today we accepted them and we consider them compatible with faith, though we HAVE TO BE AWARE that that is because we adapted our faith to them. In the beginning people was burn in the public square because they were considered heritics.

Accepting the scientific sense of "exists" and "truth" one is forced to use other words in the spiritual world, because it is clear that physically speaking spiritual entities do not exist.

Let us discuss soul and it is survival to death. If one considers the sould as a physical entity it is more than obvious that tehre is absolutely no evidence that it exists at all. The only clue of its existence is our "feelings". Unfortunately we are not able to prove that our "feelings" are a reliable source of scientific evidences. That is simply not as science works.

Of course there are antropological evidences showing that any human socienty, also independently believe is some sort of life after death. We have to accept that this notion of a soul after death is encoded in our mind. It can be there by design of evolution but there are convincing evidences that it is there.

On the other hand physically speaking we have no evidences of something which is encoded in a physical structure (our brain) but it is independent of the physical realization. Less that ever, we have no evidence of any structure which is not physically impemented. Which means that unsually when the physical support is corruted the structure is lost.

Hence one can choose either to reject physics and to consider spiritual reality deeper and more fundamental than the physical one or to consider the spiritual world separated from the physical one. In both cases (though for different reasons) there is no reason to look for physical evidences supporting the physical existence of a spiritual object.

I see a continuous trend of withdrowing from faith positions which previously were considered fundamental under the urging of new scientific evidences. I believe it would be better both for science and religion to face the problem once for all and accept that religion does not teach us anything about physical world. My personal way to this is to accept religion does not need to be rational, does not need to be physical or other, though I am aware that there could be other options as reasonable as mine.

I believe that the existing as a spiritual entity means to exists within human mind, being encoded in the human mind structure. As such the spiritual world is separeted from the physical one and asking if God can create a specimens is like investigating how much heat dissipates Santa Claus during his Christmas trip.

I am aware that most peiople on the board will not agree with this position but honestly that is not why I am on board. I am here to discuss evidences of God from science, if any.

[Judah]

Angel, what do you believe about Jesus?
I am referring to the Jesus of the Bible, the one who walked on Earth about 2000 years ago.

[angel]

At first glance I believe the same things you believe though I suppose with a quite different meaning of each word...

Let's see...
There are not many independent sources about a man called Jesus lived in Palestine around year 0. I think there are only a couple of references fron roman authors. However, doubts the contemporary romans did perceive the importance of Christian movements. So I don't expect to have too many independent sources about him.
All in all I am willing to believe that Jesus was an historical person.
A human of course.

Then there are a number of Christian sources. A small part of them are the Gospels we accept today and other sources are the so called apocriphal Gospels. I doubt we can trace any of these source really to a direct source, however, I can accept that they report informations about Jesus sometimes mixed with mithological/political/literarial material.

I personally believe (have faith!) in a divine Jesus. As I explain "divine" refers to the spiritual world. In other word I don't expect anything superhuman with Jesus genetics. I believe that he shared a common ancestor with chimps as we do.
The Gospel is a spiritual account in my belief. They are metaphorical about miracles and I don't expect any physical action to be related to resurrection and ... how do you say going in Heaven? .
I believe in Jesus resurrection in a spiritual sense, though I don't believe that the actual atoms of his body went anywhere.

I think we learn a lot from Jesus on a moral and spiritual sense, but I see no evidence in the Gospel of a deeper knowledge about physics. I prefer to be stuck to my limited skill for that.

[angel]

just wanna add that in my view the spiritual world is similar (in fact one instance of) Kant's synthetic a priori judgments.

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5f.htm


As such they are in some sense more fundamental than the physical reality.
Precisely in that sense they live in human mind, though they are not a human "creation".
I usually don't like to use philosophy as a knowledge category, though in this case it helps rendering my view.

[angel]

I think in other threads a misunderstanding has shown about what I meant by creation.

I said I believe in a spiritual God. As I said I do not believe in a physical acting god.
I probably should add that I do believe that the universe "is divine creation".

This could seem contradicting the belief that God does not act physically in the physical world. Here let me explain why this is not a contradiction...

I was asked elsewhere if I believe that God started the Big Bang and then let the universe evolve according to the natural laws.

Well I don't. I don't think God started the Big Bang. Starting the Big Bang would be a physical action, and as I said I do not believe this is the way God influences the universe.

I believe Big Bang occurred as a consequence of natural laws (some of which I am aware we don't understand completely yet), with no divine physical influence.

So you might ask in which sense I believe in a creation. I was also said that either I believe God created the universe or I do not. I think this claim should be discussed before accepted because one should be precise on what exactly means by "created".
I suppose one reading this is lead to consider me some kind of theistic evolutionary, something like "Angel believes that God chose to set natural laws in such a way that the universe was doomed to come to existence according to that laws".

Well, maybe this is correct, though I want to be precise on what I mean by "natural laws" first so that you can decide how to classify me.
BTW I would be curious to know your classification...


To be precise I am not saying that a divine tuning of natural constants produced the universe. What we know today are probably not the ultimate understanding of physical laws and certainly the origin of physical constants is beyond our current understanging.

Nor I am saying that God decided the physical laws (Lets say the Lagrangians functions of the different interactions so that they ensuing dynamics leads to universe existence). Also our understanding of fundamental interactions is almost certainly not untimate.

I instead I believe that we shall prove that most of the possible physical laws are self-contradictory and that the universe is doomed to appear in the few possible non-self-contradictory physical laws.
Of course I cannot prove any of this yet. That is why it is a belief and I am not Nobel price in physics!

Now I wanted to be specific on this because I honestly don't know if you could consider fixing a logical fact as a "creation". I do but I would understand different positions about this...

There are a lot of mathematical results which do not relie on particyular assumprions. For example on even dimensional spheres there are no everywhere non-vanishing continous vector fields.

This result is not there because of a physical action. It is there becaus of logic and we can hardly imagine someone deciding this truth. In that sense I could say that these truth are ancoded in our world without being the result of a physical action.

Now imagine that I could one day prove that there are only one possible set of physical laws and that in that world the universe is dommed to be born. Would you call the chosing of this universe a creation act?
Rationally speaking I would not because there is no choice at all as there is no choice possible to select a even dimensional sphere with a never vanishing continous vector field.

There is no choice when one chooses the only possibility available!

On the spiritual hand, however, I could believe in some divine action deciding out of space and time what is logically possible and what is not.
Is this a creation? I believe it is.
I believe it is a very beautiful kind of creation. A kind of creation we cannot imagine, we cannot understand as a creation because it is encoded in our way of understanding the universe. We are part of creation, God is not. It would not surprize me if we would be ultimatively unable to rationally understand divine actions.

[YLTYLT]

Angel,
Would you agree that.....
If there is an infinite ominpotent,omniscient, omnipresent, spiritual God , then this GOD would have to be able to interact (either directly or indirectly) with the physical world, or else the physical world would never have been created and we would not exist.

???

[angel]

If there is an infinite ominpotent,omniscient, omnipresent, spiritual God , then this GOD would have to be able to interact (either directly or indirectly) with the physical world

Agreed.
I am not saying that I don't believe God *can* interafct with the physical world. I simply do not believe it *did*.

or else the physical world would never have been created and we would not exist.

I cannot imagine what would have happened without God's action, because my nature prevent me to understand a different logical structure for this world.

I already explained that in my view the act of creation of God is not a physical action. I think we shall be able to show that Big Bang and life was the only *logical* possibility.

Although of course you can disagree with this view, I think I was clear enough. Moreover, I don't think my view is worse based than your view of Byblos one.

I personally believe it is an act of arrogance to assume that we could be so smart to see God actions even when God act in front of our eyes.
Or that divine action should happened in time and space.
I prefer to imagine a God acting out of spacetime in the world of logic which is in some sense more fundamental than the physical one.

[acrossandasong]

i think you're over complicating things Christianity is not a religion that you can have hard conceret evidence for and you seem to be looking for "physical" evidence->Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Heb.11:1 ->Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. Heb. 11:3
Faith is a hard thing to obtain but once you have it you can move mountains. do some soul searching and praying. i wish you the best and God Bless.

[Gman]

I personally believe it is an act of arrogance to assume that we could be so smart to see God actions even when God act in front of our eyes.

I personally believe it is an act of arrogance to assume that God did NOT act in front of our eyes... Man has become so arrogant now that we think we have become God ourselves...

[zoegirl]

I personally believe it is an act of arrogance to assume that we could be so smart to see God actions even when God act in front of our eyes.

To use an analogy, we might not be able to understand HOW a magician works his skills and tricks, HOWEVER, that does not exclude us from understanding that something marvelous is going on. It is not arrogance to claim to other people that amazing feats of this magician, nor to even attempt to understand. The arrogance comes when we then deny the amgician his skills, his talents, his rightful place in comparison to us.

God may work silently and soflty, indeed I think that we will be ashamed in heaven when we see how God has worked and our blindness. But that blindness comes from our sinful nature, focused on ourselved and not Him.

I am all for realizing our finite nature in comparison to God's infinite wisdom, but He himself said that His creation declared His glory. (Pssalm 19) We will never be able to contain God and understand all of Him, but we have both His word and His creation as testaments.

The arrogance comes when people are willing to claim they have enough knowledge to deny God's existence!

[angel]

The arrogance comes when people are willing to claim they have enough knowledge to deny God's existence!

... or when people are willing to claim we are smart enough to provide empirical, rational and scientific evidences that it exists.