It is the only obstacle for me because what is the foundation of theology? The idea that an all mighty being is the origin of all that is. It's starting to sound to me a little ridiculous.
Naturally, the "foundation" of theology is God and his self revelation... What else would it be? Just as the foundation of science is the world... What else would it be? I'm not sure why you find that problematic. Finding the idea of God ridiculous is one thing, but finding God as the foundation of theology ridiculous looks ridiculous to me.
You're saying God is a spirit. Well how do you know that?
You're just moving the goalpost. Clearly, your "one" problem wasn't really your "one" problem. You asked where God came from. I showed that that question doesn't even make sense on the biblical view of God. So if that was your "one" problem it just evaporated... but now you have a "new" problem (really it's just been brought to the surface, I think) which is you don't want to accept the idea that God is a spirit I guess?
You posed a problem "where does God come from" and I guess that *if God is supposed to have come from somewhere* then this question has the potential to uncover a ridiculous aspect in the idea of God. But in fact the question itself is what is ridiculous, so it does nothing to suggest any ridiculousness in the concept of God.
Now after having shown that the question is "ridiculous" (just to borrow your own terms) you want to ask "how do you know?" and this is a question we can repeat endless for *any* claim. But how I know that is really irrelevant to the fact that if God is a spirit, as Christianity claims He is, then your question "where does God come from?" doesn't uncover any ridiculousness in the concept of God. So if you want to say the idea of God is ridiculous you clearly haven't given us any reason to think so. And if you want to play the skeptics game of "how do you know? how do you know? how do you know?" I can easily tear apart every single one of your beliefs by mirroring your question. Thus, your problem will not ultimately rest in god-belief, but in
any sort of belief!
Right, from a book. I've never understood why atheists (and latent atheists?) have asked that question with such incredulity. Where did you get your education? From a book and from a guy (teacher) reading from a book... incredulous!
Why do we HAVE to accept that there is a God?
What does the word "have" even mean here?
How does such an entity exist necessarily?
Another question evidencing conceptual confusion. Things which exist necessarily have no explanation for their existence outside themselves, otherwise they wouldn't exist necessarily but contingently. Thus, a necessary being exists in virtue of its nature. If Anselm's ontological argument proves anything, it proves that the very concept of God from a Christian standpoint contains existence.
You just finished explaining that we can't trust our own logic as absolute.
Right. But I'm not sure what you're point is.
That's where people resort to faith, and that's where I feel most uncomfortable.
First, you should know that you're using "faith" here in a sense that doesn't align with how Christians have historically understood the term. Traditionally, Protestants have defined faith as being composed of the three elements of knowledge, assent, and trust. So having faith has no direct relationship to having reasons (or evidence) or not having reasons. But this isn't unique to Protestants, even Roman Catholics would agree that faith has no direct relationships to have or not having reasons. As the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser explains, faith "does not mean an irrational will to believe something for which there is no evidence" (Aquinas 2).
Second, it's not clear where or what you're referring to when you say "that's where...". What's where? But you're using faith in a sense of not knowing or at least not having reasons to believe. I don't think that's the case. If we have reasons to believe in God and reasons to believe in the Bible then indirectly we have reasons to believe all the particular claims of the Bible.
If that sounds confusing, consider this: You read an autobiography of Napoleon. Within the autobiography you read many different factual claims. Many of these you are able to verify but some you aren't. For example, Napoleon tells of a time when he spit in a puddle on his way to Russia. What evidence do you have for this claim? Well... none outside of his personal testimony. But this doesn't mean you have to adopt the belief "Napoleon spit in a puddle on his way to Russia" on something like "blind faith" or that you believe it without any reasons. Rather, the account of Napoleon is itself the reason and is a sufficient reason for believing the claim. Much of what can be verified from his account is verified and so you have reason to believe all the parts of the documents (or the document as a whole) without needing to have direct evidence of every particular event. And absent any evidence to the contrary I looks to me like you're perfectly warranted in believing the claim. (This is how historians work all the time.)
Furthermore, why any specific God in particular? And why follow a specific interpretation of that God?
And so obviously, again, your one problem wasn't your one problem. Rather, you have many problems with belief in God. But this makes me curious as to whether you really believed that you had just one problem to begin with and it just suddenly blossomed into a whole plethora of problems within the past couple hours?
Anyway, I'm sure you know that many works have been devoted to this subject. Surely you don't expect anyone here to tackle the massive task of analyzing each of the world religions and and then arguing how the Christian faith is the better explanation. For instance, Ravi Zacharias has written a book called "Jesus Among Other Gods" or you could start with Winfried Corduan's A Tapestry of Faiths or, if you're more into the philosophical, Stuart Hackett has an excellent book called "Oriental Philosophy" that examines the religions (or most of them) from a philosophical point and explains where he finds strengths and weaknesses in each that point towards the Christian God.
If each group is saying they are right over the other, how do I pick which one? No matter how broad the ideology is, someone is always disagreeing with another.
This is an objection I hear all the time. In fact I've heard it about two three times in the last month or so on this very website. So rather than start from scratch I'm just going to quote to you what I said to another person on this website a few weeks ago on this issue:
There are not just many different religious claims, but many different truth claims in every single field of inquiry (science, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and even mathematics!).
What it comes down to is that people disagree. And at most this demonstrates that not all persons are perfectly situated to grasp the truth. But it doesn't tell us that there is no truth to any claim and it doesn't even tell us why people disagree.
It may be in some cases that people disagree because the evidence is underdetermined. For instance, imagine that I tell you that I went to the grocery store and bought $10 worth of pop. Now let us say that Pepsi and Coke are the only two kinds of pop in existence. You also happen to know the cost of Pepsi and the cost of Coke respectively. Given this information, you have enough evidence to (perhaps) say that I may have bought 4 liters of Coke and 2 liters of Pepsi. You also know that I could have bought 6 liters of Coke and no Pepsi. But you also know that I could not have possibly bought 24 liters of Coke and 100 liters of Pepsi because, given what you know, that would work out to more than $10. So, the evidence is underdetermined. It rules out somethings but has room for others.
It may also be the case that people disagree over a truth claim because of bias, prejudice, or self-deception, or some deficiency in cognitive faculties.
The point is, no significant conclusion follows from the fact that there are many different religions. Indeed, whatever conclusion you think follows from this fact must pertain to all truth claims since there are many different truth claims and not just many different religions.
There mere fact that each person thinks they are right shouldn't present you with any special difficulties. Wouldn't that make it awefully easy to throw one into confusion? You say to me "Hi, my name is _______." and I respond to you "No, you're name is not ______. And I'm right and you're wrong." would you seriously go "Oh my!!! Now what ever am I to do!! How can I know what my name is?!" No? Then why think it presents any difficulty in religious matters or in other fields of inquiry?
The way I'm starting to see things is that the universe is raw in form. Chaotic, ancient, and very natural. Whatever is out there, whatever came before it, and however it came into exist, is simply not known yet, and it's beginning to dawn on me that thinking otherwise is not the wisest thing to do.
So "I don't know" is less ridiculous than God? I don't see how that works. If after weighing the evidence we can't come to a conclusion then that's fine. But we can't throw our hands up and say we don't know prior to weighing the evidence. After all, it's not like persons are just saying "Goddidit," rather they argue that we have reasons to believe God did it. And there aren't a lot of options. Either the universe was brought into existence via a personal cause, an impersonal cause, popped into existence out of nothing, or the universe has always existed. We can reason our way through each of these and see which is the best explanation.
if God has a beginning then their was time. If He has no beginning, it means He is everywhere in every split millisecond, yeah it will take you days to comprehend... But the important thing is that He wants to be with you in every split millisecond, as long as you draw nearer to Him.
