What reason is there to support belief?
1. First of all, there are many things that people believe that are not supported by evidence, but, rather, by the preferences of those holding the belief, simply by ideas that we find attractive, or that we would like to believe.
a. But in the search for truth, one should attempt to give up subjective preferences in favor of objective facts. And this is done via logic, evidence, and science.
2. Reasonable folk accept the Law of Noncontradiction: this means that contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Or, simply, that the opposite of true is false.
As Avicenna, the Persian, aptly put it: Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
a. You meet friends, a married couple, and ask if it is true that she is going to have a baby. She says 'yes'- at the same moment that he says 'no.' Both cannot be true.
b. How about this: the Bible says that Jesus died, and then rose from the dead. But the Q'ran says that Jesus existed, but didn't die: "...but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear..."
Sura 4: 157-158.
Logic tells us that both cannot be true.
c. Or...God exists, or God doesn't exist.
3. Perhaps the philosopher David Hume should be beaten. His views are responsible for much of the skepticism advanced today. Hume, an empiricist, claimed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition (as 'triangles have three sides'), or must be based on the senses. Thus, any metaphysical claims, i.e., God, must be meaningless.
a. As to why Hume should be beaten, his views are neither definitions of quantity, nor empirically verifiable....so they must be meaningless.
4. Then there is Immanuel Kant- even worse for believers! He goes further than Hume, claiming that we cannot really know the real world, because "My mind imposes a framework on the object of knowledge as I attempt to know the object. I can never truly know an object as it is." www.csun.edu/~kdm78513/subjects/philosophy/documents/.../kant.doc
a. So....if your mind structures all sense data, and one can never know the real object, the real world, Kant contradicts his premise: no one can know the real world while he claims to know something about it...that is, that it is unknowable. So, the truth about the real world is that there are no truths about the real world?
5. So much for Hume's and Kant's use in destroying 'religious' truths.
From " I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist," by Norman L. Geisler,Frank Turek
1. First of all, there are many things that people believe that are not supported by evidence, but, rather, by the preferences of those holding the belief, simply by ideas that we find attractive, or that we would like to believe.
a. But in the search for truth, one should attempt to give up subjective preferences in favor of objective facts. And this is done via logic, evidence, and science.
2. Reasonable folk accept the Law of Noncontradiction: this means that contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Or, simply, that the opposite of true is false.
As Avicenna, the Persian, aptly put it: Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
a. You meet friends, a married couple, and ask if it is true that she is going to have a baby. She says 'yes'- at the same moment that he says 'no.' Both cannot be true.
b. How about this: the Bible says that Jesus died, and then rose from the dead. But the Q'ran says that Jesus existed, but didn't die: "...but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear..."
Sura 4: 157-158.
Logic tells us that both cannot be true.
c. Or...God exists, or God doesn't exist.
3. Perhaps the philosopher David Hume should be beaten. His views are responsible for much of the skepticism advanced today. Hume, an empiricist, claimed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition (as 'triangles have three sides'), or must be based on the senses. Thus, any metaphysical claims, i.e., God, must be meaningless.
a. As to why Hume should be beaten, his views are neither definitions of quantity, nor empirically verifiable....so they must be meaningless.
4. Then there is Immanuel Kant- even worse for believers! He goes further than Hume, claiming that we cannot really know the real world, because "My mind imposes a framework on the object of knowledge as I attempt to know the object. I can never truly know an object as it is." www.csun.edu/~kdm78513/subjects/philosophy/documents/.../kant.doc
a. So....if your mind structures all sense data, and one can never know the real object, the real world, Kant contradicts his premise: no one can know the real world while he claims to know something about it...that is, that it is unknowable. So, the truth about the real world is that there are no truths about the real world?
5. So much for Hume's and Kant's use in destroying 'religious' truths.
From " I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist," by Norman L. Geisler,Frank Turek
