Originally posted by phookat
Only a sufficient answer to all of that would constitute evidence for your God.
Saint Thomas Aquinas did a fine job reasoning God's existence from observable fact.
To let it end there renders the account incomplete.
Another piece of evidence for God's existence is the reaction of the human heart that crys "Father" when God reveals himself.
Also, the changed lives under the sway of God direction and ordering. A study of such can be found in William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience.
To say "a person's reaction to what they say is God and how they conduct their affairs afterwards is all silliness because all sorts of people say and do the most outlandsh things because they say God
revealed Himself to them," is a true statement. To say, therefore, "reaction" and "the contrast between past and present conducts fails to prove God's existence" errs.
In our present state something
is missing.
To object that since our knowledge and experience is incomplete, therefore all knowledge is suspect and poppycock errs.
Becuase many, if not most, reason poorly if not wrongly and have not digested the sailient points of discussions that can be culled from the time of Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, (the discussion predates them, but they and others pick-up the thread well), we confront a bit of a problem.
It's not too far from
trying to reinvent the wheel if today "the wheel" were considered useless. What good today is a once handy invention if it be no longer valued or considered useful. At best it is thought to be a quaint antiquarian notion. At worst, a dangerous idea whose power has been demonstrated able to scuttle empire and ambition. In our time, the rise and fall of Communism would evidence such. Prior to our time Francis Bacon's
The New Atlantis lays out well the ambitions and assumptions that run counter to the claim that God not only exists, but also He is as much a fact as we are and has not hid Himself and has something to say to us about what He would have us do and be. Bacon is pretty approchable. And, contemporary also in his ambitions and answers.
The information and records of honest attempts to answer the question
What Is There[/b] remain open to all who want to delve.
That the methods employed and some of the conclusions reached from roughly B.C. 500 - 1300 A.D. are "out of fashion" and not taken seriously -- other than as a museum is taken seriously -- is true. Especially at most colleges.
That they have been shown to be false by superior reasoners and men is false.
As to Pooh's claim that our knowledge and/or our understanding is incomplete, he's correct.
As to his concluding, therefore no substantive answer can be reached is false.
As to his "Nobel Prize" jest -- if it be in good humor -- I know, you know, and he knows it's irrelevant.
If he be saying such to mock, and I am not saying he is since he has not told me why he has done so,-- appleaing to what he expects to be a point of view by most of us all -- he guilty merely of bad form.
If he expects his jest will carry the day, causing readers to agree with him because since we do not know all we cannot know at all, he errs.
