FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
Do you think nature has any kind of control?if yes then how it has such
control, just happened to be so isn't a rational answer.
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God's Existence
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Do you think nature has any kind of control?if yes then how it has such
control, just happened to be so isn't a rational answer.
Really, The only reason science works is because people question why. Why allows us to grow. If you were an infinite being and you want your creation to be more or to grow, doubt or curiosity would be the best way to go. If you said I am God and you must do this you would only have robots.
FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
And you call it a process and at the same time you believe it's natural that such process
to be controlled, but my question is how?
Regiomontanus
Eastern Orthodox
Those examples only negate a certain type of god, not the existence of a creator in general.
I really don't know. Assuming for a moment that there is a god, It seems extremely unlikely that ANY of the 10,000 definitions of god that humans have cooked up are accurate. For example it seems far more plausible to me that the known universe is some sort of scientific experiment on a grand scale. (And I know, that raises more, unanswerable questions.)
james bond
Well-Known Member
I would not use the term "supernatural," but a spiritual presence. God makes me feel good and thankful for all that he has provided. It's all around us. He is everywhere. The only thing to watch out for is Satan and his demons.
Laohg
Member
I know I exist, and I know I am first of the Elohim ("great-forces" or "great gods"), but I have control of everything to my eldest son, El Elyon, and his wife(/sister), Elat. I cast out of the Heavens because I was being was forcing the world weight of the world onto El's shoulders. Okay by this point, I either sound like I am crazy or a troll. I make things easy for you either I am Eloh Shaddai(the Great Force of Destruction/Great God the destroyer) or I am crazy, I don't care if you believe me, what matters is that I know and believe that I am not crazy, but sadly my vessel's family thinks I am crazy. Also I don't think the existence of a God or many Gods should really matter, what matters is that you are true to yourself, if you think you are incarnation of Yahweh, Jesus Christ or another supernatural being, what matters is not what others think you are, it is what you know yourself to be.
One more thing, you humans are the New Gods of this world, the Old Gods are too tired of cleaning up your messes. So now that you know that you are New Gods, I will only give you two commandments:
1. Know thyself
2. You are your own God, so be a God worth of the title God.
One more thing, you humans are the New Gods of this world, the Old Gods are too tired of cleaning up your messes. So now that you know that you are New Gods, I will only give you two commandments:
1. Know thyself
2. You are your own God, so be a God worth of the title God.
Laughing Coyote
Member
Your questions presume a certain preconception of God, as something that ought to intervene to mediate suffering or discomfort of humans, but that no such God intervenes neither proves nor disproves existence of God. It just means that if there is God, it is not one that necessarily intervenes; or if there is sometimes intervention, then it is inscrutable.
If the ecosphere develops so as to provide potential for something, then there is a likelihood that it may exist. Mosquitoes, as well as ticks and vampire bats, exist because there are warm-blooded mammals that can provide energy by taking some of that blood. The diseases we get from them come to us because these bloodsuckers provided useful hosts. We call life's creating niches. Leukemia exists because errors occur in DNA replication at a regular rate, but then also so do all other forms of life exist for that reason as well. The mutations provide possibilities, but the possibilities provided are not necessarily those preferred by the particular organism in a particular time and place (for example, sickle cell disease allows a population to flourish, but with the sacrifice of a particular percentage of its members for whom its consequences are tragic. Can say the same thing for war, which we often into enter into with patriotic alacrity, even glorifying the tragedy that occurs when it serves our purposes.)
Worship of God does seem to indicate what is called God exists as a force of some sort, but not necessarily in the terms by which people worship it. Belief in God provides solace in the face of pain and suffering, even if there is no God that actually intervenes. Many believers try to explain your answer by saying that God gives us suffering so we can learn to transcend it, but such transcendence can come without a belief in God too -- for example, a mountain climber overcoming adversity encountered in climbing a mountain, while the risk of adversity a person allows him/herself gives the rest of us sense of the expansiveness of the human spirit and the powers of the universe when a particular climber gets killed while trying to overcome such adversity.
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Laughing Coyote
Member
But without Satan could there be God? Without contrasting colors can there be a rainbow? Without sorrow could there be joy? Without tears could there be laughter? Without death can there be life? Without different sounds could there be words? All things in the universe exist due to differentials. All forces are countered by opposing forces. Nature works by negative feed-backs. Satan by necessity is God's accomplice. This is expressed at its most essential core by the Laws of Thermodynamics.
(Personally I am a great fan of the Devil's "Letters from Earth" translated to us by the Msr. Mark Twain. And I enjoyed his Screwtape Letters given to us by Msr. C. S. Lewis.)
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The Holy Bottom Burp
Active Member
I am currently eating a delicious chicken dinner in my garden as an antidote to three pages largely consisting of word salad. New, you need to be more specific about your definition of "god". If this thread demonstrates anything, it demonstrates that "god" means an entirely different thing to different people. I suspect you could poke several people sat in the same pew/bench/place of worship and they would all give you a different definition of the deity they worship. Just for the record though, whatever flavour of deity you believe in, I don't believe it exists because the burden of proof has never been met (if you want to call the universe "god", fine, but I'll just continue to call it the universe thanks). Sharpen the definition and we can perhaps have a meaningful conversation, otherwise it is just a load of people talking past each other.
Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
Thank you for replying
what is supernatural ? something which science can not explain ? But don't you think that science is still evolving and we learn various new facts everyday in science so why someone who experience something beyond science which our scientist know until now can not be real or true?
what is god or who is god according to you?
Well, science cannot examine anything supernatural directly. If the supernatural exists and it has any kind of effect on the natural, then it could be indirectly detected. Still, there is the chance that what is being measured is really just some hitherto unknown natural phenomenon. For instance, claims that praying to a deity causes healing. This can and has been measured and found not to work.
So until there is a way to link any kind of supernatural thing to a phenomenon, it is not logical to leap to a supernatural explanation, since virtually everything we have come to actually understand so far has had a natural explanation. The supernatural should not be presumed to exist until there is sound evidence for it's existence.
I feel that the God of the Bible does really exist:
I think that way because over the many centuries the Bible has lots of enemies from without and within.
Even 'within' the realm of Christendom ( so-called Christian but mostly just in name only ) those inside of Christendom have tried to keep the Bible out of the hands of their people. They have taught their church customs or traditions as if they are Scripture when Not really Scripture. That was true of the religious leaders of Jesus' day, and we can still see that today thus showing the Bible's words to be true.
Also, from 'without' governments have tried to ban the Bible and get rid of Bible people only to learn they can Not.
Look what the highly educated governmental leaders have done for the world proving the words of Jeremiah 10:23 to be true that man can Not direct his step. Man can't successfully govern Earth, can't bring Peace on Earth.
We see globally before our eyes the accuracy of Jesus' recorded words of Matthew 24:14; Acts of the Apostles 1:8 that the good news about God's kingdom government of Daniel 2:44 is now being proclaimed on such a grand international scale as never before in history. If Not from God that proclaiming work would have died out a long time ago. However, No one, nor anything can stop God's people from spreading the Scriptures world wide.
Even modern technology has made rapid Bible translation possible so that now people living in remote areas of Earth can have Scripture in their own mother tongue or native languages. Without God's backing that would Not be accomplished on such a vast earth-wide scale as it is now being done. Since the Earth is now saturated with God's people that means we are at the ' final phase ', so to speak, about spreading the good news message.
That means we are also nearing the ' final signal ', so to speak of 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3 when ' they ' (powers that be) will be saying, "Peace and Security" as the precursor to the coming great tribulation of Revelation 7:14 before Jesus, as King of God's kingdom government, ushers in global Peace on Earth among people of goodwill.
As it was written so it shall be because what was written in Scripture about the past has come to pass, so to me there is No reason to doubt the rest will also come to pass.
Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
My main reason for belief is that I have free will.
As for your proclamations about beer:
It may not save the world: but it certainly makes my day.
It's good to find things in common, eh?
How do you know you have free will and even if you did, why does it matter with respect to any god? Why can you not have free will without a god?
Laughing Coyote
Member
Scientists call it the unity preceding the Big Bang from which all things issued and of which we all are a part. The mathematician, physicist, philosopher, theologian, Alfred North Whitehead called it the "primordial existence of God," and he went even further than you by theorizing a unity not just with life but of all things, from the entirety of the particles making up to the universe to the universe itself. Something demonstrated with the recent observations of gravity and work being done in quantum mechanics, for example.
Whitehead's primordial existence of God takes form in the possibilities provided in every interaction of everything in existence, at every level from particles to atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems, the ecosphere, solar-system, galaxies extending all the way to the universe, and it is through the result of every interaction that God gains or is given subjectivity through the realization of the universe's myriad of possibilities contained in it throughout every moment of its existence. The existence of every part is an element of the manifestation of the whole. [These are for the most part my words and interpretation of Whitehead, not necessarily Whitehead's.]
The ecologist Stan Rowe differentiates between an Earth of living things, which from the late 19th century has been called the "biosphere," and a living earth which he calls the "ecosphere" (Greek for 'home sphere'), to which everything including both all living things and what we call non-living ones such as the sequestered carbon are part of and in their entirety essential to the life of the whole and all the life forms making it up, just as all things in our cells are essential to their life, even if we would say many of their parts are something we call non-living. As we eliminate species, cut down forests, plow up prairies, melt the glaciers, pollute and contaminate the seas, and unravel all the life-support systems of life, the truth of this is becoming more and more evident. Rowe terms the living Earth, creator, sustenance-giver and home of all life, as "God Incarnate."
Whitehead writes that this sense of God being embodied the earth and every instance of the existence of every part is a far cry from the prophetic conception inherited by the Judeo-Christian-Muslim worldview in which God is posed as existing as a subjective being separated from the earth and even the universe. It is a world view, inherited by Western science in its Cartesian philosophical foundations, that leads humans to dissect, exploit, despoil, and destroy the planet and all things on it, to treat it as resource and personal property rather the sacred source of our being. Societies that do treat the planet as sacred are treated with arrogant and disgraceful disdain by those of us that think ourselves as being more advanced with our Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Scientific worldview. The ever looming consequence is that the planet will shed most if not all humanity from herself. For some reason it is something that the Christians seem to have been awaiting ever since the Roman soldier Apostle Paul had his conversion on the Road to Damascus.
My feeling is that this feeling of separateness from God is a theme that runs through all the great religions that emerged with the rise of the urban civilization, something the great ecologist Howard Odum described as a kind of parasitism. In my mind this a misnomer since parasitism also has an essential role in the ecosphere. The geneticist, Rowean ecologist, and Whiteheadean New Agrarian philosopher Wes Jackson links this world view to the agricultural basis of the emergence of cities in annual, as opposed to perennial, grain plants, which requires plowing up complex grassland and forest ecosystems and making them empty fields to get our sustenance. The invention of such a form of agriculture and accompanying way of life which despoils the Earth can be interpreted in the story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden, and it also occurs in the earliest such book, the Gilgamesh of one of the first urban civilizations, Ancient Sumeria.
Rather than parasite, I'd say we are more like an invasive species that has run wild across the planet's surface, bad guests not treating it as home and absorbing all the processes, purposes, and possibilities contained within its communities and ecosystems, taking them over as our own, destroying them, and ultimately, destroying ourselves and therein destroying a manifestation of God that has been with us all the time.
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Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
There is nothing one cannot believe based upon faith, therefore, faith is an unreliable pathway to truth. Neither the universe nor the truth care about your happiness. The fact that believing something makes you happy does not make that belief true. Believing untrue things can lead one to incorrect decisions.
It is easier to respond to one fallacy at a time in your post. Science does not propose that 'all occurred by chance,' and this is taught anywhere. Science teaches that the primary cause of the nature of our existence, including evolution is Natural Law and the nature of our physical existence. The events can only take place within the constraints of Natural Law, and the variation in the course of event is best described by fractal math, and do not occur by 'pure chance.'
Your calculations are bogus, because natural laws determines the outcome, and limit the option of the outcome.
No, those are not the only possibilities. Not by a LONG shot.
There could have been a creation committee.
There could be natural laws that allow for the formation of the universe naturally.
The universe could have always existed.
The universe could be 'necessarily existent'.
Etc.
A mathematically false calculation because it assumes the independence of probabilities known to be dependent. The rest of this paragraph is thereby bunk.
We see events with lower probabilities all the time in statistical mechanics. For example, look at the distribution of molecules in a room at any one point in time. What is the probability of exactly that distribution? It is far, far smaller than even the 1 part on 10^10^123 you gave.
No, it does not. It claims that all are descended from a species that was single celled. That is very different.
Humans *are* apes. In fact, we are great apes. We have also found many links between us and the other apes.
Lucy is a legitimate fossil of a human ancestor.
Evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis. So, while abiogenesis is an interesting question that is being actively investigated, it has no impact on evolution, per se.
Other lies deleted.
I don't believe in a deity or deities. The whole notion of a cause for the universe seems rather ill-founded to me. Causality is *internal* to the universe, not external to it. ALL known causes are *physical* causes and happen within time. But even time is part of the universe.
None of the standard arguments for the existence of a God hold any water: first cause (causes are part of the universe), uncaused-cause (there could be and are many such--none have personalities), morality giver (humans determine what is moral), etc.
It would seem that is any of these arguments were truly convincing, the matter would not be still debated *at all*. Just like we no longer debate about the existence of planets around other stars (after only a couple of centuries of speculation), we should expect that the mere existence of a supernatural would be clearly shown by now (after thousands of years).
None of the standard arguments for the existence of a God hold any water: first cause (causes are part of the universe), uncaused-cause (there could be and are many such--none have personalities), morality giver (humans determine what is moral), etc.
It would seem that is any of these arguments were truly convincing, the matter would not be still debated *at all*. Just like we no longer debate about the existence of planets around other stars (after only a couple of centuries of speculation), we should expect that the mere existence of a supernatural would be clearly shown by now (after thousands of years).