When I cried out to God for help, I did not believe in the God of the Bible. There is perhaps a bit of a paradox in this, for in Romans 1 we are told that those who reject the knowledge of God are without excuse, for His presence/the fact that He exists is overtly manifest in creation. Still, people can acknowledge there is something, some force, some spiritual reality, behind all that we can see and sense with our other senses, without having what they might consider direct experience or knowledge of God, at least not enough to move them to faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ upon the cross as a fulfillment of God's plan for salvation to those who believe... Such people, not knowing God in a way that saves them, may still pray, and earnestly desire to know, and seek after truth. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Truth, and it is promised to those that seek diligently, that they will find. God does reveal Himself, even to those who do not believe in Him. If this were not true, the older testaments would be short a few stories at least.
I answered your question "Since a person doesn't any reason to hope something is true, can you give the reason you believe that 'faith' and 'believing' mean the same thing if you have faith in what you believe is the truth?"
I do not believe God lies.
Creation reflects the glory of God, the majesty of His eternal power and His divine nature. We observe nature, the stars in the heavens, the wonder of the birth of a child, and we are drawn to God.
I actually agree that it is a silly question, but I only asked it because christians have said to me that they know God exists because they have faith. So apparently to them faith is a method of knowing.
I don't mean to say that simple things change into complex things, and I never mentioned "without outside influence". What I mean is that complexity can emerge out of the interaction between simple things. An example of this is an ant colony. An ant colony obviously consists of millions of ants. When looking at an individual ant, it displays rather simple behavior. It just searches for food and follows other ants around. But if you look at the colony, it forms mazelike structures, that seem like they need to have been designed by an architect. Yet there is no "architect ant", the structure emerges from the interaction between ants.
How is that different from belief without evidence?
Can you show me the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? I have never seen any that held up to scrutiny .
How do you know other religions are false? Because it says so in the bible?
You are right that there is no evidence that anything can create itself. But it's not inconceivable. After all, we have never seen a universe come into existence, and we don't know what laws apply to that sort of event. All we know is that within our universe we have never seen something create itself. But we don't know whether the same applies to universes. If the laws of physics came into existence with the beginning of the universe, then they don't apply to universes themselves. We simply don't know at this point.
I have taken three university courses in philosophy, and read works by Plato, Descartes, Hume and Dennett, among others. So I don't think you are justified in saying I have a poor understanding of philosophy. As for theology, that's what I'm here to learn. The reason my opening questions sounds incoherent is only because I was following christian logic.
It's different from religion because religious people say: "We don't know how it happened, therefore God did it." Whereas scientists say "We don't know how it happened." and stop there. Then they do research to try to find out how it happened. That is a huge difference.
No, faith is not a realiable source of truth.
