God Does answer prayers...Read this
Offline For the past months I've been out of work because my dad, who I'm in business with is very ill, and with lot of bills piling up. The biggest thing was the loan on my car. I've been getting pretty close to having it repossessed. So my wife and I tried for weeks to sell the car, and in the area that I live in, there isn't much interest even though it's a pretty nice car. To add insult to injury, our son broke his arm jumping off of furniture and racked up a 10,000 bill at the hospital for that. anyway, yesterday, Just when the car was maybe a day or so away from getting repo'd, someone smashed into us at a stop sign, noone was hurt but the car is totaled. So I won't have to worry about it anymore and it's going to be paid for. The irony is, being the bad christian that I am, i rarley ever pray, but the night before the accident I did pray for God to help us sell the car to relieve some of the debt. God didn't help us sell the car, which is fine because we are going to get more money this way. But he does answer prayers, and thats the truth. He seems to help the way he see fit, and on his time, but mostly, he'll find a way to help. just thought I'd pass that along for some inspiration.
"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..." -CS Lewis
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Reality is what you can prove. *grins* Everything else is speculation.
I'll ask my rock to forgive you for your doubts of it's power.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Anyway I hope you do get yourself sorted and your dad gets better but I'd also hope that you see how ludicrous your reasoning is, if your not trolling of course.
While I am inclined to agree with some of the more skeptical persons here that perhaps this wasn't direct intervention by God, I stand by my Christian brother in giving thanks for a blessing amid tribulations. God is indeed good.
Anyhow, despite agreeing to a greater or lesser degree depending on the post, some of your criticisms are just sloppy. It could have been my rock that got me my job? Equivocating a single testimony and a single event with the testimony of millions, and that being a ridiculously low estimate , seems like equivocation. I could also draw from ya'lls tradition with Locke and suggest that your miracle account is invalidated because there are naturalistic explanations. I believe there are miracles that would exceed this potentiallity, have heard of them from family and friends. If you want to contest the validity of testimonies to divine intervention and the spiritual world, that's another issue. Start a thread on it if you want, but God has worked in my life, and debating whether or not God intervened here is necessarily a theological discussion. Careful where you tred, you may have to assume a defintion of God...
Another qualm, "reality is what you can prove." Provable reality is what you can prove, this in no way is indicative of the potentiallity of reality exceeding our ability for investigation. And of course it's speculation. I also speculate about the situation in Iraq, as informed by realiable witnesses. I have never been there, I'm not even "sure" that it exists. But the people who have told me, the multitude of witnesses and events that defy alternate explanations make the truth of Iraq the most plausible explanation. Testimonies differ, which requires immediate presence and extensive knowledge to further a complete understanding, which is necessarily impossible given social imaginaries. Same with God, progress without completion.
You know people who have been to Iraq, undoubtedly. I do to. I also know people who have seen and been touched by God. Chances are, you do too. Science works as the tool that it is, but it can only make reference to God, who exceeds and surpasses it's graps, and is only fully made reference to in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Tankalish,
I'm almost embarrassed by how obvious this question is:
You say testimony by the multitudes makes something more valid, but then how do you address the conflicting religions which are endorsed by as many people as endorse Christianity? Many people feel they've been touched by very different gods, can offer specific instances in which a force other than Yahweh intervened in their lives, so are they correct too? What's the deal?
Equivocation refers to ambiguous language, like using different meanings of a word interchangeably.
The rock example displays specious reasoning and confirmation bias. He remembers when carrying the rock was associated with a positive outcome, but less so when it was with a neutral or negative outcome. If he followed the Christian example in determining the validity of the rock, he would rationalize, in the event of a negative outcome that the rock was working, but it "had its reasons" not to do as he had hoped. The "testimony of millions" as you put it is not equivalent to millions of independent and controlled tests, or millions of independent eyewitness accounts by disinterested parties; rather, you have millions of people eager to fulfill a preconceived notion of how things are meant to be, as interpreted and reported by people with the same view.
You don't get to dictate the terms of the discussion to assume the framework for your anecdotes.
Argument from ignorance.
That doesn't sound like it means anything.
You're begging the question -- assuming the conclusion in your premise.
Argument from ignorance/god of the gaps.
Dang you guys beat me to it. Good job.
You know what I really think is funny or sad?
That Tankalish can clearly see how stupid it is for me to say that my rock did it. But is competely unable to see the comparison I was making about miracles/prayer.
I agree it's sloppy! That's the point!
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Valid DrTerwilliker. What I was putting forward here wasn't a defense of the God I believe in, but the notion of the supernatural. A claim that there is no supernatural is necessarily conditioned, heavily conditioned, by the circumstances in which we are raisesd. As for how I would explain conflicting religions, that's a more complex discussion that is founded around the ability of the account of God to account for the phenomena present in the world. No, I don't think they are correct, elements of truth, but falling short. The same with ya'll.
And what enabled you to find the truth? What makes you so confident that you haven't discovered only some warped elements of the truth?
My apologies on the claim of equivocation, I thought it applied to conceptual notions and ideas, not just words. Duly corrected.
As for your claim about millions of "eager to fulfill a preconceived notion of how things are meant to be, as interpreted and reported by people with the same view." This isn't at all obvious. To claim that everyone who experiences a miracle is conditioned by a belief that the miracle could occur seems preposturous. To focus on the African continent, their conceptions of spirituallity and divine intervention were fundamentally different than those brought by missionaries of the Christian and Islamic faiths, I believe now the dominate religions on the continent. Yet something in how these two religions accounted for the supernatural occurences in these people's lives exceeded their own account but fit within that presented. And I will, of course, concede that some conversions were forced, but this is definitely not, by an investigation of literature from both traditions, the case of all conversions. Perhaps they are pre-conditioned to see a miracle. Fine. Necessarily the same critique has to be applied to you, as you are pre-conditioned not to. I'm inclined to believe the testimony of others and my own mind, you don't believe these testimonies.
"You don't get to dictate the terms of the discussion to assume the framework for your anecdotes." I would like to responed, but I don't understand the critique. Sorry...
I guess there is a potentiallity that my little Iraq anecdote completely failed, but to claim that there is knowledge without faith is crazy. Metaphysically. That was the point. My bad on poor writing and ambiguity.
"You're begging the question -- assuming the conclusion in your premise." Thank you for the reminder on what begging the question is, and of course I am. I assume that God exists and proceed forward until I reach an inconsistancy. You assume God doesn't and proceed forward until you reach an inconsistancy. I'm guessing you're claiming my assumption is less valid because it doesn't fit with the tradition you esposue? Or with the experiences you have had? It isn't "proven". It isn't the starting point of thought? These are all assumptions from which you proceed forward. Not a criticism of you, a necessary condition of being.
"Argument from ignorance/god of the gaps." I don't think this is entirely valid. Claiming that something best accounts for the scenario presented seems to align rather heavily with the scientific method. I am simply applying this on a metaphysical and theological level. And I'm not a God of the gaps boy. My God doesn't fill the holes in our understanding, he permeates our understanding, is a necessary condition of our understanding, and exceeds what we see and can imagine.
Umm, I'm sorry? My post was founded on the notion of the analogy. I was rejecting its validity. The inconsistancies between the two were too great for the implication you were attempting to carry over to have validity.
This is admittedly a very vaild criticism, and I'll try to answer. What enabled me to find the truth is God. Revelation. Both natural and supernatural. Creation and intervention. What makes me so confident that I haven't discovered warped elements of the truth? I'm sure I have, which is why I haven't stopped looking. While I do start from the belief that God exists, existence pushes back on my beliefs, shapes them. Things I believed are no longer coherent. I'm afraid that the general scope of your question means I can't answer it here, but if you could narrow it to a specific objection to my perception, I'd be happy to try explaining it.
By the way, magilum, I dig the quote. Great quote, great book. In the line of confinement by cultural context, I would venture to recommend Charles Taylor's work "Modern Social Imaginaries". Fairly short, but very interesting.
I didn't say "all," or "obvious." The notion isn't preposterous at all, but is reinforced by the dearth of evidence for the claims given. What we have is evidence of people being prone to make a certain kind of claim, but no evidence for the claim itself.
Your claim is so vague; you just assert an indefinite series of events with your conclusion already assumed. I don't have a reply to it, because I don't think it's saying anything.
I don't know what you're referring to in your claim, but I'll follow along. Let's make sure we're using one meaning for 'faith' -- which is that not requiring evidence for belief. Faith is totally superfluous in the presence of knowledge. There is a wealth of evidence available to confirm many things we don't witness directly; there are predictable and testable ways in which the world would be different if some things were not so. If there wasn't a war, for instance, we could check. There would be scores of people trying to tell us what a sham it is. We could send a private spy plane over and confirm a Baghad undisturbed by occupation troops. None of this is so with religious claims.
A lot of people don't know what begging the question means. Your view presupposes a superfluous claim plied onto the natural world, mine is just the natural world itself. Unless you have some evidence the world would be different without x, y and z being so, it's not safe to assume it.
It's just not adding things not suggested by evidence. There's not a whole lot to it, really.
Science only deals with the natural world, so if science can deal with it, it's natural. Science has nothing to say about theology, teleology or the supernatural. Starting with those assumptions, even if science could deal with them, is unscientific. The scientific ideal is to subject an idea to scrutiny, try to find a failure in it, not assume it.
Then you must be a nihilist, since you don't let him hide in gaps, and he's totally superfluous to the things we already understand.
Thanks.
Someone needed to say this.
A few years back my fundy music teacher told a student to pray about finding the right car. I was so sickened. Why the hell should god give a shit about someone's car when there are thousands and thousands of children starving to death right at this minute?
FYI, this is one of the reasons why the so-called "new atheists" are sofa king angry. I simply cannot believe how arrogant you Christians are in your faux humility and piety. Yeah, God gives a shit about your car, but he was too busy to keep my nephew's sister from getting killed two weeks ago in a car accident.
A little note from the Green Day song stuck in my head: fuck off and die.
No, I don't really mean that, but I am so tired of the arrogance, the fake humility, the self-righteousness, the divisiveness, the self delusion, etc. These stupid beliefs have ripped my family to shreds. So, yeah...fuck off and die.
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Jesus, DrTerwilliker, you are spot-on tonight (or whenever you wrote this).
There is something you need to understand about America's Christians: Most of them believe in a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." That is why they are so insufferably arrogant while professing humility. I know this because I used to be one of them.
They honestly don't see the narcissism because they were taught to believe that God really does notice every stupid little detail of their lives. That is why Lux (and most of the Christians in America) are so arrogant and don't even realize it.
Let me share a little story about the very last prayer I ever prayed. I wrote it a long time ago, but when I shared the story with a friend, he rightly called me "narcissistic" for believing god gave a crap about me and my stupid little prayer.
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Agreed. I can never learn enough. I sometimes feel like a sponge thirsting for knowledge...and there's never enough time to learn it all.
We never "arrive," do we?
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Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this, but I thought I'd wait for the Lux drama to be resolved.
"Predictable" is perhaps a better description of the universe than orderly. And as for quantum stuff, I just can't get my head around most of it. I mean, if an electron can be in two places at the same time, why can't I, dammit?
I think that for a believer in a Divine Being, who is also a believer in science, that the Christian concept of God (and the Jewish foundation of Christianity) is the only God who makes sense. There are entire civilizations who have missed the concept of a rational and orderly universe because of a lack of philosophical tools, and indeed, the burden of conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science.
The animism of ancient cultures all too often concieved of the divine as immanent in created things, which hindered the development of science by making the idea of constant natural laws foreign to them. It is the Judeo-Christian deity, with his transcendent nature, who endowed creation with consistent physical laws.
I know. I tried to accomodate your lack of belifes by call it an unusual event referred to as a miracle, but you caught me anyway. LOL
Which is why I believe that God, having created a rational and predictable universe is loathe to interfere in it.
"With its enduring appeal to the search for truth, philosophy has the great responsibility of forming thought and culture; and now it must strive resolutely to recover its original vocation." Pope John Paul II
Lux, I've spent a lot of time on this thread cleaning up duplicate posts and BB code errors. It's possible your computer has the hiccups and you aren't doing anything to cause the multiple posts. Still, it would be helpful if you click "post comment" just once if you aren't limiting yourself to one click already.
Also, please familiarize yourself with BB code: http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php?mode=bbcode
Thanks,
Iruka Naminori
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exactly, noone is riteous enough to say with 100% conviction that they are right, so although you believe in this, in saying "who is to say what reality is?" you admit that it is not you and therefore admit that you could be wrong.
it's impossible to admit that noone knows what reality is and still say you believe 100% that you know what the reality is.
I'm going to assume you don't see the irony pervading your post. "Your view presupposes a superfluous claim plied onto the natural world, mine is just the natural world itself." I can and do assert that God is natural, the world is created, and without God there is no world. Superfluous? No longer clear at all, unless you can somehow think outside of time and being to the "time" when things existed in a non-void. Your view has to deal with this assumption that you made. In addition, you assume the natural world isn't supernatural, I assume the opposite. I guess this can be seen as an imposition upon the bare minimum that presents itself, except that I have heard believable testimony of events that exceed the "natural". Now your belief of "natural" fails to offer an adequate explanation for the presented phenomena. Please, try to be more scientific.
"Unless you have some evidence the world would be different without x, y and z being so, it's not safe to assume it." Somehow you can claim I have to prove that everything would be different without God? Please, try to stack the deck more. How about you create an experiment without assuming the immediacy of percievable materials, your senses ability to accurately construe them, and the mental faculties ability for rational cognition. Can you? If your thinking yes, don't bother. The moment you don't assume the senses your left with only thought. The moment you don't assume rational cognition, you don've have thought. Anything left? I'm not telling you to stop assuming them, it's necessary for progressing forward. If you honestly can't wrap your head around the fact that the human mind is necessarily pre-conditioned by biological and sociological conditions, then don't bother. You are sociologically conditioned to disbelieve miracles. Nothing wrong with it. I am too. Get over it.
"Science has nothing to say about theology, teleology or the supernatural." Umm, what? Do you not know that science emerged in the Western world as an attempt to better understand God's creation, and thus better understand him? Indeed, the opposite is true as well, my theology informs my science. Before you have a heart attack at my biased nature, once again, the assumption of the scientific methods ability to accurately grasp the nature of existence is an assumption. You assume senses reliability etc. Perhaps you'll say there has been no reason to doubt them. Very well. I have no reason to doubt God. Doesn't seem to be a good enough reason. Perhaps you'll say it's ridiculous to doubt them. Then you're assuming them on practicallity, I'm assuming them as rooted in God. Mine has an explanation.
By teleology I'll assume you mean philosophy in general. Again, the entire scientific process of viewing the world is founded on philosophical assumptions. Metaphysics and epistemology are of course informed by science, but also inform science.
It's called post-modernism, you have a metanarrative. It's ok. It just means that pure science is impossible. It means you make pre-scientific assumptions. It's true. Mine is God until proven otherwise. Yours is the opposite. Stop calling me biased and somehow unable to engage in rational conversation because of it.
Tankalish - Please define the word "God".
What? An assumption?
Science built the computer you are typing on. Does the computer work? Are we even having this conversation over the internet? That's PROOF that science accurately grasps the nature of existence.
Ever flown on a plane? Taken a flu shot? Watched TV?
That is all PROOF that science grasps the nature of existence.
Holy crap! I can't believe I'm having this discussion when men walked on the moon before I was even born.
Science. It works, bitches.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Great. Should be no problem to gather some evidence then.
Do we have to stop there? Can I assert that god is created, and without my abstract god-making machine, there would be no god?
That's tautological. No assumption needed.
You heard "believable testimony"? Color me convinced.
Apparently you can. This is precisely what you have done in order to conclude that god exists. I'm going to assume you don't see the irony pervading your post.
Correct. And that leaves you free to think up all sorts of imaginary things....such as god.
Conditioning or no conditioning, there is no sound reason to believe in miracles, because they don't occur. Get over it.
Certainly it may have started off that way (go ahead and rattle off your list: Mendel, Newton, blah blah blah). Yet as our scientific knowledge progressed, we realized there was in fact no need for god in our understanding of the universe (cf. Laplace). Quite the contrary, theology has done much to hinder science (cf. Galileo).
We can tell. Which explains how poor your science is.
Do you have a reason to doubt my god-making machine? Or do I need to turn it on again?
You are biased and somehow unable to engage in rational conversation because of it.
There are no theists on operating tables.
Is there?
It's not what you can assert, it's what you can demonstrate.
Yes, no natural explanation has benefitted from a god concept. Add it, remove it: it does nothing, explains nothing.
Argument from ignorance.
The non-assumption of a non-demonstrated thing? I have a lot of work to do then, since I'll have to deal with every unsubstantiated claim that any person in the history of the earth conceived of and put to paper. Or, you could admit to attempting to shift the burden of proof.
I don't think you understand these words that you use.
You want me to refute a vague allusion to undisclosed hearsay?
I thought you said the idea of cultural predisposition to expect miracles (to the point of self-delusion) was preposterous. Now the opposite bias is true of me? Tu quoque. Anyway, all you're demonstrating is that even you believe the evidence for miracles is so crappy and subjective that bias should matter.
Then who would be better to report that they didn't find any such thing necessary?
Don't speak for me. Science challenges assumptions and second-guesses subjectivity. Science changes because new data is constantly replacing the old. Religions tend to say the truth was perfected a long time ago and that's that.
Congratulations on knocking down the straw-man argument that senses are infallible.
I was referring to speculation about purpose, along with other things you had or may have mistakenly considered scientific questions.
Which have changed over time, and of which religion was a step.
It's special pleading to suppose gods are a particularly pressing question, even more so in the case of any particular myth. I credit anthropocentrism first for the dilemma, then blind adherence to tradition. I addressed the assumption claim previously, and you're not on equal footing to me with that.
You're in no position to make demands. LOL, 'metanarrative.'
God answers all prayers: yes or no. He doesn't always give us what we want, but what we need and what is best for us spiritually. Modern man is spoiled and suffers from the delusion that God owes us something. He owes us nothing.
Also, the Bible is clear that God does not hear the prayers of the wicked (John 9, 1 John, etc). Meaning, He does not always give us what we ask. Prayer is a tool used to bring us into conformity with His will, not our own. Jesus told us in the Book of John that abiding in Him was the requisite to answered prayer. and John tells us in his first epistle that God answers thing that are according to His own will. The Book of Psalms is also clear that God does not hear the prayers of the wicked.
However, that is not to say He ignores everyone. There are always exceptions, and God will hear anyone wo turns to Him in repentance and faith.
God always is, nor has He been and is not, nor is but has not been, but as He never will not be; so He never was not -- Augustine
If some prayers are answered in the sense that they make things easier in the form of needed help, and some are answered in the form of increased difficulty or partial help to increase spiritual growth, is there any criteria for suggesting a prayer has gone unanswered? Maybe I'm nuts here, but it seems like the prospect 'sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don't' is exactly what I'd expect from a universe without a concerned intelligence behind it.
All prayers are answered, yes or no. God is very concerned for the universe and is not passive toward our needs. He knows what is best for us. What is best for us is not always what we want. Sometimes He allows us to suffer because it might be the only way to reach us.
By the way, John 9 says something to the effect that God does not hear sinners. This was reported by the man born blind whom Jesus healed. This was the blind man's opinion anyway. It does not say God does not hear the wicked, though there are other passages on this (that God does not hear the wicked).
Also, 1 John says that if we ask anything according to His will He hears us.
Pardon me for clarifying my original point but I'm obsessive compulsive. Sometimes OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) can be a blessing and a curse.
God always is, nor has He been and is not, nor is but has not been, but as He never will not be; so He never was not -- Augustine
You can edit your posts. It's considered good manners to leave a note at the bottom, though, regarding what you edited and why.
But isn't it the christian view that we are all sinners (original sin all that other crap) as such he hears NO prayer then? is that what it is stating? and since we cannot be without sin (again original sin that taints us all supposedly) then prayer is useless.
Simpsons have it right then, Trick or treat isn't some mindless saying like the Lords Prayer.