True or False? The attempt to prove the existence of God by logic tends to result in a loss of faith.

I love your answer,
it's logic,
it's consideration of the different possibilities for different people,
it's open-mindedness,
and it's honesty.

I especially appreciate your example about the variables within love.
I vaguely remember hearing pastors and priests saying that all true faith has moments of doubt, and that these are a vital part of spiritual growth because they can generate a more mature faith. I don't quite understand it, but it seems to be a widely known phenomenon.

 

Oops: (it’s its)

 

  I appreciate your praise and your perceptions of my post. If I may, I’d like to expand on the part you said you don’t understand fully. 

  Think of all the years you’ve known your husband, and think of all the experiences the two of you have shared. Focus for a moment on all of the negatives, the bad times, the setbacks, the hurdles that had to be overcome, the obstacles that have presented themselves, the frustrations, the missteps, the anger, the arguments, the fighting, the doubts, etc. The reason I ask you to start there is that you’re then going to compare those things with the overall positives, weighing in your own mind his assets as opposed to his liabilities, but more importantly, weighing your own emotions toward him and considering whether or not you’ve always felt exactly the same way about him over all those years. Even if and when he has disappointed you, even if and when he has pleased you, your feelings for him rise and fall at varying degrees over time.
  This example can be applied to any relationship between two or more people you’ve known in your life: parent(s), sibling, extended family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances, strangers, adversaries, enemies, etc. Human emotions vary, waver, climb, fall, flatten out, et cetera.   
  Religious faith is somewhat like that. It doesn’t remain at one unmoving level the entire time it ensues itself in a person. It gets stronger at times and it gets weaker at times. And just like relationships that end because emotions die out, it is entirely possible that a person can lose faith altogether and never recover it. Religious faith carries absolutely no guarantee that it will ALWAYS do anything, either good or bad. People are faced with all kinds of situations daily, even hourly, that boost or challenge them. What cuts into one person’s faith might not mean a thing to another person. What anchors one person’s faith might not mean a thing to another.
~

Maybe you don't have all the answers, but that was a superlative one.

Okay. 

___

And that was a perfect comment to my comment---I've been there myself.

  LOL, I was (and I remain) confused as to what you meant about the "superlative"; whether it was complimentary, not complimentary, neutral, or something else entirely.
___

of the highest quality or degree

  No, I don't mean that I misunderstand or are unfamiliar with the word superlative; I understand the word itself, I know its definition, I just don't know what you meant by attributing it to my post, because an example of a superlative can be best or worst, for instance.
~

I suspect that 95% of the people consider it to be a compliment---just as at least 95% of people in the US who are watching a local weather report expect the temperatures to be listed in Fahrenheit.

How you describe philosophy is accurate for how the discipline is today.

But the Catholic Church founded the first universities for the specific purpose of proving by logic that God exists, and for the first few centuries that was the only topic of philosophy.
Definitely at this stage all the thinking was biased and directed towards faith.
Various philosophers put down logical arguments based upon the OT and NT definitions of a God who is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and good.
Each argument was considered sound until a subsequent philosopher found a logical flaw in it, and then developed a new argument in its place.

I'm not sure about the exact progression, but I think the shift to arguments against the possible existence of God first began in the early twentieth century, running from Husserl through Nietzsche to Sartre and others.

I'm pretty sure that definition of philosophy predates the Catholic Church.
Socrates, Euclid, Plato, Diogenes, etc ... all lived hundreds of years before Jesus of Nazareth was born.

If anything, we could say that the Catholic Church was the one to attempt to define philosophy as a narrow field.
Prior to their universities, anyone could be a philosopher.  You just had to convince enough people to support you.
One could (and some do) say that Jesus was nothing more than a wandering philosopher, in his time.

Definitely yes, and the West owes a lot to the thinking of the ancient Greeks.
I've always thought that the evolution of English law (and many of its institutions) owes more to Plato's The Laws than to Christianity.

But philosophy in the West might not have evolved at all if the Catholic Church hadn't founded and funded the early universities. And it wasn't until the Renaissance, only 400 years ago, that scholars began to translate and think about the thinking of the Greeks and Romans.

About Jesus - I guess that would depend whether one used the term philosophy loosely or with academic precision. Colloquially, we talk about a person's philosophy of life, meaning their beliefs, ways of thinking and values.
Academically, contemporary philosophy is now hugely occupied with ethics, and Jesus was a great ethicist. The commandment to "love others as oneself" or "love thy neighbours as thyself" was a revolutionary re-interpretation of Moses's "do unto others as you would have done unto you."

It doesn't, however, deal with the problem that large numbers of people don't love themselves. They themselves were not loved or cared for properly as children and are so traumatised that they don't really know what love is. I see this as one of the primary causes of suffering in our culture.

False, Logic refutes existence of gods. Logic questions everything, but some religion have dogmas that are not allowed to be questions. It is appalling when so many people claim to be logical but are actually quite illogical, 

Logic can also easily refute the non-existence of gods.  It all depends on the premises of your syllogism.

There is nothing that can be said by either the person who think no god exists or the person that thinks that one does that compels either side to assent to that God's existence or non existence---after all, obviously the intellect cannot be placed in possession of its object by an external agent that brings it there.

The advantage of thinking (or in my case, more accurately, knowing by experience) that God exists is that one then has a lifetime to come to know and appreciate this wonderful creator and all that He does for us.

And unfortunately, I can't speak intelligently about what advantages---if He does exist---those who do not think He exists accrue to them.

Circular arguments are what we often see on here whenever certain members come crawling out of the woodwork.

True.
I remember scrawling through some of the debates between Texaco and other members.
They spun like orbits.

I know what you mean.

BTW, I'm not promoting arguments for or against God here - rather, I'm raising questions about the role of philosophy concerning Judeo-Christian faith.

I have a farrier who is a JW. I've listened to his arguments for 15 years; some are circular, others straw men, others based on a cherry-picked translation from Aramaic, and others just shocking that he could consider them plausible.
One of the farrier's arguments for proof that God created the world for man's use is that the horse has a gap between the incisors and molars designed especially for the placement of the bit.

This post was edited by inky at July 17, 2020 9:07 PM MDT