Osler's Razor

I know I am in group number two but its not that I have not thought about it. I do think about it. I am pretty sure that I do not believe in the God that everyone else does. But I am okay with it. Thus, I am a Unitarian. i am raising my son to believe in God though, and he does and My husband does and they go to church together. I participate a little but mostly I just go to my own church.
 

I'm in group one, for mainly the reasons that you listed there, especially the third reason (the inner consistency of the universe). There are just so many things that can't be explained. Why do all flowers grow with a Fibonocci number of petals? Why do the earth and the moon both rotate, but at exactly the same speed, so that we only ever see one side? As well, the teachings of Jesus really resound with me too, and seem like things that, if only the moral teachings, should be followed by most everyone as a code of ethics. Being a member of a religion where "Love your neighbor as yourself" is the highest teaching just clicks.
 

My answer is too long. But you can read it here: http://craiglpankratz.blogspot.com/2006/11/another-witness.html
 

I am in a group (4); I think it is impossible to know whether there is a God as this is beyond the limits of reason. However, to use Kant's analogy, we may surmise some things about things that transcend theoretical reason by understanding the limits of human reason, and I find all of the available surmises about the nature of the divine to be internally inconsistent, except for certain conceptions (e.g., Judaisitic/Kabbalistic theurgical ideas, gnosticism, etc.).

Truth be told, however, I reject these as possible too on entirely practical grounds: I need not invoke these conceptions in order to explain anything about the world I live in. Conceptions of the divine are entirely superfluous to world I live in, except as anthropological and historical facts of interest.
 

I didn't know we were allowed to add our own categories. Since we are, then I propose a fifth group: Those who know by their own experience that there is a God.

I'm in that one.
 

Craig, that still puts you in group one. And Lane, I'm not sure why you need a new group-- you don't know if there is or isn't a God, and that is group two.
 

I'm in group 1. The reason is simple: The bible, God's word, consistently tells us that there is a God. The bible has never been disproven. That's about as simple as it gets!

Sure, you may call it into question with Scalia-like mind exercises. "It's the big-bang theory and nothing more!" My question is: Who created the materials necessary for a big bang in the first place?

Come on, now. Seriously.
 

I'm a fan of clear and critical thinking. I fall into the first group. I believe there is a god, and I believe it is the Christian God, but I also heed St. Paul's admonition to work out my faith with fear and trembling.

I talk to people a lot about a lot of things, including religion, and it seems to me that one's religion is more often a product of experience and education than of logical reasoning. Those with positive religious experiences (as viewed from their perspective) tend to have stronger faith than those with negative religious experiences. I think that if you had a person's entire biography, written from their point of view, you'd be able to guess how strongly they believed what they believed at any given point in time.

Of course, what we believe doesn't affect reality; it merely affects how we behave. I think if we all properly understood our relationship to God, the world would be a better place. And that's why I belong in Group One.
 

Groups and beliefs as such are human constructs at their root, but love- people could not make that up.
 

Sorry for the late post Prof! I've been in trial.

The reason why I feel that group (2) doesn't fit turns on a complicated and extremely uninteresting distinction in epistemology between transcendental ideas and empirical ones. I think that (2) would fit if I believed that the question of the divine was something subject to the same conditions for knowledge as factual things about the world. But because we maintain that the divine is essentially and substantially different than everything else in the world, and because of Kant's arguments in the antinomies of pure reason, I think that more than just, "I don't know" is warranted. I think that an examination of human reason would lead us all to conclude that none of us can know.

That, of course, is very different than the metaphysical thesis of (3). Interestingly enough, while this rules out the possibility of (3) ever being a justified position, I think there are novel arguments made in support of (1) based on faith, which is more than just an unfounded-by-evidence belief in something. Faith might be said to be a special type of belief where the traditional analysis of knowing or knowledge is inapplicable, where the state of the believer and their attitude toward the believed is of more importance than any correspondence to a state of affairs.

So, I don't think I fit in (2); I'm much closer to (1) except that I lack faith. I cannot reconcile my personal views with this idea that I should be oriented or have the attitude toward the divine that a faithful person does.
 

Group 2. I would very much like to think that there is a God, and maybe there is, but I only really know about the Christian God and I have some fundamental problems with his rules. The main one is the exclusivity of it. I just really cannot convince myself that people who aren't Christians are going to hell. Don't devout Muslims or Hindus or Jews believe some version of the same thing? If each person in each religion sincerely believes in their own religion, how can you possibly chose one over another without some sort of extrinsic evidence? I'd really like to believe there is a God and he loves everyone based on good versus evil, not Christian versus non Christian, but I don't really know where to go from there.

The only thing that makes since to me is that maybe the same one God is God of every religion and its about whether you believe in him and love him and not about the specifics of your practices. Again, I don't really know.