elevator

I have no need for "more attractive possibilities". I am simply pointing out that equally unintelligible possibilities exist. Why, then, must we imagine one of them to be true and all other to be false? It sounds like you're now trying to make the argument that we need a God to establish some sort of meaning in life. That might be a good topic for another debate; however, just because we wish it to be so, doesn't mean that it is so.

A refusal to make a choice based on lack of evidence is not denial of the obvious. In fact, I see nothing obvious at all about making such a choice. If it was so obvious, everyone would choose the same invisible dragon. Yet people argue fiercely over the nature of invisible dragons. And the massive religious array of conflicting truth claims is certainly not contributing to making the choice obvious.

George S

Yes, that is why it makes sense to call it a Miracle. When the impossible happens, that's a miracle.

George S

I like the word, but, yes, it does come with this unnatural or supernatural baggage.

ohmi

The "pesky singularity" and similarly pesky infinities are created because the tools of 'analysis' are blunt ones ... for instance 'finitistic' Maths has been well developed, yet not widely adopted.

It is also as well to remember that the very conceptions behind theories change with time in order to get better approximations to observations. Always there are limits beyond which the approximation fails [Newton's approximations fail at high velocity for instance] - the mistake then is to even imagine that these are 'laws' in any sense, they are just ad hoc approximations, a convenient way to summarise much data , just condensed observations then .

Einstein made the observation that we have no right to expect any of these 'laws' to exist, that it is remarkable indeed that we can understand anything because we have to reduce it to ultra-simplistic level before we can grasp it and use it ...

That then is unexplainable by anything but the notion of God, even beyond Spnoza's conception of a god as the 'laws' , because there is far more to 'reality' than the 'laws'...

Reality consistently defies whatever 'universe' we consider in or simplistic [and reativistic]ways , but God simply re-iterates that all men would be happy [and will be happy] once we learn that lovingness is the only way that works long-term ...

More controversially perhaps He claims that the true 'nature' of 'life' is not life of change with which we think that we are familiar, but the separate reality of changeless spirit which alone moves the elements of [our thus illusion of] this apparent reality

In mathematics, Logic and language men have sought closure of belief , and having not been able to find it , they simply assume it and stumble over the paradoxes so created... the same is true in science , we have no closure that our 'lazy' minds seek , we oversimplify and imagine we know something from relative concepts [despite their being relative to known paradoxes!]...

We revel in our puny controls, no matter that our implementation of them is actually observably destroying our home planet, not control at all, but insanity...

Without God we should all be lost simply through mankind's inability to recognise that we all only want to Love and be Loved ... in denial of our own deepest desire we live in conflict, seeking unattainable consolation in belief in the relative despite that we know the paradox in that , despite that we know it cannot work even with existing relative knowledge and the tools we use [abuse]

The 'ego' of man surges on then, ignoring paradoxes, ignoring the destruction of our only home , believing in infinite growth in a finite world , and calls it progress... It simply is not progress at all , except toward the fact that it contains its own end ... and even the religionists ignore that God has said that He will not intervene to save men learning that our false pride killed us all ...

Without God then it simply all makes no sense whatsoever that men destroy themselves in the name of progress, denying even those in science who for decades have pointed out that our ways are not progress but certain mass destruction [just as God warned through his prophets from the beginning]

The 'irony' is of course that men of science find 'new' theories only by intuition/ inspiration in 'meditation' , not by reason or thought or deduction, but only when these relative paradoxical methods fail [meet irresolvable limits, limitations] , that God alone guides men through powerful inspirations given at key moments [as history documents over and over, mankind saved from its own blindness regularly in the historic timescale, just as things looked bad - the difference is that this time God has said that He will not be intervening , we must 'learn' the hard way about our false pride in our blunt tools and puny relative paradoxical 'knowledge' , we must hit reality of the spirit through facing mass death of mankind , understand the illusion of time [and space!] ... and mortality!

ohmi

Hi Daniel

To assume change for the time-less God seems irrational ... we know the effect of 'time' , change is mostly irreversible, isolated ['closed'] systems run down , are not 'immortal' , have an end .

Some men of Physics have resurrected an old idea that time really ain't the best way of looking at things , not even in our strange [paradoxical] dependent [conditional, relative] incomplete framework of 'reason'... For 'immortal' God , time is clearly an illusion, something to know and see that it cannot be real.

ohmi

We may yet come to understand that creation is an 'illusion' since a time-less God ['beyond' created space-time] does not 'do' anything , is changeless.

Since the scripture identifies that what moves us [our 'spirit'] actually comes from God and returns to God , then there is nothing to this apparent physical reality which is real to the God beyond time ... we could say that not only the physical, but also our selves, our conciousnesses, are 'illusions', 'dreams', 'imaginings' , of God , something known , but nevertheless all unreal to God.

Creation then is our illusion within the 'illusion' of us by God , then we are simply God knowing about unreal time and space...

Think of a programmer creating a virtual reality with intelligent characters in it ... he knows that it is not real , that he created it from nothing, that it has a very different separate existence from his own...

Science is a very poor secondary parasite on inspirations [from God!]

It is a mistake indeed to confuse religion with scripture [which disproves religion], still more a mistake to confuse the images of god[s] in religions [idols] with God .

elevator

That's a ridiculous analogy, because virtual characters have no substance. You're not creating something out of nothing. You're creating nothing out of nothing. It would be the same thing as me imagining a separate existence in my brain and the people I imagine within my brain within this separate existence would by your definition then be comparable to Gods creation of the universe? Their existence non-corporeal.

And as far as the computer programmer; even though the computer programmer can be imagined to be part of a higher existence compared to the virtual characters he creates, something still must have created the computer programmer. The only way to explain away this paradox is to assume that the creator is uncaused. But if something can be uncaused, why can't we just as well imagine the universe itself to be uncaused?

sschlichter

cuz science tells us the universe had a beginning

ohmi

Rather amusing really, that the unreal virtual characters 'think' that they are real, and that the creator is unreal , but there it is .

The actual creator is time-less in order to not be transient ... the universe however is transient [finite time only] ... space-time was created and thus can end, time is finite and is the cause [or inevitable acompaniment] of transience because it is a measure of destruction [increase in entropy, chaos]

elevator

No, science tells us that what happened before the singularity is unknown. All theories that go beyond the singularity (such as M-theory and the big crunch or cyclical universe) implies an eternal universe. And if we're assuming that the universe must have had a cause, wouldn't that imply that whatever mechanism created the universe must also have had a cause? In order to avoid the "infinite regression of causes"-paradox you must introduce an uncaused cause. And my point was; if something can be uncaused; can't we just imagine the universe itself to be uncaused?