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STT
Guest
I think he is talking about Love. How Love could leads to purpose or be a purpose is a big question?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Sometimes function can be distinguished from purpose with the greatest difficulty.
Even Darwin talked about Natural Selection, as if Nature could select for a purpose, that the heart should exist to keep the human body alive even when other organs cannot. The heart’s **purpose **is to keep the body alive. It’s function, however, is to help circulate blood through the body, which distinguishes its function from other organs of the body.
Likewise, the soul’s heart keeps the soul’s blood circulating and alive for the adventure of life. Denial of that heart and its function, to circulate love through itself to others and God, results in the death of the soul. Again, this is why you see atheism so often connected with the impulse toward suicide. Atheism wants to substitute thought for love, thinking about God (which results in denying there is any God to think about) for loving God (which results in affirming there is a God to love). “ As so many have said, including Bishop Fulton Sheen: “If you want to know about God, there is only one way to do it: get down on your knees.”
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Bradski
Guest
I see that you have not attempted to address what the purpose might be of parts of existence that we cannot access, that we cannot obtain any information and which in some cases does not even exist and has not existed since even our own planet was formed.
Oh, except as an opportunity to go ‘Gee whizz!’
So is that it? God only made it to impress us?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Yes, to mystify and awe us with enormity.
Yet, considering the microcosm of the atomic world, we ought to be just as impressed.
We are halfway between both worlds. Not a bad place to be, and better than both.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
As to what purpose God made the universe so vast, Plato suggests an answer.
“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
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JapaneseKappa
Guest
Of course, I have never claimed that purpose is unknowable.
Perhaps you should read up on Feser’s blog.
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/01/revisiting-ross-on-immateriality-of.html
In this blog post, he claims:
Now he is specifically talking about semantic meaning but I would argue that you can make the same claim, but with “semantic meaning” crossed out and “purpose” written in. Suppose we stumbled on an alien device. We looked closely at the insides, found there were circuits that seemed to do addition, so we concluded that the machine was made by the aliens for the purpose of doing addition. Haha nope! Turns out the aliens had wanted to build a flashlight, but messed up and made an adding machine on accident. So the purpose of the adding machine was to emit light, despite the fact that it did addition and emitted no light at all.
So this is the crux of Feser’s (and my) argument. You simply can’t get at the purpose of a physical system just by looking at the physical facts about the system.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Well, from the atheist perspective, you could never get to the purpose of the universe because there is no purpose, whether or not you look at the facts of the system.
The atheist system is closed because the matter is decided by desire that there be no God who could give purpose to the universe.
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JapaneseKappa
Guest
I’ve already provided reasons why God wouldn’t be able to give purpose to the universe, which you have not addressed.Well, from the atheist perspective, you could never get to the purpose of the universe because there is no purpose, whether or not you look at the facts of the system.
The atheist system is closed because the matter is decided by desire that there be no God who could give purpose to the universe.
If I were as eager to ascribe motivations for beliefs as you appear to be, I’d suppose that the Christian “need” for a universal purpose is based on a fear. And as I’m sure we all know, the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
That’s why Jesus said, “Be not afraid.”
But apparently the higher rate of suicide among atheists indicates fear of something … would that be fear of a purposeless life?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
I cannot think of any other purpose for creating an entire universe other than that it should be, in the last days, a welcome home for Jesus and those who believe in him.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Perhaps rather the basest of all things is to die cocksure there is no devil waiting to greet us?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
C.S. Lewis:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
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Vonsalza
Guest
I don’t think it’s too large of a logical jump to say that if the theist believes God created the universe, then it is the God that assigns this purpose rather than the creation (us).
I think your approach assumes that the purposes of the Creator must be made known to us - beyond the few tidbits that religions claim to have had explicitly revealed by this God. Or maybe you assume that creation exists more for humanity than for the Creator Itself.
I see no real reason to hold those assumptions.
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ultimate theistic answer is along the lines of “Because I am The Immeasurable and I just felt like it”
J
JapaneseKappa
Guest
But if he didn’t create the universe, there wouldn’t be any “those who believe in him” to need a home. And Jesus couldn’t be “fully man” if there was no such thing as man.
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Bradski
Guest
So yet again the answer appears to be: We don’t know.
But if we are unaware of the purpose of creation, how is it possible to claim that there is indeed a purpose? ‘Well…there just must be…’ seems to be the response.
In any case, I think it’s safe to say that if God is responsible for creation, then the bit on which we are currently living serves some purpose. That is, to keep us alive. You’d be hard pressed to suggest that that is an incidental aspect of His work.
In which case, the bits we can’t access, the bits about which we will never even have any information about, the bits that in fact do not exist any more, one has to ask what they are for.
Where does one draw the line? The world is for us, it serves a purpose. Can we include the rest of our solar system? The rest of the Milky Way? The proximate galaxies? The observable universe? The whole universe, including that which is not accessible. And bear in mind this:
‘We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent’. map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html
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Vonsalza
Guest
We’re talking about philosophical and religious matter here. Does this answer surprise you?
In a God-centered paradigm on the universe, “Because it pleased Him” is a reasonable base-assumption for purpose. Any additional purpose is corollary.
I’m not big on open theism. I don’t believe there are any “incidentals” as God understands them.
Please see above.
I take issue with the stance that the Earth is exclusively for “us”. Most theists might propose that the creator is at the teleological center; not the creation (us).
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Vonsalza
Guest
My favorite movie of all time.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Given natural theology, we can infer. Then again, it can be revealed to us.
The victim of scientism cannot know since there is no purpose for Creation that can be detected by scientific means alone and that means alone can be accepted.
So you are consistent.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
William A. Dembski, Mathematician
“Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.”
Stephen C. Meyer, Geophysicist
“Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience. Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the “supernatural” realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information.”
“Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.”
Stephen C. Meyer, Geophysicist
“Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience. Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the “supernatural” realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information.”
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