Well, CP, the full extent my argument has actually only been that it is neither more nor less rational to believe in theism as it is to believe in atheism. Which may be correct was never something I intended to touch upon in this argument (though if you are interested, I'll summarise my thoughts in that regard by saying that it is through exploring of the consequences of this or that concept of ultimate reality in comparison with our experience and other beliefs that we have the best hope of evaluating them). Certain statements earlier in the topic lead me to contest this.
This I'm not too sure about. You are essentially repeating the ideas of Berkeley and Kant here, but those are under big debate today (equal-sided debate, too), and the precise relationship, if one exists, between material things and ideas remains undetermined as of yet. (personally, I like the ideas of Hegel and Russell, but that's just me) There are branches of mathematics which are quite detached from what we see in the world today, and I think that more data is required here before putting in a good guess. Also, the first portion of the pursuit of science involves going backwards in a way, since we first gather experimental data and then attempt to work back to more basic constructs that could work together to form those ideas. These ideas were discovered from existing things in reality, but that does not mean that they could not have come in other ways as well. Also, from these basic rules, new conjectures can come up as well, which may or may not have any relationship to the material reality; in fact, looking at the way things have occurred in history, I think there may well be a transfinite number of ideas directly linked to any one given idea. I know I am sort of thinking in terms of logic here as my mind is used to that, but I could say the same about you, or just about anyone else in the world.
I am directly citing Kant at that spot, actually. Significant portions of that post were excerpts from some of my old papers, and certain parts of them were maintained not because they were vitally important to this discussion, but because removing them would have upset the flow of the arguments. Check out the footnotes and everything!
But anyway, I still find that "If A, then B" is empty in and of itself. I can do whatever logical gymnastics I want with the argument by itself, but in the end I still need to say "If A, then B,
and A is the case, therefore B" if I want to actually be able to make some sort of truth claim about the world. Regardless the exact nature of the relation of ideas to objective reality, logic cannot pull itself up by the bootstraps. Heck, even the Ontological Argument for God assumes that it is the case that God is that greater than which nothing can be thought, and obviously that someone has thought about that, and it is the closest thing going to logic trying to prove itself. No, logic can only tell us the consequences of something
if it is the case, it cannot tell us whether it is, in fact, the case. For that we need to look to something outside of logic.
Regarding the backwards motion of science, I would point out the ideas of Thomas Kuhn in
The Nature of Scientific Revolutions. Essentailly, Kuhn argues that scientific revolutions are a matter of paradigm shift rather than of new discoveries. According to his model, scientific knowledge is dependent on the hypotheses held by the scientist. Einstein's theory of relativity came after a long period of everyone trying to figure out some very puzzling experimental results. The thing was, the experiments didn't do anything to change the physicists' ideas of space and time, they were just some puzzling results. What changed everything (at an incredibly deep and fundamental level, too) was not the evidence. What changed it all was Einstein's idea. Scientists have to think first before they can see and understand the universe; it is impossible to understand it without a prior idea of what one will find. The universe today seems still quite determined to do some very puzzling things that don't make sense in either relativity or quantum mechanics, but nobody has come up with any revolutionary new ideas, so science still sees things much the same way because it still thinks much the same way. If you've read
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, you might remember Wonko the Sane, who isn't, and he isn't precisely because he actually tries to see first and think second. The model of inquiry he describes, "See first, think later, then test," is a wonderfully ideal conception of science, and "the way it should be"; the problem is that its doesn't actually work.
When Wonko says "But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting," he is quite right. In conducting experiments, the experimenter tests his hypothesis and finds out if it is true or false. But in so doing, the whole thing is geared towards the results one is expecting, and moreover, one will generally discard those results deemed irrelevant to the hypothesis, and ignore all the variables deemed irrelevant.
Incidentally, this criticism more or less undermines the scientific claim to true and unbiassed knowledge, and as we read in Lyotard's
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge if you are familiar with it, means that the scientific way of seeing things is dependent on the scientific rules of discourse. Its knowledge arises as a function of its metanarrative, not from things as they really are. Your thought regarding a web of interconnected ideas might also be another reason to check out Lyotard: he has some similar things to say about language (i.e. the conveyor of ideas, information and knowledge) that you might find interesting.
Anyway, I don't intend to do anything with that right now, I thought I might just bring it up for interest's sake as much as anything.
Yes, that is as irrational, but there are still some reasons why we should prefer it to the alternative. Remember that atheism has one major advantage over any form of religion; it fits in with the currently accepted science, most notably the cosmological principle of general uniformity and the looped-universe system. (you yourself are saying that this god does is not subject to any natural laws) Now you have stated numerous times that it cannot be shown whether either explanation is the more probable one, and I fully agree with that. Therefore, to keep the number of additional variables as low as possible for the purposes of temporary problem-solving, the atheism course should be taken into account first, fully analyzed using the rules of logic, and then we should go for the religions. This is the way any theoretical problem in real life is solved; the fastest course to the end is first used only using absolutely necessary variable, and the secondary variables are then taken into account one by one. (heck, that's how the general relativity equation was formulated, and why the special one came first) The best thing, however, is to keep this problem in an indetermined state as far as science and philosophy goes, but to follow a course of atheism in everyday life, once again to prevent complications that may or may not be necessary; religion merely acts as a shield from what most people perceive, which makes individuals feel good, but leads to stagnation of society as a whole. (nobody perceives a god, directly or indirectly; they just assume that he exists) Unlike in most situations, the accuracy of the religion/science/whatever is not an issue here, as both explanations are equally accurate as far as we know, and so we must go by what we perceive. (for the moment anyway)
Well, first of all, I do not agree that religions are necessarily incompatible with currently accepted scientific theories. Returning to Christianity, since it is the example with which I am most familiar, it is not necessarily true that a Christian must demand that the entire universe was created in 144 hours and that the theory of evolution is a falsity. Certainly some do, but that is just their opinion and way of interpreting the Bible, rather than something intrinsic to the religion. It is my opinion, in fact, that the hardline "creationism" that insists upon Genesis chapter 1 being a literal, blow by blow account of the mechanics of God's creative act is actually the product (I refrain from using the term aberration, though it was my gut instinct) of a mixture of Christian faith with the general manner of thinking of modern Western culture. Westerners are a scientifically oriented people. We like our knowledge to be universal, absolute and static, and generally regard literal, factual, and preferably empirically verifiable statements to be somehow of greater truth value than any other kind. In modern Western culture, it is almost natural that a mind which was not paying attention to what it was doing would assume that the Bible, which is supposed to be the revelation of God (written by human hands, to be sure, but under divine inspiration such that through these writings God reveals Himself to humanity) and thus a vehicle of truth, would have to deliver truth in the form of literal, factual statements.
However, this is forcing the Bible into a mould it was never meant to fit. The Hebrews did not live in the same sort of culture as modern Westerners, and the Bible is not written to reflect modern Western culture. The Bible is not a science text, and never was intended to be. Literary analysis of the Genesis 1 account reveals, for example, three "days" of creating an environment, and three of filling that environment, indicating purposes at work in the story which were not that of technical description. It is interesting to note that nowhere else in the Bible is any reference made to Genesis 1 that would indicate the sort of literal, mechanically factual understanding of the passage that fundamentalist Christians insist upon today. Also, fundamentalist creationists often fail to appreciate properly that "day" in Hebrew had a far more extended idiomatic range than it does in English, and to talk of a "day" was only to talk of a period of time. Some FC's have tried to use another passage of Scripture that says "A day is as a thousand years to the Lord" to argue that it was actually six thousand years that God took to make the universe, but this I regard as a very silly argument on a number of levels, and one which moreover reveals again the modernist mode of thinking trying to force the Bible into a form it was never meant to fit.
Regarding evolution specifically, neither the statements of Genesis 1 that God said ‘Let there be _____' and it was so, nor the statement of Genesis 2's more specifically human-oriented account that God made man out of the dust of the earth in any way tell us the mechanics of the how these things occurred. The evolutionary process could just as easily explain the mechanics of these things as any other theory. It might even be better. At any rate, I myself give considerable credence to the theory of evolution, and find it in no way incompatible with a well thought out Christianity.
Basically, the Bible isn't a science text, and was never intended to be. The idea of God creating the universe is as compatible with Aristotelian spheres as it is with quantum mechanics, and is tied to none of them. Those who try to use the Bible as a science text are misusing it, while those who reject it for not being a science text, or for supposedly being a bad science text, are likewise making demands of it that it was never meant to fulfill.
Anyway, on to the next sentence of your quote
:
The fact that I say that God is not subject to natural laws does not mean that the idea of God is incompatible with current scientific thought. A God who is not subject to natural laws and can actively engage with nature (both in ways that conform to natural laws or do not) is incompatible with the metaphysical idea of a closed, inviolable Nature, but metaphysical statements are outside the ken of scientific enquiry. To describe the manner in which things usually behave within the natural realm and thereby make general predictions and further hypotheses with which to investigate the behaviour of nature is the task of science. To describe realities that might exist outside of nature is not science's task; it lacks the necessary tools to do so. When science tries to make claims about what may or may not exist beyond the natural realm, it has stepped out of its bounds. The idea of a closed universe is the claim that nothing exists outside of the natural realm that could interfere with it in any way, but this is not a scientifically ascertainable claim: it is a metaphysical claim. The moment any scientist makes an assertion about reality beyond the confines of nature, he has left science behind and entered the realm of metaphysics. And he is certainly allowed to do so if he wishes, but he cannot them claim that his metaphysical position is a scientific one. In short, the idea of God is not incompatible with current scientific thought, but with certain metaphysical thoughts currently circulating among the scientific community.
Next small point (just a matter of clarification):
Most technically I would not say that I believe it cannot be shown which position is the more probable, but that I believe neither position can be demonstrated to be less rational than the other.
Moving right along...
When you say that the atheistic position enjoys a simpler set of assumptions than does the theistic, you are also making a certain assumption about the atheists assumptions. By this view, the atheist views the universe in accordances with a set of assumptions (A) regarding that universe, whereas the theist views the universe with the set of assumptions (A+G), where (G) is the assumption of God's existence. Applying Occam's Razor, you find the atheistic position to be superior.
I contest this view. The atheist has a very specific assumption regarding God, namely the assumption (G*) of God's non-existence. Without this assumption, one is by definition no longer an atheist. With this in mind, let us now call (A) a set of assumptions regarding the universe that makes no reference to God. Since the atheist does have an assumption regarding God, namely (G*), and the theist likewise has an assumption, namely (G), regarding God, it seems that neither one holds merely to (A), but rather to (A+G*) and (A+G) respectively. Occam's Razor finds neither (A+G) nor (A+G*) to be any simpler than the other, and thus neither position is found superior according to this criterion.
If neither position can be demonstrated to be superior according to the criterion of simplicity, then the remainder of your argument for the following of atheism in everyday life is unjustifiable.
Continuing along...
Regarding your statements about religion acting as a shield, this seems to be an emotionally rooted position, rather than a rational one.
Also...
I would not grant the premise that no one can any perception of God. Mystics of all sorts claim to have had encounters with the divine, and a Christian will point you to such stories as that of Moses (to choose a prominent example) or Jeremiah or Paul or innumerable others as people who directly perceived God in some fashion. Numerous Christians today most certainly believe that God is actively involved in our world and have had experiences that confirm this to them (my brother's healing, as but one example). It still remains that any and all of these perceptions of God require that one be willing to grant that they actually are manifestations of God and not something else if they are to be recognised as such. It is possible that Moses standing on the mountain talking to God could have instead perceived it as a delusion or the result of something funny is his goat milk, but he did not because he found more probable the idea that what he had experienced could be explained as an encounter with God. The experience itself will only be granted as a perception of God if we are willing to grant that such things are possible.
Now, I do not believe that an experience of God can be had by an individual without he have the concept of God resident in his concept of ultimate reality, but that is because he will not recognise such an experience as such, rather than that the experience itself might not be God actually doing something.
One thing I have already stated in this thread many times is that I do not have so much of a problem with the religious ideas themselves, but rather the manner in which people accept them. In topics like these, where much is open to speculation, people should try to think independently unless a more precise, logical proof comes up, for each existing one is about equally correct. Now these religions completely discourage independent thought (Hinduism started off better here, but I have seen that in practice it has become the same); for example, many of the pro-religion people here seem to "believe in the Bible," which a considerable portion of the world uses as an assumption for an absolute truth (including you), since the book is essentially a set of rules to follow - "obey these rules and god sends you to heaven; break them and god sends you to hell," both of which are simply things that appeal to the practical side of humans. I stand behind my contention that it is less likely that an archaic book full of logical contradictions and cryptic language contains all of the possible knowledge in the universe than it is for the knowledge not to exist in the concentrated form of ideas just yet. (this is confusing to explain here in detail, but I'll write more in the book)
I will concede that many adherents to a religious persuasion (
any religious persuasion, I might add, including atheism) do so without any real critical thought about what they believe. Many people in the Western world today embrace atheistic ideas, not because they have really thought them through, but simply because that is what is to be found in our cultural milieu these days. But this is not really a fault of the religion in question (it is probably obvious by now, but I consider atheism to be a religion, at least for purposes of this discussion), but the fault of laziness and/or stupidity on the part of the uncritical believer.
To answer your charge in more specific detail, I'll use the specific objections you raise. First of all, the idea that the Bible is the "absolute truth" is one in serious need of definition. I wouldn't phrase things that way at all, if it were me (which right now it is
). The Bible is understood to be one of the primary mediums by which God has revealed himself to humanity. It is possible to say therefore that the Bible "is" true, but I find that this particular formulation causes a great deal of confusion in the minds of believers, and questions in the minds of disbelievers, and is not very helpful. If we want to understand what the Bible is all about in regard to this issue, we had best start from the position of asking what the Bible's intentions are, rather than what it "is".
If, as we said, the Bible amounts to a collection of writings which together reveal God to humanity, then it is safe to assume that its intention is in fact to reveal God to us, and that its writing will be geared towards that goal. Now the collection of writings that is the Bible span a considerable time period, over 1400 years or so, and include all manner of literary genres. Moreover, these individual writings are each addressed to a different situation, and within themselves have different intentions guiding their composition. Histories are very different from love poetry, which is very different from legal stipulations, which are very different from proverbs, which are very different from letters. In each book of the Bible, however, it is contended that God reveals something of himself to us, and it is this revelatory factor that guides the decision to include or not include any particular writing in to the Bible.
Now, if these many different books of different times and genres are each speaking to a different situation, it is not unreasonable to expect tem to say different things, and this seems to be precisely the case. At certain times, God is represented as wrathful because it was needed for God's wrathful side to be shown to rectify the problems being addressed by that particular book. At other times he shows his mighty protective side, and at others his tender and loving side. You see, God reveals himself in and through the world he has put us in, and as the world is a dynamic and changing place, so also is his interaction with us in the world. In effect, what I am saying is that the Bible is contextually based, and must always be understood in reference to its context. The truth of the Bible is not a disconnected truthfulness, floating above the chances and changes of the passing world, but one which is entirely situated within the world, for that is where God reveals himself to us.
This also address the concern that the Bible is contradictory. Some people object to the Bible on the basis of some apparently contradictory statements, while others will adamantly insist that the Bible isn't contradictory at all. The fact is that the Bible does contain statements which, when isolated, do appear contradictory. This is perhaps most easily illustrated in encapsulated form by the Book of Proverbs (near the middle of the Bible if anyone is interested), which is, not surprisingly, a book full mostly of one- and two-liner proverbs. Many of these proverbs will outright contradict one another, but when reading them it is blatantly clear that each one of these proverbs is meant to address a different situation. It is not that this or that proverb is not true, but that some speak to this context and others to that. In like fashion, when trying to learn from the Bible and apply it to our lives, it is important to consider carefully the context of a biblical account in question and compare it with our own situation to determine the suitability of the passage of showing us how God would reveal himself it a situation like ours.
In short, the truth of the Bible is a contextual, situated truth entirely unlike, say, the absolute and universally applicable categorical imperative of Kant and followers. We in our modern mindset tend to consider truth to be set apart, floating above the flux, change and motion of reality as the immutable governing rule. The Bible does not carry this peculiarly post-17th century Western tendency in its nature, and appears to carry a different way of thought about truth. I find that the easiest way to grasp this different understanding of truth is to think of truth as something organic, part of an active, dynamic, changing and growing reality. Essentially, truth must always have its context under a dynamic model, and that context can and does change. Moment by moment the world is created afresh, and its meaning grows, though the past remains too. In a world ever-renewed, no static, totalising truth can suffice. In a world that is new each day, we must be able to find meaning freshly each day. Truth in such a context is no longer absolute, but is narrative and dynamic, growing with the story of the world each day. The truth of the past can be added to as new situations emerge. Christianity is not Paramenidean, it is not timeless truth. From the Biblical and Christian perspective, truth is real and grows even as the world grows through time. Biblical truth is contextual, situated truth intimately involved with the changing world, not the rarified and detached truth that we modern scientific Westerners so easily and unconsciously slip into assuming. I will admit that reorienting our view of truth seems at first a bit of a difficult thing to do (the power of habit is not to be underestimated
), but once we do so we find ourselves in a far better position to understand the Bible and its message.
To say that the Bible is essentially just a book of rules to follow is analogous to saying that science is what tells us why dropped objects fall to the ground; such a description is grossly inadequate, and misses the point entirely. The Bible is, as I said above, the written medium of God's revelation of himself to humanity. That God's moral precepts would be a part of that revelation is to be expected, but the revelation is far broader than that, meant to show us all sorts of things about God, not just his moral directives. Christianity's central claim and concern is not really about moral precepts. It is Christ's resurrection and his promise of resurrection to us that are Christianity's primary concern. Moral precepts are adjuncts to the fuller explication of the how's and why's of this concern, and arise again as a part of the consequences of Christianity, but they are not the point of it all.
Finally, if ever I met a Christian who claimed that the Bible somehow contained within it pages all of the knowledge there was to be had in the universe, my response would be
. I'd probably then go find someone else to talk to so that I could have an actually meaningful conversation. Of course the Bible doesn't contain all knowledge! It reveals to us some important things we need to know about God, that's all. If I want to learn something about economics, I go read an economics text, not the Bible.
quote:
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The most basic thing the human mind does in forming understanding is believe. Any logician, theologian, philosopher, or psychologist will tell you that before the mind carries out, indeed is even able to carry out, any type of reasoning, it must first have some previous extra-rational foundations upon which to build. And so, to understand anything about anything, the mind must have some final, irreducible "truths" upon which all its further understanding and belief is based. These irreducible assumptions form the structure of one's concept of ultimate reality. This structure can be fleshed out by reasonings and beliefs based on these assumptions, but the core lies in the irreducible assumptions themselves.
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I already stated this exact same thing in my earlier post; what is the point you are trying to make here?
Only to state clearly the position from which I am arguing. See above for further discussion.
So basically what you are saying here is that the absolute truth does not exist, but only the perceptive does. You have reached the "perceptive paradox" here, because if everything is perceptively true and false at the same time, while nothing can be absolutely true or false (it is indeterminate in the absolute), then the statement of the perceptivity differing between each person is also not absolutely true. Because of this type of thing that comes up in every attempted deduction, we cannot pursue this means to an answer at all; that fundamental assumption allows one to derive a set of rules from what we see.
Ah, now that is not actually what I am saying. As a Christian, I do believe that there is an objective, non-perception-based reality about which our perceptions are true or false. It is one thing to say that our views of reality differ, and another to say that reality itself is indeterminate. One can argue that all our perceptions of reality are informed by our categories of interpretation, yet it still remains true that believing in certain categories is one thing and believing that some thing or event has been encountered that fits into those categories is another. For example, the statement "John F. Kennedy is dead" may depend on my categories of identity, time, and death, but regardless whether those categories are granted they are being employed to posit a description of an encountered situation. Likewise, if I encounter a situation which my currently held categories of interpretation are inadequate to explain to me, I need to modify my categories to account for the new experience, not discount the experience.
Perhaps I should clarify one very important point: I am
not arguing that it is impossible to judge between two different concepts of ultimate reality, but only that neither one can be dismissed as inherently illogical (unless, of course, a given concept includes logically necessarily false statements, but such are hardly of concern to us here: both "God exists" and "God does not exist" are logically contingent statements). So long as we remain strictly within the bounds of logic and reason, there is no way to determine whether (G) or (G*) is correct. However, I do believe that evaluations can be made between when we look beyond the scope of pure reason and consider how well the ramifications of this or that concept of reality fit with our experience (although even then we must be careful not to exclude experiences that may not fit our expectations, and in general remember our own fallibility). I have not attempted any such comparison in this topic, but only have been trying to disabuse people of the notion that theism is inherently illogical so that they will be open-minded enough to consider embarking upon such a comparison.
Actually, that has nothing to with that assumption.
Oh, I know.
I just meant that as I was looking for a place where you stated it, I came across this other unrelated thing, and decided to comment on it.
it says that the absolute truth should be collected and analyzed before the perceptive truth in an attempt to keep things as simple as possible for the purposes of deduction.
This, I am assuming, is your first assumption. Unless you are using these terms to signify something quite different from what I understand those terms to mean, absolute truth is what is true apart from anyone's perception of it, while perceptive truth is the truth that we perceive about absolute reality. Now, if it is true that we can only directly access our perceptions, then we cannot collect the absolute truth or analyse it directly at all.
Now, your assumption appears to be that there must be a human god who takes care of humans, which is fine at the moment since it cannot be proved or disproved, but it fails to explain other things in the world, such as why he is not doing a very good job of it. It needs to be either altered or discarded altogether.
First of all, God is beyond our comprehension entirely. He has revealed himself to us in human terms because that is the only way anything of his revelation could be at all comprehensible to us, but it would be folly to assume that God really was nothing more than an omnicompetent "human." We don't understand God, we haven't the capacity; we can only accept what he has chosen to show to us using a means we can grasp, and a clear-thinking Christian will frankly tell you that all this is only a dim approximation of the truth regarding God and his nature.
As for explaining other things in the world, that is the task of theology, or one of its tasks anyway. Theology is the attempt to use our reason to try to extend our knowledge regarding God and associated beliefs and beliefs systems. The specific question you raise, the Problem of Evil, does in fact have its theological answers, and if one cares to look into the discipline, one will find them. If you want a particularly brilliant and lucid discussion of the subject, you might try C.S. Lewis'
The Problem of Pain, although there are all sorts of things out there to read on the subject.
That is true to some extent, but then again, nothing can be proved or disproved. We can, however, give things a probability with regards to existing science constructs and that which we can objectively perceive. For the third time, I give you this example: suppose I were to say that I am the god and have created the universe and given it its laws, and so I must be right about everything. This proposition could of course not be disproved, but most people (well, most people with any tad of sense anyway ) would reject it because it does not fit in with what they directly perceive.
See above regarding the evaluation of different schemas.
I have a feeling you are trying to avoid the question here. What you are saying is that simply because the logic system is not adequate for explain these "miracles," (which is doubtful in the first place) they should go unexplained? Here is what I mean about religion discouraging further thinking; this need to progress both scientifically and socially is in my opinion what seperates the man from the animal, and religion tries to dull the scientific part of it. If you are convinced that it is not possible to explain using logic, then devise a new system of thought (it is possible in theory to do this from existing ideas) to break this "miracle" into basic constructs simple enough to predict a similar thing in theoretical situations, and maybe even change in practice. (technology) As for the "god putting new things into the universe" part, I said earlier that the laws of science are theoretically alterable, so this sounds perfectly fine, but - and I will use your analogy here - people will try to find out how the third billiard ball came onto the table instead of just accepting its new existence there, and so it should be similarly seen on a larger scale how or why this god suddenly changed the laws and whether or not he will try to change the laws again in the future, rather than merely accepting the effects of the change. (thinking "backwards" once again, so to speak)
Not trying to avoid it at all.
I do not mean in any way to say that logic is inadequate to explain miracles, nor that they are to go unexplained. Whether a miracle is ultimately the occurrence of a
creatio ex nihilo or a temporary alteration of the usual behaviour of nature, in neither of these cases do I see any reason to think that logic would have to be revoked. Indeed, if logic were revoked, the idea of miracle would go with it, for without rationality the perceived events would become utterly meaningless to us, and if they were meaningless we could not understand them to be acts of God. As I said at the end of the paragraph you were referring to, if we want to find the point at which a miracle occurred, we need to examine the results and determine what was needed to bring them about. This obviously implies the continued viability of logic and reason in dealing with the occurrence of a miracle.
As for finding out how a
creatio ex nihilo works, that is perfectly fine with me. Go right ahead, I'd be very happy to hear anything you might discover (not sarcastic).
Of course, if you want to understand anything of the causes leading up to a
creatio ex nihilo you must step outside of the natural realm, since such a thing has, by its very definition, no antecedent natural causes. A
creatio ex nihilo is a terminus point so long as our field of view is confined to the natural.
And finally, I post the same questions yet again, that still remain unanswered: How or why did god come into existence, and also, why do you like the god? He cannot be the absolute, or anything even close, if he is what they say in any of the religions, for he would then have no effect on human affairs in the manner which he supposedly does. (and if we are going by the Bible being the "word of god," he must have forgotten what he did with the universe by the time he uh, dictated it, judging from the number of errors in it )
Basically, God did not come into existence. Coming-to-be is a concept that requires the idea of temporality in order to be formulated, and God, it is maintained, does not exist subject to a temporal mode. The idea of atemporal existence is a hard one for us to really wrap our minds around, of course. The closest approximation I have found is to think of everything as being in the present to God. In this eternal present, God simply is.
If that isn't a good enough explanation for you of why no explanation for God's existence can be given, I offer this argument:
1. The truth of
There exist things whose existence it is logically possible to explain cannot be explained by there being things whose existence it is logically possible to explain (the existence of
those things is just what is to be explained).
If little Susie asks about why there are golden retriever puppies, she can be told about golden retriever parents. If she asks about golden retriever parents, she can be told about golden retriver grandparents. But if she then asks about why there are golden retrievers at all, she cannot be told about golden retriever parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents, or the like; these will all be the tings she want to know about - why have any golden retrievers existed at all. If little Susie asks why there ever have been any possibly explicable things at all that exist though they might not have existed, she cannot properly be told about there being possibly explicable things that exist but might not have existed; these are what she is asking about.
Premise 1 is plainly true; whatever Xs are,
there being Xs cannot explain
there being Xs.
2. That a logically contingent existential proposition is true can only be explained by some other existential proposition being true.
If, in the relevant sense of explanation, A's truth entails B's truth, A entails B. No existential proposition is entailed by a set of propositions that does not contain any existential propositions.
3. If an existential proposition does not concern something whose existence it is logically possible to explain, it concerns something whose existence is logically impossible to explain.
4. The truth of
There exist things whose existence it is logically possible to explain can only be explained by a true existential proposition concerning something whose existence it is logically impossible to explain (from 1, 2, 3).
The upshot of this argument is that it is inevitable that one should come to something whose existence it is impossible to explain. For the theist, this is God. The atheist is left to find for himself something that exists and whose existence is logically impossible to explain. By this argument, it is shown that demanding an explanation for the existence of God is invalid.
As for why we love him, it is because we believe in the Judeo-Christian God, who has revealed himself to us as a God who loves us and has done astounding things on our behalf because of it. When you love your mother, it is because she is your mother, the woman who has done so much for you, indeed sacrificed herself in so many ways for your benefit. In the case of people who do not love their mothers, it is invariably because they had mothers who did not love them as they should have. Similarly, we love God because he first loved us. It is not without reason that God is often described as our Father. To believe, really believe, in Christianity and still to despise God seems to us Christians so contrary to human nature as to be nearly incomprehensible. If one actually believes that God did all that Christianity says he did, if he came to earth and became a man like us and suffered and died, and then rose again to defeat death for us, and promised us that we too will be resurrected to a life better than anything we could ever imagine, how could one respond to such incredible love with anything but love in return?
