Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
The reason that distinction wasn't made is because they were talking about theists, not deists. The difference between deism and theism is that deists don't believe in a personal and intervening god, while theists do. They didn't mention that difference because it wasn't relevant.
As for the part of god acting on faith-based requests,
given only faith, mountains can be moved. Seems legit. |
Deism is a segment of theism. Theism is the belief of existence of one or more supreme beings, while deism is the belief of one or more supreme beings exist but don't intervene. Fundamentally, most people can be divided into "Yes" (Theist), "No" (Atheist), and "I don't know/Can't be answered" (Agnostic). Deism would be a specific type of theism (and deism itself could be broken even further).
As for the quote, I certainly don't believe the Bible much, if at all (the more likely in my book) - I doubt virtually all things that happen in there (especially since the multitude of translations have made things harder to discern), but I think you can't connect lack of prayers answered to lack of any type of supreme being flat out (as I state below, I think we might be able to rule out the existence of the Biblical definition of God, but I refer here to the concept of all supreme beings). There are too many questions being left unanswered and too many ways that this might not work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheese
Our prayers must be asked in faith. Concerning our prayers James 1:6-7 says, "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord." We must have faith in God and if we are faithful and obedient to Him then He will hear and answer our prayers, otherwise we will receive nothing. Jesus says in Mark 11:24, "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them." So we must have faith if we expect God to answer our prayers.
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Definitely messed the first bold. The second seems to refer more to the concept that you must expect that God will answer your prayers if you are to receive them, a statement that seems to be into grounds of "you can't halfheartedly believe". If (and again, I'm not scholar with literacy in older languages) this could be seen into the original translation in the original context (as linguistics changes over time...see even simple examples as the usage of the word "gay"), I think we could theoretically test it for accuracy of the Bible's section on this. Even if we can shake this as false, how can we be sure the Bible just isn't wrong? It's not like the thing is known for its accuracy. Of course, by the same stretch of argument, we could say that if the Bible is false, we're believing in something because a book with known lies in it is telling us to. Why would it be accurate on the existence of a God if it can't nail down his plans for answering prayers? The whole thing could very easily be a set of lies. Though, we can deduce that statistically, the more we identify as false, the less likely it is that any of the Bible actually makes sense, existence of "God" and all.
I guess in short, what I'm trying to get at is that there are too many assumptions that we know what a supreme being is and that we can test it with such a simple set up. Biblical definition of a God? Sure, if we assume the Bible is accurate. Any form of supreme being? Harder to test.
I do see that the video discusses "God" as oppose to "supreme being", meaning they likely talk about the traditional Biblical definition of a supreme being. My main concern is how they convert that from "Biblical religions" to all theism though, as theism refers to any number of supreme beings and not elusively to a single holy text's definition.
This post was written while I was watching a movie, on TV, so I apologize if any of it is mistaken...hopefully I didn't make too many errors when typing.