Ivytalk wrote:JoltinJoe wrote:
Former Deist. Pretty much described me in my later high school and early college years.
I will say this. I find it ironic that so many people who so frequently cite Occam's Razor don't see the evident simplicity in a god who takes your form and explains everything to you. Isn't that the perfect God?
Spot on. Did the Fordham experience help you shed your Deist phase?
Sure did. Fordham's a great school not just because it has a faculty who can help you find genuine value in your own existence, but because of where it is located. Starting school in the fall of 1980, at a time when something called "The South Bronx" was described as that "area of the Bronx south of Fordham Road," turned out really to be an opportunity. Back then, so many people were turned off by the location (the neighborhood is much better -- although not great -- today), but it really was an asset. The Bronx opened my eyes. It was the first time in my life I really felt "connected" to others. It was the first time in my life I really understood why it was an obligation to help others. I think it was the first time I understood that I was selfish, and I wanted to change.
You might have recognized the core curriculum at Fordham because it was very similar to the core curriculum at Harvard. You'd think the first theology you'd have to take in the liberal arts school at Fordham was something based in Catholicism or Christianity, but it was "World Religions." I remember thinking as the class developed that all religions seemed to share a very common core of values. Coupled with my philosophy class, Introduction to Metaphysics (which I originally dismissed as "bunk" and "intellectual drooling"), my eyes were opened to the vanity of believing we can know all and experience all through our intellect, our perceptions, and our logic and inferences. It seemed so OBVIOUS that there were truths and realities beyond our experience -- and yet I had never seen that before. I had been content to base all my beliefs on actual knowledge and experience, and had never understood before how limited our knowledge and experience were.
Deism is a station on the railway. If you've reached it, that's good, because it means you are thinking for yourself and you are not saying something just because you were taught it when you were young. But there's more to the journey, because Deism suggests questions you really should answer. I had always felt ashamed that I had an intuitive need for a personal God, but when I came to understand that human intuition is just as significant as actual knowledge and experience, I came to believe there is a reason we intuit a personal God.
Intuition is the foundation of the scientific method, and no matter of science is provable until someone intuits a belief and then tests it. Nonetheless, there are many scientific intuitions that become accepted as true, even though they can never be tested: the Big Bang, evolution. And the existence of God falls into that category too: it cannot be proven, but it can be rationally accepted. And I say that because I believe that it is manifestly obvious that there are dimensions of reality we do not know, and that I believe that somewhere there MUST BE a repository of all truths: human truth, scientific truth, moral truth. And those truths compel us to feel connected and care for each other.
I completed this in one fewer paragraph that JSO would have.
(said the Troll)