nozzferrahhtoo wrote: » I would be more than happy for you to get back to the thread. That would indeed be nice. I hear often that there is reasoning to suggest there is a god. More often than I have had dinners. What I have not heard once is what that reasoning actually is. If I had a cent for every person who told me there was evidence I would have a lot of money. If I had a cent for every person who then did not present a shred of it I would have EXACTLY... to the very CENT.... twice as much money.
nagirrac wrote: » However, I think you are misstating the Jesus "myth".
nagirrac wrote: » In this context God went though a hell of a lot of suffering to get his point across.
A women with no promise of an after life or expectation of bliss or dominion risked everything to merely temporarily alleviate the suffering of a fellow human being. For me HER risk and sacrifice.... though foolish and ultimately pointless.... makes anything Jesus is said to have done pale into insignificance. She is one of the true heroes of the story.
tommy2bad wrote: » Well spotted, and intended to be read that way. I think the idea that an afterlife cheapens this life is a misrepresentation, this life is not a dry run, test or waiting room for the next life. It's all the same life.
nagirrac wrote: » No Marienbad, the speculation that the observed universe was created is no more valid scientifically (based on experimental evidence) than the speculation that it arose randomly. Both are metaphysical hypotheses and both can be argued from reason. Deism is based on reason, and experience. The attached summarizes deism and modern versus classical deism.http://panendeism.webs.com/deism.htm[/QUOTE] But this is just more of the Aquinas type of reasoning . You look at the universe and you see the hand of a creator or whatever. And the only back-up you are offering is that other theories have received more support based on less 'evidence ' Do you accept your belief is just your hypothesis and nothing more ? Might I ask when did you reach your conclusions ? Because it seems to me to be working from a conclusion backwards to find evidence ? By the way thanks to you ,Morbert ,Nosferattu , Zombrex and a few more this is by far the most continuously interesting discussion here and though probably 90% goes right over my head I appreciate the thought and care and time ye put into posts, makes for fascinating reading.
marienbad wrote: » But this is just more of the Aquinas type of reasoning . You look at the universe and you see the hand of a creator or whatever. And the only back-up you are offering is that other theories have received more support based on less 'evidence '. Do you accept your belief is just your hypothesis and nothing more ? Might I ask when did you reach your conclusions ? Because it seems to me to be working from a conclusion backwards to find evidence ? By the way thanks to you ,Morbert ,Nosferattu , Zombrex and a few more this is by far the most continuously interesting discussion here and though probably 90% goes right over my head I appreciate the thought and care and time ye put into posts, makes for fascinating reading.
Geomy wrote: » So our eye's consciously play tricks on us... Do our eye's have brains ?
bogwalrus wrote: » Only recently scientist made an artificial eye that they connected to the brain. The visual quality was not great but the fact that it was able to do the job of sending external information to the brain is just awesome. Nothing really special about eye's. In the future scientists could just build higher quality eyes that could see more of the light spectrum and just replace the old ones. Maybe even x-ray eyes. cool!
nagirrac wrote: » Rather than getting bogged down in one specific argument, I try and look at all the evidence in a holistic manner. This has convinced me that the likelihood of a creator is greater than any current alternative, although I accept future knowledge may change that. That is the reasoned part, but what makes me a believer is the experience part. This is also the most difficult to discuss as someone who holds a spiritual belief due to their experiences will never convince someone who has not encountered such experiences or perhaps has and dismissed them.
nagirrac wrote: » Thanks for participating, it is an interesting discussion and one that can be carried out without rancor. Agnostic deists and agnostic atheists actually have a lot in common, a desire to make life better for themselves and others, rejecting dogma, rejecting the claims of theists, separation of church and state, etc. The God bit is all that separates us, and it is actually a small matter compare to the bigger matters in life.
J C wrote: » The theological answer is that God is balancing his omnipotence with His gift of free-will to Humanity
Brian Shanahan wrote: » Well the theological answer is an impossibility. If an omnipotent being gives free will to a lesser being he is surrendering part of his omnipotence to that being.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » This is due to the fact that in order to give the lesser being free will the omnipotent being no longer has any power to directly influence or affect the lesser being. Thus omnipotence is surrendered and the greater being is no longer omnipotent.
J C wrote: » Amazing but true. True ... but this will not be the case forever ... God has only suspended His omnipotence to allow us exercise our free-will in the temporal sphere.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » No once your imaginary friend reduced his power to a level below omnipotence it was permanent. Omnipotence means power to do anything at any time for the whole of eternity. If that power is lessened for even a nanosecond it is lost forever.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » No once your imaginary friend reduced his power to a level below omnipotence it was permanent.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » Omnipotence means power to do anything at any time for the whole of eternity. If that power is lessened for even a nanosecond it is lost forever.
J C wrote: » Indeed the capacity to choose not to act is as much a part of omnipotence as is the capacity to act. A God who is constrained to always act is not actually an omnipotent God ... He would be more like some kind of universal policeman.
Choosing not to act when one can basically comes down to negligence.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » No once your imaginary friend.
tommy2bad wrote: » So omnipotence requires action to be 'good' ?
Geomy wrote: » How is it lost forever ?
Brian Shanahan wrote: » Because there is something that at some stage the supposedly omnipotent being was impotent with regards to. Omnipotence doesn't mean, "being able to control everything at one specific time", it means being able to control everything all the time. Giving free will disrupts the time element of the equation, even if the power is reclaimed at some future date. Seriously, this is not much harder to grasp than your five times tables.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » Omnipotence doesn't mean, "being able to control everything at one specific time", it means being able to control everything all the time. Giving free will disrupts the time element of the equation, even if the power is reclaimed at some future date.
The argument that divine foreknowledge is not compatible with free will is known as theological fatalism. Generally, if humans are truly free to choose between different alternatives, it is very difficult to understand how God could know what this choice will be
smacl wrote: » Christianity, and other religions, contain many beliefs (e.g. total omnipotence, total omniscience) that are logically incompatible with other beliefs (e.g. that God created free will and is omniscient leads to theological fatalism). From wikipedia; By labelling omnipotence and omniscience as inherent gives God the ability not to be omnipotent or omniscient at certain points in time, which sorts out free will, but places God in linear time and hence falls foul of predestination The bottom line IMHO is to be Christian demands blind faith, and places God largely beyond mankind's abilities of comprehension. The true nature of God and how He survives various logical fallacies gets revealed to the faithful post mortem as they become enlightened. While as an atheist, I have no such faith and wouldn't want to, I have no difficulty with the concept that there are limits to what we can comprehend at any point in time. This leads to the need to abstract and to think divergently, both of which are very important parts of critical thinking and problem solving.
tommy2bad wrote: » Terrible fail on understanding how a God outside linear time can know a decision made in linear time before it's made.
smacl wrote: » Perhaps you could explain it better so, my concept of non-linear time doesn't extend much beyond Dr Who to be honest. From what I understand of Christian mythology, much like other mythologies, it includes a sequence of notable events that happened in a stated order, which in turn implies linear time. e.g. Lucifer was and angel that got thrown out of Heaven. Note the necessity for tenses. So we have time in God's realm and time in our realm. The biblical statement that God created the world in seven days suggests that a direct relationship between elapsed time in both realms. So the question is, does God exist out of time in heaven as well as earth? If so, why have an event such as casting Satan into the pit, when after all as an omniscient and omnipotent being existing outside of time, there clearly was no necessity to have created Satan in the first instance? My take on all of this is that Christianity has to evolve its ideas on a regular basis to keep pace with man's progress in philosophy and the sciences. Hence creationism gets sidelined by 'intelligent design', and where everything in the bible was originally taken as literal truth, it is now largely taken as metaphorical and analogical. It still seems to demand quite a bit of blind faith from where I'm sitting.
Geomy wrote: » Begora, I know Christians who think of God as being more of a force rather than a being. ...
Brian Shanahan wrote: » Hate to break it to you but they're not christians, as they don't believe as the bible instructs them to (leaving aside the fact that the bible instructs people to believe myriad* blatant impossibilities).
Peregrinus wrote: » Thank you, Pope Brian, for your authoriative definition of "Christian", and for your infallible insight in to what the bible "instructs" people to believe!
Morbert wrote: » I didn't see his comment as too controversial. Doesn't the Bible say that God is a being (three beings in fact)?
Peregrinus wrote: » The suggestion that the Bible says that God is three beings is highly controversial! Just ask a Jew. Or a unitarian. More to the point, Pope Brian's decree seems to assert that the Bible instructs people what they must believe, which it doesn't, really, to any large extent, and that the Bible defines Christian in terms of believing what is in the bible, which doesn't to any extent. What is true is that the Bible does present God as a person, or at least as an entity fittingly imagined as a person, rather than a force, and it's also true that the mainstream Christian tradition goes along with this. But what's not true is that this is the defining characteristic of a Christian. In so far as the Bible has anything at all to say about who is a Christian, the term is applied to the community of followers of Jesus of Nazareth (though the term doesn't get applied them until well after his death). While most followers of Jesus of Nazareth do understand God as a person, I must respectfully dissent from Pope Brian's decree that anyone who does not share that understanding cannot be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.
