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Einstein spent 10 years in the world of subjective before coming up with e=mc2 , he solved the problem in his subjective experience and applied it to objective reality amazing thing is ....it worked !
Why couldn't a reasonably intelligent and powerful god create people who have free will, agency, intelligence, etc., but all freely choose to worship him because it's the right thing to do?
Right. And if they don't, I'll just drown them. It'll be wonderful spending the rest of eternity with a bunch of finger puppets worshiping me and singing my praises 24/7/365. The rest I'll just kill off. I won't bother with all this hell and eternal torment and stuff.
I like to connect this to the philosophical question why does something exist rather than nothing. If something exists there has to be something that is independent of the object to cause the creation. Whether or not you believe in evolution is beside the point because the rule still applies that something with intelligence has to initiate the object into existence. God is like an engineer or mechanic that builds a 3D printer to make something, in this case evolution is the 3D printer and whatever the engineer decides to create are the worlds. I think that most non-theists believe that matter is eternal, because at what point in their worldview is there nothing and then something? Things don't always just occur.
Intelligent beings with free will will make different choices when the parameters of the situation change. I don't see how this gets you to the conclusion you're arguing, though.
So you don't acknowledge any difference between a being with free will and reason who rationally chooses the obviously best option and a robot that has been programmed to choose the best option?
Depends on the God, but assuming we're talking about one that's all-knowing and all-powerful, I'm sure he could figure something out.
Sorry - not really sure what you're going on about here.
) requisite to have the capacity to come up with or recognize this, each on his own, is full self-awareness.
Two things:
I'm not sure how. Of course, I don't think materialism is really defensible anyway (or to the extent it is, it must be sufficiently different from classical materialism s.t. the "material" or "physical" includes things such as information, "virtual" particles, processes, functions, etc.). The "first cause" argument assumes a linear and singular model of causality that cannot be true without time, and therefore doesn't apply to the start of time (or spacetime) itself. It is also the same kind of reductionist, mechanical thinking that doesn't allow for consciousness or free will, it doesn't hold of many phenomena and arguably doesn't make sense relativistically (at the very least, it would have to show how locally the same sequence of events can have a different order depending upon where the observer is). There are other issues, but again these don't really matter as physics "knocks materialism out of the way".
Assuming that consciousness exists (and I believe it does), it need not be material to emerge like so many other processes in biological systems from those systems (e.g., metabolism, internally regulated and maintained homeostasis, internal representation of the external world, etc.).
How?
It doesn't. The standard interpretation holds that quantum systems are abstract, mathematical devices we use for prediction, not to understand nature. Quantum mechanics is an irreducibly statistical theory, but unlike with statistical mechanics there is no other, deeper level analogue of classical mechanics that we could use in principal were things not too complicated (hence irreducible). I think this is misguided. However, even assuming that physical systems are actually in superpositional states (and, in particular, that it is meaningful to ask questions like "where was the photon/electron" before it was detected in the double-slit experiment), all that is needed is interaction with the environment. The main question in physics isn't so much "how are superposition states destroyed?" because we know how. It's "how can we maintain such states/processes?"
I'm not sure what you meant to say here. Any such leap in cognition would result in another species. Human cognition is just that: human. It applies to an enormous range of possible abilities because cognition is fundamentally influenced by culture and environment. The biggest leaps in cognition came with writing and civilization. Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, and most of that time we've lived almost the same in small nomadic tribes with sticks and stones. Then came agriculture and with it the ability to have more permanent civilizations, and a few thousand years later we're building supercomputers and spacecraft. Cognitive leaps aren't biological changes (unless, again, you're talking about a different species).
The problem with this evidence is that, even though it is evidenced, it is often hard (certainly for me) to find convincing without having such an experience.
Long before humans (millions and millions of years before humans), a horrible, corrosive gas was released upon early life. It killed much of this life, and changed the atmosphere. Nothing humans have done has come remotely close to this process, which fundamentally changed not only the earth's atmospheric concentrations (changing a trace gas to a major portion of the atmosphere), but basically all life (even us). This life-ending, dangerous pollutant was...oxygen:
Something had to have. Things don't just explode or expand, especially when the thing expanding is nothing.
We're here. If you follow that line of thinking we shouldn't be here. Nothing should be here if the universe or evolution has no cause. Evolution wouldn't even be in existence. And yet here we are arguing.
The personal experiences of theists are about the only thing I can think of that keep my mind open to the idea of a certain kind of God.