Totenkindly
@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2007
- Messages
- 50,269
- MBTI Type
- BELF
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- 594
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
When it comes to belief in God I actually didn't want to believe he existed. However my experiences have lead me to believe otherwise.You are right though that I didn't conclude God existed through logic. (Logic is simply how I try to explain things to other NT's, but it doesn't work too well with atheists because we are operating under different axioms.)
I agree with the parenthetical part.
Funny -- my experience was the opposite. I started out believing in Him since my earliest memories and WANTED to believe in him... but my intellectual integrity is such that I have to be very clear and fair about what I can prove and show and what I cannot.
The evidence has been ambiguous to me; I can't determine whether my spiritual sensibilities and perceptions are part of some anomalous physical/bio state or whether I'm perceiving and experiencing things beyond the material realm.
At this stage, I just accept that it's ambiguous. I can live as if I believe in God and that paradigm is real to me; at the same time, I can carry its shadow and acknowledge that there might not be anything there at all and I'm just too far immersed in my framework and biology to evaluate it from the outside.
I can't speak for other NT's though, but personally I don't really conclude anything with logic. I always lead with intuition, and then use logic to check if my conclusion is correct.
I have trouble determining what's logic and intuition, for me -- they both work so closely together. My intuition uses logic to make connections from data to data and fill in blanks, and logic uses intuition to formulate new points... it is sort of a blur.
I was very unhappy in my teens and 20's though, because I had intuitive ideas but had separated them from logic, and was trying so hard to prove to others that spiritually I was 'right' via logic and dismissing intuition and feelings.
However there are some instances where logic is virtually useless, and a person must rely on perception alone. For example how does a person conclude the grass is green? They simply see it is green.
Yes, it's SOMETHING.... and we've labeled that something green.
No thinking is involved, only perception. That is the best analogy I can give for why I believe God. I believe in God, because I perceive that He exists.
Maybe it's the delineation between what can be perceived and what actually can be formulated that causes issues? I think many people have perceived God (or a higher spiritual reality) but either the perception was limited (and thus God is limited) or they add extra things to the perception that they THINK were part of the perception but were NOT... just actually spiritual baggage of sorts.
(We see this in cultural studies of faith - people extrapolate from a small pool of data to suddenly make broad pronouncements of what must be true and why other experiences that don't mesh up in the superficialities must be false.)
All that I'm pointing out is that you (and others) continue to return to the same line of reasoning: that there is a sort of "default theory" (here: "God exists"), that must be disproved by any other theory. This is a basic logical fallacy. This is a "critical thinking 101", will-be-on-the-first-test-of-the-first-semester, as-basic-as-they-come logical fallacy. ... You're thinking from the wrong end. All theories are in a foot race, if you will: he with the most evidence wins. It doesn't matter if we're talking about theories as to how light may be produced from electricity or theories as to how life came into being: theories stand or fall on the basis of evidence.
yes, that's definitely part of the baggage I refer to. I experience it not just in the religious discussions, but in social conundrums that involve preference or psychological/spiritual values. I see people assume their position is the default, and this justifies their view of the other person as the "defector" or "violator" and then leads to particular courses of action being taken. If they would see it as no one has the high ground and that all viewpoints are inherently unprovable, their behavior and attitude would change accordingly and the situation would become easier to resolve; it's hard for people to overcome that strong inner bias if they view their own views as the "standard" against which other things are the deviation.
With me, I'm stuck: I see patterns of deity and Providence, and I also see a self-sufficient system that operates like a giant mobile, potentially having spawned itself. I'm not sure which is right, even though I can operate in either sphere quite well. I don't see either as the "default." But I remember (with some pain) the look on a loved one's face when I told them what I saw... because I was obviously deranged compared to their assumption of their position as the default.