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Phil_Marinus
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This Thread STILLL going ?We have a created universe as evidence of the feasibility of a Creator.
What feasible evidence do you have that the universe created itself?
Zip. Zero. Nada.
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Tomdstone
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Values vary over time and cultures. For example, some couples say it is a mortal sin to use any form of artificial birth control, even if they already have 10 children. However, there are environmentalists who say it would be wrong not to use ABC in such circumstances. There are some who say that marriage between homosexuals should be allowed. there have even been cases where Roman Catholic priests have blessed such marriages. In fact, I got a school magazine from my Catholic school which talks about the accomplishments of alumni and alumnae and has pictures celebrating marriages. Well, what do you know: On one page of this Catholic magazine, there was a picture of two homosexual men getting married and we are supposed to celebrate that? There was a time when slavery was accepted, now it is not. There was a time when torture at an Inquisition was accepted. Now it is not.
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Peter_Plato
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Not only was it predicted, it was precisely predicted to occur by planning and then carried out, which means all of the variables were taken into account to predict, before the fact, that it could successfully be carried out. The question that remains is by whom, but that is an entirely other matter.
Merely because someone or even a number of someones failed in their prediction does not mean that events like Kohoutek could NOT have been predicted given appropriate motivation, knowledge and access to resources.
To claim that “Not everything can be predicted” is a generalization that may or may not be true depending entirely on a stipulation of the subject doing the predicting. I even had goldfish who accurately predicted their feeding time most of the time.
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Tomdstone
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In some cases science is successful, but in others not so. Take for example, the assassination of JFK. Has science been successful in either predicting the assassination or in eliminating the doubt raised by the numerous conspiracy theories pointing to someone other than LHO being responsible?
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oldcelt
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You mean the deity push elements together? Maybe out of curiosity. Having never met him, her. it, I really can’t say.
No I don’t. Scientists are able to predict some of the disorder, collisions, explosions and so on, which I mark up as disorder. They haven’t reached the point, and likely never will, when all functions are understood.
Which values?
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Tomdstone
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My question was specifically did anyone predict the assassination of JFK by LHO? Who predicted that LHO would assassinate JFK?
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Tomdstone
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Well, anyone can make a false prediction which is not saying much.
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LogosSokratikos
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Not only I would, but I have. I wasn’t an agnostic always. Before 18, I was Catholic.When you call yourself an agnostic, you dismiss God as a reality.
If you thought for one moment there is a God, you would not hesitate to act accordingly.
Would you?
I don’t think you understand what an agnostic is. I suspend judgement on matters I do not have enough information to pass judgement. In fact, most Catholics are much more atheistic than I am, as they reject point-blank every single deity that is not part of that religion. I, in contradistinction, do not dismiss any god I have not had enough information to be able to decide upon, but I am open to the possibility of others I have not collected much information about (one has only a certain amount of time to devote to researching these matters!). I have a lot of information on the Bible and the Qur’an to dismiss the god-concepts proposed in them. Both books are chock full of falsities and absurdities, to leave me pretty much decided about them. The problem is, if the source book is flawed, does that mean the entities that are seen nowhere except in them be dismissed? That is a philosophical problem I have no certain answer, but I do think it is enough to doubt the wisdom of praying 5 times a day towards Mecca --much as the improbability of winning the German lottery (chance of winning being 1 to 139,000,000 according to Wikipedia) is enough to discourage a mathematically literate individual.
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Peter_Plato
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LogosSokratikos
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So, pretty much your recommendation is “Be naive”, “Don’t cross-check”, “Close your eyes”, etc. Thanks but no. Thanks for calling me smart though, Peter Plato. Honestly, thanks. It doesn’t happen every day! I wasn’t born this way. I consider it my moral duty to myself and others to not get swindled, not get conned, don’t get others confused with false things I might believe myself for not having double checked and thoughtfully considered.
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Peter_Plato
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Do you demonstrate that level of “smart” with, for example, your wife? Do you cross and double-check, keep your eyes peeled, never allow yourself to be conned, swindled nor naively treated etc., etc., by your wife, as an aspect of your “moral duty,” every second of the day?
What you are doing is confusing objective proof with trust.
If God were a snow leopard, alien, flying spaghetti monsteri or garden fairy, then your vigilance regarding proof would be warranted and to your credit.
However, either there is one Creator God who is the explanation for all that is, including yourself OR there is not. It is really that easy. Either / Or
If there is such a God, then trust is the appropriate response.
If not, no amount of proof will ever substitute for or create trust, just as no amount of proof will ever suffice to warrant trusting and loving your wife.
We treat other PERSONS differently than we do objects or events. Persons can never be completely objectified, which is why they can never be sufficiently evidenced in an objective sense, to warrant trust or love.
The trust and love we have for other persons might be broken but it can never be fully proved or warranted by evidence. Trust is a risk we take by putting ourselves into the “hands” of the other, just as love is the risk of pouring yourself out for the other.
Neither of these can ever be contingent on proof or they would never begin to be actualized - we would never trust nor love if these depended upon sufficient and objective “evidence.”
“Smart” is one thing, wisdom is something else, completely. Solomon was the wisest man on Earth until he became smart. That is when things fell apart for him and for Israel.
No other “god” would be worthy of worship in the same way that God is. Lesser “deities” might be respected, feared, tolerated, revered, honored, esteemed, avoided, denounced, hated, sought, proved, falsified, etc., but towards THE God who is Being Itself, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, Actus Purus, the Source of all that exists, there can only be one possible response - absolute faith and loving trust. That is the ONLY means by which he can be intimately known.
We do not come to know other human persons by “proofs” or evidence, we get to know them by entering into a personal relationship with them. By establishing mutual trust we come to know “who” they are are, not “what” they are.
It might be possible to prove “that” God is, but those proofs would never come close to revealing WHO God is.
Objective knowledge can never take the place of subjective intimacy.
Mere children can be very good at the latter, while astrophysicists and biochemists can be totally incompetent.
This universe might be solely and completely an “objective” place or it could be profoundly subjective. You are hedging your bets on objectivity.
What do you think Jesus meant by his words? Do you think he was utterly naive and easy to swindle when he could read the thoughts and intentions of the astute brainiacs and power mongers who held high political or religious office and sought to crucify him?
Perhaps he “knew” something they were - despite their intelligence - completely oblivious to. A light in their darkness?
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Charlemagne_III
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Where did the orered laws of the universe come from if they were not designed?
That’s a dilemma for you. Why should the universe appear to obey laws at all?
Why isn’t it just chaos? But it obviously isn’t just chaos. We would not be here if it was.
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Charlemagne_III
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So at the ripe age of 18 you had it all figured out, that there was nothing to figure out?
I’ve dealt with many agnostics. I challenge you to find one who has made room in his life for God. That means a decision has been made. The decision is fundamentally to side with the atheist, without the embarassment that dogs the atheist position: which is that no atheist can prove God does not exist. The agnostic simply says there is no proof either way. He thinks he has escaped the atheist’s dilemnma, but he hasn’t. He has committed himself to no God. That means he not only doesn’t know anything about God, but that he has dismissed God as an active presence in his life. That is to reach a conclusion about God that defies describing it as agnostic; there is an implied certainty that God doesn’t matter since we do not experience Him up close and personal as you might experience some person in your life. .
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Phil_Marinus
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And in the Red corner we have ?
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oldcelt
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That is no dilemma whatsoever. The universe developed as it did restrained only by laws of physics such as gravity. No divine intervention needed for that. You are making an un-backed assumption that anything resembling order must be of a divine origin…that is simply another article of faith on your part…it is proof of nothing.
So far as chaos, there seem to be plenty of areas in the universe that are quite chaotic. Even our solar system is under almost constant bombardment from various celestial bodies, solar flares and the like. We cannot stay out in the sun too long or tolerate extreme cold and you know who told us that…we did.
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JamesCaruso
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If you are conceiving of another race of beings with intelligence and free will, not necessarily human, then I do not think it is presumptuous to say that there is no more perfect way of redemption that what God has given us. First, God could do no more than to become one of us and die on the cross for us. He deliberately made it this way so that we would know absolutely how much He loved us. He pulled out all the stops. Any other form of redemption would not be so perfect as this. Now, He might decide on another form of redemption, but I do not think it can be as perfect unless it replicates the perfect sacrifice that He made for us. And, yes, we do call it the perfect sacrifice in our liturgy. Is that presumptuous? Also, I don’t think it is presumptuous to believe that Mary, Queen of heaven, is queen of the only heaven that exists. Any other form of redemption will have to accept that that particular role has already been filled for all time. One might argue that more than one earth, but not heaven. Scientists may speculate that there are more than one universe, or more than one planet of intelligent beings, but heaven is out of their bailiwick. God is in heaven (Our Father who art in heaven) and Mary is Queen of heaven as declared by Pius XII. These are not presumptions, they are facts, at least for Catholic believers. I may not have explained it with great art, but what I am saying is that God cannot outdo his best, and He has declared in many ways that what He did in Jesus Christ was His best, the eternal covenant, the Perfect Sacrifice. He may do many other things, but He cannot outdo His self-declared best, IMHO.
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oldcelt
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What’s wrong with logos having figured things out by 18? In the Church he would have received or been eligible for virtually all the sacraments. Are you saying that you don’t need knowledge to be ready for the sacraments? Aren’t they important?So at the ripe age of 18 you had it all figured out, that there was nothing to figure out?
I’ve dealt with many agnostics. I challenge you to find one who has made room in his life for God. That means a decision has been made. The decision is fundamentally to side with the atheist, without the embarassment that dogs the atheist position: which is that no atheist can prove God does not exist. The agnostic simply says there is no proof either way. He thinks he has escaped the atheist’s dilemnma, but he hasn’t. He has committed himself to no God. That means he not only doesn’t know anything about God, but that he has dismissed God as an active presence in his life. That is to reach a conclusion about God that defies describing it as agnostic; there is an implied certainty that God doesn’t matter since we do not experience Him up close and personal as you might experience some person in your life. .
Why would atheists be embarrassed by being unable to prove a negative? Try it sometime. In fact, why would they care? The same thing applies for agnostics.
To some of your final statements let me say this: If the Abrahamic/Christian God does exist, he had one relatively short burst of involvement with the human race in a very small portion of the populated earth and has since been silent.People can say that God talks to them and that’s just fine, but it means nothing to me and is certainly not proof of anything.
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Peter_Plato
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The problem with this solution to the dilemma is that the laws of physics were not, originally, immutable. The cosmological constants and laws of physics were completely “accidentally” set if they were not so ordered by God. That means each of the thirty or so constants could have been set along a wide range with wildly divergent results. It was kind of like winning thirty lotteries simultaneously without even buying the tickets. It requires much more faith to subscribe to a non-ordered universe than to a divinely ordered one.
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Aloysium
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Figuring the odds isn’t a good way to Truth.
What do you think the odds are that you would exist? I don’t mean someone with your name, your position in the family, school or work. I mean you, the guy who hurts when you stub your toe. (I most definitely do not feel it when you do, as you do not feel my pain.)
I guess there are no odds to that. Perhaps the odds are 1/1; there could be no other possibility since you do exist. I can imagine an immensity of things that would have had to happen to make your existence a reality (astronomical, if not impossible, odds), but maybe there is something else involved in bringing things/us into existence.
There are so many questions, besides that of where our existence comes from. Given that you are (weird ain’t it), why are you here? Does it matter what you do?
You said you don’t want to “get conned”, but how do you know that you are not doubting because you have already been conned? There must be some belief that you hold to be more true than another; where does that come from?
You may be getting mixed up because you think religions are about something out there.
:twocents:
It’s actually all about this right here: this moment and what lies at its Foundation.
Personally, I don’t pray five times a day towards Mecca because it is better to try to pray all the time, and God is everywhere, in everything and more.
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