| I am often impressed by those who say that they have always known that
God existed, starting from a very young age. Those people seem to have
a special relationship with the Divine, a special affinity, that I have
never experienced. It is something that I don't understand and cannot
relate to.
To me, the categories of perspective on God are not discrete, but
instead seem to span across a spectrum; on one end is the atheist who
is convinced that God exists, and on the other is the theist who is
convinced that God does exist. The agnostic lies somewhere in the
middle. In the course of my life I have jumped around across the
theological spectrum. More recently, I have come to the conclusion
that God exists, but this conclusion arose as something of a working
hypothesis, and was in no way accompanied with a sense of finality or
certainty. Coming to this conclusion involved considerable reflection.
It was not possible for me to accept the existence of God until I was
able to resolve many of the philosophical difficulties that led me to
reject the idea of God in the first place. It was my discovery of
process theology that led me to realize that many of my prior
objections were based on certain theistic formulations about God that
are not inherent to the concept of God per se. I realized that my
prior objections were not to God, but to certain ideas about God that I
could not agree with. With that understanding, I was able to view God
in a new light, and was thus able to again accept theism.
But do I experience feelings of doubt? Certainly. I am even willing
to entertain the possibility that perhaps God does not exist after all,
even though I work on the assumption that He/She does. Some might call
me an agnostic because of that element of tentativeness, although I
don't identify myself in that way. Because I view atheism and theism
as poles on a spectrum, I see myself as lying somewhere on the theistic
spectrum between pure agnosticism in the middle and absolute theistic
certainty at one pole. But even if I am uncertain, I act on the
assumption that God does exist, and therefore I identify myself with
the "theistic" camp rather than the "agnostic" camp.
-- Mike
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| Re: .1 Mike
> To me, the categories of perspective on God are not discrete, but
> instead seem to span across a spectrum; on one end is the atheist who
> is convinced that God exists, and on the other is the theist who is
> convinced that God does exist.
An atheist who is convinced that God exists? Hmmm, that's an interesting
perspective. :-)
-- Bob
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