LOL, I have watched that also.I can’t resist. To answer your original question of “What is God?”
God is an alien from another planet with highly advanced technology that visited us long ago and built the pyramids for us.
History Channel! \o/
What about us?
Yes, indeed: Those things would have been scientifically observable to the ones who witnessed them (e.g. Moses would have had scientific certainty of the existence of the burning bush even if no one else did), just as a random (but natural) lightning strike, along with the effects of it, would be observable for someone who had witnessed it and the immediate time afterwards 2000 years ago. Now, however, we would have no empirical access to that specific lightning strike, and the aftereffects would probably be too far distorted or destroyed by 2000 years of erosion, circumstances, etc. There is no more reason to think we should still have empirical access to the miracles God worked in the Bible after all these many centuries.
Why not? We can access ancient volcanic erruptions, decipher ancient weather patterns, analyze ancient genomes… Surely an event so Earth shattering as God appearing and temporarily subverting the laws of physics would register somehow?
That’s an assumption, not something that is “surely” true. There are plenty of specific events in the world’s history that we will never know empirically or have empirical access to, and these miracles could easily be among them. There is nothing particularly Earth Shattering (as in, it would leave an eternal mark) about a giant fish swallowing a man: It happens to violate physics, but there’s nothing about it that should leave an eternal imprint on the Cosmos. There’s nothing particularly Earth shattering (as in, it would leave an eternal mark) about a burning bush that wasn’t consumed. Eventually it would decay, and there is no reason anything should be left of it that would tell us it had ever been anything but normal (in fact, if it wasn’t consumed, it would mean the fire had made no impact on it that would even show us it had burned in the first place). There’s simply no reason to think that these events, just because they happened to be miracles, would leave some sort of mark which would be eternally accessible by empirical means.
Does this whirlpool **know **it is dispersing? Or is it just the effect of currents finally dispersing? Once again, we have a cause and an effect relationship.
I don’t see any evidence of that… So we know we’re going to die. That doesn’t stop it happening… If we fall off a bridge, does the knowledge that we’re plummeting to the ground allow us to decelerate?
When I used the word Earth Shattering, it wasn’t rhetoric. For God, or for that matter anything, to appear and then disappear on Earth would cause the same kind of devastation as a thermonuclear explosion.
Not if He didn’t want it to. It’s logically expected that He could control/bend the Laws He Himself authored. If God wanted to appear to an individual or perform a miracle without causing the devastation and uproar you suggest, there is no logical reason to think He couldn’t if He Himself was the creator of the Laws of Physics in the first place (which is the whole point). Your assumption still works from the premise that God is somehow helplessly bound by the Laws of which He Himself is the Master.
Exactly which is why I said it in jest.
Although I’d change my tune if big bearded aliens with rippling muscles suddenly landed on my front lawn. I agree that this is true (from my viewpoint that’s assuming, of course, that God wouldn’t step in and give someone a vision so as to give the Faith a new jumpstart), but the same would be true of most secular history. We only believe in our history, for the most part, because our ancestors took care to spread the word to future generations (through records, etc.), and subsequent generations have cooperated and continue to cooperate in preserving and propogating these things (by adhering to those records and not dismissing them). If we halted this “spreading of the word” in every way, shape or form, we would become a people with little to no awareness of history–literally having to just make up theories as to why certain monuments and countries existed, etc. Archeological evidence only speaks for itself to a certain point, beyond which we could only theorize and assume, which wouldn’t lead us to even remotely the historical awareness we currently have. Likewise, if school systems suddenly started universally teaching an alternate history and we stood by and allowed it, within a few generations the alternate history would be taken as the truth by the overwhelming majority. The point is that of course this has nothing to do with whether or not historical events really happened, just as it has nothing to do with whether or not any give religion is true: It just has something to do with people believing a certain thing, whether it’s absolutely true, partly true, or not true at all.Exactly which is why I said it in jest.
Either way one of the points I was trying to indirectly make though even though it was really a joke is that if most of society was raised on the idea aliens from such and such a solar system visited us thousands of years ago to give us a jump start on civilization, then that’s what we most of the people would believe. Faith and religion are taught by other people that have that faith and religion. If people didn’t actively “spread the word” then religions would most likely die out in as little as a few generations.
lol? obviously you do not understand what I am saying.
Well we do have some pretty big gaps in our written history where we don’t really know what happened. The difference is that historians will typically come right out and say “we don’t reallky know what happened here, we’re only guessing based on what we see”. History typically doesn’t take any “belief”. Either it happened or it didn’t happen.
And your only response to my post was:
**I am still waiting! **
So if people did base their entire lives and plan out their afterlives based on some obscure event that happened in WWII (that we currently believe and that we currently have no problem believing), and if we knew for a fact that as long as they believed the events of WWII, they would continue to live as such (let us presume, for the sake of argument, that something about that event could truly be argued as suggesting we should live as they say), then should we, for that strictly pragmatic reason, start doing everything in our power to suggest or convince others that the events themselves didn’t happen so that they would stop basing their lives around it? That may be pragmatic, if you disagree with them and are tired of hearing them preach, but it in no way means they’re anymore likely to be wrong than they would’ve been if it didn’t shape the way they lived.
With that attitude, no sir. No sir you will NOT hear from me soon.
Even though I agree, this probably isn’t the forum to say such things :doh2:
I’m not quite sure how you think that makes us become immortal after the first time we die?
Ah yes, the argument from sheer will. God can do anything, God can be anything, there is no argument you can give against God that I can’t get round by saying “God can do anything he wants.”
