The fact that these people have strong faith is not a reason for me to believe the same things they believe, but I do admire them.
I find I do admire them in some way, but when I think about it, I'm not sure why, given that I think they're wrong and illogical. I suppose I like to see people who have thought about this stuff at all, even if they reach a different conclusion from my own.
If you are absolutely determined in your atheism, then you could always point to another explanation for any miraculous or revelatory incident.
Yes. However, if enough things which you can't explain within your current model start happening, you'd hopefully become aware of the mental kludges you were having to put in to patch up the old system, and you'd eventually get a paradigm shift. robhu is right to say, as he does elsewhere in these comments, that no single thing would be convincing.
I think Pascal was partly right when he suggested that it is possible to take on a mental and spiritual discipline and train yourself to have faith even if you don't at the start of the process. But I think he, like many other Christians, had little basis for arguing that this self-training process was worth doing.
Yep, what gjm11 speaks of as the theological virtue of faith in his deconversion essay. I think it's a good idea not to move either way on the existence of God in a rush, which seems to me to be what Gareth's process of considering stuff was about. But you can reach the stage when that discipline is nonsensical, and that that point it's time to call it a day.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-09-10 11:39 pm (UTC)I find I do admire them in some way, but when I think about it, I'm not sure why, given that I think they're wrong and illogical. I suppose I like to see people who have thought about this stuff at all, even if they reach a different conclusion from my own.
If you are absolutely determined in your atheism, then you could always point to another explanation for any miraculous or revelatory incident.
Yes. However, if enough things which you can't explain within your current model start happening, you'd hopefully become aware of the mental kludges you were having to put in to patch up the old system, and you'd eventually get a paradigm shift.
I think Pascal was partly right when he suggested that it is possible to take on a mental and spiritual discipline and train yourself to have faith even if you don't at the start of the process. But I think he, like many other Christians, had little basis for arguing that this self-training process was worth doing.
Yep, what