How can people still take the Bible or other the religious texts literally?

[fourhats]

Every religion I am aware us has a most-high, most-powerful god king in the sky and a death-father (or mother if you lived in fertile-crescent-era Babylon) underground.

Buddhism doesn't have a god.

But the point is--aside from political gain, conspiracy theories, and so forth--that there are many who have a religious faith, and that reason vs. faith arguments aren't going matter to them. I go to church (a traditional one, not an evangelical one), and find faith a great comfort. There are many scientists, doctors, and even philosophers who attend my church, since it's in an academic town. None of them has any problem reconciling their faith, interpreting parables, and squaring this with their scientific beliefs.

[marshwiggle]

Yes. This is what I am primarily worried about. I don't care in the slightest what people believe in private. I do care a lot when their religious beliefs shape political agendas.

It's likely much more the other way around. People justify actions by all kinds of different things, including religion. If one justification were not allowed, there would be lots of others available.
Specifically, in politics, you will find, for instance, Christians all over the political map. The fact that a bunch of very vocal ones show up on the far right is at least partly due to it being clickbait for the media; the trope of fanatical religious people gets eyeballs, even if most religious people are much more moderate than that.
 

it is completely reasonable for a person to accept religious beliefs if they provide a more complete description of their universe and life within it. Specifically, if questions of human value, the purpose for existence, and so on are  more satisfactorily answered in a religious framework, then it is reasonable for someone to accept those beliefs on that basis even without being able to verify specific factual claims about ancient events.

I was once channel-surfing and ran across one of those mega-church broadcasts at exactly the moment that the preacher was saying "What would you rather believe in?  A God that is all-powerful and benevolent or a cold impersonal universes?" or something right along those lines.  My thought, of course, is that there are all sorts of things I'd like to believe in (I am a rock star in the world's biggest band; I can bench-press 500 lbs; I've won the Nobel Prize in Basket-weaving), but reason and experience suggest otherwise. 

You can't really believe you've won the Nobel Prize. You can say it; you can try to get other people to believe it, but that's all.  What you can actually believe is what makes sense. Which is part of why religious groups, political parties, etc. contain hypocrites - people can claim to believe things for a variety of reasons. What they actually believe will become apparent by observing their actions over time in a variety of settings.

And the "framework" of religion has given us some of the worst times in human history, so it is not a clear-cut answer. 

As I said above, people justify their actions all kinds of ways. Horrible things have been done in the name of "freedom", "love", safety", and probably any other cause you can think of.

This is not to say that religion doesn't provide a worthwhile framework----it does...sometimes.  This is to say that just because we want to believe something doesn't mean it is objectively true.  People really truly believe in Bigfoot, the belief answer some call in their lives.  But there is no Bigfoot.

And no serious religious person has ever said that. (That was Disney; "Wishing can make it so!" And Andrew Lloyd Webber, (or actually Tim Rice), riffing on the Bible; "Any dream will do".  Not very close to the biblical original.)

[Parasaurolophus]

What evidence would convince me of the literal resurrection of someone who was actually dead for three days back 2,000 years ago way before modern medicine?

Shrug. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, crucifixion is quite a slow death. It can take days for the victim to suffocate, die of dehydration, or be dispatched by their friends. If you took someone down before they'd actually died, they'd have ghastly but not immediately life-threatening wounds, and they might well seem dead. If they woke up sometime later, you'd be pretty surprised by it. More recently, we have plenty of evidence of people who were thought to be dead, but who came to life suddenly (in some stories, during the funeral services, although that may well be apocryphal). It doesn't stretch my imagination to believe this happened at some point to someone who'd been crucified. Maybe Inanna? It's the kind of story you'd tell for a while after.

Every religion I am aware us has a most-high, most-powerful god king in the sky and a death-father (or mother if you lived in fertile-crescent-era Babylon) underground.

Buddhism? Jainism? Daoism?

What is interesting is how culture shapes the concept of deity, how paleolithic cultures generally perceive animals as personifying the forces of the universe, how warrior cultures such as Rome or the Vikings tend to favor their war-gods, and how the more sophisticated we become technologically the more abstract and symbolic our deities become, for instance.

I dunno about the rest, and a historian can and should weigh in to correct us, but I think the 'warrior culture' analysis is wrong. There's a tendency among some strands of historians to reduce ancient cultures to mythological systems, even when it's inappropriate. IIRC, it's inappropriate with Iron Age Scandinavia, and probably also Rome. How important was Mars to Romans outside the armies (where, it has to be said, a bunch of other deities, including Mithras, seem to have enjoyed a significant following)? How important were any of the war gods to your everyday soldier? My impression is 'not very' (at least insofar as a Christian, Muslim, or Jew would see things), but it may well be mistaken.

Where Iron Age Scandinavia is concerned, my understanding is that there's not much evidence for a mythological system at all; rather, religion was part of the social community, and was reflected more in ancient customs and stories (e.g. the Edda, the sagas, festivals, etc.) than anything else (e.g. regular prayers to someone, personal intercessions, various prohibitions, etc.).

While it's true that Odin was chief of the gods and the god of war, you also have to understand that he's a treacherous bastard who's just as likely to kill you if he likes you as he is to save you. That's because he needs doughty companions to help him with the frost giants et al. come Ragnarok. So he's not a reliable patron if you're viking around. Thor's much more reliable, and is consequently better represented in terms of amulets in settlements and graves. But even then, my understanding from the sagas and other sources is that Frey (god of fertility) had a bigger, more important role in everyday Iron Age Scandinavian life than Odin--again, to the extent that anyone had much of a role in everyday life.

[Parasaurolophus]

You can't really believe you've won the Nobel Prize. You can say it; you can try to get other people to believe it, but that's all.  What you can actually believe is what makes sense. Which is part of why religious groups, political parties, etc. contain hypocrites - people can claim to believe things for a variety of reasons. What they actually believe will become apparent by observing their actions over time in a variety of settings.

Like I said earlier, belief is complicated. On the evidence, it's absolutely possible to believe false things, unlikely things, and even impossible things. The situation is different for knowledge--you can't know a proposition that's false or impossible. Similarly for trying, at least according to most action theorists: you can't genuinely try to jump over the moon, provided you understand how far away it is and how it relates to the Earth in space.

But belief? Some accounts of the representational structure of beliefs won't allow for inconsistencies, but I think it's fair to say that generally speaking, it's thought that the conditions on belief are weak enough to allow for contradictions. At least, as long as you don't recognize the contradiction. If you do, then we get into nittier and grittier territory.

So yeah. I think your intuitions about knowledge are crowding into your intuitions about belief.

[apl68]

This is offered by way of personal explanation of the original question posed in this thread:

I was raised by parents who were and are devout evangelical Christians.  They both had higher education (Met in college, in fact).  Dad gave up studying engineering to go to seminary to prepare to be a bi-vocational minister.  He worked several day jobs over the years to support the family.  Mostly he laid bricks.  Mom was a school teacher who later earned two MAs in modern languages and for many years taught Spanish language and literature at the college level.  They taught me both to believe in God and God's word, and to value education.

I spent six years training as an academic historian in a PhD program at a leading R1 university.  In those years I was exposed to quite a wide diversity of people and views.  Although I washed out of academia and eventually became a public librarian, I have spent my adult life studying history, and have long had a lay interest in comparative religion, philosophy, and science and technology.  All of which is to say that I've had no lack of exposure to different sorts of ideas, perspectives, and people.

And I have never doubted the fundamental truth of the Bible--God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, creation, Heaven, Hell, future prophecy, the whole nine yards.  Why?  Mainly it comes down to Jesus.  Since I was a child, Jesus/God/the Holy Spirit--they're all ultimately the same Deity--has been a living presence in my life.  With the experience I've had of God's presence in my life, I could no more doubt God's existence than I could that of my parents, whom I still talk to and sometimes see face-to-face.  To me it would be insane to question God's existence.

In my tiny individual's experience of God I've found what the Bible says to be truthful.  So have a lot of people I know, with diverse backgrounds and life experiences.  This makes me inclined to accept the truthfulness of those aspects of the Bible's teachings that lie beyond my experience to date.

[mahagonny]

I am posting this after having been temporarily suspended from another forum for mocking the notion of a certain person's actual death and actual coming back to life after the equivalent of a long weekend rotting in the grave. Apparently, I have given offense.

However, how is it that full-grown, otherwise intelligent adults can believe literal accounts of the resurrection or other religious miracles?

Good people use religion to make themselves better people.

Bad people use religion as an excuse for being a**holes.

I can see which type you are based on your post.

that's really sweet, Ciao.

[apl68]

Now as regards actually proving anything in the Bible, or convincing anybody of its truth, there's only so much I can do.  The only "proof" I and other Christians can really offer is the effect God has had on our lives. 

Is that extraordinary enough to prove some extraordinary claims?  Well, I've seen some pretty extraordinary stuff.  I've seen lives completely turned around after they met Jesus.  I've seen people who did vile things to those closest to them become wonderfully kind and loving people.  I've seen people (including myself) find joy even after absolutely crushing life experiences.  I've seen people whom society increasingly says ought to be at war with each other instead treating one another as brothers and sisters.

I know of a man on his deathbed who told a visitor who was living a very messed-up life that he "expected to see him again someday"--and the man afterward experienced a totally transformed life.  I know of a thirteen-year-old girl who died a lingering death from an extremely rare cancer who praised God for her life as long as she had consciousness--and members of her family were moved to make needed changes in their own lives.  I know of another teenager who could forgive the youths who murdered her grandmother and left the girl herself for dead.

Are things like that extraordinary enough?  YMMV, I guess.  The thing is, it's not my or any other Christian's job to make anybody believe anything.  All we're responsible for doing is telling others what we know, and living the most extraordinary lives that we can.  It's a pity most of us don't take that seriously enough.  Heaven knows I've fallen behind on that for a lot of my life. 

One thing about it, though.  The more we as Christians get to know God and understand God's Word, the more we start to understand that even the most terrible things that happen in our lives are really God's way of making our lives more extraordinary for him.  That understanding makes life a whole lot freer and more livable.

[marshwiggle]

You can't really believe you've won the Nobel Prize. You can say it; you can try to get other people to believe it, but that's all.  What you can actually believe is what makes sense. Which is part of why religious groups, political parties, etc. contain hypocrites - people can claim to believe things for a variety of reasons. What they actually believe will become apparent by observing their actions over time in a variety of settings.

Like I said earlier, belief is complicated. On the evidence, it's absolutely possible to believe false things, unlikely things, and even impossible things. The situation is different for knowledge--you can't know a proposition that's false or impossible. Similarly for trying, at least according to most action theorists: you can't genuinely try to jump over the moon, provided you understand how far away it is and how it relates to the Earth in space.

But belief? Some accounts of the representational structure of beliefs won't allow for inconsistencies, but I think it's fair to say that generally speaking, it's thought that the conditions on belief are weak enough to allow for contradictions. At least, as long as you don't recognize the contradiction. If you do, then we get into nittier and grittier territory.

So yeah. I think your intuitions about knowledge are crowding into your intuitions about belief.

This was my point about the Nobel Prize example. As you say, belief is possible with unrecognized contradictions, and even with small recognized ones, I would say, but it is still in principle falsifiable. I can't really believe I have a Nobel Prize since I've never been contacted by the Nobel committee or invited to Sweden. 

This is an irritating and disingenuous strawman that non-religious people employ against religious belief; the idea that people can choose to belive whatever they want. The classic example is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The choices people have about what to believe are always limited to things that they feel have a reasonable liklihood of being true. So to use a recent example of false belief, when Trump suggested hydrochloroquine and bleach, some people tried them, but people didn't try consuming every chemical in the house. Why? Because there is a reasonable liklihood that a national leader will provide correct information to the public. (Spend as long as you like enumerating the cases where leaders in general, and Trump in particular, have violated that principle..... However, if leaders' advice had no statistical improvement over random guesses society would break down completely.)

People do not "choose" their religious beliefs, as much as they choose a belief system which fits their beliefs. Someone who does not believe in any sort of afterlife is not really free to choose many religions, since in most the afterlife figures prominently. (Buddhism, as I understand it, is a possibility in that case.)

So, while belief and knowledge are not the same thing, belief is possibly only insofar as it does not directly contradict knowledge.

[Parasaurolophus]

The more we as Christians get to know God and understand God's Word, the more we start to understand that even the most terrible things that happen in our lives are really God's way of making our lives more extraordinary for him.  That understanding makes life a whole lot freer and more livable.

Last fall, when I took over a sick colleague's courses, I found myself having to teach this kind of apologetics and theodicy (which I encountered in classes on the history of the discipline years ago, but hadn't touched since) in the work of some contemporary figures. Although in the readings my colleague had assigned, the purpose tended to be to guarantee free will, rather than provide some benefit for God. Very few of the students came from a Christian religious background (they were mostly international, and these were mostly Muslim, but also mostly not devout), so it was their first exposure to this sort of reasoning.

I have to confess that I thought it was pretty monstrous. Not so much the reconstruction of god's purpose, as the practice and purpose of the apologetics itself, and our collective contemporary interest in these kinds of justifications. The deeper I delved into it all so that I could teach it, the more horrified I became. Thinking through particular cases and applying the reasoning to them left me seriously disgusted.

I'm not quite so horrified by 13th-century theodicy.

[Wahoo Redux]

I dunno about the rest, and a historian can and should weigh in to correct us, but I think the 'warrior culture' analysis is wrong.

I was just simplifying to make a point----same with the sky-god.  Ares is a brute and bully in Greek Myth; Mars is a braver more acceptable deity in Roman myth because the Romans were colonizers.  Most mythologies have a hierarchy with a king-god somewhere above us.  I am not as familiar with Eastern religions.  And sure, the fertility goddess has always held an important place in the pantheons; Joseph Campbell made the point about the Virgin Mary being a reiteration of this fundamental figure.  Innana is a resurrection story.

[marshwiggle]

The more we as Christians get to know God and understand God's Word, the more we start to understand that even the most terrible things that happen in our lives are really God's way of making our lives more extraordinary for him.  That understanding makes life a whole lot freer and more livable.

I have to confess that I thought it was pretty monstrous. Not so much the reconstruction of god's purpose, as the practice and purpose of the apologetics itself, and our collective contemporary interest in these kinds of justifications. The deeper I delved into it all so that I could teach it, the more horrified I became. Thinking through particular cases and applying the reasoning to them left me seriously disgusted.

Even this needs to be compared to a completely materialist worldview, where there is no meaning whatsoever to anything in life. Given the choice between believing that having one's family wiped out by a terrorist bomb will result in some (as yet unknown) good in the future, and believing that the deaths had no purpose whatsoever, it is no surprise that there are people who will still find the religious interpretation more satisfying.

[Parasaurolophus]

The more we as Christians get to know God and understand God's Word, the more we start to understand that even the most terrible things that happen in our lives are really God's way of making our lives more extraordinary for him.  That understanding makes life a whole lot freer and more livable.

I have to confess that I thought it was pretty monstrous. Not so much the reconstruction of god's purpose, as the practice and purpose of the apologetics itself, and our collective contemporary interest in these kinds of justifications. The deeper I delved into it all so that I could teach it, the more horrified I became. Thinking through particular cases and applying the reasoning to them left me seriously disgusted.

Even this needs to be compared to a completely materialist worldview, where there is no meaning whatsoever to anything in life. Given the choice between believing that having one's family wiped out by a terrorist bomb will result in some (as yet unknown) good in the future, and believing that the deaths had no purpose whatsoever, it is no surprise that there are people who will still find the religious interpretation more satisfying.

I won't get into the specifics because I find them disturbing, and this doesn't seem like the place to do that (especially when that wasn't at all the idea expressed by apl68), but when you present it as a choice between a world where bad things happen because some people want them to happen but it's not part of some bigger plan and one where bad things happen to people so that the victims and perpetrators will be blessed with the privilege of exercising their free will (and that's the Big Plan), I find the former interpretation vastly preferable, and I'm not sure I have the right words to express my revulsion to the latter.

Other theodicies are available, of course, and I don't find them all as morally horrific as this particular one as expressed by those particular Big Names In Apologetics.

[Wahoo Redux]

Now as regards actually proving anything in the Bible, or convincing anybody of its truth, there's only so much I can do.  The only "proof" I and other Christians can really offer is the effect God has had on our lives. 

....

Is that extraordinary enough to prove some extraordinary claims?  Well, I've seen some pretty extraordinary stuff.  I've seen lives completely turned around after they met Jesus.  The more we as Christians get to know God and understand God's Word, the more we start to understand that even the most terrible things that happen in our lives are really God's way of making our lives more extraordinary for him.  That understanding makes life a whole lot freer and more livable.

This sounds wonderful and I am happy for you, and I would never directly challenge someone's personal experience with faith, so please forgive me----this is not meant to be an attack on your personal beliefs...

...but you must be aware of Catholic abuse of children, Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, and the relationship between the church and Hitler, just as the most overt examples of faith gone badly wrong.

And as a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, I can attest to a number of experiences and steps which have had just exactly these sorts of changes in people's lives that are unrelated to any concept of deity.  In other words, its not just the Christian religion which inspires people to be better than they are.

[Treehugger]

Yes. This is what I am primarily worried about. I don't care in the slightest what people believe in private. I do care a lot when their religious beliefs shape political agendas.

It's likely much more the other way around. People justify actions by all kinds of different things, including religion. If one justification were not allowed, there would be lots of others available.
Specifically, in politics, you will find, for instance, Christians all over the political map. The fact that a bunch of very vocal ones show up on the far right is at least partly due to it being clickbait for the media; the trope of fanatical religious people gets eyeballs, even if most religious people are much more moderate than that.
 

I think it maybe hard to quantify, but there are certainly instances of conspiracy theories having pretty negative real world outcomes, of the theories actually producing the actions, not merely serving as a pretext or justification for something that would have happened anyway.

Take Edgar Welch's infamous misguided attempt to free the children supposedly held prisoner at Comet Ping Pong in DC. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689/pizzagate-gunman-sentenced-to-4-years-in-prison. He was not some kind of criminel who would have just found some other outlet for his violent tendencies. It is not like he was just going to invade some restaurant and the conspiracy theory pointed him to Comet Ping Pong. It doesn't mention this in the article, but I remember reading elsewhere that he did not have a criminal record, nor did he have a history of mental health problems. Instead, he honestly thought he was doing the right thing. But he was wrong.

I'm sure the same could be said in many other cases. How about the 9/11 terrorists? Was this group just aching to fly planes into buildings, and radical Islam gave them an excuse to do so? I think not.

Upon reflection, I am sorry that I brought up the case of the resurrection. I really don't care that much about one particular element of one religion.

I do care about about what is real and what is not real. It is incredibly important now as there are all kinds of  fake news, "fake news" and radicalization out there thanks to the internet. We need to be empowered to say: "No, that belief is incorrect and dangerous (and here's why). And no, you are not simply entitled to believe whatever the hell you want to believe. But I am willing to listen to you make an argument for your views." Instead, most of what I hear is that we are to respect others' beliefs no matter how crazy, no matter how objectively false. I also think there is also a tendency in academia to want to make an issue interesting, to have sophisticated conversations about a question and if a matter is to clear cut, no one is interested.

[marshwiggle]

I do care about about what is real and what is not real. It is incredibly important now as there are all kinds of  fake news, "fake news" and radicalization out there thanks to the internet. We need to be empowered to say: "No, that belief is incorrect and dangerous (and here's why). And no, you are not simply entitled to believe whatever the hell you want to believe. But I am willing to listen to you make an argument for your views." Instead, most of what I hear is that we are to respect others' beliefs no matter how crazy, no matter how objectively false. I also think there is also a tendency in academia to want to make an issue interesting, to have sophisticated conversations about a question and if a matter is to clear cut, no one is interested.

This is the opposite of what is happening now; as more academics refer to themselves as "activists", they shout down and "cancel" anyone who has a different view than theirs. Sophisticated conversations are considered to be "giving a platform to XXXists/XXXphobes", where XXX can be one of any number of things. They want to make it seem that the issue is clear cut, and that no one is interested, but it's only because most peole who disagree are cowed into silence.