OK. I'm going to sidestep the "God will provide" thread, because I think it leads quickly to "why does God allow bad things to happen?", which will take over this thread if allowed to. And I will attempt to sidestep the chasm that is free will, and stay on the narrow-path thread of translation.
I think translating from faith to lack-of-faith is at best difficult and more likely impossible. I think translating from having a set of moral values that define the good to having no such values is, similarly, difficult-or-impossible.
But I'm not sure any of that has anything to do with theism, necessarily. Perhaps it is easier, or more likely, for a theist to sustain faith or act in accordance with a set of values... or perhaps not... but either way that doesn't mean a nontheist can't understand the activity. There may be differences in how _compelling_ the two formulations are, but I'm not sure there's an unbridgable gap in understanding. And certainly, I would expect the sorts of nontheists who attend Quaker meetings to be several sigmas up the able-to-talk-about-faith-and-moral-values-cogently scale within the domain of nontheists. (This is similar to the sense in which, though men are on average more muscular than women, a given weight class can contain both male and female weightlifters.)
But here again, I find the more abstract we get, the harder it is for me to get a grip on the matter. Perhaps my problem is precisely that I'm not enough of a faithful theist to understand the thing that you feel is not getting translated.
But, OK, trying to respond to this in the same abstract terms... it seems to me that a nontheist who has a set of moral values that define the good and sets out to act in accordance with the good in a given situation, is in essentially the same position you describe here for a theist who has a set of intuitions about God's will and sets out to act in accordance with God's will in a given situation.
I'm not necessarily saying here that "the good as defined by one's moral values" and "God's will as one is able to discern it" are the same thing... or even that they are similar. The Galaxy is incommensurably larger than the Earth, and not very much like it in many important dimensions... however, both are so huge and pervasive relative to an individual person that in the context of the overwhelming majority of tasks we undertake, the differences don't matter. A nonGalaxist and a Galaxist might find they can still navigate a boat to the same place in the same way, even when one (correctly) understands the stars to be suns lightyears away, and the other has no such belief.
All that said, I don't know if I'm making much sense... and I'm also not sure I'm really understanding you. It's funny to be talking about whether understanding can span a conceptual bridge over that same conceptual bridge... :-)
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Date: Sunday, 26 February 2006 12:37 am (UTC)I think translating from faith to lack-of-faith is at best difficult and more likely impossible. I think translating from having a set of moral values that define the good to having no such values is, similarly, difficult-or-impossible.
But I'm not sure any of that has anything to do with theism, necessarily. Perhaps it is easier, or more likely, for a theist to sustain faith or act in accordance with a set of values... or perhaps not... but either way that doesn't mean a nontheist can't understand the activity. There may be differences in how _compelling_ the two formulations are, but I'm not sure there's an unbridgable gap in understanding. And certainly, I would expect the sorts of nontheists who attend Quaker meetings to be several sigmas up the able-to-talk-about-faith-and-moral-values-cogently scale within the domain of nontheists. (This is similar to the sense in which, though men are on average more muscular than women, a given weight class can contain both male and female weightlifters.)
But here again, I find the more abstract we get, the harder it is for me to get a grip on the matter. Perhaps my problem is precisely that I'm not enough of a faithful theist to understand the thing that you feel is not getting translated.
But, OK, trying to respond to this in the same abstract terms... it seems to me that a nontheist who has a set of moral values that define the good and sets out to act in accordance with the good in a given situation, is in essentially the same position you describe here for a theist who has a set of intuitions about God's will and sets out to act in accordance with God's will in a given situation.
I'm not necessarily saying here that "the good as defined by one's moral values" and "God's will as one is able to discern it" are the same thing... or even that they are similar. The Galaxy is incommensurably larger than the Earth, and not very much like it in many important dimensions... however, both are so huge and pervasive relative to an individual person that in the context of the overwhelming majority of tasks we undertake, the differences don't matter. A nonGalaxist and a Galaxist might find they can still navigate a boat to the same place in the same way, even when one (correctly) understands the stars to be suns lightyears away, and the other has no such belief.
All that said, I don't know if I'm making much sense... and I'm also not sure I'm really understanding you. It's funny to be talking about whether understanding can span a conceptual bridge over that same conceptual bridge... :-)