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Bradski
Guest
Why do so few people read what I write? Is it the fact that I class myself as an atheist and that therefore whatever I say must be wrong?
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ColdComfort
Guest
Well, the world is beautiful. How does one explain this in a Godless universe?
Given the Christian view of human nature and nature just what one would expect.
Even intelligent aliens would be contingent beings. They would not be able to create the universe and themselves out of nothing.
The last sentence can apply to anyone including atheists. I can think of lots of reasons why someone would want God not to exist. Let’s all agree that what we want is irrelevant to the truth.
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Linusthe2nd
Guest
Not exactly sure what you are really asking. He did come in the Person of his Son, working miracles of all sorts, casting out demons, raising the dead, fulfilling over a hundred prophasies announcing his coming and he was still rejected. What more could he have done?
People who don’t want to believe will not believe. If he appeared, people would just say it was the devil or that people were hallucinating or were out of their minds.
We both know and believe. We can know he exists through philosophy. And we believe he exists because of his revelation of himself.
We can be good, it takes work and grace however.
Alturism, loving and serving our neighbor can exist along side of our Hope of Salvation and our fear of loosing it. I don’t see a problem here at all. Perfectly normal, perfectly in line with the Sermon on the Mount and the Commandments.
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Linusthe2nd
Guest
No, not even in the case of God. God’s Essence is his Existence.
For all the creatures he created, from Angels to no liveing minerals God created complete beings, their essence and their existence together at the same time. He didn’t have a bank full of essences and another bank full of existences. I think you get this from the way Thomas talks about essences and existence. But he makes it clear in many places ( don’t ask me to find the sources, you can do that) that God created the beings - essences which exist. Existence is not a separate note added to beings, substances, essences, extents. I think of it like this. A being is an essence which is real by the creative power of God, acting innermostly in the essence making it " to be. " I may have the wrong idea of course but that is about the only way I can make sense of it.
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Linusthe2nd
Guest
We all love you Bradski even if get upset from time to time. It is just that your ideas are so strange. Now ask a straight foreward question, one that is serious.
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Bob_Crowley
Guest
I suspect your first paragraph has a lot to do with it. The Bible states that no man may look on God and live.
I remember myself, when early in my Christian walk, I got a bit too pally in my mind with Him. Next thing I knew this sense of anger descended on me, and I literally felt like I was going to disintegrate. I was driving at the time, and I had to pull over into a side street until the whole thing passed. Very uncomfortable.
I still remember it vividly - I was on my way to a gym under our Presbyterian Church; the road was one Kedron Brook Road, and the side street was either Main or Fifth Avenue. And this was probably nearly 30 years ago now.
Our spirits are not destroyed, but if we were to see God in our physical bodies, we’d die.
I don’t think any of us comprehend the frightening holiness of God. It’s deadly.
So He hides himself. We are only permitted to see Him after we die, and we exist in spiritual form only.
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kelner
Guest
Only if you are quote mining.
First, Genesis omits a critical piece of information: that the Sun in a star. Forget DNA. Ancient Israelite would have no vocabulary to describe DNA. However, the text in Genesis mentions both Sun and stars, yet never makes connection between the two. This is actually a very serious omission. Because once you admit that Sun is a star (i.e. its not unique), then you have to conclude that Earth is not unique, and hence, humans are not unique (i.e. you have aliens). Once you have aliens, then you have the problem of salvation of the aliens. At this point, one Giordano Bruno would like to have a word with you.
Next, both Old and New Testament refer to a 3-level universe; God’s dwelling is on the top floor (heaven), we live on the ground floor, and Sheol/Hell is down in the basement. Mind you, in the Bible, heaven is literally up; Satan is cast from Heaven and falls down. Even Apostle’s Creed (8th century) says that Jesus descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven. Of course, that makes no sense in light of actual astronomy. No wonder that this Galileo guy got in trouble…Modern theology escapes this by declaring that Heaven and Hell are not places, but states. However, if it is so, then one has to wonder why the Bible does not say so explicitly.
In short, you are trying to tell me is that when Divine Truth was revealed to the writers of Genesis, they understood the Big Bang all right, but at the same time failed to understand a round Earth moving around a star, and all that follows…
It only fails, because it is a straw man. Vacuum, at quantum level, is not nothing.
Universe from nothing is actually a very elegant idea, because it only needs unstructured spacetime and laws of physics to produce a structured universe. The reason people don’t like it, is that common sense dictates that order cannot arise out of chaos. However, once you observe that self-organizing systems exist in nature, you have to admit that producing order out of chaos does not necessarily require intelligent action:
youtube.com/watch?v=W1TMZASCR-I
youtube.com/watch?v=KPP-4-LEHXQ
youtube.com/watch?v=it2nKg2hTAo
Now, ask yourself this. Aren’t you simply doing God of the Gaps, invoking God to explain things you don’t know today? Aren’t you putting yourself down the path where, as your knowledge grows, and gaps shrink, then your God will shrink as well?
I AM WHO I AM. I am existence.
Universe exists. You exist.
Why are you looking for God outside existence?
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ColdComfort
Guest
Hey! I answered him.We all love you Bradski even if get upset from time to time. It is just that your ideas are so strange. Now ask a straight foreward question, one that is serious.
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ColdComfort
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kelner
Guest
Tell me if this makes sense:
Imagine you are sitting in a movie theater. You see some characters projected on the screen. To you, they are mere phantoms, brought into existence by the action of the movie projector.
Yet, somehow, these phantoms are sentient. They exist in the world of the screen. Whatever you see on the screen, they see as well. Except that they cannot see the world outside the screen.
Two characters on the screen are arguing. One says that their existence suggests the existence of the projector. The other says: But if the projector exists, why doesn’t it reveal itself to us?
You hear the projectionist asking you from the back: Any idea how we show these guys that we exist?
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robwar
Guest
I did read what you wrote and responded to what you wrote. I didn’t make any judgement good or bad but responded to your comments which is looking at the world in a negative light and responded to your somewhat sarcastic post. There is no comment on your atheism and why or what you believe.
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kelner
Guest
That’s the whole point. “Universe from nothing” is catchy, but incorrect.
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Anthony_V
Guest
It’s not. Faith is a knowledge of a higher order. God’s existence is objectively axiomatic, and does not require blind trust. One might ask, “then why isn’t everybody a theist?” And I would reply, “because we humans are subjective, not objective.” Allow me to further explain:
God, in his entirety of knowledge, is the Logos. His being is eternally expansive, yet eternally simple in essence. The Logos is known fully only by itself, as it knows itself. The next question arises, “how do human beings understand knowledge as a principle?” The Logos, infinitely expansive, cannot fit inside a finite understanding (as Logos is Understanding itself). We understand God by abstracting him into logoi–that is, smaller principles we can understand. But because we know that whatever the Logos is, it is an irreducible substrate, we attempt to conform all the possessed logoi into a single system of information, which we subjectively call Truth. This is why God appears very complex and confusing, and why we write millions of books and spill barrels of ink. In fact, even if we wrote an infinite number of books and spilled an infinite number of barrels of ink (with an infinite amount of information that was all true), we still wouldn’t understand the Logos through any form of finite natural knowledge. This is where faith comes in.
Faith is not a blind trust. It is a participation in God’s eternal understanding of himself in a way that is not axiomatic to natural knowledge. Obviously, you can gather where the societal connotation of faith was derived. For our purposes, however, that connotation does not fit, as it is not an object of natural reason. This is not to say it isn’t practical or pragmatic, however. That’s the entire message of the Gospel, to reveal that God does want us to see him, and we are given the means to practice supernatural Love.
And in fact, faith is not different than knowing. Faith is a metaphysical and transcendental knowledge with absolute certainty. While you can discredit a particular existent, you cannot discredit a principle of being simply by virtue of the limitations of sense knowledge (or natural knowledge, for that matter). All that to say, we can intuitively say that God exists as an imperative; axiomatically.
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Anthony_V
Guest
God is existence. We are not existence as a principle–we are existents, XYZ’s that exist. That’s been thoroughly written upon. He is outside creation, but factoring that variable requires a decent amount of metaphysical thinking. Now, “producing order out of chaos” is an abstraction, not a sensible proposition. “Order” is not a thing, so to speak. It is a positive principle. “Chaos” is neither a thing. It’s a negative principle; lack thereof. It’s a metaphysical question over and above pragmatism. It cannot be answered by physics.
Apart from that, I think science is heading in a rather decent direction with the “nothing” theory (or whichever you should like to call it). I’m not joking. It’s getting closer to the concept of God as an ontological principle. Why do physicists think it might be nothing? Because it is simple. Complexity arises out of simplicity.That’s a basic law of physics. The universe expanded out of singularity. Molecules form out of interacting atoms. The first cells probably formed out of lipid bubbles, inside of which simple proteins formed. Additionally, it’s a basic law of metaphysics: the question of existence as a principle. Nothing exists necessarily, and no things exist necessarily, yet things do, and nothing doesn’t [absolutely]. I am not insisting that God is “nothing” in the least bit, but that there is at least credence given to the fact that a positive something can be scientifically recognized as a singular principle in cosmology.
meltzerboy
New member
A few points concerning your remarks. Maimonides as well as the Lubavitcher Rebbe and other sages and scholars have pointed out that in the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, there is a suggestion of extraterrestrial life. Maimonides also talked about the consciousness of the heavenly bodies as well as its inhabitants. However, from a Jewish perspective, even though that alien life may be intelligent, it would not be bound by the same moral principles found in the Torah. It would not even necessarily have free will. Since salvation is not a key issue in Judaism–although the belief in an afterlife is present–the existence of aliens as another life form created by G-d would not be a problem. Likewise, the fact that the Sun is merely a star does not rob the Earth or the humans who inhabit it of their uniqueness. Our uniqueness as human beings is defined according to Judaism not even with respect to our higher order of consciousness, but rather our free will to choose the good bestowed upon us by G-d, which He gave to neither the beasts nor the angels. (The issue you presented concerning Satan is not a problem for Judaism in the sense of willful rebellion against G-d since Satan, the same as the other angels, does not have free will and is thus not our enemy.) Further, for Jews our uniqueness is also that G-d gave us His Law, which we are to follow in spirit and deed and, by doing so, set an example for other nations to follow. One final point, with regard to the language in the Bible, including the words ascending and descending, is that the various biblical texts are written according to different literary styles, some of which incorporate more figurative language. Such is most likely the case for the passages you have in mind that speak about Jesus descending into Hell and ascending into Heaven. The same kind of figurative language is used when describing Jesus as seated at the right hand of the Father.
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ColdComfort
Guest
Incorrect in what way? Nothing can come from nothing. You described a universe arising from “unstructured space time and the laws of physics”. Where do these things come from?
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ColdComfort
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God has revealed Himself to us.
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wittgenstein
Guest
Post 37 gave me a lot to think about. Thanks!
PS: the other posts are great also! Thanks!
PS: the other posts are great also! Thanks!
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kelner
Guest
Incorrect in a way it is used in (counter-)apologetics.
The main claim of theism is that since something cannot come out of nothing, then universe cannot come out of nothing by itself, and you need God to create universe.
Then, someone discovered that it is possible for a universe to be spontaneously generated out of quantum vacuum. This is a scientific fact. Since quantum vacuum is the closest thing to nothingness there is (although, remember, vacuum at quantum level is not empty!), this was called “universe from nothing”.
At this point, the idea was seized by the atheist camp, which claimed that since universe can be generated out of nothing, then the main proposition of theism is falsified. (Krauss and Dawkins being the main offenders here). Of course, this is a straw man, because, as you have observed, vacuum + laws > nothing.
But, once that straw man was set up, the apologetic crowd countered that the “universe from nothing” proposition is absurd. In reality, this is another straw man. The problem is that the apologists use the word “nothing” to mean philosophical non-existence, while Krauss etc. use it to describe quantum vacuum. That leads to both sides attacking their own straw men.
In reality, it is trivial to reconcile “universe from nothing” with theism. Just say that God made the laws in the first place, and you’re fine. Well, almost: generation of universe through a quantum process involves statistics, so instead of God creating the universe in a conscious act, you have God playing dice and winning a universe
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kelner
Guest
Likewise, the projectionist could show something on the screen to communicate to on-screen beings that he exists. Say, project a prophet and a miracle.
How can those on the screen prove that the prophet and miracle are actually legit, without looking outside the screen, which the cannot do?
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