Gemma Therese

You must remember, God is not limitted by time. He exists outside of time. He is eternal, and eternity is a moment that is always happening.

Gemma Therese

copernicus

That's right. God wanted to "share" his love, but only with those who didn't end up in eternal torment. Being "outside of time", the Big Guy knew about all the miserable failures already, but he decided it was worth it to risk their torment in order to make the successful ones feel loved. In any case, what could he do about it? Being outside of time, he already knew what he was going to...er had...er will...do about it. What a Guy!

Face it, Gemma, the "God's purpose" discussion always ends up in the confusion. We try to put a human face on our gods, but the universe keeps behaving as if it didn't really care about humans. Most of our religions originally had us being the center of all creation. Now we find ourselves stuck out on one remote arm of a fairly non-descript galaxy. What you really want to say is that humans can't comprehend "God". His motives are completely "ineffable". That gets you off the hook of having to explain contradictions and paradoxes. The problem is that humans can only relate to an "effable" god. So you end up with the conclusion that God's motives are explicable up to the point where they are not. In other words, theism, with its on-again off-again anthropomorphism, explains nothing at all about the human condition.

Bumble Bee Tuna

Actually, I just made this very topic a few weeks ago.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=46664

Also, someone else made the topic within the last week. Don't get your hopes up, all there was was a lot of question-dodging.

-B

Ojuice5001

Copernicus,

I would think that the Greek creation myth leads to just the right amount of anthropocentrism. Think about it.

In humanity's original state, humans were a little higher than cattle or whatever, but they were hardly as important as, say, Genesis portrays Adam and Eve. Then, when Prometheus gave fire to the humans, they became radically more self-willed than the other animals. At that point, Jupiter had to take more notice of humans, now that they had fire. But naturally enough, Jupiter still cares a lot about his original plan for the world, the one that doesn't involve placing humans at the center. Thus humans are important without being 100% central.

And you will notice that that's just what you'd expect if A) humans evolved, B) the gods are like humans to a considerable degree, and C) humans aren't the center of the universe. All three of these assumptions are rational ones.

the_cave

Well, if you're going to talk about it that way, the universe "cared" about us at least enough to create us, and give us a decent sun to keep us warm for a while...

But to answer the original question, I'm not sure how the traditional answer is insufficient--God created out of a love for creating love. Only Calvinists assume he decided ahead of time which lucky few were going to get his love, and which folks he planned on tormenting eternally.

But there I go knocking the Calvinists...and based on reactions to such intra-religious squabbles I've seen on these boards, I have to take a moment to say look: if anyone, Christian or atheist, is going to define his or her position, they're going to have to simultaneously explain what positions they don't hold...all I'm saying is that there are certain Christians who believe in double-predestination. I disagree with them. If you were an atheist explaining you weren't a Stalinist, I certainly wouldn't criticize you for being a holier-than-thou atheist! I hope this aside doesn't derail the main discussion. 'nuff said.

copernicus

Actually, I do think that the pagan religions were more honest about the nature of gods (who, after all, personified nature). The Persians came up with the simplified scheme of super-good and super-bad gods, and the jewish tribes, having become part of the new Persian empire, adopted their perspective. In the old days, it made more sense to explain the good and bad events of human lives in terms of (super)human behavior. Nowadays, I think we are past the point of considering such attitudes rational. I'll concede that such attitudes are human, but humans are clearly not always rational beings.

That does give me pause. Does this mean that the universe only cared about us for an eyeblink of time, given the billions of years when we didn't exist? Does it not care about the beings that could exist, but for the inhospitable biosphere that has evolved here? Or does it just mean that we filter out the possibility that the universe really wasn't created by some kind of super hominid?

Bumble Bee Tuna

OJuice, I'm going to have to take issue with the things you said here.

Ojuice5001

Bumble Bee Tuna:

It's possible that we discovered fire on our own. I would hardly call it obvious. We don't know the details of when fire was first put to use by humans, but it probably wasn't an inevitable outcome of a train of thought or causation. Humans could easily have never discovered fire. So why did we discover fire, instead of never discovering fire? I dislike attributing things to chance, so my answer is that it's because a god wanted things that way.

Well, if that's true, that supports my idea that fire-making is a contingent fact of culture that requires an explanation. But I would need to know in more detail to answer fully. How recently were these tribes discovered? How do their traditions say they discovered fire? As of their first contact with Westerners, was there anyone alive who saw it happen? Was their discovery of fire such that it couldn't have been arranged by Prometheus or another god?

How do you know the gods didn't evolve? Mythology portrays them as reproducing, after all, and I think that, since the world is billions of years old, there have been enough generations of gods for evolution to make itself known.

copernicus

I, too, dislike attributing things to chance. Since we observe humans discovering and inventing things in modern life, and we can't observe a god inspiring them to do so, it is reasonable to assume that fire-making methods were invented in the same way. You admit that "it's possible that we discovered fire on our own", but you leap to the conclusion that some outside agency was involved. Occam's razor applies here.

Mageth

Gemma Therese:

God didn't need anything, but he wanted to share His love with us.

I'm assuming you're using the following definition of "want", and are not using "want" as a synonym for "need" or in the sense of "lacking":

want - to desire (a particular thing or plan of action).

OK, but it seems a bit contradictory that a god that knows everything and is perfect would want or desire anything as well.

So you're back to square one.