From: gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: BELIEVERS: WHAT WOULD MAKE YOU NOT BELIEVE IN GOD?
Date: 8 Jan 93 22:52:43 GMT
Organization: DSC Communications Corp, Plano, TX

p00261@psilink.com (Robert Knowles) poses the question:

  >To the believers:  What would make you not believe in god?

This is a very interesting question. Indeed, it is hard to say.

I think the reason is that my belief in God is not something that I
arrived at out of a single strain of logical arguments and conclusions,
or even out of a single, dramatically enlightening life experience, 
but out of a number of experiences, some intellectual, and others not,
as well as what I can only characterize as a kind of ongoing aesthetic 
judgement, over many years of my life.  To really describe why I do 
believe in God would require really the story of my life, or at least 
a long autobiographical essay.  And my belief, which I can characterize
in many aspects that might be apropos of rational debate and discussions 
about God and atheism, is different today, grown so to speak, than it 
was, say, five years ago.  Likewise my vision of it is a lot clearer now 
than it was.

I suggest also that many believers who enter into the debate trying to
prove Christianity to atheists also came to their faith through a much more
complex process than the logic of the (to them) rational arguments that
they put forward.  This is especially true, for example, of proof texts
and prophecies.  For me many of these texts become clear as a result of
the insight that has resulted from faith.  And some of them are not so
clear.  Likewise there are contradictory texts that, quite frankly, I
suspect may be in error, but others that become the touchstone to the
most remarkable new insights and mysteries.  But had you shown them to
me when I was a skeptic, I would not have been convinced of their logic.
That is why I find these arguments via proof texts to be not only 
counterproductive (from an evangelical point of view) but even distasteful.
These things are too precious to be used as clubs to compell someone to
believe by force of logical argument.

Being not so totally enlightened (in the sense of the Buddha or perahps
Francis of Assisi) that I am completely in control of my body and mind,
I can imagine circumstances under which I would deny God.  But they are
not pleasant to contemplate. However I can't imagine a sequence of logical
arguments that would touch on those realms of life which make the spirit
for me a reality.  From a logical point of view it is true, you can't prove
the non-existence of Fred Smith.  But my experience of the divine, which
includes rational consideration among other things, goes beyond this.
It does not, however, permit of my using it to persuade others of the
rationality of the existence of God (though I may be drawn into the
discussion from time to time).

I would say that I believe that each person's path to God, is unique,
and that for each that path may lead in the opposite direction.  The
statement of Christ, "I am the way... no one comes to the Father but
by me" does not contradict this.  Likewise, Christ's path to each
person is also unique, even as each individual is unique.  And invariably,
the traversal of that path involves much more than a few philosophical
arguments.

I should add one anecdote.  Somewhere along the way, I was deeply impressed
by the theological arguments of one man, a liberal Jew and pupil of Martin 
Buber.  When I read Arthur Lelyveld's book, "Atheism is Dead", all kinds of lights went on.  But I realized later that it was not just the force
of his arguments, but that plus a whole sequence of preparatory growing
experiences, a culmination point of which was the pulling of much of them
together by way of my reading that book.  I went on to become a Christian,
and I don't even have the book anymore or remember its essential argument.
But I will always be grateful to Arthur Lelyveld for that moment when I
picked up and read his book.  I could say the same for a musician, Donald
Francis Tovey, whose work is strictly about music, but which profoundly
enlightened my thinking about things spiritual and culminated in new insight
at a later juncture in my life.

Sorry this is a little long, but as you said, it is harder for the
believer to get a hold of the nature of his faith (and its relationship
to knowledge) than it is for the non-believer to do the corrseponding
thing.  The problem is that undoing it all would be for me undoing a lot
more than a single life experience or a rational position.  And for that
reason, the whole complex of my "reasons for believing" are also not
necessarily applicable to someone else - though some of them may be.

I would close with the observation that neither my faith nor my knowledge
do I consider to be complete, or the same today as it was yesterday. This
is not a question of arbitrary change, but of growth.

Gerry Palo (73237.2006@compuserve.com).
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc,alt.pagan