On the Divine

[squeakus]

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Douglas Adams

As I noted last time, I need to give my views on the divine. This is different to belief in the divine, though that will be touched on here; but belief, faith, and for that matter knowledge are a subject to

Comments

[princess_peas]

There are two kinds of faith

[squeakus]

Well, this is looking at God from a purely rationalsitic perspective, is the thing; I'm ignoring faith throughout, or trying to at any rate, because faith interferes with rational discourse. Which is why I want to discuss the issues bound up in faith later, today maybe.

I'd always be interested in seeing the flipside.

[princess_peas]

I'll see what I can do. Although my point was that sometimes, believing in something because it's rational is faith, just as believing in something even though it isn't rational is sometimes true too. So by looking at a rational explanation, you are still acting by faith. But like I said, I'll see what I can find about believing in God because it's the most rational explaination :-)

[squeakus]

But can you have a rational faith? I'd argue that if faith is rational, it stops being faith and becomes knowledge instead.

[tomfranklin]

Let us deal with Ockham first, and I think you are abusing his argument, which is that the simplest argument that agrees with all the "facts" is the most likely to be correct. However, he is not saying that God is simpler than not God, but that an explanation of the world without God doesn't cover all the known "facts" (or at least the known "facts" then). Thus, it is / was simpler to explain things by evoking God. This is sometimes known as God of the Gaps; and inevitably this will be a retreating God as we understand more. For instance, it wasnt until Newton that we had an explanation of planetary motion that did not require God. The simplest ones had God, now they don't