Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
I think we are all in possession of each other’s opinions and the only quasi-legitimate reason for me not to let this thread end with Dr. Page’s last summary is to thank him: thanks for the considerable time, patience, and thought which you applied here.
(Although I would dearly like to take up the issue of consciousness/sentience which appears to be your central premise, as I think there is evidence that … but no, I must learn to resist these temptations.)
Dear Dr Page, (to keep it sweet and short)
why does your God speak to people in the past via burning bushes etc, but not in any of today’s cell phones (I am sure He knows my number), media, newspapers, TV, Internet, Web, Facebook, Twitter???
I’d even be tempted to accept Him sending me a selfie with the Pope.
(please note my phone plan is very parsimonious)
To go for a longer version.
1) Are you able to offer a clear definition of a supernatural being?
2) Then it could form the basis of a hypothesis, testable by science.
But usually it falls foul of an observation by Sir Karl Popper (Austrian/British philosopher):
“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing”
As the attributes often given to the being of omni-this, omni-that & omin-the-other can indeed be used to explain everything.
In the popular sci-fi UK BBC TV series, Dr Who (a time lord) at one stage had a companion robot dog, K9 (see here at the BBC). K9 got the Dr out of many scrapes.
In a similar manner to that supernatural being, it spoilt the plots by making it too easy to “get out of jail” free. As a side note, K9 was eventually given to Romana (played by the wife of Dr Richard Dawkins).
Second try, this time without presuming this supernatural being. Is there any evidence that leads to that conclusion?
As evidence:
1) there is a complete explanation of all the physics that can affect humans.
Our host, Dr Carroll explains this in his recent speech, “Death and Physics,” on accepting the award from the Freedom From Religion. See his own blog post Life Is the Flame of a Candle.
No sign of any supernatural intervention.
Oh, there is fine-tuning. But no evidence that these numbers could be altered.
Although the Bible does alter the value of Pi to the more convenient whole number 3!
There are highly plausible suggestions for the origin of this universe and also for how life started.
Discovery of many exoplanets and the search for signs of life elsewhere (even in the solar system) will add to this list.
The SKA radio telescope being developed in the southern hemisphere may allow the detection of advanced life nearby (if you call millions of light-years nearby).
2) there are many sciences that explain the diversity of life, eg the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Humans are not special and many of us have small amounts of DNA from mating with our cousins, such as the Neanderthals.
In particular there was never a case of only one, then two humans. So no fall. And no need for that vicarious redemption.
And there are many contingent factors in the one play of the recorded history. The claim is that if there was a replay the outcome would likely be quite different. Eg the collision of two proto-planets that gave the Earth/Moon, the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that wiped out much of life are just two we know on the current play. We just don’t know what alternatives there might have been had these not happened.
You seem to accept that your God created billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars & exoplanets.
And that is only in the visible part of this universe.
Then out of all that, He chose one rocky planet with many contingent steps to arrive at a small group of bronze-age, illiterate people intent on wiping out competing tribes.
And next, just an oral tradition that is eventually written in another language, copied umpteen times, translated to English replete with errors, inconsistencies.
Do you also accept the global flood, restarting all of humankind from a few people etc?
What about the story of Exodus for which there no evidence for it and much to refute it?
Ah well, perhaps as JimV suggests you or even our host (calling Dr Carroll . . .) should have the last post?
TY
Quoting Aron Wall
“Of course you cannot force God to reveal himself to you. Any approach must be on his side. In retrospect, it is clear to those chosen by God that nothing they did beforehand caused them to deserve or merit the experience of God. It is gratis, an undeserved gift, which comes in spite of human resistance and even deliberate ignorance.”
True as far as it goes, but it could leave people thinking God will ignore or reject a genuine and persistent enquirer, which I don’t believe to be the case.
“Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.”
(Mat 7:7)
“………. God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to come to know the truth.”
(1Ti 2:3-4)
Simon, rest assured you are not in disagreement with St. Aron for in the next paragraaph he writes:
“And yet that does not mean that preparation is unimportant. The freedom of God is not an excuse for human laziness. Even at the level of human experience, you cannot force somebody to fall in love with you, nor force yourself to fall in love with somebody else. But you can be the sort of person to whom it happens more easily—fortune favors the prepared. “Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” It matters if you have a heart which is receptive to truth, and beauty, and ethical goodness. Those who practice certain disciplines are more likely to find God, or rather more likely to be found by him.”
THANKS again professor Sean Carroll for making it all happen through your Blog Post: Don Page on God and Cosmology; and THANKS again professor Don Page for your well articulated responses and the conviction in them. What a blessing.
Yes. I pretty much agree with TY, although I have a different perspective on religion (Hindu). Both science and religion have limitations and they can compliment each other for the good of mankind. I also thank Don Page for participation in these extensive debates and Sean Carroll for allowing this to happen on his blog. In fact I know there are some eminent physicists who are thiests but who do not engage in public debates about science and religion. I wish there would be more such debates, civil of course!
Sorry! Spelling mistake in above comment. It should be “complement” although compliment is also not altogether absurd in this context!
At last I managed to watch the film about Hawking & his first wife.
This leapt out at me.
Stephen Hawking:
(P16, The Theory of Everything, screenplay by Anthony McCarter, Nov 2013)
“A physicist can’t allow his calculations to be muddled by a belief in a supernatural creator.”
Not sure how it would. Newton and probably most great physicists before the 20th century believed in one, didn’t give them any problems.
Newton is a good example. He didn’t continue trying to analyse higher-order interactions among the planets after “concluding that periodic divine intervention was necessary to guarantee the stability of the solar system.” (Wikipedia.) LaPlace famously dispensed with that god-hypothesis and was able to show with more precise analysis that “any two planets and the sun must be in mutual equilibrium and thereby launched his work on the stability of the solar system.” (Also Wikipedia.) Although Newton failed to reach the current determination that the current solar system is stable for at least hundreds of millions of years, he however considered the notion of the trinity to be unbelievable and so would have been considered a heretic if this fact were generally known.(Gleick’s biography.)
This gets us full-circle back to my first comment, where I said the god-hypothesis is more of an excuse for ending investigation without having a good explanation than an explanation in itself. For further example, doesn’t the Christian god-hypothesis require a major expansion of the Standard Model to whatever forces and/or particles it uses to resurrect the dead, read our minds, and upload our memories and personalities into an afterlife? (Forces and particles which, as Dr. Carroll has pointed out, have never been reported in any of the millions of physics experiments which have been carried out.)
At this point, not only is no one convincing anyone, but we are trudging along over our previous footsteps.
Jim V,
When someone has a prior commitment to something it is a low order of probability that you will be able to convince them. Given the statement you responded to in your most recent comment, and your response in which you point to the clear, and easy to be had by anyone who bothers to look for it, evidence that the statement was completely inaccurate, you’d think otherwise.
But as someone once said, “You can’t reason someone into something that they didn’t reason themselves into.” And despite avowals of weighing and being convinced by the evidence, the actual circumstances are often that religious believers have very strong motivations for their beliefs that don’t have anything to do with reasoning, evidence and assessment of evidence in anything remotely resembling the way those tools are used in modern science. Or even as those tools are used by even commited religious believers when considering many day to day, ordinary, mundane things. That prior commitment heavily weights every aspect of any evaluation they may do.
Jim
Yes Newton was at the extreme fringes of Christian orthodoxy, but he was definitely a theist.
The three body problem remains, as far as I am aware, insoluble in the general case as an analytic solution. You need to use a numeric approximation. It is a well know mathematical conundrum. Newton did not solve it, in the general case, in the analytic sense, but neither has anyone since. So the stability of the solar system, as an n-body analytic problem, remains, ultimately, unknown. So perhaps he had a little more insight than you are giving him credit for.
Well, we have millions of results for particles searched within certain windows. But there remain windows, as I’m sure Dr Carroll would concede. One limit we necessarily search within is achievable collision energy, we max out at a few TeV, which was needed to find the Higgs hopeful hump at about 125GeV.
I am not an advocate of giving up on scientific research. I am, however, sensing a slowing of big picture progress, and a lack of ultimate insight on the big questions approached through the scientific paradigm.
^JimV
Yes, I think you are on the right track.
I have found these two quotes helpful in trying to understand the category of mistakes Newton et al make with having those priors:
Sir Peter Medawar (UK biologist)
(Mind, 70, Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Phenomenon of Man”)
Stephen Law (UK philosopher)
P14, Believing Bullshit, Prometheus Books 2011
Peter
Great quotes, but obviously subjective and requiring the data referred to, to be examined carefully; our point here. I have noticed that atheists like Richard Dawkins can also attract football fan type admirers, devotees more than thinkers. I’m sure you are applying the quotes in your thinking to Christians or maybe theists in general. I personally would say they work pretty well when applied to those who implicitly believe naturalism, or popular level atheist books by people like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchins. I do have doubts from time to time. I do have unanswered questions. On the whole my beliefs remain steadfast, for the reasons I initially adopted them and because of much subsequent and ongoing evidence. So something along the lines of a growing subjective Bayesian scenario confirming Christian Theism.
I have been reading Ersnt Mayer ‘What Evolution is’ again. It just re-enforces in my mind that there are lots of clever sounding phrases for various alleged processes within the supposed big picture of evolution by natural selection but no hard proof whatsoever. He starts early in the book by acknowledging the creationism ‘problem’ and referring you out to a number of books on the issue. I think the book is worth reading whilst asking yourself, ‘why exactly do I believe this?’ I think the same applies to an atheist ‘belief’ in general. I say ‘belief’ because I think something at the back of your mind is probably in doubt about it all.
So I guess I’m just re-stating my point of view.
To clarify my point about the Standard Model, it is thought to be incomplete due to lack of data at the energy levels of and near the Big Bang – but these are not the energy levels which occur during prayer, healing the blind, turning water into wine, and so on. The mechanisms by which such events can occur at ordinary energy levels have never been identified in literally trillions of data points.
This is a point which I did not think of myself. I must give Dr. Carroll primary credit for it. However, it illustrates very well my own point that the god-hypothesis is like a magician’s trick which focuses our attention on what it purports to explain while concealing the further issues it raises.
^Simon
I will raise you a quote from physicist Richard P. Feynman:
The two previous quotes are really observations on how many ignore this principle. Maybe you are an exception and are not, dunno for sure.
As for me, yep, I bet that I fool myself about some things . . . but not about magic sky fairies. Tales from bronze-age desert tribes of some two millenia ago that are contradicted by A-Z (archaeology – zoology) of modern science don’t cut it for me.
oops, sorry Simon, that may have come across as a bit, you know, strident.
Should have been:
I am not at all convinced by two separate and contradictory accounts of the creation, of how God didn’t realise that Adam would need a companion, two accounts of how Eve came to be (complete with belly button?), through to God inseminating a human with Himself, then arranging His death & resurrection. Never mind that there is no support for any of this in modern science or that almost all of those reports from 2 or more millenia ago are actually contradicted.
Then there is that part about the Trinity with the Holy Ghost, one God but three really.
Maybe it is like quantum theory?
If you think you understand it then you have just shown you are fooling yourself?
I have never understood QM in spite of Dr Carroll et al explaining it again and again, and . . .
Peter
I don’t have all the answers and refer you back to my 14th April 12.54 am comment and the last comment of TY. Don’t worship science, it’s not big enough or smart enough. I don’t have a whole lot more to say at the moment.
Peter
I don’t have all the answers and refer you back to my 14th April 12.54 am comment and the 7.23 am comment of TY on the same date. Don’t worship science, it’s not big enough or smart enough. Science is a fallible attempt to understand the methods of God. The ones he sees fit for us to work out at present. It is nice to give people puzzles if they enjoy them. I don’t have a whole lot more to say at the moment.
I’m with Aubrey Eben: “Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don’t worship it. Feed it.”
In fact, don’t worship anything. That has the advantage of not needing to believe that evolution is false, that there are demons out there, or that African witch doctors might really be able to do black magic (presumably by allying themselves with said demons).
I was interested in Simon’s quotation: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” What does it mean to understand something “by faith”? Is “faith” a mechanism for gaining knowledge, in this use of the word. If so, how does it work? That is, what happens when someone understands something “by faith”?
Hi Paul
I have something to say on this one.
‘In fact, don’t worship anything.’ I don’t believe you are actually able to do that. You came delivered with a built in worshipper. If you attempt to eliminate all external sources of worship, perhaps through pain or disillusionment, you will end up worshipping yourself, and fall into some concoction of self-aggrandisement, self-justification, self-pity and self-absorption. To truly worship God is for everything else to come into a balanced and harmonious whole; all our values are accurately calibrated.
“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” What does it mean to understand something “by faith”? Is “faith” a mechanism for gaining knowledge, in this use of the word. If so, how does it work? That is, what happens when someone understands something “by faith”?
The quote is from Hebrews chapter 11, and earlier, in verse 1, it says “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” I don’t see that as an exhausitve definition, but it is a good starting point.
Faith is a growing (or shrinking) relational commodity. Without this commodity it is impossible to please God. (Conversely, without good understanding of the mechanics of God’s creation, it remains entirely possible to please God). The Greek word rendered ‘faith’ is ‘pistis’ and has the connotations of fidelity, persuasion and conviction. We know what ‘acting in good faith’ means. Faith works in an environment of hope, and particularly hope of a good final outcome. Faith is about growing trust, and if you trust someone fully you will feel able to accept and act on their statements. The Bible is about putting our hope in a God of love through acts of faith. Deterministic coersion is not really what God is after here; there is a mutual respect and vulnerability.
Knowledge, in the sense of understanding of observations, comes about either by revelation, or by analysis, or by some combination of the two. For the first to work, you must be trusting in a revealer who is trustworthy. You must have faith in them. So yes; faith is a mechanism for gaining knowledge.
I do not have a ‘cut the nonsense and give me an algorithm’ type answer for what faith is.
the campfire seems to be in need of more fuel.
So here is a sort of periodic table style of elements, found by what I can only assume is “by faith”:
Crispian Jago’s view of irrational nonesense.
Skeptics are never going to run out of moles to whack . . .
I said faith is a mechanism for gaining knowledge, not the only one, and not that faith can be legitimately placed in anything. There is enough evidence for anyone who really wants to know.
Simon Packer said:
This is very sad, tragic even. Also redolent of so much tragedy à la 1984 throughout history.
You seem to project a lot. You think that your experience must be the same for everyone, even if they don’t realize it. After reading your comment that I quoted I both feel for you and am scared of you.
(If Prof Carroll would prefer me to take this elsewhere, let me know: I’ve got my own blog 🙂
Simon wrote: You came delivered with a built in worshipper. If you attempt to eliminate all external sources of worship, perhaps through pain or disillusionment, you will end up worshipping yourself.
That’s an interesting assertion. How do you know it’s true? How are you defining worship? As far as I can tell, while there are people who are obsessed with money or themselves, it’s by no means everyone.
I’m not clear from what you wrote quite what you think “faith” is. Heb 11:1 seems to say it is a feeling of assurance or conviction, so I’ll go with that.
I was interested in how a feeling of being sure about something could be a way of knowing or understanding something. I think you’re saying that people can come to know something if God reveals it to them. You said that for revelation to work “you must be trusting in a revealer who is trustworthy”. There seems to be a chicken and egg problem here: if God will not reveal himself (or, as perhaps you meant, people will not take notice of that revelation) until someone trusts him, how does someone come to trust him? Was your claim true of Saul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9)? If not, why doesn’t everyone have a similar experience to Saul’s?
You did say that faith cannot legitimately be placed in anything. How do you determine what it is to be placed in, in that case? You said that “There is enough evidence for anyone who really wants to know“, but earlier in this discussion, you wrote that “I am not claiming that the evidence for Christ is totally unambiguous to all men at the intellectual level… faith would effectively be mandated if the evidence was obvious/airtight/unambiguous.” So I’m confused about how, in your view, one comes to a legitimate feeling of being sure (faith) about, say, Jesus. Can you explain that?
Simon: “‘In fact, don’t worship anything.’ I don’t believe you are actually able to do that. You came delivered with a built in worshipper. If you attempt to eliminate all external sources of worship, perhaps through pain or disillusionment, you will end up worshipping yourself, and fall into some concoction of self-aggrandisement, self-justification, self-pity and self-absorption. To truly worship God is for everything else to come into a balanced and harmonious whole; all our values are accurately calibrated.”
Weird. I distinctively remember being taught to worship. A very unnatural process. And easy to unlearn, once I brushed aside the peer pressure.