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987mk
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Then prove it.
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Smfm
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Na ! God isn’t false, His Son came here, died for us & was raised from the dead, please point out what the other gods did ?
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Peter_Plato
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No “proof” is necessary to accept a reasonable proposition where a strictly axiomatic “proof” is unlikely or impossible.
It is called abductive reasoning or making an infererence to the best explanation.
Look it up…
plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/
Unless you have a better explanation for how life or the universe came to be, she is well within reasonable grounds to make the claim.
If you want to challenge her claim, provide a better explanation for how life came to be.
It isn’t enough to merely disagree. The burden is on you to give a more plausible explanation.
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Peter_Plato
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To be clear…
The claim of classical theism is that it is in the essential nature of Existence Itself to be the Subsistent Act of Being Itself, which means, essentially, that Existence is Actus Purus that has the capacity to actualize any potential which is logically possible.
This means that Existence Itself is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent in that Existence Itself underwrites and superintends the existence and welfare of every existent being to the extent determined by omniscience and omnibenevolence.
Given that matter, energy, space and time all came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, these are all essentially ruled out as being the possible causes of the universe. Which takes us back to the proposition that Existence Itself – immaterial, eternal, intentional, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent – is pretty much the only remaining alternative explanation.
The claim of classical theism is that it is in the essential nature of Existence Itself to be the Subsistent Act of Being Itself, which means, essentially, that Existence is Actus Purus that has the capacity to actualize any potential which is logically possible.
This means that Existence Itself is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent in that Existence Itself underwrites and superintends the existence and welfare of every existent being to the extent determined by omniscience and omnibenevolence.
Given that matter, energy, space and time all came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, these are all essentially ruled out as being the possible causes of the universe. Which takes us back to the proposition that Existence Itself – immaterial, eternal, intentional, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent – is pretty much the only remaining alternative explanation.
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PRmerger
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Who do you think made the universe? Magic?
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rossum
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God is Himself alive, as the Psalm said: “the living God”. If God is Himself alive, then it is impossible for God to create the first living thing, since He Himself is the first living thing. At most, your God can have created the second and subsequent living things.
God can no more create the first living thing than He can create a square circle.
God is alive, so if God is not created then life was not created. Alternatively, your God is not alive. Do you worship a dead God? No, I didn’t think that you did.
rossum
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rossum
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Vishnu sent Krishna to be Arjuna’s charioteer. Allah sent Mohammed to be His Prophet. Mithras sent himself to die and rise again. Durga slew the demon Mahishasura. Athene helped the Greeks conquer Troy.
There are stories about all the various gods.
rossum
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rossum
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Define the universe as “All that exists”. Does your God exist? Now ask your question again: “Who made the universe?”
If you restrict the meaning of universe to the STEM universe of science, then you need to change your “who made” to a “what caused”. The answer might be the multiverse, colliding branes, strings or some other cosmological hypothesis. Ask in the cosmology department of your local university.
rossum
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Bradski
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People miss it because it’s not true.
If there is a microscopically tiny advantage in any change whatsoever, then it may well be kept. That means that there is just a one in 26 chance of getting the first letter you need and thee second takes no time at all. Neither the third, if the second is an advantage and is kept. And so on.
So your millions of millions of years becomes a few seconds.
Your hubbies maths may be ok (I haven’t checked), but his ‘747 in a junkyard’ thought process is so far from being correct that it’s not even wrong.
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808Catholic
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You could easily say “man created numbers” which he didn’t. Man created a means to express numbers. The idea of “zero” took a long time and is a relatively new concept yet so crucial to the number system. Did zero not exist simply because man didn’t know the concept or name?
We may create names for gods but we cannot create God or He would not be God. For God to be God, He would have existed long before man and must be a higher power. If we can invent “god”, “god” is merely our creation like a drawing or book we write.
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808Catholic
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If Christians could explain the totality of God, we would be greater than God, wouldn’t we? Fact is, we don’t know everything about God and even the little bits He gives us as hints we have difficulty in grasping. That’s why faith is so important to Christians and why discernment (prayerful contemplation) is the key to greater understanding. Without the help of God, we know nothing.
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808Catholic
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I think your difficulty is the understanding of “life” and “alive”. Do you believe our physical existence is all there is to being “alive”? If so, God was only “alive” for 33 years when Jesus walked the earth. If you believe “life” is made up of more than physical existence, the God can “live/exist” forever. God, by Christian understanding, is beyond any physical or time limits: He has always existed, exists now, and will exist long after the end of the universe. He exists outside of physical space so He’s there 1,000,000 years ago, here with us now, and will be somewhere 1,000,000 years after we’re long dead. Every physical object, alive or dead matter, came to being somewhere and sometime and will end somewhere and sometime. Not so with God.
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rossum
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I disagree. See below.
Look at the top right of my posts where it says: “Religion: Buddhist”. There is more to life than merely the physical.
Buddhism is not an Abrahamic religion; nothing can live forever. Everything changes and everything dies, eventually. The gods may be vastly longer lived than humans, but all the gods (yes, even yours) die eventually and are reborn, unless they have attained enlightenment during their current lifetime.
Not difficult. Any living being that does not attain nirvana will outlast the current physical universe and be reborn in the following physical universe. Buddhism follows a version of the oscillating universe hypothesis with alternating Big Bangs and Big Crunches.
The point is to avoid coming back again and again and again, which means dying again and again and again.
At Savatthi. There the Blessed One said: “From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating and wandering on. What do you think, monks: Which is greater, the tears you have shed while transmigrating and wandering this long, long time – crying and weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing – or the water in the four great oceans?”
“As we understand the Dhamma taught to us by the Blessed One, this is the greater: the tears we have shed while transmigrating and wandering this long, long time – crying and weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing – not the water in the four great oceans.”
“Excellent, monks. Excellent. It is excellent that you thus understand the Dhamma taught by me.”
– Assu sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 15.3
You are making a lot of assumptions here based on the Abrahamic approach. Many of those assumptions do not apply in Buddhism where things can be very different.
Yes so with your God and with everything else. All things have causes. It is not your God that is infinite, but the chain of causation that is infinite and without origin: “A beginning point is not evident.”
rossum
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womanatwell
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It would be seconds if each “correct” letter was kept. This is where the computer simulations confuse people. First, they are designed by people who know what they want in the end. If you are talking about origin of a free-living organism, you have to have DNA in working sequence for about 1000 proteins, which means about 1 million DNA sequences in order (this is estimated by Eugene Koonin, Director of Comparative Genetics at NIH). Each DNA sub-unit (called a base) does not “know” that it will need to stay in a certain position for the whole working organism. Therefore you have completely random combinations of bases which need to be somehow collected together and tried. Some researchers believe life started with proteins instead of DNA (DNA is used as a code to make proteins), but proteins have sub-units (these are called amino acids) that go hand in hand with DNA, so you have the same problem of getting their sub-units in the necessary order.
Second, with existing life, these computer simulations (that I’ve heard about) are not mentioning all the wrong changes a DNA sequence can have before a “right” one comes along. With a protein that has less specific binding, you may be able to substitute more of the sub-units (called amino acids) but with some proteins, one change can make the protein unworkable (and there are, as I’ve said, many unworkable proteins in comparison to functional ones). They are identifying more diseases that have substitutes of just one amino acid. Even so-called self-replicating molecules have a good percentage of “conserved” bases and one in particular that must be in place for it to work. Not only is there a problem in binding for these changed proteins, but protein changes of only a few amino acid substitutions can gravely affect the thermodynamics of the protein and dramatically decrease its function.
Douglas Axe, a researcher in protein function, has written a paper called The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds which you can find here:
bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.1 .
It explains biological research and a layperson should be able to understand it. I have a post about ATP Synthase, a protein complex which produces a high-energy molecule (ATP) used for cell metabolism. Look at the pictures if nothing else. They show the actual machine, then the series of molecules which are needed to set up an electrical gradient for it to work. Then I have a picture of an amino acid, and below that a chart of the amino acids in just one of the set of proteins for ATP Synthase. The ATP Synthase in E. coli has over 6000 amino acids for each of these machines which work for energy production in their cells.
womanatwell.blogspot.com/2013/01/microbiology.html .
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womanatwell
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Let me clarify that I mean biological life. Perhaps you are familiar with the Bible book of Genesis. In the first chapter, it describes God creating and making plants, living creatures and man. The version here is New American Bible Revised Edition used by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops:
usccb.org/bible/genesis/1 .
As for complexity of God, our Bible in the book of Isaiah, chapter 55, declares that the Lord’s ways are above our ways and His thoughts go beyond our thoughts as high as the heavens above the Earth:
usccb.org/bible/isaiah/55 .
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rossum
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OK, you explain the existence of life-2 by invoking an entity of type life-1 of unexplained origin. Shall we try that same explanation in a slightly different key?
Q: How did biological life on earth originate?
A: It was made by intergalactic aliens from beyond the known universe.
Q: How did those aliens originate?
A: You are not allowed to ask that question, and I am not allowed to answer it.
Not very convincing, I’m sure you will agree.
So, you have no explanation for the origin of complexity. You start with an already complex God. That is not an explanation, it is the avoidance of an explanation.
In order to explain the origin of complexity, you would have to explain the origin of the initial complexity contained within God. That is effectively the same as explaining the origin of God.
rossum
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Peter_Plato
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Except that God is not “a living thing,” NOT “a thing” at all. God is more akin to Life Itself than a thing that has life.
In other words, God could only be counted as “living thing #1” if he is, indeed, “a thing that has life.” That is not the case, however.
A parallel: He would not be “a thing on fire,” nor “the first thing on fire.” He would be fire itself.
Things that burn are distinctly different than the fire that burns them.
We are things that exist, things that live, but we are not Existence Itself or Life Itself, just as things that burn are not fire itself.
God is not counted among the “things” that have existence or have life because he is not one of them. He is not part of any genus, as Aquinas says. He is Existence Itself, Life Itself.
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Shaolen
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The oscillating universe theory doesn’t escape a true beginning. Each “bounce” becomes further apart from each other and if you go in reverse would still find yourself with a finite beginning
And your infinite regress fails to understand that you can’t have an infinite regress of causes. At some point you’d have an uncaused cause. A cause who’s cause is explained it its nature.
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rossum
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If an entity is not a ‘thing’ then it is ‘no-thing’ and a ‘non-entity’.
Does your God exist? Then He is an entity that exists - a thing.
Then He is non-existent and dead. Do you follow a dead God who does not exist? No, I didn’t think so. You need a better argument here than mere Humpty Dumpty redefinitions of the meanings of words.
rossum
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rossum
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The Buddhism version is not identical to the scientific version(s).
Why not? It is perfectly possible to have an infinite number of predecessors. The number 0 has an infinite number of predecessors: -1, -2, -3, -4, … Given that in mathematics, the whole numbers are defined in terms of the succession operator: S
then we have 0 = S(-1), -1 = S(-2) etc.rossum
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