God, or lack of One, isn't the biggest difference between Atheists and believers (specifically, modern monotheists of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths). The real split is on the importance of belief as a mental process, and its use in determining reality.
To an atheist, "belief" is a judgment or a guess, distinct from "thinking" in that it's not as rigorous, and from "knowing" in that it's not based on sensory information. Your mind uses judgment when there's something that cannot be confirmed through thinking or knowledge, so you use intuition.
For believers, there's "belief" and then there's "belief in." Unlike the former, the latter expresses a commitment or goal to maintain belief. "Belief in" isn't just a mental process: it's all important because it determines the outcome of a person's life for eternity, that is, forever.
"I am the Lord, thy God . . ." Modern monotheisms all require that the person "believes in" the Deity. Nobody appears to ask why this would be the most important requirement, but to conclude that there is no God, one must first stop thinking that belief can effect a change in your eternal fate. One has to be willing to come to the conclusion that one may not be a more worthy position than the other.
In other words, you have to be willing to stop corrupting judgment with expectations of reward or punishment. And that's where the real difference between atheists and believers turns.
I have a few disagreements.
ReplyDeleteFirst, not all modern monotheisms base eternal judgment on creed/belief. Some base it on on deed. "Justice, Justice, shall you pursue" (Deut 16:18-20)
I'm not sure I agree with your 'atheistic' definition of 'belief.' The 'scientific' part of my mind defines belief as a hypothesis waiting to be tested. Not as something that can't be tested.
Finally, if we define 'knowledge' by what we can observe with our senses, then we may run into difficulties with optical illusions.
However, I do agree with you that the major difference between 'Science' and 'Faith' is in the process of determining reality.
I'll preface this by saying my background is in Catholicism, so I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about Judaism as somebody who studies and practices it.
ReplyDeleteThat being admitted, I was aware that Jews believe their eternal fate depends on good deeds. Islam says this as well. What they mean by this, however, depends on how they define "good" in the term "good deeds."
Good is based on God's teachings and sometimes these teachings are very specific commands.
In other words, you may do some good deeds "by accident" but you're almost to believe, however lightly, in a specific God and have specific instructions first. In Judaism, all of the practices involve God's laws. It's implied that the practices accomplish nothing if they don't yield good deeds from the practitioner. Most of practices, however, are, at best, obliquely related to the good deeds the believer is supposed to do. The only connection, psychologically speaking, seems to be to strengthen belief and put you in better contact with God. This is all dependent on faith.
So, though the religions say good deeds will make it or break it for you, a will to do them is contingent on a belief in specific class of deity.
In Judaism, in theory it's possible to reach a good afterlife, and have a good material life without belief, if you could still manage the good deeds.
In practice, it seems almost impossible to do. To underline this, Jews and Muslim are tolerant of other faiths. Even so, both Judaism and Islam revile unbelief in the most contemptuous terms. And when they do, they make plain the judgment that unbelievers are capable only of wickedness.
There seems something necessary about a belief in God as a prerequisite for good deeds.
About your equating belief with a hypothesis, that's because you have a more scientific mind than most. The mental process we call belief predates science. You could say the scientific process uses belief as well as knowledge and thought.
There's a difference between hypothesis and belief. If you tell someone Manchester Avenue is six blocks north, that person has a right to think that's direction you would walk to get to it. Now, you could perform the experiment by walking the other three directions first, and finding where it isn't. Therefore, you've not only given them the hypothesis, you've given them the method you'd take in testing it.
Optical illusions: you'd be right, except we have other ways to observe those, and those ways all involve the senses. Anything that comes in through the senses is sensory. So we've found with optical illusions that our vision give us contradictory information. We then have to determine what nugget of truth we're really perceiving. We also have to be aware of the limits of our senses, and know that they can malfunction. In other words, the information is sensory, but don't jump to conclusions.