Is a God probable...?

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attofishpi

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Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?

www.androcies.com
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?

www.androcies.com
Click to expand...
You are joking, aren’t you?
How do find enough energy to fight enthropy and be God?
You must be joking!
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?
Click to expand...
The answer to this question is dependent on how much information God contains. God is omniscient, knowing everything; a very large amount of information indeed. However we can put a lower limit on the information contained in God. Given that God inspired the Bible, the minimum amount of information is the amount contained in the Bible. God knows more than is in the Bible; knowing less is not possible.

Looking at one of my Bibles, I find that it has about 30 characters per line, 56 lines in a column and two columns per page. The Old Testament contains 840 pages and the New Testament 240 pages. A total of 1080 pages. This is 30 x 56 x 2 x 1080 = 3628800 characters. For simplicity let us take the number of possible characters as 30, 26 letters plus space and some punctuation. Therefore by the standard probability argument the likelihood of the Bible having arisen by chance is 1 in 30 ^ 3628800. Remember that this is an upper bound, God is less probable than this because He contains more information than is in the Bible.

Working out the numbers, 1 in 30 ^ 3628800 is a probability of 1.8 x 10 ^ -3628942.

😃

rossum
 
rossum said:
The answer to this question is dependent on how much information God contains…
Looking at one of my Bibles, I find that it has …Working out the numbers, 1 in 30 ^ 3628800 is a probability of 1.8 x 10 ^ -3628942.

😃

rossum
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Never heard that one before! 🙂 Thanks, Rossum!

Looking at the art website linked by the OP,( very clever,) we might say then that God is “probe-able,” or capable of being “probed.” So God is capable of sustianing and yeilding results by the method of inquiry. Since God said “I AM WHO AM,” we might ask "who (or what) am I? Since I is subject, we might use “am” ins tead of “is,” and that would work as well, and may even be more correct, as God IS. So “Who (or what,) is I” can be a method for discovering a useful answer to the probe-ability of God.

Indeed, upon inquiry, it seems that this is the time honored way of discovery used by many Saints and Sages of the ages, even up to this day. Even if not this exact form, some traditions tending to complicate things unnesessarily, in essence, this is the method of penetration, the method of discrimination between what is God, the Biblical “I,” and what is not God. As has been often put forth, God is discovered by negation, not by affirmation, as affirmation is always necessarily incomplete and misleading. But it is easy to say “I am neither this nor that.” And of course, by elimination, after everything you think that “I” am is eliminated, only One is left, and that is not thought. (that last clause is not santa, but a horrible pun, despite its accuracy.) 🙂
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?
Click to expand...
There are a lot of good ideas in here, but they are kind of mooshed. Kind of what can happen when the personal paradigms of a psychic or mystic make it necessary to couch an otherwise accurate “message” in a language form that can’t quite accomodate it. But here are some other ideas regarding those that are offered for your perusal:

First, cause and effect are an overlay made necessary by our ordinary state of subject-object way of perception, that way being equivalent to the “fall.” Yes, the Garden stoory has other interpretations, some more functional than others. So “causation” is a concern only to time sequenced awarenes patterns, not to “being.” It takes both to be human, the “being” part being mostly neglected as a fertile feild of inquiry and result.

Second, Higher intelligences seem to be anti-entropic, as they assemble ergy into more complex, yet increasingly fragile, patterns. Some of these tend towards simploicity. The more simple, the more durable, approaching “eternal,” a state which has no component of duration.

The “super efficient state” can be equated to “Being,” and that is the original substrate, not a result.

“Conscious awareness” is a marvelously wondeerful phrase. It implies the end result of the reflexive function of human awareness utiliezed to discover its own Source. And often that reflexive function so employed is highly discounted by “spiritual” (religious) people despite its demonstrable efficacy. But eventually experience and grace will prevail in this matter.

Reborn or not reborn, and in what sense? Reincarnation is a wonderful device for learnig about THAT which was never born to die and never died to live again.

So let’s put those in the stew and see what flavors come forth.
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?

www.androcies.com
Click to expand...
The Bible says that God created everything from nothing. Science confirms this with the Big Bang, in which scientists say the entire universe came about from nothing. Intelligent life was not introduced until the earth was ready. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years without ever becoming intelligent. Insects existed for about 300 million years, but never became intelligent. Why? Because the earth wasn’t ready for the introduction of intelligent life. At any other point in history, we would be trapped in a perminant stone age. God introduced intelligent life when everything was in place for advanced civilization. The billions of gallons of fuel we need for our cars, the gas we need for our power plants, the organic matter we need for our rubber and plastics, etc. If you step back and look at the big picture, everything was done logically and in steps.
 
Ah yes… I too, used to engage in such intellectual thumb twidddling…
I have since made the leap however. Today I am just too busy enjoying God.

P. S. The extra ‘d’ in ‘twiddling’ is for effect… 😉
 
Yes, order and intelligence resulting from disorder and non-intelligence is less probable.
 
vera_dicere said:
Care to elaborate? Because a “No” isn’t very convincing.
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I said ‘no’ to the question “Is a God probable”? I say this because there is nothing I know of for which a god(s) is the simplest explanation. There are things for which there is no explanation, but history suggests that explanations will later be found. Using a ‘god of the gaps’ to fill these as-yet-unknowns seems unnecessarily complicated compared with “we don’t know, yet”. After all, god(s) were once used to explain the weather (and people, even on CAF, still invoke them for the purpose of influencing whether it rains). But we don’t find many people who serious believe in gods of winds, rain, and tornadoes.

I do, however, think that god(s) exist as social and psychological realities, just as ideas and dreams exist. Like ideas and dreams, they are material phenomena, and can be studied, though people’s experiences of them. That’s why I am happy to be welcome here at CAF.
 
Hokomai said:
I said ‘no’ to the question “Is a God probable”? I say this because there is nothing I know of for which a god(s) is the simplest explanation. There are things for which there is no explanation, but history suggests that explanations will later be found. Using a ‘god of the gaps’ to fill these as-yet-unknowns seems unnecessarily complicated compared with “we don’t know, yet”. After all, god(s) were once used to explain the weather (and people, even on CAF, still invoke them for the purpose of influencing whether it rains). But we don’t find many people who serious believe in gods of winds, rain, and tornadoes.

I do, however, think that god(s) exist as social and psychological realities, just as ideas and dreams exist. Like ideas and dreams, they are material phenomena, and can be studied, though people’s experiences of them. That’s why I am happy to be welcome here at CAF.
Click to expand...
The Bible says God created everything from nothing. Scientists tracked all the stars and galaxies blue and red shifts and via the doppler effect and discovered that everything originated from one central point. This resulted in the Big Bang theory. Now scientists believe that everything came from nothing. Can you close your hand, say “bang” and then have something appear in it? Believing in God makes a lot more sense than believing in nothing. How did the people who wrote the Bible 6 thousand years ago know this?

The Bible says that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Now scientists making a mitochondrial DNA excursion into the past determined that every human being descended from one woman thousands of years ago. The Discovery channel made a documentary about it: “The Real Eve: 5 Billion People from One Woman”:

amazon.com/Real-Eve-Billion-Discovery-Channel/dp/B00006AUKZ

How did the people who wrote the Bible 6 thousand years ago know this? And by the way, this only works for humans, not mammals, amphibians, insects, fish, etc.
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?

www.androcies.com
Click to expand...
Your supposition is self defeating as it begins with the existence of GOD when you declare “Since the big-bang…” You acknowledge that the first cause was in Existence before the big-bang, which is necessary to make the statement “Since the big-bang…” and now you question if such a BEING is probable?
 
Hokomai said:
I said ‘no’ to the question “Is a God probable”? I say this because there is nothing I know of for which a god(s) is the simplest explanation.
Click to expand...
How about the entropy problem? Naturally, nature wants to increase entropy, the measure of disorder. How could something organized (i.e., biological life in particular) develop if nature wants disorder?
 
The most obvious answer is “God is” He tells us that in the Gospel of St. John. Then support your Faith with Reason. St. Thomas Aquinas is the cornerstone of this.

Suggest some determined reading of St. Thomas Aquina “Summa Theologiae”, “Summa Contra Gentiles” and then to the modern “New Proofs for the Existence of God.” by Fr. Robert Spitzer. A simpler approach is to get Cardinal Schoenborn’s “Chance or Purpose”.

All of the most relevant writings of St. Thomas Aquinas are available in English at

dhspriory.org/thomas/

You can also get them in kindle book format at Amazon for free, or for a few cents. Spitzer and Schoenborn books also available in kindle mobi format.

Spitzer gives a thorough analysis of the most relevant physics and data and then proceeds to approach God’s existence through a couple of novel metaphysical arguments.

Still hard to beat St. Thomas’ Five Proofs. They can be stated in a few words and are compelling in my view.

And, there was nothing, “nihil” prior to the Big Bang except God who is always and whose existence is not judged by temporal or material notions of time, space and matter.

A little reading and thought would answer this kind of question very easily.

Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus!
 
attofishpi said:
Since the big-bang, the ebb and flow of a cause and effect universe eventually ceases its natural progression as life evolves into an increasingly intelligent form. The more intelligent the life-form, the greater the opposition to this natural causal outcome.
Intelligent life forms require increasing amounts of energy to sustain their lifestyle. As resources diminish (entropy increases) these lifeforms must interface to a super efficient state.
Would conscious awareness eventually evolve into an overriding intelligent system, created by such intelligent beings in the first place…and as they are reborn, they are not aware that IT is GOD…the ultimate judge as to whom shall have access to these limited resources?

www.androcies.com
Click to expand...
Alberti_Devoveo said:
How about the entropy problem? Naturally, nature wants to increase entropy, the measure of disorder. How could something organized (i.e., biological life in particular) develop if nature wants disorder?
Click to expand...
A classic sci-fi short story explores this possibility, see Asimov’s “The Last Question”
multivax.com/last_question.html
 
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  		 		 		 		 	   	 	 		 	  		  		 			 			 				http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon1.gif 				**Re: Is a God probable...?** 			
  	 			 		  		 		 			 			 	Quote:
   		 			 				 					Originally Posted by **Hokomai** 					[forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_khaki/viewpost.gif](http://forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=9208634#post9208634) 				
  		*I said 'no' to the question "Is a God  probable"? I say this because there is nothing I know of for which a  god(s) is the simplest explanation. There are things for which there is  no explanation, but history suggests that explanations will later be  found. Using a 'god of the gaps' to fill these as-yet-unknowns seems  unnecessarily complicated compared with "we don't know, yet". After all,  god(s) were once used to explain the weather (and people, even on CAF,  still invoke them for the purpose of influencing whether it rains). But  we don't find many people who serious believe in gods of winds, rain,  and tornadoes.
Click to expand...
I do, however, think that god(s) exist as social and psychological realities, just as ideas and dreams exist. Like ideas and dreams, they are material phenomena, and can be studied, though people’s experiences of them. That’s why I am happy to be welcome here at CAF.*

The Bible says God created everything from nothing. Scientists tracked all the stars and galaxies blue and red shifts and via the doppler effect and discovered that everything originated from one central point. This resulted in the Big Bang theory. Now scientists believe that everything came from nothing. Can you close your hand, say “bang” and then have something appear in it? Believing in God makes a lot more sense than believing in nothing. How did the people who wrote the Bible 6 thousand years ago know this?
Click to expand...
The Bible says that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Now scientists making a mitochondrial DNA excursion into the past determined that every human being descended from one woman thousands of years ago. The Discovery channel made a documentary about it: “The Real Eve: 5 Billion People from One Woman”:
Click to expand...
amazon.com/Real-Eve-Billi…/dp/B00006AUKZ
Click to expand...
How did the people who wrote the Bible 6 thousand years ago know this? And by the way, this only works for humans, not mammals, amphibians, insects, fish, etc.
Click to expand...
Well, if the peple who wrote the Bible were inspired to tell us all these scientific truths, by an omnipotent, all-knowing God, why did they not tell us what actaully happened, with all the scientific detail, and why did they tell us things which are plainly wrong, such as different species not be related by descent, and the sky being made of water? Your understanding of “Eve” in the ancestor sense is wrong. She is not one of two ancestors of all humans, she is one of a great many ancestors. It is just that it is possible to identify her. The science that established 'mitochondria Eve" also establishes that she herself had parents, and was related to frogs, lichens, amobeas, and trees as well as being your, and my ancestor. Why did God not think to point this out?
 
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