Faith
On Tuesday, unscriptured member GodBob, brought up a point that I’d kind of been thinking about myself. The question is: Why should you believe me when I tell you what God has said to me?
In a broader sense, why should you believe anyone on anything?
Scientists have an answer to why you should believe them. They publish their data. They explain their experiments. They build on the published experiments that have come before them. This means, that if you wanted to, and if you had enough time, and if you had enough money, you could reproduce all the experiments yourself going right back to first principles and see for yourself that what they’re telling you has an empirical basis. Now, of course you can’t do all of that, but you can see that for pretty much every accepted experiment, someone has checked the math and reproduced the results. This is what peer reviewed science journals are all about and is what leads to the famous statement about standing on the shoulders of giants.
So I asked God, “Why should they believe me?”
And he told me you shouldn’t. That is, you shouldn’t take anything I say on faith alone. And you shouldn’t take anything your preacher says on faith alone. And not anything in the Bible either.
What God wants you to do is to learn principles that you can apply to figure out for yourself what is right and what is wrong. You should read what I write if it entertains you. And you should read what I write if it helps you to think about things in ways that help you to figure out for yourself what is right and what is wrong.
So, yeah, God wants you to read what I write, that’s why he bothers to talk to me, but he also wants me to write in a way that makes you want to read it, even if you can’t know for sure that what I tell you comes from him.
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