I'm a Christian Aspie

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Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?
Student : Yes, sir.
Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?
Student : Absolutely, sir.
Professor : Is GOD good ?
Student : Sure.
Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?
Student : Yes.
Professor: My brother died of cancer even though
he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would
attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t.
How is this GOD good then? Hmm?
(Student was silent.)
Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s
start again, young fella. Is GOD good?
Student : Yes.
Professor: Is satan good ?
Student : No.
Professor: Where does satan come from ?
Student : From … GOD …
Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil
in this world?
Student : Yes.
Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD
did make everything. Correct?
Student : Yes.
Professor: So who created evil ?
(Student did not answer.)
Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality?
Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in
the world, don’t they?
Student : Yes, sir.
Professor: So, who created them ?
(Student had no answer.)
Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you
use to identify and observe the world around you.
Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?
Student : No, sir.
Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your
GOD?
Student : No , sir.
Professor: Have you ever felt your GOD, tasted
your GOD, smelt your GOD? Have you ever had
any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?
Student : No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.
Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?
Student : Yes.
Professor : According to Empirical, Testable,
Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD
doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?
Student : Nothing. I only have my faith.
Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem
Science has.
Student : Professor, is there such a thing as heat?
Professor: Yes.
Student : And is there such a thing as cold?
Professor: Yes.
Student : No, sir. There isn’t.
(The lecture theater became very quiet with this
turn of events.)
Student : Sir, you can have lots of heat, even
more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a
little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything
called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero
which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after
that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only
a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We
cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not
the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.
(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)
Student : What about darkness, Professor? Is
there such a thing as darkness?
Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t
darkness?
Student : You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the
absence of something. You can have low light,
normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you
have no light constantly, you have nothing and its
called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t.
If it is, well you would be able to make darkness
darker, wouldn’t you?
Professor: So what is the point you are making,
young man ?
Student : Sir, my point is your philosophical
premise is flawed.
Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?
Student : Sir, you are working on the premise of
duality. You argue there is life and then there is
death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are
viewing the concept of GOD as something finite,
something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t
even explain a thought. It uses electricity and
magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully
understood either one. To view death as the
opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that
death cannot exist as a substantive thing.
Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence
of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your
students that they evolved from a monkey?
Professor: If you are referring to the natural
evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.
Student : Have you ever observed evolution with
your own eyes, sir?
(The Professor shook his head with a smile,
beginning to realize where the argument was
going.)
Student : Since no one has ever observed the
process of evolution at work and cannot even
prove that this process is an on-going endeavor.
Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you
not a scientist but a preacher?
(The class was in uproar.)
Student : Is there anyone in the class who has
ever seen the Professor’s brain?
(The class broke out into laughter. )
Student : Is there anyone here who has ever
heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or
smelt it? No one appears to have done so. So,
according to the established Rules of Empirical,
Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that
you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir,
how do we then trust your lectures, sir?
(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the
student, his face unfathomable.)
Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on
faith, son.
Student : That is it sir … Exactly ! The link
between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that
keeps things alive and moving.

The student turned out to be Albert Eisntein.

-I just copy paste this. Something that inspires me a lot

I love that!
Howdy! I'm Angie and I'm Christian too! I'm NT. Nice to meet you!

I'm a Christian aspie too. I really enjoyed your post.

I'm pretty new to this site. Are we a small minority?

My only criticism of the forward you posted wasn't on the level of ideas because it pointed out a lot of common fallacies made in objections to the faith that you encounter at an everyday level, but I have to criticize it that it is not historically accurate of Einstein himself who was Jewish and then eventually subscribed to a sort of Spinozean pantheism.

Either way, I really enjoyed the post! : )

Yes yes. It isn't really Einstein, I might even think that it's a fiction though. Would maybe the one who wrote that just wanted to make a point that even a great genius can or would believe in God.

I'm glad meeting you virtually.

Nice to meet you too Angie. BTW are you a nurse?

Oh, I figured you knew that. I agree. It's great anyways. I suppose I was anticipating someone trying to shut down its good content for such a small thing.

Yeah I've noticed a lot of comments on here that seem to misunderstand the rationality of our beliefs. One barrier is that they will sometimes expect us to provide a quick full account, but the complexity of how we arrived at our beliefs requires a long process of conversation to share, and it will sometimes require sharing concepts that need to be pondered a while before grasping. Moreover, our own beliefs are mysterious to us as well in the sense that making explicit one's epistemology is a difficult task for anyone and takes a long time of examining really why it is that we believe--especially since we can't leave out the personal relationship with God, which to a non-believer seems easier to dismiss than to try to understand what we're talking about.

How did you know?

Einstein was not a Christian. He was an ostensibly liberal thinker who believed in Chasidic Judaism, and then followed Spinoza.

What's more, these arguments don't properly define empiricism, and conflate it at different points with naturalism and skepticism. The scientific method appeals to the realist, correspondence, and coherence theories of truth. So if this professor supposedly couldn't explain either of the these three theories, then obviously he had no how to philosophical validate the practice of science in the first place.

Empiricists don't rely on faith in the popular sense. Their epistemology is fundamentally different. Of course, "faith" in it's biblical sense, as seen in the original languages, is quite irrespective of this "blind faith" as it is understood in the popular vernacular today. Actually, faith as seen in words like pistis, ahlam, and fides (Koine Greek, ancient Hebrew, and ancient Latin, respectively) is antithetical to "blind" reasoning.

Btw, I'm not trying to put you down and I enjoyed your contribution.

Last edited by Lukecash12 on 16 Jul 2015, 11:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I don't think there's a lot of us here. I believe a lot of Aspies are either Agnostic or Atheist from what I gather. I never met an Atheist until I came to the Aspie websites, but I have an open mind and I've learned a lot from them and how they think - more logically and scientifically.

I. LOVE. THIS. thank you for posting

I mentioned that above. I agree with you that the professor isn't putting forth a consistent and well established epistemological stance, but I do think it reflects fair enough certain uncritical epistemologies that one finds in daily life, which is why I still enjoyed it.

Most Christians I know don't really think of faith as "blind reasoning" either, but it is a difficult task for most people to explicitly detail how they believe. I am aspergic and thus obsess over ideas for days at a time, and I have studied philosophy and theology for the last 9 years, and I am still working on explaining how it is that I believe what I believe. I would say from a philosophical standpoint I have been most impressed by the hermeneutical tradition springing out of Hegel/Heidegger/Gadamar, etc. I have also been very influenced by Michael Polanyi, even if he is sort of rogue with respect to academic philosophy, I felt his developments on top of Heidegger were very insightful.

When it comes to theological epistemology, or gnoseology, or properly fideology, things get much more tricky but hermeneutical insights can help. The personal relationship element can be included in the total data that we are working with, along with the philosophical conclusions we arrive at through systematic reasoning, that is the basis for our fundamental interpretation of reality. Everybody has such a fundamental interpretation: atheists, agnostics, Jews, Christians, pantheists, etc. That's what I was getting at when I said polemical contexts are really a horrible context for defending one's worldview. I am probably guilty of thinking I can dismiss someone's standpoint because they couldn't answer a difficult question for me on the spot, but I am also sure that that has happened for me. In fact, I'm curious to hear from the other aspies if that is a frequent issue in general for them: that we spend hours upon hours thinking about some problem only to come to a counter-intuitive solution that just gets laughed at or is responded to with eye-rolling?

Anyways. I thought you made some really good points. I guess I was just viewing it more from the standpoint of typical fallacies we encounter in daily life rather than the thoughts of systematic philosophers in the subject areas.

I am also a Christian (a Lutheran, to be specific), and a fellow Aspie.

Let's set the tone for this big rabbit trail, and enjoy some material from Psalms:

Yes, it really demonstrates that many people walk around feeling as if their system of thinking is so much more robust and rational than some other group, yet appearances can be deceiving. I've met a number of professors like this, especially in public institutions, who think that because they know much about one subject they are instantly conversant in a bunch of other issues, most often philosophy. I can't even count how many science teachers I've been acquainted with that couldn't even explain to me what epistemology is, or find any good reason to believe in the scientific method when presented with just a few basic problems from Descartes, probably the easiest and most familiar example of Rationalism one could mention (e.g., the "brain in a vat" argument, or the "demonic entity" argument).



Of course, they don't exactly consider it wholesale "blind reasoning", either. Let me explain faith in it's authentic biblical context:

Ahlam is the Hebrew root term, and most concordances and dictionaries such as Strong's Concordance, Vine's Expository, and so on into more modern entries have agreed that ahlam actually indicates a relationship concept, similar to people trusting their parents. So let's ask ourselves: why do we trust our parents? Well, typically we trust them because they have established that trust by doing all the things that they do for us. Okay, simple enough.

Next stop is a little visit to Koine Greek: pistis. A pistis is actually similar to an argument and it is a specific type of logos that is meant to persuade someone. There are strong conceptual ties between pistis, logos, and pneuma so it behooves us to take a look at each of these. In the ancient Hellenized world one's pneuma was the essence of their spirit, the idea of some tangible wind like substance that resided within the body and was the seat of intellect. When people spoke or otherwise communicated, their logos, a visualized portion of their pneuma, left their bodies and interacted with others, and inasmuch as they formed ideas they took on a life of their own; hence the wide variety of definition for this term in Attic Greek). Plato took logos to mean ordered thinking, or a system of thought as in a scientific discipline (the "sciences" used to be a much more broad, holistic term). But we're talking about biblical Koine Greek here, so the aforementioned, comparatively simple definition is more appropriate. Finally we visit pistis again and note that it is a particular type of logos that is intended to persuade another person to accept a position. So again here we can see that the term is talking about a rational process. This is notable when we look at instances like Paul saying in an epistle "did you accept this person's pistis, that person's pistis, or even mine? Well I was trying to get you to accept the pistis of Jesus Christ, not that of some other person."

And now finally we come to the word in line just before our modern word faith: the Latin term fides. Long before it was used by Catholic Christians to talk about theology, fides was a very important concept in Roman society. Well, not just important in fact but the bedrock of Roman society. It was considered an essential element in the character of a man of public affairs, which signified reliability, a necessary sense of trust between two parties that was a precondition for them developing a relationship. This was an entirely reciprocal and mutual thing. It is very important to note that in order to understand later Christian references to God being faithful. If we think of God as faithful in the misguidedly popular, modern sense of the word "faith" we come to the silly thought that God merely believes in us. Well of course He does, He did make us after all. The statement makes no sense to modern ears with a modern definition.

The truth is that many Christians (but of course not all) have battered themselves into the modern definition of faith as many of them retreated from issues in the intellectual world. They looked at verses in the epistles like "faith is belief in the evidence of things not yet seen" and assumed from their English translation that that meant faith was somehow separate from reason. My contention is that we have bastardized the definition and for the longest time faith was actually seen as it's own form of reasoning that wasn't mutually exclusive to other forms at all. This should be even more clear when we look at the Apostle Peter, as he talks about being ready to give an account of your beliefs in his epistle and when we look at what appears to be an apologetic/logical-argument (surprise surprise folks!) in his address to the people on the day of Pentecost near the beginning of Acts. In his address to the people he makes an appeal to prophetic texts and eyewitness testimony in order to convince people that Jesus was who He said He was. Eyewitness testimony huh? Isn't that enough to put someone away for murder even now in modern courts?

What's more, I would also contend that it's easily arguable that an ancient thinker would have defined a physicist's belief in atoms as faith, because the physicist can't see atoms but he can reasonably prove their existence under the paradigm of empiricist philosophy. Faith is how we establish a reasonable belief in things that aren't as tangible as others, such as an ancient Roman using fides to gauge the trustworthiness of his business partner when he has no Cartesian proof that that business partner won't cheat him.

Newton used faith to argue for different classes of substance and form, and also the existence of gravity, as opposed to Leibniz who argued for monads and a liquid medium called aether in the place of gravity. For Leibniz it didn't make sense that objects could interact with one another without directly touching so he assumed that the two objects were affecting a fluid medium in order to get around Newton's concept of gravity while still sufficiently explaining Newton's solid observation that objects attract one another, and this is what causes the planets to orbit the sun. Neither of them could see with their own eyes what they were talking about but we take it for granted today that one view prevailed and the other didn't, that today we believe in gravity instead of aether. And to this day physicists argue over issues using indirect observation or appeals to what they feel is the more reasonable explanation of the same data. So the truth of the matter here is that we still use faith all the time and it is an indispensable tool for modern reasoning. Without it we wouldn't have radio waves or a whole host of other very tangible inventions using things we can't see. People have long understood that this form of reasoning is valid and you can verify it with another more easily observable form of reasoning by talking to a friend of yours on the phone.

Now Christians might get confused by this into thinking that I have just sterilized the concept of saving faith in the Gospel. However, the faith that we have involves more than just pistis. That experience is the result of both pistis/faith and metanoeo/repentance. Repentance, in the Greek, is a change in a person's mind. It is a compound word for "mind" and "turn" that, as opposed to one typical understanding today that says "repentance is a change in behavior", actually refers specifically to a mental change. After we receive the pistis of the gospel and have metanoeo towards it, the rest of the picture here comes into play.

The main source of confusion here, in modern discussion, is that all of these concepts aren't wrapped up under just one term. In order to explain all of that we have to come to a general view of the ordo salutis, i.e. the process or order of events in the life of a saved person, and if we want to agree upon and explain all of that we become involved in several other terms.

Classical Calvinists, for example, believe that the ordo salutis is unconditional electing grace, regeneration, faith, repentance, justification, and then sanctification (this is a shortened version of their whole ordo salutis). A Classical Arminian believes that the order of the process is prevenient grace, faith and repentance (happening simultaneously at the same stage of the process), justification, regeneration, and then sanctification.



I treasure such moments because they invite me to admit when I am in error and must change my assumptions on the grounds of the challenge, or when I don't know enough yet to form a proper conclusion. Truly disciplined thinkers should feel they are flattering themselves if they can say that they've been known to concede a point.



And thank you for the pleasure of reading and contemplating your post.

Obviously the student was possessed by Satan!

Couldn't help myself... I have an odd sense of humor.