quote:At the same time, I can't trust what a religious person tells me about God, because they don't really know either.
This in an incorrect and unsafe assumption. You have not experienced what others have, and as such you do not know if their conclusions are good ones. You are correct that you cannot trust in their beliefs just because they are confident or even absolutely certain of them. To assume there are not people out there who know about God is pretty presumptuous.
You'll note that I specified that they cannot know in any kind of concrete way. By that I mean, as others have since pointed out, that anyone who does claim to know with certainty that God exists is unable to provide any proof, other than their own feelings and experiences, which are inconclusive at best.
When push comes to shove, everyone that I have heard of who has said that they "know" that God exists will eventually admit that they simply believe that God exists and are unwilling to deny that belief. It's not really knowing in the same way that I know I'm typing in English right now.
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Well, I'd say it's a bit more unsure than that, but yeah. As I mentioned also, personal feelings and thoughts are notoriously unreliable.
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quote:Absolutely no faith is needed to say "if we assume the following set of things is true, what else must be true?"
But you do need faith in order to ACT upon those assumptions.
I think that faith (despite how sometimes it is used in religion) is not a method for calculating truths. Instead, it is a tool for transforming a calculation of evidence into a way of acting. It is essentially saying "I'm going to take this particular set of assumptions and this particular method of reasoning, and trust it to guide my actions, even though it relies on assumptions."
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: But to suggest that nobody knows there is a God is not something anyone can rightly say, even if they had been alive for millions of years.
You need to say exactly what you mean by "know". Most people would distinguish "know" from "believe" by saying that the former a knowledge of accuracy that requires reality testing, and that belief in a God that's never been observed to do anything tangible doesn't meet this standard.
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quote:You need to say exactly what you mean by "know". Most people would distinguish "know" from "believe" by saying that the former a knowledge of accuracy that requires reality testing, and that belief in a God that's never been observed to do anything tangible doesn't meet this standard.
This is an LDS thing. They teach that there are different categories of knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is not inferior to scientific knowledge, it is merely obtained through an alternate epistemology. Little accounting is given to the practical flaws with this alternative epistemology, so they consider the highest level of confidence obtained with that epistemology to be "knowledge" and give it equal (or greater!) weight to the highest level of confidence obtained with a scientific epistemology.
It is very important that they use the word "know" to describe this spiritual confidence. Every month every single LDS congregation gathers for a "Testimony meeting" in leue of normal services with the sole purpose of allowing individual members to go to the podium to share all the things that they "know" spiritually - that the Church is true, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that Christ lives, etc. The one time I witnessed someone state that they merely believed, he was challenged on the point by the next speaker. Even small children participate with their parents whispering into their ear the words "I know the church is true, I know Joseph Smith is a prophet, I love my mom and dad..."
Science and religion start with the same fairytale. The difference is, that is where religion stops, and that is where science begins.
Science may start with a fairytale of an idea, but then the continue on to prove or disprove the fairytale, and if along the way they see that the fairytale is wrong, they aren't above re-writing it to make it more right, even if they don't quite have the full answer yet.
Religion, on the other hand, doesn't try to prove anything. They simply keep finding new ways to assert that the fairytale is true even without proof.
"Inteligent Design" isn't proof of anything; it is just one more way to keep the fairytale alive.
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