Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Deuteronomy

[Fred the Credible]

What does it mean to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? I find this difficult to understand.

[jimwalton]

I define love as making a willful choice to selflessly and sacrificially serve others for their benefit. To love God means to live my life giving preference to God's desires and what will advance his person and cause. It means I will trust what he says as true, obey what he tells me to do, be the kind of person he expects me to be, and give him credit for what is to his credit. You've heard Christians talk about a relationship with God, and this verse is an important part of that understanding. You can readily see that my association with God is not religious ritual or robotic legalism, but a love relationship and all that implies. We have an illustration of this in our best examples of love relationships between two people, or between parents and children, so that we know what this looks like.

[Slip in the Stream]

Why do you need to do all that through God? You seem like a decent, moral person. Couldn't you just be an atheist and love people the same way?

We don't know for sure that any of the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God, or that God could even communicate with the people that wrote the Bible...so 'trust what he says as true' is really 'trust what the Bible authors thought'.

> To love God means to live my life giving preference to God's desires and what will advance his person and cause.

For instance, how do you know what God's desires are? We don't have any updated communications that we can trust came from him.

[jimwalton]

Sure an atheist can love people in the same way. What the atheist doesn't realize, however, is that they are borrowing capital from theism to claim that though. For instance, atheists love to talk about the problem of evil, but not too many think far enough to ponder the problem of good. To the atheistic naturalist, everything that exists is merely chemicals, matter and forces that were the result of accidental collocations of atoms, natural selection (a misleading term, another borrowed capital making one think purpose is part of the process), and genetic mutations, which are almost always deleterious. If there is no purpose (except contrived purpose), no meaning (except randomly assigned meaning), and what matters is survival (food,fight, flight, and reproduction), then what is love? In your system, love is nothing but a meaningless social construct. All ends at the grave, there is no meaning, and eventually humanity will end in ruins. As Richard Dawkins says, the universe has "precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." How can you talk of love as if it has actual meaning unless you are borrowing capital from theism?

> We don't know for sure that any of the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God...

Obviously, while science, archaeology and history can show us that the Bible is a reliable document, to comment on its divine inspiration is outside of the scope and possibility for those disciplines. I believe they are actually from God for many reasons, most of which you won't buy into. But a few of them are:

1. Most of the time God gave a miraculous sign to confirm that the word he spoke was actually from him and not anything else. Those signs are recorded for us all over the Bible. Skeptics say, "Prove it," which is like asking me to prove that I saw a rainbow last week. Some things are just outside of the purview of science.

2. The issue of prophecy in the Bible is a confirmation that the things recorded there are actually from God. We can't even predict the weather flawlessly, let alone the score of the football game or who's going to win the election in November. Atheists claim that we can't prove that the documents were written before the events prophesied, but there are plenty of scholarly evidences that say otherwise as well.

3. People's experiences confirm what the Bible says about itself and about us, but those are obviously subjective. But no less subjective than me saying, "I'm in love with Hannah." It can be perfectly true, but nothing that science can prove.

> how do you know what God's desires are?

If the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God, then we know what his desires are. The Bible is specifically written to reveal God to us, and therefore what it tells us about his desires are to be taken as authoritative.

> We don't have any updated communications that we can trust came from him.

We don't need updated communications. We have 1600 pages of them, and his desires haven't changed. We look at the same moon and sun that the ancients did. So also God's desires are the same now as then.

[Slip in the Stream]

> In your system, God, not love, is nothing but a meaningless social construct.

We can't watch anyone and we can't get people to become peaceful Jews so lets give them a Messiah that will achieve those goals.

> I saw a rainbow last week

Really? Wow. So not a miracle? Why would I believe you if you saw a man rose from the dead? Because that's crazy.

1. The issue of prophecy in the Bible means that someone wrote it knowing what the prophecies were. If we say 'We can't assume there is anything supernatural, as you do, then this is the only possibility'.

2. People's experiences prove that every religion is both true (for as long as they are delusional enough to believe it) and false (/r/thegreatproject has many stories of ex-theists). It's not subjective to say that all religions are false, it's basic logic.

We don't know that the Bible is actually from God. We know the prophecies are too good to be true and were likely made up. So 'His desires' are likely made up too.

We do need updated communications. Why would we trust a single source thousands of years old with a murky authorship and no proof of the claims it makes? If God exists, why is He hiding? Sure is strange if you ask me.

[jimwalton]

> We can't watch anyone and we can't get people to become peaceful Jews so lets give them a Messiah that will achieve those goals.

You are free to make up whatever you want and believe what you want to believe.

> "Rainbow" ... So not a miracle?

Hm. Sarcasm won't lead us to productive dialogue. Of course rainbows aren't miracles. if you're making a snide comment about Genesis 9, then we need to discuss that, because you have a distorted misunderstanding.

> The issue of prophecy in the Bible means that someone wrote it knowing what the prophecies were.

Hm. You obviously have a distorted notion of prophecy as well. I don't know where you got your ideas, but no wonder you mock—you've been fed a bunch of lies, I guess.

> People's experiences prove that every religion is both true

It's impossible for every religion to be true, and also impossible for every religion to be both true and false. The law of non-contradiction leads us there, as well as common sense. To sound grand and magnanimous by saying, "I accept all religions" (I recognize the words of the Living One no matter what his name) is actually to either violate them all or violate reason, or both. We all have a right to proclaim what we believe about ultimate things, but that doesn't mean that everything we believe is right. All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of truth as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true. The thinking person must honestly weigh the evidence and come to the right conclusion.

> It's not subjective to say that all religions are false, it's basic logic.

OK, then, give me the syllogism.

[Slip in the Stream]

I meant the rainbow thing because it's not an extraordinary claim. It doesn't break the laws of physics. Biblical miracles do, however, and need a better explanation.

So it seems you agree that all religions cannot be true. How do you explain, at the psychological level, why other people are so deeply convinced that they believe in the correct religion? Are you aware of confirmation bias as it relates to prayer?

[jimwalton]

Biblical miracles cover a broad range of definition. The one of "breaks the laws of physics" is not a catch-all. Some miracles are a matter of changing the relative time continuum (wine always comes from water, but it takes 3 months, not .3 seconds), some are a matter of timing (earthquakes were common in the region of Jericho, but one just when the Israelites blew their trumpets is a bit too oddly coincidental), some an extension of what normally happens anyway (bodies heal, bread can some from previous bread and fish from previous fish). To claim that all miracles require a breakage in the law of physics is reductionistic.

Besides, there is nothing in science to successfully prove that science is all there is. Science cannot prove that nature is a closed system, nor that the laws of physics cannot be broken. The laws of physics merely describe how things normally act given that there isn't any interference. I hit a pool ball across the table, and I can predict its velocity, its angle of reflection, and its loss of energy assuming there is no interfering force. With an interfering force, all bets are off. Classical science cannot prove that miracles are impossible, and quantum mechanics even less so.

> How do you explain, at the psychological level, why other people are so deeply convinced that they believe in the correct religion?

I'm sure you're aware of the phenomena of people seeing what they want to see and believing what they want to believe. While such confidence doesn't make things false, it doesn't make them true either. Veracity has to be established at other than the psychological level.

> Are you aware of confirmation bias as it relates to prayer?

Of course I am, but apparently you're not. Prayer is not subject to scientific inquiry, nor is it necessarily a victim of confirmation bias. If God exists, and the Bible is the revelation of him, then it's safe to assume God answers prayer. Discerning what events in life are answers to prayer and which are not can be very difficult, but claiming any answer to prayer is not automatically confirmation bias. It's always quite impossible to prove or verify that any particular event is an answer to prayer, unless it involves something so astoundingly coincidental and/or something that our current understanding of nature considers impossible, such that Ockham's Razor indicates that the simplest answer is divine intervention. But this is no longer the argument from efficacy of prayer, but rather the argument from miracles, which is a different discussion, as mentioned above.

It's true that it's very difficult to establish whether God answered prayer or not, though it would be more proper to say, "We have no idea whether He will answer any specific prayer," since one would need only ONE example (not a statistical majority, or even a statistically significant minority) to prove that he "answers prayer" (meaning "grants requests") in general. The Bible records numerous examples of answered prayers, and since the same Christians who believe that God does answer prayers believe that the Bible is the accurate record of the activity of God, it is not inconsistent for them to believe that God DOES answer prayer, though this gives them no assurance that he will answer any given (or any at all) prayer of THEIRS. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Most Christians will affirm that they have no way of knowing whether or not God will grant a particular request, and most of the ones that won't affirm that are operating under faulty theology that I have no desire to defend.

We do know that God answers prayer didactically, not empirically. Causation (of any kind) can't be measure empirically without fully isolating variables and replicating results. Revelation ( = being told by God) is the only way we know ANYTHING about what God is like or how God acts. Generally, when we affirm something as an "answer to prayer," this is not on the basis of an absence of physical/biological efficient causes, but on the belief that God works by means of those causes. In other words, we believe that prayers are answered ONLY because we first believed in a God who answers prayer.

If you want to jump to confirmation bias any time a Christian claims an answer to prayer, you have no logical ground to stand on. If you expect to prove that the argument from the efficacy of prayer is invalid, well, technically it isn't. If anyone could manage to prove that even ONE incident, ever, in the history of time, occurred as an answer to prayer, and NOT from some other cause, it would prove that God exists (or existed at that point in time), that he answers prayer, and that confirmation bias is as much a bias of accusation as it is of conclusion.

No one could ever possibly isolate all the variables at work in a particular situation subject to prayer. It's not a scientific situation. In ways it's like the weather, but more so. We can use science to predict the weather, but we will never get it absolutely perfect and flawless. There are just too many variables at play to nail it down with precision (like we can do with gravity, for instance). So also with prayer. It's impossible to have a totally and perfectly controlled laboratory environment to evaluate prayer with precision, and therefore confirmation bias is an illegitimate accusation against its efficacy.

[Slip in the Stream]

It's clear that you're a very clever guy. I'm just confused how you can be so rational about something that is so intrinsically irrational.

I also have to add that it's kind of sad that the only source you have for any of your knowledge is the Bible. There's no other way to check any of these 'true' claims?

[jimwalton]

Some things from the Bible are verifiable by historical and archaeological corroboration, and some are not. We can certainly look at other records to see if Hezekiah was a king of Judah, but we can't look in archaeology to see if God led Israel through the desert with a pillar of cloud. It's illegitimate to apply the wrong criteria to certain issues, just as I can't use an MRI to see if you are experiencing pain in your stomach.

I use the Bible where it's appropriate to use the Bible. If you are talking about answers to prayer, science won't help you with that, either. to be able to verify confirmation bias, you need to have a standardized base line of what works and why, and what all of the possible elements are so that we can establish a control group and be able to directly identify exactly where Christians are blowing it out their ear. The problem with your wanting to check "true" claims, you need to have information and isolation of data that you absolutely do not have.

When you say, "I'm just confused how you can be so rational about something that is so intrinsically irrational," are you claiming miracles are irrational, or that the Christian faith is? Regardless, your logic is inconsistent, since neither of these can be proved, nor can science be used to substantiate your point, so you'll need to go a little further to explain what you mean by your accusation of "intrinsically irrational."

Again, as far as miracles, it sounds as if you want to to use science to prove something that is not particularly scientific in a backward look. For instance, last August there was a Perseid meteor shower in the middle of the month where thousands of meteor fragments were burned up in the atmosphere. Well, prove it. You can't. They burned up. There is no remaining evidence of them. There were some eyewitnesses, but can we really believe the eyewitnesses? I could pull up a thousand illustrations like this. And yet there are many similar events in the Bible. At the time they were provable, but 3000 years later, they aren't. That doesn't make Christianity intrinsically irrational, and there may be no empirical resource to verify it.