This approach assumes the existence of God. If you assume the existence of God while trying to justify the existence of God, then you're begging the question.
No, I did not assume the existence of God
before I had evidence for the existence of God. The Messengers are the evidence and that is how I know there has to be a God. Why I believe they are Messengers of God is because of evidence that indicates that they were MORE than ordinary men.
In a sense yes, since we cannot substantiate that what Messengers said or wrote came from God, but in a sense no, because it is more than a rumor if it comes from someone I consider a Messenger of God.
Hearsay: information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate; rumor.
https://www.google.com/search
The God you've described? I can't see any.
So you think that maybe you can know about some other god?
It seems to me that in your attempt to make God unfalsifiable, you also made him unjustifiable.
I don’t know what you mean by that.
This is an irrelevant question. It's not about "making God communicate directly;" it's about justifying belief in God when we've assumed he doesn't communicate directly.
Why do you
assume that God does not communicate directly to those God shooses as messengers?
How do you, using only information you have at your disposal, tell the difference between a God that exists but doesn't interact with humanity directly and a God that doesn't exist at all?
I can tell the difference by reading what the Baha’u’llah wrote about that God, including His explanation of why God only communicates with Messengers and not to ordinary people, which makes complete sense to me. I cannot say that I would believe in God based upon the Bible or any other scriptures because they do not make any sense to me. I operate on logic, not on emotion.
So then to justify belief in God, you would need to justify believing both of those statements.
I can't see how you could do that without having already established that God exists (among other things).
I understand what you mean because other Atheists have said the same thing to me. They think that
first we need to know that God exists before we can say:
- these "messengers" really are messengers, and
- what they say is true.
But that is a catch-22 because
the Messengers are the evidence for the God and there is no other evidence. Logically speaking, if God sent them as evidence of His existence then that is what God wanted us to look at as evidence. We cannot make an omnipotent God provide some other kind of evidence. Moreover, if God is omniscient God knows the best kind of evidence to provide.
I have justified them to myself. Why would I need to justify those claims to anyone else except myself? What problem have I traded for two?
The problem of establishing that God exists.
We can
believe that God exists and we can
know in our mind that God exists but we cannot establish that as a fact, because God is not a material entity that can be proven to exist. There are many underlying premises we have to accept before we are going to conclude that God exists. After I became a Baha’i I assumed that God existed but I never really knew until I understood what Baha’u’llah wrote about God. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks and life has not been the same since. I have my issues with God but I know that God exists, and I know because of Baha’u’llah and what He wrote about God. I just made sense to me.
So you might say that I kind of came in through the back door. I accepted that Baha’u’llah was a Messenger of God but I did not really know that God existed; although I kind of believed in God, it did not mean much to me at all. Later, after I read the Writings of Bahaullah with intent to understand God, I knew God existed.
If you feel that your beliefs are justified, fine; I assumed that the reason you're in this discussion is to help other people understand how your beliefs are justified. So far, I'm not seeing how they are.
All I can do is explain to people how I justified my beliefs to myself. I use logic to justify my beliefs, not emotion. However, not everyone reasons the same way, so not everyone is going to see what I see. In other words, not all logical arguments wind up with the same conclusions. Logic can be applied in many ways.