re the arrogance of christians in article apr athos rutgers edu aa freenet carleton ca mark baker writes i am asking you to believe in things not visible i don t know if this is believeing blindly or not i m not sure how blindness comes into it i do not deny reason indeed i insist upon it but reason only draws conclusions from evidence if you decide in advance that your reason will act only on the evidence of the five physical senses then you cut reason off from any possibility of reaching a conclusion outside the physical sphere beyond the rather provocative if inconclusive conclusion that the physical sphere is not self explanatory so your are saying to rely on our feelings and experiences since this is the only other source of information left to us how can you then convince somebody that your feelings and experiences are the correct ones then if you can t show somebody visible and measurable effects if my experiences say that there exists no god and yours says there does where does that leave us since we are only going on experiences then both of us are correct within our own personal realities furthermore the trouble with feelings and experiences is that they can lead you astray as the tragic outcome of waco illustrates i am sure that many of koresh s followers really believed in him but i think that you and i will agree that they were being misled finally how on earth do you come to the conclusion that the physical sphere is not self explanatory when you only rely on the five senses christians claim that they have received a different kind of evidence which they call faith and which is a gift of god that is this evidence is the evidence of a thing which chooses to reveal or hide itself the evidence of the senses cannot tell you is such a ting exists reasoning on the evidence of the senses won t help either but christians do reason of the evidence of faith and do claim that this evidence is wholly consistent with the evidence of the other senses and indeed that the evidence of these other senses is part of god s revelation of himself to us you must be using a definition of evidence that i am not familiar with to me evidence is something you can show others unambiguously that what you are saying is true however i agree with you that belief in a diety is a matter of faith it is not something you can share around others must experience it independantly unfortunately as i have explained above this puts belief down to a matter of experience my impression is that christians do not have the monopoly on reason evidence and faith as far as any of these things can go in a previous article phs d vaxc cc monash edu au says you are right that science and reason cannot prove anything however if we do not use them we can only then believe on faith alone and since we can only use faith why is one picture of god e g hinduism any less valid than another e g christianity faith as i have said is not opposed to reason it is simply a new source of evidence on which reason may operate it is clear that human beings have many systems for explaining the evidence of the physical senses and similarly there are many systems for explaining the evidence provided by faith religious believers in general and christians in particular use reason to help sift through the evidence to come to a clearer understanding of the evidence provided by faith science claims with good reason to be the most valid system for explaining the physical universe and christianity claims also with good reason to be the most valid system possessed of the best evidence for explaining gods revelations of himself to man at the risk of repeating my argument as i have explained previously the trouble is that moslems buddhists jews etc will all say that they claim with good reason to be a valid system possessed of the best evidence for explaining gods revelations to man for buddhists it should read for explaining the non existence of god so not only must you prove your own case you have to disprove theirs alt messianic is a good place to see people strong in the belief of their own faiths and with their own good reasons if you doubt that christians use reason read this newsgroup for a while and you will see rational debate aplenty i know that all people can use reason i never claimed that they don t i just wish to make sure that their arguments are well founded it goes without saying that if i make a blunder that i expect people to correct me once we have all gone through this process of removing the non essential and contradictory bits we should hopefully have made some progress towards the truth mark baker the task is not to cut down jungles but aa freenet carleton ca to irrigate deserts c s lewis don lowe department of physics monash university melbourne victoria australia
