Paying devotion to the tollbooth of validation on the highway to Heaven –
When I was a young boy, I vividly remember my parents guiding me through the process of getting saved to be a born again Christian. I gave my heart to God that peaceful evening. I’m grateful that they did that for me.
Throughout many adversities and blessings in life, I’ve always felt the love and guidance of God. I always figured that the folks that said God doesn’t exist just didn’t have the ability to sense God’s love like the rest of us.
Growing up, I always had a relationship with God through Christian faith, not through any method of processing evidence and reason.
So I started asking, why is it that we use evidence, reason, and empiricism to validate and identify things in our daily lives and, well, everything in the universe, but we don’t use that same standard to identify God?
Why is the most important relationship in our lives exempt from this method of identification?
The method of using evidence and reason to verify the truth value of everything in the universe is a method even God believers use to live within reality in their daily lives, but God is never subjected to that method.
Believers use faith for that.
So, what is faith?
Faith, as it is practiced, is just believing in something without using evidence and reason.
If my relationship with God is going to be sincere, is faith going to be a necessary and sufficient criteria for that relationship and belief to be sincere?
Sure, having faith in the existence of God feels good and all that, but if I am going to have an authentic relationship with God, I must boldly question the foundation of that belief to make sure it’s valid rather than just my opinion.
It doesn’t seem sincere for a relationship to rest upon faith based beliefs. I figure, God would appreciate a sincere relationship with him rather than distant faith.
As many of us know, when a claim is made, the burden of proof rests upon the one making the proposition, rather than the on refuting it.
I knew it would be a challenging journey to prove (or at least make a decent case) that God exists. So, over the years, I’ve mastered the tools of identifying objective reality in order to make sure my conclusions on the very existence of God (or the existence of anything) were not up to my opinion or perception, but based strictly upon unbiased objective reasoning. I also have always consistently increased my education on everything to do with God, religion, the Bible, and the history pertaining to to all that. I enjoy it.
Bible revival
As with anything in life, I like to keep an open mind, with a healthy dose of unbiased skepticism. Over the past several years, my journey with God has been a marathon of baby steps expanding upon what I was taught as a child.
After I read the Bible from beginning to end in 3 months, and re-read the new testament over again, that’s when I became more enthusiastic to explore the relationships sapiens have with God.
By the way, can the New Testament really be called new? I mean, it’s like thousands of years old, and we call it new.
Anyway, I had learned many scriptures growing up, but reading the whole Bible cover to cover gave a much clearer picture of the stories within the Bible.
After studying history and the Bible, I became more curious about who or what God really is, and how (or if) faith can verify that curiosity.
I questioned and entertained alternatives to the standard Christian narrative that, maybe God isn’t a centralized conscious omniscient being in a spiritual dimension that has a plan for all our lives. Maybe the “voice” of God that we feel is some sort of spiritual energy that flows throughout us, and interconnects us.
You should be aware, I currently, and always will try to argue against the validity of any conclusion or position I currently put forth.
I am not loyal to any conclusions, but I am loyal to empirical and logical validation of conclusions. In other words, I’m a free agent when it comes to conclusions, but I am wed to the ontological method by which valid conclusions can be arrived at. The proper methods by which valid conclusions are reached is the important part.
So, if you can point out logical fallacies or contradictions in any of my current positions or premises, I would be eternally grateful to you.
Now, it’s important to be on the same page with the definition of important terms within a proposition.
My definition of “God” in the following curiosities is the standard one described by modern Christianity as –The only supernatural, all knowing, all powerful being, with a centralized consciousness; not consisting of physical matter/energy, quasi-anthropomorphic male, consolidated in supernatural Heaven, that has a determined plan for you and everyone, intervenes, and grants free will.
Even different Christian denominations have different versions and biblical interpretations, so there isn’t any one true definition, but I am trying to use the most general definition in western religion.
Some folks say God cannot be fully defined. Those folks cannot make a valid truth statement about God, because that which cannot be defined, cannot be validated to be true or false. Their God is just a null speculation, so no rational truth claim can be made.
Some say “God is love.” I think we all can agree love as a feeling/emotion exists, therefore, God under that definition could work. But then, when we tell someone we love them, are we saying “I God you?”
-Curiosities
Everything Happens for a reason
People always say that everything that happens is part of God’s plan, and everything happens for a reason. That never made sense to me.
For example, when a plane is about to crash, and some folks pray to be spared, while others don’t pray, it seems to be completely random that some of the praying ones die, and some non believers survive.
The typical Christian answer to that, or to any incident of an untimely death is that God has overridden the prayer request and has taken the person home to Heaven to do more important things for God. And the non praying survivors need more time for his plan in this life.
If it’s in God’s plan for you to get sick, or injured, or die in a plane crash, why pray for healing or for safety, or for someone else to be healed or safe?
Isn’t it God’s plan for these things to happen?
Doesn’t everything happen for God’s reason?
What makes you think you can and should override fate by attempting to veto God’s plan for you through praying?
By the way, have you ever noticed that the people who think everything happens for a reason seem to have a self-serving answer for the potential reason why something happened, as if all the events that happen in the universe revolve around that very person making the claim that it has a reason? Things don’t happen for a reason, but we can adapt and grow stronger from random adversities in life.
The aloof God who loves you
Why is it that God loves everyone, has a plan for everyone, and God is supposed to be the primary entity that we love and worship, but he’s invisible, elusive, and not directly involved in daily corporeal life and interactions?
On the other hand, my family and friends all have characteristics that I know of because we interact with each other on a regular basis.
The only characteristics I know about God is what others have described, and they get that description from their tradition, or Christian society and culture, or the Bible.
We love those whom we interact with, and we interact with those who we love, but God is too elusive to interact with, if he loves us why doesn’t he reveal himself and clearly interact with us? As long as God is ambiguous, the churches will all have different interpretations of what is right according to God.
It’s funny how I can communicate these thoughts instantly around the world to many people simultaneously, but God settles for sticking with an ancient text with multiple authors and mistranslations over the centuries in order to convey messages about him that in many cases are contradictory.
And he is the all-knowing all-powerful one? It seems that God is a bit incompetent in that department for being all powerful.
What is the method of validating true or false and why is it necessary?
You should be aware that reality and the laws of nature exist regardless of anyone’s perception, opinion, awareness, or consciousness of it. Many Christians go on the false premise that their personal perception creates reality.
Logic is the method by which a volitional non-automatic consciousness can ensure that its content corresponds to the facts of an independent reality. In other words, it’s a method of thinking in accordance with the law of identity and noncontradiction.
Any contradiction, paradox, logical fallacy, or any other violation of the laws of identity, eliminates the truth value of a claim or proposition that is made. So when I point out a contradiction or fallacy, or any other violation of objective reasoning, please be aware, it only takes one to invalidate a premise.
Personal opinion has no place in logic or within these articles.
Does the God as described in the Christian Bible violate and contradict laws of physics, biology, and nature?
Back when the Bible was written there was no method of science, biology, or physics, so back then people would believe anything that sounded good without any way to rationalize that which is true or false.
Would it be wise to worship any being that violates the very laws (of nature) of which it created? It makes you wonder, if God is all powerful, can he break a law of nature?
Could he still be a moral God then?
If a law of nature can be broken, wouldn’t it be called a likely suggestion instead of a law?
If there are no natural laws, then the behavior of matter and energy couldn’t be universally identified or validated, and we would know nothing for sure, and there would be no such thing as objective reasoning, and everything would be subjective opinion.
Clearly, as reality manifests itself, laws of nature are consistent and universal, and therefore objective, and laws of nature cannot be broken by any supernatural being.
If the behavior of matter and energy was all subjective and unsure, and you were skiing down a snowy slope, how would you know that gravity would bring you downhill or uphill, or that you would need a coat to stay warm in cold temps, or that your coat would not be a gas and a solid simultaneously?
Of course, if someone tells you that you can’t be sure of anything, just ask them if they are sure about that statement, and their assertion destructs.
Many Christians will tell you that God cannot be proven by any method of logic and rational thought. I completely agree, but why is God the one and only thing that is exempt from the laws of identity and rational thought?
Are Christians admitting that everything they do and observe in the real world is based on rationality like the rest of us, but God is the one thing that is irrational, why?
Ironically, many Christians will tell you that you can’t be sure of anything, while simultaneously making an absolute truth claim that God exists for sure.
This is probably the crux of where science is different from faith. In the science world, if there is inconclusive evidence for a proposition, the one making the proposition will humbly say “I don’t know the answer, so let’s keep curiously exploring until we can falsify all doubts.”
In the Christian world of faith, the believer induces a truth claim of absolution, for sure, that the divine loving spirit of God is with them, while not having any inductive or deductive evidence that is required to make a truth claim valid.
If the Christians would just say they have a feeling or a hunch, and propose the possibility of the divine loving spirit of God while saying “I don’t know for sure”, then there would be no debate between the faithful and the empiricists. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with speculating.
Rational thinkers have no problem saying and knowing that they don’t know; Faithful believers will never say they don’t know, they will always have an answer to the unknown as -God did it.
What’s even more strange is that the Christians will quote scripture from Ecclesiastes (probably my favorite Bible book) and tell you that no human mind can comprehend or know of the things of God, while they simultaneously tell you absolutely without any doubt, they know of the things of God and his divine loving spirit.
If God has a plan for everyone, why would God create non-believers?
So if I pray for someone and the prayer doesn’t come true the way I intended (different results than what the prayer intended) that means it’s God’s plan for that prayer to not be answered, right?
So if one concludes based upon empiricism and reason, that God doesn’t exist, and others pray for that non-believer to have faith and believe in God, and she never ends up believing or having faith that God exists, does that mean that it’s God’s plan for her to not believe?
Most answers to this would be that God allows free will and free choice. The problem with this answer is that if God has a plan laid out for your life, it cannot be free will. It can’t be both, right?
Thanks for joining me in laying the groundwok in part 1 for this 8 part series. I hope you join me for part 2 where we explore incentives involved in having a relationship with God. Thank you
