God debate comment

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crowonsnow

So we can continue our discussion I need to know if you hold that the BB is a miracle.

Since the universe could not have created itself, created its own laws to abide by (that wouldn’t even be magical … it would be absurd), there is nothing else to call Creation but an act of God bringing something out of nothing …** yes, a miracle **since a miracle transcends anything we are accustomed to in natural law.

By extension, everything that follows the initial Bang participates in the rippling miracle of an expanding universe which has evolved from pure light in its early days to the Light that shines in the world, even when the world does not grasp it.

The miracle is not over … science itself, as Einstein said, is an attempt to understand the mind of God … what God was thinking when He created the universe. Religion has no quarrel with science, unless science thinks there is no God and leaves the universe infinite, eternal, and without purpose … which atheism is driven to in the last analysis as a dead end to all explanations.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Since the universe could not have created itself, created its own laws to abide by (that wouldn’t even be magical … it would be absurd), there is nothing else to call Creation but an act of God bringing something out of nothing …** yes, a miracle **since a miracle transcends anything we are accustomed to in natural law.

By extension, everything that follows the initial Bang participates in the rippling miracle of an expanding universe which has evolved from pure light in its early days to the Light that shines in the world, even when the world does not grasp it.
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I certainly agree that the BB is ongoing. It’s not like it came to an end 14 billion years ago. I don’t know how this invisible alleged god/magician could have decided to create itself either. Maybe one day you can explain how its alleged self creation is any less absurd than your self creating universe theory, which btw I’ve never heard before.

I don’t know what the purpose of this god/magician would be without a universe however. It seems like the universe, something that clearly is real, is the only thing giving it any purpose whatsoever.

You are correct that the universe has no purpose, at least none that I can discern. The challenge is to give it purpose, at least give the part of it we call ourselves purpose, which I think mysticism and magic and religion certainly can accomplish where sufficient maturity and knowledge is lacking. I think it is a greater challenge and therefore a greater accomplishment to give it purpose without pretending in magical childhood and adolescent fantasies, though they also have their place for now.

Thank you for the chat. I have thoroughly enjoyed our exchange.
 
crowonsnow said:
I think it is a greater challenge and therefore a greater accomplishment to give it purpose without pretending in magical childhood and adolescent fantasies, though they also have their place for now.

Thank you for the chat. I have thoroughly enjoyed our exchange.
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On your part it was an exchange of abusive caricatures and straw-men. When you’re mature enough to respect of peoples beliefs, then maybe you will be ready to have a reasonable debate that doesn’t rely purely upon misrepresentation and ridicule.
 
MindOverMatter said:
On your part it was an exchange of abusive caricatures and straw-men. When you’re mature enough to respect of peoples beliefs, then maybe you will be ready to have a reasonable debate that doesn’t rely purely upon misrepresentation and ridicule.
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I honestly don’t think so. I do in fact think it’s a matter of maturity and experience. There is after all no difference between abracadabra and miracle except in that I am taught to respect one or the other. After all, how they allegedly operate in the natural world is identical. A mountain is still a mountain no matter how we humans describe it, or how different our languages or explanations.

I think a mature person will be unaffected, generally speaking. They will be a good juror and look at the evidence, not emotion and argument.

Is that a reasonable position?
 
crowonsnow said:
Is that a reasonable position?
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Abracadbra is a trick. A miricale is God bringing something about through the power and will of Gods nature alone. It is a manifestation of Gods eternal will and mind. You assume that because you cannot do it, nor can understand how God can do it, that therefore it is not reasonable to believe that God can do it. However if the laws of nature have been invented by God, then it is far from unreasonable to think that God can do things that we can’t ( being that human beings are subject to laws and change.) It follows neccesarily so; and the only thing that undermines such a premiss is your prejudice.

Thats why you could never be taken seriously as a philosopher.
 
MindOverMatter said:
Abracadbra is a trick. A miricale is God bringing something about through the power and will of Gods nature alone. It is a manifestation of Gods eternal will and mind. You assume that because you cannot do it, nor can understand how God can do it, that therefore it is not reasonable to believe that God can do it. However if the laws of nature have been invented by God, then it is far from unreasonable to think that God can do things that we can’t ( being that human beings are subject to laws and change.) It follows neccesarily so; and the only thing that undermines such a premiss is your prejudice.

Thats why you could never be taken seriously as a philosopher.
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No. Magic and gods are obviously cultural phenomena. Preferring one over the other is really just a matter of cultural prejudice. Even in its early history high Christianity went out of its way to discredit explanations with which it didn’t agree, magic being one.

And there were lots of excellent philosophers before there were ever any religions calling themselves Christian.
 
crowonsnow said:
I honestly don’t think so. I do in fact think it’s a matter of maturity and experience. There is after all no difference between abracadabra and miracle except in that I am taught to respect one or the other.

Is that a reasonable position?
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The only reason that you relate the two, is so that you can feel comfortable about naturalism; pumping your self up with a self proclaimed rationale that you have not proven, inorder to hide your fear that God makes better sense of the evidence. You can of coarse, believe what you want. However, to sustain your belief, you must believe in something thats far more absurd then God.

You must believe either…
  1. The world has existed forever for absolutly no reason. The premiss being that an infinite number of events have preceded this one. Which is unprovable and impossible, because it’s self-contradictory to think that an actual infinity of past events can be made up of numbers. You cannot make an infinite out of numbers, because and infinity transcends any countable number of events; and if you are nolonger counting numbers, then you are nolonger describing physical events. Numbers are only potentailly infinite. In other words, there is no such thing as a number that one can legitimatley describe as infinite since you can always add one more to it. Therefore it makes no sense, neither is there any ligitimate reason, to say that there is an actual series of infinite events in the past or any where in the universe. If there was an infinte “number” of events in the past, one could never arrive at this moment. And if one could, then that would mean that the past is potentailly infinte, which is a contradiction in terms. The present event, is the sum total of past events.
  2. Or you could believe that the ultimate foundation of all physical beings, is absolutly nothing. You have to believe that the first event brought itself into being.
Which ever one you choose, neither of them sufficiently explains why the Universe exists and more importantly why people exist with feelings and desires. At best, Naturalism gives us superficail explanations that require me to believe in something much woser then magic. They require me to believe in a magic trick without a magician. They require me to ultimately give up reason.
 
crowonsnow said:
No. Magic and gods are obviously cultural phenomena.
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Your belief that God is merely a cultural phenomenon, is just a cultural belief. There is nothing obvious about it. The only thing that is obvious is that you wish to portray God in a light that best pleases you, and serves your interests. Thats fine; but just admit that instead of pretending that you know what you are talking about.
 
crowonsnow said:
And there were lots of excellent philosophers before there were ever any religions calling themselves Christian.
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While this may be of interest to you, it doesn’t deal with any of the issues that i raised in my post. It has only served to derail the thread.
 
crowonsnow

The bottom line is that the BB theory has left atheism in a decidedly awkward position. The atheist who calls on science to abet atheism suddenly finds that science has gone over to the other side by confirming the assertion of Genesis that some kind of Creation event **did **occur, that the universe is neither infinite nor eternal. Moreover, statistical odds are that the universe was created by Design, which implicates (without proving) the existence of a Designer. Some of the more rational and less stubborn atheists, like Antony Flew, have had the courage to admit this.

The more uninformed and stubborn atheists seem to hold to the outdated nineteenth century idea of an infinite and eternal universe which exists without purpose. Having lost all so-called legitimate arguments against God and religion, they persist in using language like “magic” and “abracadabra,” as if they were the fountains of “maturity and experience.”

All of which leads to only one conclusion: the motive behind atheism, whatever else it may be, is certainly not intellectual integrity.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
All of which leads to only one conclusion: the motive behind atheism, whatever else it may be, is certainly not intellectual integrity.
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Intellectual integrity is first and foremost being a good observer. Kepler was a good observer and was forced to give up his cherished illusions when it came to planetary orbits. He wanted to believe one thing but his data pointed to something different. He accepted his data, not his prejudices. He was practicing intellectual integrity.

The myths in the bible aren’t scientific. They’re stories. No scientist believes in voices from invisible sky creatures and talking snakes. That’s just not science.
 
crowonsnow

No scientist believes in voices from invisible sky creatures and talking snakes. That’s just not science.

Copernicus was a Catholic priest. Louis Pasteur died a faithful Catholic. Gregor Mendel, father of the science of genetics, was a Catholic priest. Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the Big Bang theory, to which Einstein finally gave his assent, was also a Catholic priest. Many scientists living and working today are Christians and are broad-minded enough to know that science is not the only path to ultimate truth.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
 
crowonsnow said:
Intellectual integrity is first and foremost being a good observer. Kepler was a good observer and was forced to give up his cherished illusions when it came to planetary orbits. He wanted to believe one thing but his data pointed to something different. He accepted his data, not his prejudices. He was practicing intellectual integrity.

The myths in the bible aren’t scientific. They’re stories. No scientist believes in voices from invisible sky creatures and talking snakes. That’s just not science.
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Strange then that many of the great scientists believed in some kind of God. There are many good scientists today like Kenneth R Miller who see no conflict. Galileo did not stop being a Catholic when he made his discovery’s. Your whole argument is based on an assumption. You assume that being Christian means that one must believe in what you caricature Christianity to be. But anyone that does their home work will find a different relationship between science and religion that far outweighs the popular myth that science is at war with the Bible. Christianity doesn’t undermine science. Ignorance undermines science.

But this not only reveals your un-ending prejudice; it also assumes that if one is a Christian that one must believe in talking snakes and invisible sky creatures. One need not believe in either. For one, God is not an invisible sky creature; get your facts straight. Christians believe that God is a being that transcends physical reality and is the root of it. God is Existence. And neither does one need to believe that there was an actual talking snake in a garden called Eden. There are many differing interpretations. It seems to me that nobody here is forcing you to believe in God, so please be charitable enough to represent Catholic belief in its proper and full context.

It was popular in many Christian circles, before science, to think that the Bible, concerning genesis, was describing completely literal events; they had very little reason to believe otherwise considering that the sciences were underdeveloped at the time. But if you study the Fathers of the Christian faith, you will find that there are differing views about the context in which one ought to understand Genesis. The Catholic faith practices its own Bible criticism, so far as how it ought to be interpreted, and this is evident through out history.

I don’t care if you choose to criticize Christianity. But have some respect for your brain and stop spreading misinformation.
 
I believe this discussion has reached a dead end … at least for me. See you elsewhere!
 
As a very wise priest once told me “something doesn’t come from nothing”. Without faith, we cannot begin to wrap our minds around God. The problem an athiest has is that God’s existence is dependent upon his ability to intellectually understand Him. Since the athiest (nor anyone else) can intellectually understand God in His fullness, he determines that he must, therefore, not exist.

I find it curious, however, that even logic points to a Creator (Uncaused Cause), yet this seems to be ignored by unbelievers, rather than disputed. Intellectual honesty is seriously lacking in this man’s argument.
 
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