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Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 17th, 2009, 11:15 pm
by postodave

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 1:41 am
by mitchellmckain

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 7:06 am
by AllanS

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 7:09 am
by AllanS

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 3:50 pm
by postodave

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 18th, 2009, 11:33 pm
by mitchellmckain

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 19th, 2009, 5:02 pm
by cyranorox
Perhaps we can prove or intuit that a god exists, and many have. That our God exists, ie, the Holy Trinity, the God of Love, no, I don't think we can get there without revelation. And, the god of 'Do you believe in God?' is no one in particular - you might say, does not exist at all, since God is a definite being with definite descriptors and intentions.

The other great basis for knowledge is deceptively simple: the reliable[or not] witness. This is not only the face to face encounter, or the text, or the chain of custody of the evidence, but even the reliance on the self: all my memories are but the testimony of witness, my self. in fact most problems of epistemology reduce to a question of the reliability of the witness.

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 19th, 2009, 6:02 pm
by postodave
I was really seeing revelation and intuition as two sides of the same coin. If God reveals himself it is by intuition that we recognise that revelation as revelation. The only alternative I see to that is to make revelation the subject of a hypothesis. And I was not seeing intuition as something limited to what we can intuit through creation. It is our experience given through the Church or the scripture or the tradition or the liturgy that most often triggers the intuition. We say God is trinity because that is the God we experience.

If I am not making this clear I will not be understood.

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 20th, 2009, 8:38 am
by mitchellmckain
I can add that God certainly has made His existence obvious to some people in history. But I think those who are particularly significant are the first people in history, Adam and Eve. And I think it is what happened in their case that has everything to do with why God has been reluntant to make His existence so obvious to the rest of us.

It is a rather ubiquitous human tendency, starting with Adam and Eve, to blame God for our woes even when they are obviously our own mistakes and discussions with atheists have made it quite clear to me that they are ironically the most ready to blame God for everything. The more power one has in our life the easier it is to put the blame on them and so an alpowerful God makes a perfect scape-goat.

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 20th, 2009, 11:49 am
by postodave

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 20th, 2009, 11:26 pm
by postodave

Re: How can we know there is a God?

PostPosted: February 21st, 2009, 4:45 pm
by Coyote Goodfellow