I'm genuinely curious - do you actually know this? Or are you just assuming this based on the age of the Roman empire, the fact that they were older generations, etc? Cause I personally don't know that much about it, but we know ancient civilizations grappled with these kinds of questions all the time.
> These are all fine traditions! Far and above Roman mythology. You could replace "Christianity" with any of these in my original comment, and it would still apply. There's a world of difference between "a silly belief that people held when they were a child and continue to hold just because of inertia" and "a serious belief with a rich intellectual history, though one among several other such beliefs".
Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
An Atheist makes a simpler argument - all of these beliefs are wrong. That is applied equally and consistently to all the different beliefs. A Christian by definition agrees with the Atheist on 99% of religious beliefs - namely all non-Christian beliefs - and probably for the same reason (lack of evidence that they are correct).
I say this because there are no seriously-taken arguments for the Roman mythological gods (or anything like them) like there are for foundational beliefs of the other religions you mention (none that I have heard of in my studies, at least... I'd be very interested to hear them if they exist). And because the ancient philosophers - e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus - generally drifted away from popular mythology to something more akin to monotheism.
>Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
I see - I made that point about intellectual history there because the implication originally seemed to be that both Roman mythology and Christianity are just silly beliefs that people held as children and continued to hold because they hadn't thought about it. That isn't to say that that alone shows Christianity is true, just that it's a set of beliefs we need to take more seriously.
>As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
This might sound kind of silly. But there is a point at which your justifications of your beliefs have to bottom out. Can you start with only naturalist/scientific premises and reach Christianity? No, even if you agree to Christian apologetic arguments, they will not get you to Christianity proper. In this sense, atheism, Christianity, and other religions are each in a kind of bubble that arguments alone can't let you escape from. It still makes sense to talk about internal consistency (inconsistencies should probably lead us to drop the system), but I don't think we can really make any progress by trying to argue about the foundational premises themselves, if that makes sense.
As for your final comment - Christianity does share a lot in common with other religions. It shares a lot with Islam and Judaism, the other Abrahamic religions. It's maybe not apt to characterize Islam and Judaism as "simply false" from the Christian perspective - there are significant elements of truth even though the overall system is false. This is true, I think, even for the eastern religions.
Yes! I think this is the crux of the matter. I also think this is why discussions involving religion are often unsatisfactory to me. This very thread started with a discussion on _evidence_. And the rest of the discussion is from a _rational_ perspective. But then evidence or rationality only work with scrutiny, including and especially of the axioms. So if discussions on Christianity start with the _premise_ that Christianity is true, then can there really be any further discussion? For instance, elsewhere in a comment you wrote:
> a Christian, in thinking rationally, is not forced to ask "what evidence do I have for this belief?"
In everyday life, this is fine. But when discussing Christianity rationally, questioning the premise is an important part of the process, no?
I present some of my own thinking below. I am taking Christianity only as an example in the context of this thread, but it applies to any revealed religion.
"I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
But Christianity then takes certain leaps.
* God is omnipotent and omniscient. Why? Even a God that is only finite in power and knowledge could have created this universe. Think "super-scientists" in a base reality. So do we really have to take God to be limitless in His capacity?
* God is all-loving and personally cares about His creation. Why? God could have just created the universe and stepped aside, not caring at all about human prayers or actions. So do really have to worry about Heaven and Hell, especially as defined in Christianity?
* God is Good. Why? A fallible God (or even the _evil_ Devil) could have created this universe. It would explains the problem of suffering, or why God seemingly revealed Himself multiple times with conflicting mutually exclusive instructions, perhaps due to incompetence or deliberate manipulation. So say God did actually reveal Himself as the life and tribulations of Christ. Is Christ a reliable arbiter of what is true and good? What if it was the Devil who came down multiple times as Christ/Allah/Buddha, just to mess with humanity? This is an important question I think, and would love to hear if there is a better justification than a priori faith.
Faith plays an important role for many of my family members and friends and by no means would I want to take it away. But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
Maybe I'll draw an analogy - a foundational premise of science is that the past resembles the future. If we determine certain laws of nature based on past experimentation, that's not going to change in the future. Does the scientist, in thinking rationally for himself/herself, need to have an argument for this belief? I don't think so - the scientist can go on analyzing and understanding things scientifically through the scientific worldview without ever needing to construct an argument for this foundational premise. He/she is, however, on the lookout for contradictions - things or events that science can't explain or seem to defy science. I don't think I've described an irrational person here. Of course, if we have a discussion about the enterprise of science and its validity as a whole, then it may come to questioning this premise. But does a scientist in doing science have some kind of burden of proving this premise? I don't think so, just as the Christian in looking at the world through the Christian worldview does not have some kind of burden of proving Christianity.
>I present some of my own thinking below... What you've outlined here is actually firmly in the scope of natural theology, the project of establishing certain theological claims through human reason alone, though not all Christians agree that this project is successful. You may be interested in section 5 of chapter 2 of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that addresses the Gap problem, which is exactly what you've described, the problem of the gap between the conclusion of a cosmological argument, i.e. the existence of an ultimate cause, and the traditional omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent God.
Christians who don't buy natural theology would instead just say that God and His most important properties are self-evident through spiritual experience. (Even Christians who buy it would agree, I think, that this purely rational project doesn't really get you to the fullness of Christianity, and that spiritual experience is key to having the fullest sense of who God is, the presence of Christ here today, our role in the world, etc.)
As to your last point about whether we're being tricked, it is true that we cannot have certainty about these claims. Uncertainty is part of the human condition. But that doesn't prevent us from having knowledge of things. I know that there's a floor beneath me, even though I don't have a certain proof of it (it's not necessarily true - I could be dreaming, there could be an evil demon feeding me false sensory data, etc.)
>But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
Well, religion being an exclusive arbiter of reality is only something held by a fringe group of religious people I think. Most reasonable religious people will have no problem with mathematical proofs or scientific evidence revealing things about reality. Many religious people will also accept that those of other religions can have knowledge of moral truths. But if you just mean that religion wants to be the ultimate truth, well, yeah, it does.
>> If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
I respectfully disagree with every sentence (except the last).
Firstly, I think God's existence can be proved rationally, using arguments that take very basic empirical observations as premises (for example: "things change", "things behave predictably", "there are multiple instances of the same thing"). I don't think these are arguments that fit into a combox, which is frustrating but that's the reality -- although I think most of the common arguments against God's existence can be dealt without many words.
Secondly, once God's existence is established, I think the empirical basis of Christianity specifically (evidence for the resurrection) is sound. I think the common objections fail. Many of the objections are variants on Hume's, which amounts to "the resurrection is so unlikely given my philosophical assumptions that literally any explanation for the observed facts is more likely". Once Hume's assumptions are undermined (in stage 1), the facts take on a very different light.
Thirdly, I think Catholicism is internally consistent and has further evidence in its favour -- including miracles, continuity of institutions and continuity of teaching -- whereas I think Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy lack these qualities. While intra-Christian disputes may seen beyond the scope of this discussion, I think they have some bearing. For example:
>> Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments.
This is a specifically Protestant view (although many Catholics mistakenly hold to it since it chimes so easily with the post-Enlightenment concept of religion). I would say faith is a rational assent to revelation. But more importantly for the present discussion, I would say God's existence that can be established by pure reason, independently of faith.
> "I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
There are solid arguments against all these and in favour of monotheism. Again, no way of summarising in a combox, but I can give a few thoughts, which should not be taken as even an adequate description, let alone a complete defence that is intended to convince you :-).
Pantheism is false because it can't explain change. A thing can only be changed by something else; therefore the first principle (First Cause) of reality can't change, because otherwise it would not be first. But the universe is changing; hence the universe can't be the first principle of reality. Each of these points is obviously controversial, but I think defensible.
Alternatively one could argue that change is an illusion, like many eastern religions do. But speaking very generally, one object is distinguished from another by how it changes (that is, how it acts or is acted upon). We distinguish the presence of hydrogen from that of helium by how they act, or how other things act on them. We also distinguish a human being from a dog by how they act -- not least, how they act on our sight, sound, etc. And so on. If change (that is, action and being acted on) is an illusion, it means that individual objects (like stones, trees, dogs, human beings) are not actually individual at all; their individuality is only an illusion. But if this is so, predication is impossible, because we are predicating only of our illusions. Since this is not so (because if it were, why are we even bothering with this discussion?), pantheism must be false. Such is the vague outline of another argument that a monotheist would make.
Alternatively one could argue that a thing need not be changed by something else -- that it can change itself. The trouble with this is it fails to explain why things act in one way rather than another. If things could change themselves, they would act completely randomly, because there would be no cause of their change, and therefore no reason. This is not so.
Pythagoras was the first to propose that mathematics was the basis of everything. But there are things that are not numeric or can be reduced to number. For example, non-mathematical logic, which is a fundamental aspect of reality, and can't be reduced to number. Again, a counter-argument would proceed on these lines.
I'm not going to attempt any other answers in a combox because these are profound questions that require, and have received, book-length expositions. I am only attempting to give you the vaguest idea of the thought processes I go through in arriving at my beliefs. But I have not yet found an argument that makes me doubt my Catholicism, and I think it's profoundly false to say that Christianity is independent of logic or observation.
