Difference between "atheistic evolution" and "christian evolution?"

[wjp984]

The idea of special creation is opposed by Darwinism

When did I ever say I ws a supporter of Darwin. I was trying to give you some sort of creidt in this post saying that in regards to Earth, I would agree that it is all theory and anything could have happened so you are entitled to believe your opinon and try to refute the facts of evolution. However, on the astronomical scale, you are still entitled to your opinion but if you could provide any sort of facts for me to read or look into that could make me more open minded, I would appreciate it. That is all I was saying. I don’t know how one can refute what one can see in pictures of what actually happened millions and billons of light yerars away therefore proving some sort of evolution or creation of the universe, stars and organic life.

 

[Steadfast_love]

See
Q: Do you have to be an atheist to accept evolution?
No. Many people of Christian and other faiths accept evolution as the scientific explanation for biodiversity. See the God and Evolution FAQ and the Interpretations of Genesis FAQ.
talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

Correct. Evolution is not atheistic, therefore theists can accept it just as easily as atheists.

Thus for them the Godless nature of evolution doesn’t exclude God, per se from belief.

…and the mysterious nature of evolution doesn’t exclude atheism either. Everyone can get along under evolution as long as atheists and ID are kept from appending their personal biases.

This is, by the way, deemed to be the ‘regular form’ of evolution. They deem any form of evolution involving non-material forces to be mere quackery.

I’m not sure what you mean by non-material forces I can only guess you mean God. In that case “They deem any form of evolution involving *God *to be mere quackery” that is an example of atheistic evolution. Unlike the regular form of evolution, atheistic evolution specificaly excludes the Christianity and other faiths by demanding that there is no God.

What’s this got to do with anything?

It explains why in the long run, you can’t count on evolution to win your theological aguements for you.

 

[Nullasalus]

It explains why in the long run, you can’t count on evolution to win your theological aguements for you.

I’d grant that, but I think when it comes to evolution the greater need is to illustrate how it doesn’t harm the theistic, specifically Christian attitude about man’s ‘creation’, rather than using it to prove theism

I think a strong, but not impervious argument can be formulated along such lines. But right now, my big worry is that christians who accept evolution seem more interested in picking fights with christians who don’t accept evolution, than with atheists who use evolution to argue against God.

 

[Hubriss]

Alright, I’m gonna reply to some from my last post on.

Gosh, another evolution thread??? Wake me up when it’s over.

-Ahimsa

It’s better than most of the other pointless stuff people talk about on these forums.

Also from reading Gerald Joyce’s work, I find it extremely difficult to reconcile evolution with a personal God.

-Ribozyme

I find it hard to believe even without reading her book.

If the God ‘was concerned enough’ to create the universe, and then to allow for anthropic properties, and then to allow a condition to arise where life can come from those properties, and then allow for that life to become complicated, conscious, self-aware, etc… why should it stop there? Maybe this deistic God also intended Christ, morality, and ultimately salvation (and damnation, if that’s your cup of tea.)

That’s the ‘problem’ with an omnipotent, omniscient God. He doesn’t need to be active, even ‘personal’ to be… well, personal. A strange situation, sure, but so’s reality.

-Nullasalus

But a non-personal god does not have to be some conscious, thinking, being. It could just be a power.

Here in Genesis, God created the lights, greater light (the sun), lesser light (the moon), and stars. He created them to give light on the earth, govern day and night, and to be signs for seasons, days and years.

From this, it states that not only did God create the stars that you are talking about, but also the light from the stars. Hence the light that we see does not have to been travelling millions of years for us to see it. If God’s Word is true, God created the light from the stars along with the stars.

-Simbagizmo

If that made scientifically any sense at all, that would be a good point. But a star would not be a star if it did not give off light. That passage you quoted also says that god created a greater light, then a lesser light, and also made the stars. The sun (greater light) is a star, so that statement doesn’t cognatively(right word?) make sense.

For some scientists there is no God. That is a purely personal and philosophical conviction for which their reason may be any one of a hundred. But they feel the need to prop up their personal philosophy with some kind of scientific foundation because by conviction they really cannot believe in anything unless it has a scientific basis. Yet atheism has no scientific basis. Evolution does. And so they make that giant leap from evolution to atheism without the slightest blush. Shame on them.

-Gilber Keith

You make it sound like a bad thing. I’ve noticed you do that a lot. Atheism is based on logical inferences derived from scientific evidense. Now, remember, you don’t need to be a scientist to produce scientific evidense, anyone can. Science is based on our experiences, and personal experiences are in fact scientific evidense for individual people. Atheism is in fact based on science because you usually don’t presume something exists unless you can experience it, or logically infer that it exists, based on other experiences.

The idea that they are useless is also flawed. Within humans, for e.g. there was, at the beginning of the 1900s, deemed to be dozens of these things, but over time we have found use for many, thus the tonsils are found to help fight infection. The idea that because we don’t know what something for equals we know it’s not for anything is plainly wrong.

-Montalban

Well what about our appendix? Or how about whales with useless hands inside their bodies? Also, we can now specifically date fossils with carbon dating and several other new methods.

None of this explains the difference between a directed evolution and an non-directed one as per the OP.

-Montalban

No, but it shows how directed evolution is not necessary.

 

[Montalban]

Correct. Evolution is not atheistic, therefore theists can accept it just as easily as atheists.

Except that ‘evolution’ as taught in schools is the atheistic variety. Whilst talkorigins, for e.g. allows you to believe in God, it doesn’t allow you to believe in a God that made His presence felt in evolution, because for them evolution happened by wholly naturalistically.

 

[Montalban]

Montalban:

The idea that they are useless is also flawed. Within humans, for e.g. there was, at the beginning of the 1900s, deemed to be dozens of these things, but over time we have found use for many, thus the tonsils are found to help fight infection. The idea that because we don’t know what something for equals we know it’s not for anything is plainly wrong.

Hubriss:

-Montalban
Well what about our appendix?

What about our appendix? The point I made was just because we don’t know what the function is doesn’t mean we know it has no function.

Montalban:

None of this explains the difference between a directed evolution and an non-directed one as per the OP.

Hubriss:

-Montalban

No, but it shows how directed evolution is not necessary.

I don’t say that it is. It is, however the form of evolution that is taught in schools and universities.

 

[Montalban]

Montalban:

The idea of special creation is opposed by Darwinism

wjp984:

When did I ever say I was a supporter of Darwin.

I don’t say that you do.

wjp984:

I was trying to give you some sort of credit in this post saying that in regards to Earth, I would agree that it is all theory and anything could have happened so you are entitled to believe your opinion and try to refute the facts of evolution.

I’m not here to ‘refute the facts of evolution’ but rather to discuss people’s concepts of evolution

wjp984:

However, on the astronomical scale, you are still entitled to your opinion but if you could provide any sort of facts for me to read or look into that could make me more open minded, I would appreciate it. That is all I was saying. I don’t know how one can refute what one can see in pictures of what actually happened millions and billons of light years away therefore proving some sort of evolution or creation of the universe, stars and organic life.

Well there you go again talking about pictures showing life.

When I questioned you on this thread forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=1542098#post1542098
I asked where have they found pictures of life. You said, no not life, but Carbon. I then asked where have they found Carbon (they might well have, you’ve just not supported this either - and Carbon IS NOT LIFE), and you went off on a tangent about you don’t think God would be tricking us.

Which is a really strange concept. Imagine if you would you were a Christian (well versed in Greek science) living about the year 400. The view of the universe might have been that the earth is the centre of the universe. The ‘facts’ as best understood then was that this was so. Someone questions this, and you say that you don’t think that God would be tricking us. It’s not God tricking us, it’s us tricking us - our perceptions of what is, and then ascribing that to God’s work.

This is, if anything, what I refute. You have an idea of what is. You believe that God did it. It must be because God wouldn’t contradict your sense of what is - or make what you think what is, a mere trick.

 

[Nullasalus]

But a non-personal god does not have to be some conscious, thinking, being. It could just be a power.

You still end up with the same potential I’m talking about. If a non-thinking, non-conscious ‘power’ is capable of producing the universe we are certain of (or are as certain of as we can be through observation), then it’s also capable of producing the universe we’re not certain of (the Christian result, or just about any other faith’s).

 

[Hubriss]

What about our appendix? The point I made was just because we don’t know what the function is doesn’t mean we know it has no function.

-Montalban

We know that it serves no positive function for us.

Which is a really strange concept. Imagine if you would you were a Christian (well versed in Greek science) living about the year 400. The view of the universe might have been that the earth is the centre of the universe. The ‘facts’ as best understood then was that this was so. Someone questions this, and you say that you don’t think that God would be tricking us. It’s not God tricking us, it’s us tricking us - our perceptions of what is, and then ascribing that to God’s work.

-Montalban

Well, in order to think that, you’d have to believe the Bible is wrong and was just written by humans. The genesis story paints the Earth being at the center of the universe.

You still end up with the same potential I’m talking about. If a non-thinking, non-conscious ‘power’ is capable of producing the universe we are certain of (or are as certain of as we can be through observation), then it’s also capable of producing the universe we’re not certain of (the Christian result, or just about any other faith’s).

-Nullasalus

A non-thinking, non-conscious god would also be non-personal. Most other faiths believe that the god would be personal. Unless you’re saying that a higher power could have created your omnipotent god.

 

[Nullasalus]

A non-thinking, non-conscious god would also be non-personal. Most other faiths believe that the god would be personal. Unless you’re saying that a higher power could have created your omnipotent god.

I find the concept of a ‘personal god’ to be tricky. What I’m arguing here is that, when your deist god is able to

• Create a universe to begin with
• Sustain this universe indefinitely
• Allow it to achieve order
• Allow complexity to arise from that order
• Allow life to arise from that complexity
• Allow consciousness to arise from that life

…That it therefore makes no sense to exclude potentialities of this deity, which would later…

• Allow an objective moral order to be discovered by that conscious life.
• Allow that objective moral order to play a role being subjective death
• Allow for the ultimate result of this universe to effectively fulfill theological/spiritual urges.

These are the common aspects of the ‘personal God’, yes? I see no reason to exclude them out of hand other than personal assumption. So, a God can be extraordinarily ‘personal’ while never being actually personal. Infinitely removed by infinite foresight.

That’s why I have a quirky view of deism. I don’t think the ‘pessimistic’ conclusions are justified. You can make an interesting case in the other direction.

 

[ribozyme]

Alright, I’m gonna reply to some from my last post on.

-Ribozyme

I find it hard to believe even without reading her book.

That’s an insult to Professor Joyce, you better take that back.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Hubriss

Atheism is in fact based on science because you usually don’t presume something exists unless you can experience it, or logically infer that it exists, based on other experiences.

Three thousand years ago Democritus said that atoms exits. Yet he had not observed them or experienced them. Nor logically could he infer their existence as there was no reason to believe that anything can be so small that you cannot see it or experience it. For that reason, Aristotle rejected Democritus’s theory as invalid. Yet we know today that Democritus was right.

And so a scientist today has no right to say that a world exists beyond the known world that is subject to scientific scrutiny. That world might indeed exist, and the atheistic scientist may one day come to know that God and spirits exist even if we don’t see them up close and personal.

Atheism is based on logical inferences derived from scientific evidense.

If anything, the only inference from science you can get is that the universe was created. So far as we know scientifically, there was only one creation event for the universe. Theories of a cyclic universe are pure wishful thinking for atheists. They have no scientific basis in fact.

A single creation event is consistent with what Christians have always believed, even though the scientific evidence didn’t arrive until the 20th century. The author of Genesis was 30 centuries ahead of the astronomers.

There is now no evidence whatever that the universe is infinite and eternal, as some atheist scientists used to believe before the Big Bang was discovered. Almost all of the resistance to the Big Bang theory came from atheists. Want to guess why?

I see that you are only 18. I’m sure you mean well, but I think before you get much farther into discussions such as these, you should do a lot more reading and thinking. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that you don’t know all you seem to think you know.

All of us are in that boat!

 

[ribozyme]

A non-thinking, non-conscious god would also be non-personal. Most other faiths believe that the god would be personal. Unless you’re saying that a higher power could have created your omnipotent god.

I would that by definition a God would have to be conscious; otherwise, it is just a power .

 

[wjp984]

I don’t say that you do.

I’m not here to ‘refute the facts of evolution’ but rather to discuss people’s concepts of evolution

Well there you go again talking about pictures showing life.

When I questioned you on this thread forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=1542098#post1542098
I asked where have they found pictures of life. You said, no not life, but Carbon. I then asked where have they found Carbon (they might well have, you’ve just not supported this either - and Carbon IS NOT LIFE), and you went off on a tangent about you don’t think God would be tricking us.

Which is a really strange concept. Imagine if you would you were a Christian (well versed in Greek science) living about the year 400. The view of the universe might have been that the earth is the centre of the universe. The ‘facts’ as best understood then was that this was so. Someone questions this, and you say that you don’t think that God would be tricking us. It’s not God tricking us, it’s us tricking us - our perceptions of what is, and then ascribing that to God’s work.

This is, if anything, what I refute. You have an idea of what is. You believe that God did it. It must be because God wouldn’t contradict your sense of what is - or make what you think what is, a mere trick.

I can at least answer your question about carbon. They can detect it through the processes of the sun. A sun fuses hydrogen into helium and then after it uses all the Hydrogen up it fuses the helium into carbon. When a really big star dies it supernovas releasing all the atoms like carbon as well as every other atom into the universe.

 

[Montalban]

Montalban:

What about our appendix? The point I made was just because we don’t know what the function is doesn’t mean we know it has no function.

Hubriss:

-Montalban
We know that it serves no positive function for us.

So what? We don’t know that it has any function. That’s not the same as saying it has no function. You’re like saying "We don’t know that there’s life on other planets, therefore there is no life on other planets.

You can continue to speculate all you like that there is no function, as opposed to ‘we don’t know that there is any function’ - and take note, that the number of so-called vestigial organs was great at the beginning of the last century.

Montalban:

Quote:Which is a really strange concept. Imagine if you would you were a Christian (well versed in Greek science) living about the year 400. The view of the universe might have been that the earth is the centre of the universe. The ‘facts’ as best understood then was that this was so. Someone questions this, and you say that you don’t think that God would be tricking us. It’s not God tricking us, it’s us tricking us - our perceptions of what is, and then ascribing that to God’s work.

Hubriss:

-Montalban

Well, in order to think that, you’d have to believe the Bible is wrong and was just written by humans. The genesis story paints the Earth being at the center of the universe.

Genesis is inspired by God, it’s not the verbatim account of God’s creation. As an Orthodox I don’t ever get bogged down in the literalness, other than to believe that it was ‘so’. As the late Fr. Seraphim Rose said…
“Some Protestant fundamentalists tell us it is all (or virtually all) 'literal.” But such a view places us in some impossible difficulties: quite apart form our literal or non-literal interpretation of various passages, the very nature of the reality which is described in the first chapters of genesis the very creation of all things) makes it quite impossible for everything to be understood ‘literally’; we don’t even have words, for example, to describe ‘literally’ how something can come from nothing. How does God “speak”? - does He make a noise which resounds in an atmosphere that doesn’t yet exist?”
Fr. Seraphim Rose (2000) “Genesis Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision”, (Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood; Platina, CA), p69

Secondly, cite the verses that says that the earth is at the centre of the universe.

 

[valient_Lucy]

You make it sound like a bad thing. I’ve noticed you do that a lot. Atheism is based on logical inferences derived from scientific evidense. Now, remember, you don’t need to be a scientist to produce scientific evidense, anyone can. Science is based on our experiences, and personal experiences are in fact scientific evidense for individual people. Atheism is in fact based on science because you usually don’t presume something exists unless you can experience it, or logically infer that it exists, based on other experiences.

That’s a pretty blanket statement. Can you provide evidence that every single atheist becomes an atheist based on “logical inferences dreived from scientific evidence?” Can you categorically state that every single atheist approaches the existence (or non-existence) of God from that point of view?

 

[Hubriss]

I find the concept of a ‘personal god’ to be tricky. What I’m arguing here is that, when your deist god is able to

• Create a universe to begin with
• Sustain this universe indefinitely
• Allow it to achieve order
• Allow complexity to arise from that order
• Allow life to arise from that complexity
• Allow consciousness to arise from that life

…That it therefore makes no sense to exclude potentialities of this deity, which would later…

• Allow an objective moral order to be discovered by that conscious life.
• Allow that objective moral order to play a role being subjective death
• Allow for the ultimate result of this universe to effectively fulfill theological/spiritual urges.

These are the common aspects of the ‘personal God’, yes? I see no reason to exclude them out of hand other than personal assumption. So, a God can be extraordinarily ‘personal’ while never being actually personal. Infinitely removed by infinite foresight.

That’s why I have a quirky view of deism. I don’t think the ‘pessimistic’ conclusions are justified. You can make an interesting case in the other direction.

-Nullasalus

Yes. But when you say that the the god “allows” life, “allows” complexity, you still assume that this god is thinking and conscious. Also, the universe may not be indefinitely sustainable. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all the potential energy in the universe will eventually disappear, and it will suffer a “heat death.” I don’t think this is necessarily true, or will with 100% certainty happen though. It doesn’t make sense to me that you can have a universe that is infinitely expanding, and yet has a finite amount of energy. Heh, or maybe it could if it has an infinite amount of energy from an infinite source? Possibly, but as of yet there is no good evidense of it, I don’t think.

Three thousand years ago Democritus said that atoms exits. Yet he had not observed them or experienced them. Nor logically could he infer their existence as there was no reason to believe that anything can be so small that you cannot see it or experience it. For that reason, Aristotle rejected Democritus’s theory as invalid. Yet we know today that Democritus was right.

-Gilbert Keith

Yes, he did logically conclude their existence.

If anything, the only inference from science you can get is that the universe was created. So far as we know scientifically, there was only one creation event for the universe. Theories of a cyclic universe are pure wishful thinking for atheists. They have no scientific basis in fact.

-Gilbert Keith

No, you don’t get from science that the universe was created. It’s true that the origin of the current universe was centered at the big bang, but that doesn’t mean matter and energy didn’t exist before the big bang. Your assumption on a cyclical universe being wishful thinking is ironic. You could also apply that to the string theory, along with religion. Yes, we see that some of the matter in space is moving faster away from us, but could that be because we are just slowing down faster than they are? Yes, wishful thinking, but hey, most of what we don’t understand is.

A single creation event is consistent with what Christians have always believed, even though the scientific evidence didn’t arrive until the 20th century. The author of Genesis was 30 centuries ahead of the astronomers.

There is now no evidence whatever that the universe is infinite and eternal, as some atheist scientists used to believe before the Big Bang was discovered. Almost all of the resistance to the Big Bang theory came from atheists. Want to guess why?

-Gilbert Keith

That’s funny. You know, because I seem to recall… that the author of Genesis said that the universe was only a couple thousand years old. But that’s not even close to the current realization that the big bang occured about 13 Billion years ago.

Yes, there is evidense that the universe is eternal, because as far as we know, matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only change forms.

 

[Nullasalus]

Yes. But when you say that the the god “allows” life, “allows” complexity, you still assume that this god is thinking and conscious. Also, the universe may not be indefinitely sustainable. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all the potential energy in the universe will eventually disappear, and it will suffer a “heat death.” I don’t think this is necessarily true, or will with 100% certainty happen though. It doesn’t make sense to me that you can have a universe that is infinitely expanding, and yet has a finite amount of energy. Heh, or maybe it could if it has an infinite amount of energy from an infinite source? Possibly, but as of yet there is no good evidense of it, I don’t think.

Insofar as ‘allows’ go, I was talking about the deistic god - the conscious entity, ‘watchmaker’ god who starts a universe up then goes on to do something else. Though really, it can apply to a non-conscious god as well. ‘Allow’ isn’t important to the concept, that’s just semantics specific to the deist. If this ‘god’ is not a conscious, its unconsciousness is rather productive.

I don’t buy any of the described ‘ends of the universe’ either, personally - if only because they don’t really touch on how humans can affect things, even if we seem helpless at this, our early stage of technology. Still, that wasn’t what I meant by eternally sustainable - even if the universe suffers ‘heat death’, the universe is still there. It’s just rather boring and lifeless. I don’t think any theories of the end of the universe account for it winking out of existence, really.

Actually, I just thought recently. If there was a deistic god - again, the watchmarker - one could always make one fun claim. “Just because this god is not involved in the world right now, doesn’t mean said god never was involved in the world, or never will be in the future.” Again, I know you’re also talking about unconscious gods - there’s interesting thoughts on such as well - but, I’m illustrating why the ‘deistic’ concept never did much for me. Leaves too many unanswered questions, and we inevitably get back where we started.

 

[Vmaalouf]

I would that by definition a God would have to be conscious; otherwise, it is just a power .

-ribozyme

That all just depends on your definition of god. There is a distinction. For example Buddhism is atheistic in the sense that Gotama did not believe in a personal god.

So what? We don’t know that it has any function. That’s not the same as saying it has no function. You’re like saying "We don’t know that there’s life on other planets, therefore there is no life on other planets.

You can continue to speculate all you like that there is no function, as opposed to ‘we don’t know that there is any function’ - and take note, that the number of so-called vestigial organs was great at the beginning of the last century.

-Montalban

I told you. It’s not that we don’t know its function, *We know that it has no positive function for us. *

Genesis is inspired by God, it’s not the verbatim account of God’s creation. As an Orthodox I don’t ever get bogged down in the literalness, other than to believe that it was ‘so’. As the late Fr. Seraphim Rose said…
“Some Protestant fundamentalists tell us it is all (or virtually all) 'literal.” But such a view places us in some impossible difficulties: quite apart form our literal or non-literal interpretation of various passages, the very nature of the reality which is described in the first chapters of genesis the very creation of all things) makes it quite impossible for everything to be understood ‘literally’; we don’t even have words, for example, to describe ‘literally’ how something can come from nothing. How does God “speak”? - does He make a noise which resounds in an atmosphere that doesn’t yet exist?”
Fr. Seraphim Rose (2000) “Genesis Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision”, (Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood; Platina, CA), p69

-Montalban

Okay, that just brings up another question. How do you or anyone know that the bible was inspired by god? Because the people who wrote and/or put the book together said so?

Secondly, cite the verses that says that the earth is at the centre of the universe.

-Montalban

I did not say it specifically said the Earth was the center, but it seems like its intention. It states Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.” It starts off with the Earth coming first. Then the light of day and the darkness of night. He then goes on to bodies of water and vegitation. But the sources of light aren’t created until after that, after light and darkness had already been created, which makes no sense at all. Wouldn’t you think that if the bible was really inspired, it could at least get some little things like that right? I mean if it was truly inspired?

Here’s the important part. When he talks about the creation of a dome, its purpose is to seperate the water on the earth, from the water in the sky, above the dome. The water in the sky above the dome was meant to explain rain. Now, it then says, Gen 1:14 “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to seperate day from night.” It says **in the dome, **Meaning that the sun would have to be much smaller than the earth to fit, and would have to revolve around the earth. This is clear because in order for it to be in the dome, it has to be beneath the source of the rain. So it seems that they didn’t know rain came from clouds, lest the opposite would be evident because clouds can block out the sun. Or maybe the water above the dome just fed the clouds, but still remained above the sun, and clouds beneath. Nevertheless it is still evident that the writer believed the sun was created to serve the Earth by shedding light, and therefore the Earth was probably considered the center of the entire universe, if not, at least the solar system.

 

[Hubriss]

Uh… Sorry. The VMaalouf above is really a post by me, Hubriss.

That’s a pretty blanket statement. Can you provide evidence that every single atheist becomes an atheist based on “logical inferences dreived from scientific evidence?” Can you categorically state that every single atheist approaches the existence (or non-existence) of God from that point of view?

-valient Lucy

Yes. “Scientific evidense” is based on observations of our “real world.” Not only atheists, but even most religious people form their beliefs by their personal subjective experiences. In fact, almost all beliefs are formed from personal observations and experiences, and logic heavily based on those experiences. The question then asked is, is the experience reliable? Can it be confermed by others’ experiences? Is it logical according to well established, well accepted principles? Of course well established and accepted principles are not always correct, so we must be willing to refine our ideas as we experience and learn more. There are truths, there are absolutes. But the problem, is that we do not or cannot know many of these absolutes, especially those pertaining to that which we cannot experience. I tend to adhere to Lao Tzu’s understanding of these absolutes:

“Those who tell, do not know. Those who know, do not tell.”

This is so because even if one did know, it is impossible to explain or describe “God” (or whatever someone wants to call it, Nirvana, etc), because words are limited to our physical world in which we live in.

I know I kind of got off on a tangent. Guess I’m just trying to explain what I’m trying to say.

Actually, I just thought recently. If there was a deistic god - again, the watchmarker - one could always make one fun claim. “Just because this god is not involved in the world right now, doesn’t mean said god never was involved in the world, or never will be in the future.” Again, I know you’re also talking about unconscious gods - there’s interesting thoughts on such as well - but, I’m illustrating why the ‘deistic’ concept never did much for me. Leaves too many unanswered questions, and we inevitably get back where we started.

-Nullasalus

Yeah, I’m somewhat somewhere along those lines.