The Scientific View Of Man, Ctd

A reader writes:

"If I could disbelieve in God, I would." Funny, I'm the exact opposite; if I could believe in God, I would.

Another writes:

Surely a God who cares about human beings would not so limit our free will as to make it impossible to disbelieve in him. If he could do that, he might as well have put a big "I AM" sign in the sky.

I was simply expressing a personal fact, not a general truth. I'm blessed, to my mind, cursed to others. Another:

I found your remark after the bit about Hume intriguing.

I'm assuming that you mean directly "your belief in God" and not your belonging to the Catholic religion. That even if you left the Catholic Church, this statement still holds. Are you then saying that you are "forced" by an intangible something to believe in God even though you'd rather not? Or are you saying that, right now, you benefit by your belief, inconvenient as it is. If, however, you could get a similar benefit/consolation of the Big Picture elsewhere - say, by science - you'd rather not have to believe in something that is hard, if not impossible, to defend logically?

Or is there another option? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, my faith in God is profoundly filtered through my Catholicism, although I remain open to the idea that other faiths and traditions are in touch with same deity. This is not about weighing up costs and benefits or making some kind of calculus. It's frustratingly outside those categories.

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