Thread 24612835

Can faith in God be proven through reason, evidence, or experience, or is it ultimately a matter of personal belief? Are there good books or philosophical literature that explore this question in depth?

>>24612835 (OP)
Start with The Book of Tobit It emphasizes the importance of trusting God, living a righteous life, and God’s care for His people.

Quit spamming jeet you already have threads on the catalog

>>24612835 (OP)
Most people find faith through personal experience not rational arguments or justification. Faith is more of a personal thing not something you do in dialogue with others.

>>24612840
you are a nigger jannie, i have your dox info

>>24612835 (OP)
Here's your God: /vt/. Here you go

>>24612835 (OP)
I think it is possible to give a fairly strong account of the grounding of the finite in infinite being through "natural philosophy" (pic related). This is quite different from revealed religion though, and it still relies on the core assumptions (which are really all the same) that:
-Contingent things do not happen for "no reason at all"
-Actuality is prior to potency
-The world is intelligible

Strong rational arguments and arguments from empirical observation can be mustered to support these, but more to the point, if the world isn't intelligible and things "just happen," philosophy is sort of useless anyhow. This can pave the way for revealed religion. Faith, at least traditionally conceived, isn't opposed to reason. It is the assent to what is revealed. In its early stages, there is assent with limited understanding, but the entire idea of illumination and gnosis, the "light of faith," is that understanding is posterior to faith, and generally the fruit of praxis (prayer, ascetic labors, the sacraments, etc.). One does not gain the light of faith by simply affirming certain propositions, but by living the spiritual life and cleansing and reorienting the passions. Praxis is central, and asceticism and the rejection of ultimately unfulfilling worldly goods is essential, since the person must be rightly oriented to be enlightened. Hence, faith is, in its mature form, the very deepest sort of knowledge in love.

>>24612835 (OP)
>asks non-literature-related question
>slaps the words "books" and "literature" at the end
Classic.

>>24612862
I saw your mom there

>>24612864
just wanted to say this is beautifully written and sums it up quite nicely. might be a bit tough to unpack if youre new to this sort of thing though

Jeet spam thread. Dude spends at least five hours a day on /lit/ starting variations of the same thread, then samefagging them with chatGPT. He is a ~19 year old poo, his reddit account got found a couple of years ago and it is confirmed jeet.
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>SARRRRRRR LET ME ASK YOU BOUT PLATO SARRRRR
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>SARRRRR IS DERE PROOF OF GOD EXIST?????

>>24613247
Careful now, he might spam a bunch of Jesus pictures at ya

>>24612835 (OP)
Your question isn't formulated correctly. It's not faith that people ask can be proven, but the objects of faith.

>>24612864
basically explains it perfectly. You can prove the God of classical theism, provided that anything makes any sense at all (which of course it does). But belief in the facts of revelation is itself a supernatural thing, the result of the gift of faith.

>>24613326
What do you mean by "Objects of faith"?

>>24613326
>>24612864
>basically explains it perfectly
Does it? The issue here isn't whether there is a first cause, anyone who understands the logic of the question will assert that there is. Even in Kant you have the "Ideal" of unity which we must think of, even if we don't hypostasize it. The question is whether the first principle is transcendent - why can't it be nature? What does Aquinas say about this? Let's all find out together:
>Objection 2: Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence.
>Response: Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article.
First of all, Aquinas has already jettisoned Aristotle's (wrong) cosmology, in which this response would work - i.e. the motions of the sublunary world can only be explained by reference to the celestial spheres, which leads to God. Instead he simply asserts that nature must work under the direction of a higher agent. But Aristotelian physics itself contradicts him because Aristotle believed in the immanent substantiality of beings, i.e. a things behaves as x because it is x, not because of something beyond it. Again he thought you needed the celestial spheres, but Aquinas already threw this out because of its implicit paganism. So if you throw out the cosmology, Aristotle's theology collapses. As for the human will, the 'unmoved mover' of the will is nature itself, i.e. we desire things outside of us and are moved by them. This, too, is in Aristotle. Occam recognized this. Kant recognized this. Random chuds on the internet will never recognize this, and they will never stop repeating these quasi-Aristotelian arguments because the fact is that the ground of their belief is not in argument at all. And there's nothing wrong with this, but they want a pretendo, knock-down, pseudoscientific Proof because they are, themselves, corrupted by modernity, and if it ain't scientific it just ain't real, for them.

>>24613369
The contrary of reddit spacing is also reddit spacing.

>>24613369
What is the end goal of the stuff that you have just said so far?

>>24613408
To point out that the old Aristotelian arguments for God's existence don't actually work, that if you want to "prove" the existence of God you shouldn't be making him a hypothesis the explain nature, which is what all of these proofs do. And this leads to admitting that you can't prove the existence of God at all, in the sense that you can prove the laws of gravity. I think religious people harm their cause when they make retarded arguments, most of the people who say this shit are parroting things they've read, they haven't worked with the primary sources, so they sound retarded twice over - to atheists, who can tell there's something fishy with the arguments, even if they are themselves too retarded to articulate what it is; and to philosophers, who do know the arguments and know what's wrong with them. Aquinas says in Summa Contra Gentiles that believers harm their case by making retarded arguments.

>>24613419
Is your cause justifiable?

>>24612835 (OP)
If faith could be proven, it wouldn't be faith anymore.
Which is why I always chuckle at evangelical faggots who insist the existence of God has been proven to them.