Ever since I began this religious transition I have had more doubt than I ever did as a Christian.
In a conversation I had with someone I respect, they brought up the fact that I may be wrong and he mentioned presuppositions.
I was not familiar with the term before so I had to look it up, and it basically means stuff you assume to be true which supports other stuff.
I initially took this to mean that maybe my new found knowledge could be assumptions. I spent some time really thinking that over. Did I miss something? Is there some key evidence that the scientific community is overlooking? Are we only making assumptions about how the universe came to be with the big bang or life with evolution? The answer is yes I think. There's quite a hump from atoms becoming self replicating molecules, to the complex form of life we know and even though there's an awful lot of evidence to support that idea...
What if I'm wrong?
He wasn't even asking the question. Pascal just ninja'd his way into my brain. In Christian terms you could say I'm not firm in the unfaith. His real interest was primarily in how I came to the conclusion.
Our conversation left me thinking back through everything I had learned and ruminating on each point. I believe the Bible to be untrue because the evidence of reality speaks directly against it. If parts of it are untrue, how can I trust any part is true which cannot be directly verified?
A good example of this conundrum is Noah's ark.
I heard someone say the other day that they wished we could find a huge boat on a mountain matching the biblical description, so we could finally lay to rest that the flood story was fact. It would be very difficult to explain how a giant wooden boat made it to the top of a mountain, but it still wouldn't explain why we don't see the results of a global flood in geological layer. While the find would be quite curious, what if we never find this mythical boat? Does it disprove the story? NO!
You cannot prove something doesn't exist. Only proof can be offered for that which does exist. It's incredibly convenient to believe in nearly anything in that respect. I can assert that I believe in purple butterfly-winged unicorns as rulers of the universe and no one can offer proof it doesn't exist, but it only exists in my mind.
Even though my mind went through all this, the presupposition which he thought I might have been making incorrectly was that, as a Christian, I assumed the Bible was absolute truth.
What if the Bible is just a love story from God to us, written by the imperfect instrument of man?
I know it may sound silly, but I considered, is the Bible partially untrue in order to tell the greatest truth of all?
Faith is still not far off for me. I needed to consider this further. It made me consider again: what if I was wrong?
It lead me to the thinking of why would God allow so many lies to tell his ultimate story? Why would Jesus break bread on the Passover if it never happened. Why would Jesus be the true completion to a complete lie? I simply cannot reconcile the idea to what and who I thought God was. I thought of him as greater than the men who wrote his words in such a way that he could inspire them to write absolute truth. If God cannot overcome man's imperfection to write his story down, how can he have the power to make them perfect through the death of Jesus?
There it goes again. My presupposition that I have any clue about God and his power.
I should know something about God from all the time I spent believing in, trusting, and studying him.
I still find the idea of using a well orchestrated lie to tell the truth. I think it's the ultimate goal of every story teller, and if God is the ultimate story teller...
It is a very interesting concept though, one I'm sure will be running through my mind for quite some time, but in the end, the idea contradicts the evidence in the Bible, so I come full circle to the same belief that the biblical story can safely be put back in the category of mythology. Ultimately faith presupposes faith and therein lies the problem.
Part of this religious transition is learning about me and how I react to situations and questions. I know a lot more of these will arise as time goes by and I have to realize that I do have artifacts from my faith in my psyche which leave me with a desire to believe despite the evidence to the contrary.
I want to believe because I like the idea, but if I'm wrong, as I have been in the past, "believing" in order to gain what the biblical story offers in eternal life and salvation just in case, is not what the God I knew ultimately wants and if he does exist, he didn't build the case for my faith sufficiently to have true faith.
In a conversation I had with someone I respect, they brought up the fact that I may be wrong and he mentioned presuppositions.
I was not familiar with the term before so I had to look it up, and it basically means stuff you assume to be true which supports other stuff.
I initially took this to mean that maybe my new found knowledge could be assumptions. I spent some time really thinking that over. Did I miss something? Is there some key evidence that the scientific community is overlooking? Are we only making assumptions about how the universe came to be with the big bang or life with evolution? The answer is yes I think. There's quite a hump from atoms becoming self replicating molecules, to the complex form of life we know and even though there's an awful lot of evidence to support that idea...
What if I'm wrong?
He wasn't even asking the question. Pascal just ninja'd his way into my brain. In Christian terms you could say I'm not firm in the unfaith. His real interest was primarily in how I came to the conclusion.
Our conversation left me thinking back through everything I had learned and ruminating on each point. I believe the Bible to be untrue because the evidence of reality speaks directly against it. If parts of it are untrue, how can I trust any part is true which cannot be directly verified?
A good example of this conundrum is Noah's ark.
I heard someone say the other day that they wished we could find a huge boat on a mountain matching the biblical description, so we could finally lay to rest that the flood story was fact. It would be very difficult to explain how a giant wooden boat made it to the top of a mountain, but it still wouldn't explain why we don't see the results of a global flood in geological layer. While the find would be quite curious, what if we never find this mythical boat? Does it disprove the story? NO!
You cannot prove something doesn't exist. Only proof can be offered for that which does exist. It's incredibly convenient to believe in nearly anything in that respect. I can assert that I believe in purple butterfly-winged unicorns as rulers of the universe and no one can offer proof it doesn't exist, but it only exists in my mind.
Even though my mind went through all this, the presupposition which he thought I might have been making incorrectly was that, as a Christian, I assumed the Bible was absolute truth.
What if the Bible is just a love story from God to us, written by the imperfect instrument of man?
I know it may sound silly, but I considered, is the Bible partially untrue in order to tell the greatest truth of all?
Faith is still not far off for me. I needed to consider this further. It made me consider again: what if I was wrong?
It lead me to the thinking of why would God allow so many lies to tell his ultimate story? Why would Jesus break bread on the Passover if it never happened. Why would Jesus be the true completion to a complete lie? I simply cannot reconcile the idea to what and who I thought God was. I thought of him as greater than the men who wrote his words in such a way that he could inspire them to write absolute truth. If God cannot overcome man's imperfection to write his story down, how can he have the power to make them perfect through the death of Jesus?
There it goes again. My presupposition that I have any clue about God and his power.
I should know something about God from all the time I spent believing in, trusting, and studying him.
I still find the idea of using a well orchestrated lie to tell the truth. I think it's the ultimate goal of every story teller, and if God is the ultimate story teller...
It is a very interesting concept though, one I'm sure will be running through my mind for quite some time, but in the end, the idea contradicts the evidence in the Bible, so I come full circle to the same belief that the biblical story can safely be put back in the category of mythology. Ultimately faith presupposes faith and therein lies the problem.
Part of this religious transition is learning about me and how I react to situations and questions. I know a lot more of these will arise as time goes by and I have to realize that I do have artifacts from my faith in my psyche which leave me with a desire to believe despite the evidence to the contrary.
I want to believe because I like the idea, but if I'm wrong, as I have been in the past, "believing" in order to gain what the biblical story offers in eternal life and salvation just in case, is not what the God I knew ultimately wants and if he does exist, he didn't build the case for my faith sufficiently to have true faith.
I know you have looked much into this, maybe more than myself, so you may have already reasoned. The bible can be chalked up to a man-made creation, but this does not confirm god doesn't exist. I have times of doubt, but at the end of the day, what am I left with? A god that I can't know or identify, who doesn't communicate with us, and who may have no interest at all. What if we are in a giant ant farm and the one who built it is a child among other gods? I cannot prove nor disprove. Possibility does not have to equal probability though. I don't know if that makes a lick of sense, but just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely correct! The reality could always even much stranger than we can conceive. I cannot disprove God and it might be that one exists or none exist. My personal belief is that if there is a god out there, they have no interest in revealing themselves to us as it would be fairly easy for an omnipotent being.
DeleteYou've misunderstood the presuppositional argument. It's very different from Pascal's wager (which is unbiblical). The argument from presuppositional apologetics is not that you could be wrong - it's that you are wrong and that without God you can't even account for the concepts of right or wrong because they presuppose truth and you can't account for truth without God. See www.godorabsurdity.com/truth.html
ReplyDeleteAnd www.godorabsurdity.com/proof-god-exists.html
You've misunderstood the post. He wasn't even talking about presuppositionsal apologetics. He was talking about my assumption the Bible was 100% true. The part about pascal's wager was all my mind and doubts in my own position. BTW you can't account for the concept of right and wrong without the Queen of Hearts, because we're all mad here ;-)
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