Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!
Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them—this is the Law and the Prophets. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it. If you will concede the possibility that He is there, and if so you would wish to find Him, then He will most surely find you. CD, I have no problem conceding a god may exist.
I just know that there is no convincing evidence for it to be true. Milton, your thinking is still fundamentally anthropocentric, and more specifically Milton-centric. On the justice of suffering: God partially gives us what we want — a world where his presence and justice is distant or non-existent. This is not a mistake; it too is a lesson in human evil and call to repent. Why do hundreds die in natural disasters? Why are children mistreated and slain? You and me and people just like us.
Why does God not step in and stop it? But in the meantime he wants us to recognise our utter general culpability and turn to him for mercy. Yet we would rather blame him for giving us exactly what we corporately asked for — to rule ourselves and our world in our own way. Now, there are half a dozen possible objections to this.
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But if any of them hold, then we are in a worse place — if there is no God who will judge, then there is no justice, no right, no wrong. These are all things we make up to try to make ourselves feel better in a dog-eat-dog world. As for evidence of God, why do you assume the problem is a lack of evidence? There are none so blind as those who will not see.
But he does offer some of us two gifts — the gift of realisation that we need him, and the gift of salvation. For those he gifts with the first, the second follows easily. Perhaps in his mercy and plan he will offer them to you. Finally, let me observe that when the Apostles speak in public in the book of Acts , their ultimate focus in not on the crucifixion of Jesus but on his resurrection.
To their thinking, the resurrection of the Christ is the sign that he is King and the judgement of God is coming upon the world Acts 2: The apparent reign of ignorance and evil is coming to an end; do not be caught up in its fall. God in his mercy offers you a way back to him. You have actually put thought into your reply. Unfortunately, I disagree with your reasoning. My main point is that if god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent then he has both the ability and the desire to end immorality.
Is he is incapable or unwilling? It is irrelevant that he may step in at some point in the future and stop it. The point is that he can stop it now and chooses not to. Therefore, if he exists, he is immoral. Let me give my original question to you, because virtually everyone else on this thread has dodged the question and not answered it.
Maybe you will be the first to have the courage. If you could stop a child from being raped without any risk to you or others, would it be immoral not to stop it? If you think it is immoral, then you and I agree…. If I could stop a child from being raped, without any risk to myself or others, would it be immoral for me not to stop it? In accordance with human conceptions of morality, it would be immoral for me to stand idly by.
Is God bound by human conceptions of morality? Did evil break me? Yes, but only until I allowed myself to be loved back to wholeness. Why do children starve to death? There is ample food to provide for every being on Earth. Look into the vast amounts of perfectly good food disposed of every day because of its aesthetics bananas are a great example!
Why is all of this perfectly good food thrown away? Because it is a financial drain to transport this food to the starving, when they cannot pay even a cent towards the cost, significantly impacting profits. As far as communism is concerned, it works very well in theory, but every failed example throughout history failed because of human greed in those at the centre the greed which also causes capitalism to fail! He designed the entire system knowing beforehand what the consequences of his choices would be and he was okay with those choices.
How is he not culpable? As much as we might like to be, or believe that we are, we are not gods, so cannot perceive nor judge His actions or lack thereof, depending on perception by our own standards. The Bible however, says that God knows our every thought before we have them, not that He chose them for us. Though, as I said, many people have different perspectives on this topic — many of which make not a shred of sense to me! To follow the logic that God is culpable for sending people into a world in which He knew the cost of our poor actions would be like saying a knife maker is culpable for designing a kitchen knife that someone used to kill somebody, or a teacher is culpable for setting a test that students would fail, if they chose not to study in preparation.
We all have the opportunity to make good choices, or terrible choices. Something is moral or it is,not. Why would you imply it is somwhow moral for your god to allow a child to be raped, but immoral for humans to do so?
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The act of rape is to me immoral, and so is allowing it to happen when you could easily stop it. Whether god stopped a rape in another instance is irrelevant. I am concerned with the ones he does not stop. If Christians say human morals are derived from god and are objective in nature, then how can our moral standards be different?
In what context is child rape moral? To say your god would allow someone to rape a child just so the child could hit rock bottom and maybe recover sometime in the future to learn some lesson is obscene. Allowing children to be raped to teach then a lesson about life is a horrendous idea. How can you even think that could somehow be moral? Is that the best an all-loving god can do??? What about those who do not recover? Finally, I find it odd that you are telling me you believe it is impossible for an all-knowing, all powerful being to overcome the drawbacks of a human economic system and feed starving children.
If that is so, then he is surely no god. I am surprised you are proposing to limit the power of your god in such a manner. On the other hand, if he could have prevented the course of history that brought us to this point, then there would perhaps be no starving children. If that is so, then he remains responsible for those results.
Obviously, I write as a human being, and my opinions and perspectives are my own, which I have formed based on my own limited understanding and life experiences. I may be dead-wrong, and as I am absolutely no theologian, I stress that my perspectives represent only myself, not my family, my church, my denomination, and certainly not Christianity as a whole. I do have a friend however, who is a very learned woman of God, and a priest. I will send her this link and see if she wishes to answer some of your questions more accurately and concisely than I will ever be able to without years of studying theology!
On saying that though, here is my completely worthless! People with faith in God understand that we are nowhere near being on a level playing field with Him, so will not ever assume to judge His actions, based on our limited understanding. Not only do we have no right, but we are somewhat concerned for the state of our immortal souls! We are each tempted, we each question and doubt, and we each place higher value on human concerns and endeavours, and the pursuit of immediate gratification, rather than the things that really matter. As I said above, I certainly did not mean to imply that a child would go through such an ordeal for any kind of lesson.
Their suffering is as a result of the evil afflicting another individual. I do however, believe that we can learn from all suffering that we experience. I know I sure have. I also posit that anyone who truly finds God can find healing of any and all things that they suffer, experience, or — the most unpopular stance — commit.
What it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that any situation, no matter how base, how vile, how debilitating, can be injected with hope and eventual healing through faith; that all hurts can be healed through God. I do not believe it is impossible for God to cure the wrongs of the world.
The Earth was created with more than enough for everyone, yet the gift to humanity of free will, along with temptation, caused all of this to crumble. To somebody who does not have faith, death is the endgame, so to think of people dying from starvation, after a life albeit extraordinarily short in far too many cases of suffering is unconscionable and disgusting — hence your mistrust and hostility towards faith, as God is then to blame for this.
When one does not have any faith in anything outside of physical human experience, the ills of life are all that matter; they are the most important and debilitating questions in existence. When one does have faith, the ills of life are infinitely easier to bear. If you imagine the primary purpose of life as an opportunity to experience existence both with and without God, so that when you are faced with an opportunity to choose how to spend your eternity, your choice will be informed by your life experiences, the suffering of a godless world is easier to understand, endure and see through.
I have to distance myself enormously and place this conversation on a hypothetical plane in my mind in order to have this discussion at all, as the reality of suffering and starving children throughout the world causes me significant distress. The fact that there are children in agony due to their lack of food and clean water in parts of the world, whilst people in my own small corner of the globe throw elaborate birthday parties for their dogs, sickens me.
I feel the pain of these people especially the mothers, with whom I can most strongly identify , and I try to help in my small ways, through child sponsorship and feeding some of the local poor, when I can. I also thank God every single day for the riches my family can enjoy.
I see the good that many Christian and non-Christian organisations do to try to remedy the situations and alleviate the suffering, then I also see the individuals affected by greed who exploit even these organisations most often from within. In these, I again see lives with and without God.
I see that free will and life are gifts given to humanity such that we might experience existence both with and without God, and be able to make our decision at the time of judgement. I also look forward to a world that is free from all of this. He will however, always be there to pick up the pieces and to heal the hurts, as well as to allow good to come from any evil experienced.
In my personal experience, my incredible hurts drove me away from the path that I was on to medicine, and instead redirected me to education. So if you had the power to prevent rapists from brutally raping children without any risk to yourself or to others, would you prevent such heinous acts?
Or would you sit there and do nothing? Which of those two courses of action or inaction do you think would present you as a more morally sound person? So you would stop the rape. The most important question here is the implicit one — what obligates me to act? If the oppressor is powerful, I may draw persecution to myself, or even be unjustly blamed for his offence. Conversely, the more social support I get for intervening, the more likely I am to go out of my way to perform it.
Firstly, this is not a new question. Consider Psalm 10, a lament to God that the powerful are getting away with evil. Secondly, while we act from a very limited moral and temporal perspective, God does not. Broadly speaking, to turn a blind eye to evil that I could prevent is to condone or even participate in it. If I see one of my enemies mistreating another, am I bound to prevent it? This is the first reckoning. But there is an alternative reckoning. God will not and cannot overlook evil, or dismiss it cheaply. Instead, Jesus, Son of God, comes to be human, to suffer as a human, to be rejected by humans, to die as a human, and to be judged by God as the innocent ideal human in place of all other rebellious evil humans.
In that death, he takes the evil done upon himself. Moreover, he takes the evil suffered upon himself also. For me to overlook evil is immoral. Sorry, but if your god does not intervene and stop an immoral act, then he is complicit in the act. His future acts cannot unrape the child. I think that having another person pay the penalty for your own immorality is a sick concept. If your great grandfather killed someone, would you think it fair that they put you in prison for his transgression?
No, that is the response of a man who is truly unaware of his own depravity. I answered your question, and you complain about it because my answer holds you and I as guilty as the hypothetical rapist. We humans have a wonderful moral system. God has a slightly different system. He starts with his own perfection, compares that to his rebellious, treasonous creation, and withdraws from us because he does not want to destroy us utterly. Well, many cultures have had some variant on that. But I am saying that, in the scheme of things, our day-to-day evil is not unique — rather, it demonstrates and confirms that we really are cosmically evil.
Then he is immoral for doing so. This is precisely what you would expect if there was no god determining outcomes. Your responses to 2,3 and 5 carry no weight whatsoever. If I say that fairies boil water, and you say that giants blowing bubbles boil water, showing that the water boils proves nothing either way, since we already agree on that. If you want to argue for a moral system which will affirm the goodness of man, the floor is yours.
Then why does the Christian god interfere with free will in the Bible, and why do Christians pray in a way that would interfere with the free will of the person being prayed for? Christians argue that their god values free will above the well being if his creation. My argument was pointing out that such a god evidently places the free will of the offender above that of the victim as well.
Take it up with Him. Hugh7, Three objections occur to me: First, It is not clear that the need for free will on the part perpetrators should supersede the need to prevent unjust suffering on the part of their victims—always, sometimes, or as often as seems to be the case. Second, according to the Bible, God DOES occasionally intervene in the lives of his creations and thus implicitly deny their free will.
Third, Believers are constantly praying precisely that God will intervene in the lives of His creations, thus implicitly denying the free will of agents in those cases where prayers are supposedly answered in a positive way. How can you have it both ways? It is not me who needs to explain those things, but you. I do believe God is quite the interventionist. God intervened in the life of His creation not only when He created us but when He saved us creating the way to be right with Him.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. And yet he chooses not to intervene to stop child rapists, or to save starving children, or prevent tsunamis or earthquakes or hurricanes….
Thanks for your reply. Basically, any being that would allow such things when it vould easily stop them is malevolent. No, your crabbed and hidebound viewpoint is that any being that allows any evil to happen is malevolent. This is entirely your own opinion, based on you limiting yourself to the earthly, human effects of any action. There are lots of people who claim,that in an odd way, getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. There are people who suffered unimaginably yet say it was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Your reasoning is shallow. What was the thing gained by the child that was raped? What was the big lesson formthe millions of children that starve to desth or die from horrible diseases every year? What was the big lesson for a quarter million people swept away by a tsunami? That God is supreme.
And has divine authority and he can allow evil to touch us if we refuse to turn to him. Explain that to a child that is starveng to death or to infants and todlers killed in the catastrophe your god chose to allow. You assume that the only thing that matters is what happens here on earth. This is the atheist self referential loop. If you want to argue with religion then you must take it as it is, not cut out parts of it. Your childish imagining is that the only thing that happens is what happens on earth, as if God should be some sort of Big Mommy in the Sky.
Whether there is something to worry about other than here on earth is completely beside the point. If you can prevent a child from being raped with no risk to yourself at all and you do not, have you acted morally? So they try to defuse the query by employing a red herring. IMO, the best counter attack is to keep repeating the question until they admit their tenuous position. Hi Pierre, I was just wondering why you believe suffering occurs? Why do you believe people do horrific things to each other? Annie — It could be for one of a number of reasons or a combination of those reasons.
Among those that come to mind are anger, hatred, greed, lack of compassion, revenge, mental illness, lack of empathy, sadism, etc. I see no differnce between the rate at which evil falls upon beleivers of any religion and the rate at which it falls upon the general population, somthat does not hold up under scrutiny.
Do you believe that all evil is the result of your god choosing to allow evil, or only some of it? If only some, how do you objectively tell the difference? At the end of the day, if you are capable of preventing evil and look the other way, you are complicit in the evil. If I saw a child being raped, I would do all I could to stop it.
That is the difference betwee me and your god. Milton — check this out. Milton — another one for you. You seem to know a lot about God. You do not know the mind of God. Evil falls in much greater rates among people who abandon the idea of God and do whatever the hell they want.
In fact, we saw some of the greatest evils fall among people who explicitly drove God out of their societies — the communists, who gloried in their atheism. As a result, they saw no problem terrorizing millions upon millions. They saw no problem killing people who were troublesome. They saw no problem in gulags and massacres. The average attendee at Sunday services commits far less crime, is involved in less of all societies problem makers such as drugs and alcohol.
So we have tried that little experiment, it was called Communism and the results are in. By and large, the people out there doing crime, whoring, taking drugs, committing armed robberies etc have little or no religious belief. It is a well established fact that the more secular a society is, the lower the crime rates tend to be. It is also a well established fact that with regard to prison inmates, Christians represent a larger percentage relative to their percentage of the overall population than atheists represent as a percentage relative to their percent of the overall population.
In either case, this of course demonstrates correlation and not causation. But then I am not claiming religion is necessarily the cause. I would add that doing the right thing out of fear of punishment or hopes of some large reward is not morality. Hi Hugh7, I ask you in a spirit of humility and questioning, if there is no absolute truth, then how can we know an absolute reality? I never said there is no absolute truth. I think there has to be a real universe, otherwise what is it that are we arguing about? Over the last few centuries we have discovered that reality is a lot more complicated than we thought — that everything is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space, for example.
Or that space and time are more flexible than we thought. I think we will go on discovering more and more of that kind of thing, including how we are deluded. For example we now know that we begin to move before our conscious minds have formed the intention to move. I think no matter how much we discover, reality will always be more complicated. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. You simply shift the problem of evil to the easily observable, still with no way to explain it.
So you are claiming that reality itself is evil and life is not worth living for aggregate humanity. The most miserable life that any human ever lived is but a blink of an eye compared to the timespans of heaven. Yes, some people are born into squalor and misery and torment on this planet from which they never escape—until death.
But heaven is available to them, and that is for eternity. Without the capacity to commit evil and hurt others we would not be human beings with moral agency. But through things like disease, violence, and natural disaster we are motivated to learn about the physical world around us. If there was no distress and danger in the world, what kind of science would exist? Would there be any reason for scientific research if there were no illness and no natural disaster?
Do you desire a world with no problems to solve? And yet I would wager, since you have time to engage in this discussion right here, that your life is already pretty close that as it is. And yet you still view the world itself as full of inexplicable evil and torment. Are you angry at God for not making you some sort of kept animal in a video game? No, reality is a mixture of good and evil, and for most of the world, the good outweighs the evil. First, because of our natural curiosity to find out how the universe works a universe in which science has yet found no trace of nor need for any supernatural agency.
Then because there are many issues which are not disasters. The good can be improved. The uninvented can be invented. Cellphones would still be useful even if we did not use them to summon rescue helicopters.
How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus
John, I am losing track as to who I did and did not answer. I do not see that i responded to you, so here goes:. Your claims are patently absurd. Christianity dictates that one must believe in the Christian god and in Jesus at a minimum, am i not correct? So demonstrate that those billions of people who die of starvation, and cancer, and natural disasters to the person do not fall into that category. My idea of a world with no evil is simply a world with no evil.
We both have time to engage in this discussion, so whatever you wistfully apply to me, do so to yourself as well. I will take it from your use of seven consecutive question marks that you cannot rationally address any of the points I raised, and I will pray for you. Hope you feel better. So, the quarter million people who lost their lives in the tsunami some time back were all killed because they did not acknowledge your god? Children starve to death in Africa because they did not accept your god even though they may not ever have heard of him?
Milton — your argument is that there is no God because he does not operate as sort of a Super Hero Saving Squad. This is a childish notion. God has a plan and every single human being is part of it. People died in that tsunami because spoiled cretins like me and you would rather spend time arguing with each other on the internet than developing ways to detect and alert people to natural disasters.
The technology to warn and evacuate people in tsunami zones already exists. Have you contributed anything to that field of study? Kids are starving in Africa because their parents are unable or unwilling to feed them, and because me and you are not feeding them either. Because, according to Christianity, he designed the system that produced these results…….
His alternative is to deny there is a God who cares about people because some times bad things happen. Therefore he prefers a world in which child rape, etc are simply natural occurrences, which have no intrinsic moral effects. He is acting like a baby, who wants a God who prevents each and every instance of evil, everywhere, or he is not going to believe in him.
Is There a God?
You forget that believe in God is to also believe in Satan. There is a spiritual realm and it influences everything that happens in this world, whether for good or for evil. Satan is an awful, awful individual. He is rotten and takes absolute glee in the pain and agony and atrocities that take place in this world. They are his doing.
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But God allows it because he created us as free, he wants us to have the choice otherwise there is no point. And at the end of set time alloted, our choices will be rewarded eternally. And we are offered an eternity, a promise, stated over and over again in the Bible where there will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more crying, no more dying, no more war, but everlasting, everlasting peace and safety. An eternity with God. Sin and satan will no longer exist or threaten to touch us.
But even now, the promise remains in Romans 8: I bhave experienced this personally. There is no lose with out gain. Look at the nation of israel. They are prime example of this truth and evidence that God does exist. They have experienced some of the worst hatred and suffering than any group of people on the earth and yet they remain and maintain their faith. After the holocaust, after great, great loss, because of it they gained back their homeland and then their capital and holy city. After thousands of years of exile, they made a great gain followingtheir great loss.
Look at the life of Joseph. He went through tremendous tragedy and set back and in the end he said what you meant for evil, God meant for good. That is the final answer. We obviously live in a fallen and wicked world. Why should that keep us from faith? It should actually increase our faith!! Because the bible doesnt say not to expect trouble, it actually promises it. But Christ defeated him at the cross and promises to dispose of him for good at the end of the age. Until then, we have to live in the world that he is ruler of and embrace the love of God and the promise that our pain may endure through out our lives, but joy will be ours through Christ, eternally.
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Ultimately, faith is listed as one of 9 fruits of the spirit. It is a supernatural thing to believe. It is not in our nature or in our surroundings, it is of God himself. For more on this, please watch this video. Are you under the impression that suffering is of no worth? I would say that it is of little to no worth, yes. Especially when one has no idea why they are suffering inexplicably. God can, will and does intervene, especially when we seek Him. They are being the hands and feet of God, being his love in action! To believe in good, does not mean to deny evil!! It is a very real and obvious fact of life in this world.
But it does not help those who lost their lives or were permanently maimed. Heather, please ask God to cure all cancer patients in the country of Australia? Have him do it at midnight tonight. If that happens, I think a lot of atheists will become believers. Jesus and the Apostles already healed thousands and only a few were convinced.
You only have anecdotal accounts. That is wholly insufficient to support such claims. There are no medical records to consult, and no witnesses to talk to. If Jesus wanted to impress the world, he should have eliminated disease. Now that would have still resonated throughout the world. I am sorry he is not an amputee. Thousands of these on the internet. But thanks for the effort.
What makes this a miracle rather than a rare event? Yes Heather like the Salvation Army who indeed have been trying to compete with the Catholic Church when it comes to child abuse. I appreciate the good that some religious organizations do. There is no denying it, nor would i wish to. But the question of a god preventing evil is quite apart from the question of people helping others recover because he chose to allow it to happen. All of that merely proves the existence of Satan in a fallen world.
There was no such in Eden and there will be none in the New Earth. God has given us the free will to choose evil or to choose good. Which have you chosen? No, it proves much more. Your statement implies one of two possibilities exist. The free will question does not come into play. One cannot choose not to get cancer, or not to go blind because of a parasite infection, or choose not to be swept away by some natural disaster.
A child cannot choose not to starve to death because there is no food. I am nowhere addressing whether one chooses to believe in a god or practice a religion. I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. His ways are perfect. I do not understand them. I am not God. But the more I study His character, the more complex He becomes. I love your thought process. I wish you Shalom.
When you figure out how a supposedly completely benevolent being can commit immoral things, get back to me. I wish you well. But variations of this comment have been made many times over the years. Psychosis is defined as a loss of contact with reality, and can manifest in numerous ways. These delusions tend to be very resistant to argument, no matter how blatant the evidence to the contrary: But then, that begs the question, why do religious beliefs get a free pass? People are very resistant to those being challenged too.
The brain essentially maintains a mental model of how the world is meant to work, and what things are meant to happen and when. Beliefs, experiences, expectations, assumptions, calculations; all are combined into a constantly-updated general understanding of how things happen, so we know what to expect and how to react without having to figure everything out from scratch each time. Raised in a religious environment, Charles Darwin studied to be an Anglican clergyman. While eventually doubting parts of his faith, Darwin continued to help in church affairs, even while avoiding church attendance.
Darwin stated that it would be "absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist". Agnostic views are as old as philosophical skepticism , but the terms agnostic and agnosticism were created by Huxley to sum up his thoughts on contemporary developments of metaphysics about the "unconditioned" William Hamilton and the "unknowable" Herbert Spencer. Though Huxley began to use the term "agnostic" in , his opinions had taken shape some time before that date.
In a letter of September 23, , to Charles Kingsley , Huxley discussed his views extensively: I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not?
It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions That my personality is the surest thing I know may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties.
I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the non-ego, noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth. And again, to the same correspondent, May 6, I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.
I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father [who] loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts. So with regard to the other great Christian dogmas, immortality of soul and future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I—who am compelled perforce to believe in the immortality of what we call Matter and Force, and in a very unmistakable present state of rewards and punishments for our deeds—have to these doctrines?
Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them.
Of the origin of the name agnostic to describe this attitude, Huxley gave the following account: When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them.
They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis"—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic".
It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took. Therefore, although it be, as I believe, demonstrable that we have no real knowledge of the authorship, or of the date of composition of the Gospels, as they have come down to us, and that nothing better than more or less probable guesses can be arrived at on that subject. William Stewart Ross wrote under the name of Saladin. Ross championed agnosticism in opposition to the atheism of Charles Bradlaugh as an open-ended spiritual exploration.
In Why I am an Agnostic c. In , Russell gave a lecture on The existence and nature of God , in which he characterized himself as an atheist. The existence and nature of God is a subject of which I can discuss only half. If one arrives at a negative conclusion concerning the first part of the question, the second part of the question does not arise; and my position, as you may have gathered, is a negative one on this matter. However, later in the same lecture, discussing modern non-anthropomorphic concepts of God, Russell states: That sort of God is, I think, not one that can actually be disproved, as I think the omnipotent and benevolent creator can.
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
In his essay, What Is An Agnostic? An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present time. An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not.
The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. Later in the essay, Russell adds: I think that if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next twenty-four hours, including events that would have seemed highly improbable, and if all these events then produced to happen, I might perhaps be convinced at least of the existence of some superhuman intelligence. Although radical and unpalatable to conventional theologians, Weatherhead's agnosticism falls far short of Huxley's, and short even of weak agnosticism: Of course, the human soul will always have the power to reject God, for choice is essential to its nature, but I cannot believe that anyone will finally do this.
Ingersoll , an Illinois lawyer and politician who evolved into a well-known and sought-after orator in 19th-century America, has been referred to as the "Great Agnostic". Is there a supernatural power—an arbitrary mind—an enthroned God—a supreme will that sways the tides and currents of the world—to which all causes bow? I do not deny. I do not know—but I do not believe. I believe that the natural is supreme—that from the infinite chain no link can be lost or broken—that there is no supernatural power that can answer prayer—no power that worship can persuade or change—no power that cares for man.
I believe that with infinite arms Nature embraces the all—that there is no interference—no chance—that behind every event are the necessary and countless causes, and that beyond every event will be and must be the necessary and countless effects. Is there a God? I do not know. One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be. In the conclusion of the speech he simply sums up the agnostic position as: We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know.
In Ingersoll explained his comparative view of agnosticism and atheism as follows: The Agnostic is an Atheist. The Atheist is an Agnostic. Demographic research services normally do not differentiate between various types of non-religious respondents, so agnostics are often classified in the same category as atheists or other non-religious people.
Agnosticism is criticized from a variety of standpoints. Some religious thinkers see agnosticism as limiting the mind's capacity to know reality to materialism. Some atheists criticize the use of the term agnosticism as functionally indistinguishable from atheism; this results in frequent criticisms of those who adopt the term as avoiding the atheist label. Theistic critics claim that agnosticism is impossible in practice, since a person can live only either as if God did not exist etsi deus non-daretur , or as if God did exist etsi deus daretur. Religious scholars such as Laurence B. Brown criticize the misuse of the word agnosticism, claiming that it has become one of the most misapplied terms in metaphysics.
Brown raises the question, "You claim that nothing can be known with certainty According to Pope Benedict XVI , strong agnosticism in particular contradicts itself in affirming the power of reason to know scientific truth. The knowledge of God has always existed". The Catholic Church sees merit in examining what it calls "partial agnosticism", specifically those systems that "do not aim at constructing a complete philosophy of the unknowable, but at excluding special kinds of truth, notably religious, from the domain of knowledge".
The Council of the Vatican declares, "God, the beginning and end of all, can, by the natural light of human reason, be known with certainty from the works of creation". Blaise Pascal argued that even if there were truly no evidence for God, agnostics should consider what is now known as Pascal's Wager: Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli cited 20 arguments for God's existence, [98] asserting that any demand for evidence testable in a laboratory is in effect asking God, the supreme being, to become man's servant.
According to Richard Dawkins , a distinction between agnosticism and atheism is unwieldy and depends on how close to zero a person is willing to rate the probability of existence for any given god-like entity. About himself, Dawkins continues, "I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden. He states that "agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.
Ignosticism is the view that a coherent definition of a deity must be put forward before the question of the existence of a deity can be meaningfully discussed. If the chosen definition is not coherent, the ignostic holds the noncognitivist view that the existence of a deity is meaningless or empirically untestable.
Ayer , Theodore Drange , and other philosophers see both atheism and agnosticism as incompatible with ignosticism on the grounds that atheism and agnosticism accept "a deity exists" as a meaningful proposition that can be argued for or against. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The view that certain metaphysical claims — such as the existence of God or the supernatural — are unknown and perhaps unknowable.
Not to be confused with Gnosticism.