thomaq

are you suggesting some sort of pantheism?

orac

Tired of talking about it - or at least tired of people who think they've discovered an original proof of god.

The whole "god can be uncaused but the universe can't" just doesn't work. Even your own logic (God has to be "timeless") doesn't help, because apparantly God can do things like create the universe, interact with the universe, provide meaning for life, and so on even while finding time to play hide-and-seek with his creations. If such a busy and active God can be uncaused, you haven't given a reason why an uncaused universe can't have a few odd chemical reactions that try to figure out how it all started.

Asha'man

This argument has been presented here a thousand times, and taken apart two thousand times.

Item 1 has pretty much been invalidated by quantum mechanics. Things begin to exist at the quantum scale all the time, and are apparently utterly without cause.

The only difficulty is transforming a quantum level event into a macroscopic one. The neat thing about the Big Bang theory is that it already solves this problem. When the universe started, it wasn't big at all, but existed entirely at the quantum scale. An uncaused quantum event simply expanded into the macroscopic universe.

Besides, if everything that exists must have a cause, then how can you rationally say that God doesn't need a cause but the universe does? You are arbitrarily drawing the line where you want to, based purely on wishful thinking, not evidence.

Darth Dane

are you suggesting some sort of pantheism?

Yes a sort of. But not exactly.

It's like solipsism, with pantheistic ideas. But all is contained within One "thing" or one Reality.

God and the universe are both uncaused?

God = Universe?

The difference lies in human perception, how can we say that gravity is God? or of God? or that it is not?

Irrespectively if we give the universe human like attributes(God), or just say it is the chaos of the universe, still leaves us having to deal with our neighbors and friends, regardless I'll still have to behave if I want peace and harmony.


If everything stems from the uncaused cause, everything that Is, regardless of what in fact it Is, comes from the uncaused cause.






DD - Love Spliff

thomaq

just for the record, i am just searching for truth. it may seem like i am arguing for a position when in fact i am trying to weigh the positions. that being said, maybe a God would have a reason for playing "hide and seek" with his creation. this has nothing to do with whether or not he exists.
as far as God being uncaused, the argument is that things that begin to exist have a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore there MUST be a cause that did NOT begin to exist. and thus by necessity would have to be timeless and extremely powerful blah blah blah........

thomaq

"Item 1 has pretty much been invalidated by quantum mechanics. Things begin to exist at the quantum scale all the time, and are apparently utterly without cause."

it is probable that item 1 still stands because things at the quantum scale "apparently" begin to exist without cause. when in fact there probably is a cause that we dont know about yet. it seems more rational to hold that "something" does not come from "nothing". the very name itself quantum "mechanics" presupposes a mechanism not just randomness. so now the argument drops back one step into "what is a quantum field". it is something rather than nothing. is it not a " fluctuating sea of energy" (maybe over simplified). so where does the quantum scale come from? does change and therefore time exist within this quantum scale? if so then it cannot have always existed due to the impossiblity traversing and infinite amount of past moments.



"Besides, if everything that exists must have a cause, then how can you rationally say that God doesn't need a cause but the universe does? You are arbitrarily drawing the line where you want to, based purely on wishful thinking, not evidence."

not arbitrary at all. it is based on P1 and P2 and therefore C3. God being uncaused follows necessarily if the P1, P2, and C3 are correct. so if P1 and P2 are wrong then you can say its "wrong" but not arbitrary.

what type of evidence are you desiring? empirical only?

Aravnah Ornan

That reminds me of something I've read about consumer polling done by (IIRC) Ford Motor Company in the 1950's. The pollsters found that if they asked, "What do you want?", the answers didn't explain consumer behavior at all. The correct question to ask was, "What do you think your neighbors want?"

I think that this is another example of that. From my interactions with the believers I've known, it appears to me that the biggest reason for belief is psychological comfort. People have a need to believe in a sky-daddy who cares about them and will make everything work out okay, and they need to believe that even though life is manifestly unfair, the sky-daddy will make everything fair in the end. I've also noticed that many people who identify strongly with minority religions do so to set themselves apart from the unwashed masses. But people don't want to be caught believing for such simplistic reasons, so they try to sound high-minded and talk about the argument from design.

thomaq

thomaq

i guess its settled then. It is rational to believe in God.

Wyrdsmyth

I don't think it is rational to believe in God. At least, I don't see how it is any more rational to believe in God than it is to believe that the unverse always existed, or that the universe sprang into existence from some Great Unknown Cause. If you want to identify that Great Unknown Cause with a deity, I suppose you can, but I don't see that as being a rational but rather an emotional decision.

I think the most rational belief to hold is, first of all, to be open to the possibilities. I'm no scientist, so I don't know which theories are even currently in or out of fashion. All I do know is that no theory is sacrosanct doctrine, and anything that is put forth now on purely theoretical grounds could be invalidated later on, by new data and observations. But it seems to me entirely possible that there will always be certain aspects about our universe which will never be known to everyone's satisfaction, such as how our universe came to be, or even how life came to be. I think it is rational to accept that possibility. I also think it is rational to accept the possibility that all religions and mythologies spring from the imaginations of man, from the proverbial desire to have things "decided and agreed upon" as far as many of the Big Questions are concerned.

So, I ask, is it possible that a monotheistic God exists, that He revealed himself to the chieftains and prophets of certain Near Eastern Semitic tribes, but for the most part he's hiding from the rest of us, and that the Bible is his primary means to communicate with mankind? I suppose it is, but I find that scenario as unlikely as drunk Irishmen telling stories about leprechauns. Stories about invisible, undetectable entities that can never be communicated with or verified, are, by their very nature, implausible. But that's for everyone to decide individually. I don't find such beliefs to be rational, but I guess that's just my subjective conclusion. Based upon my own observations and thought-processes, I have concluded that magic and miracles, the occult and the supernatural, most likely have their origins from within human imagination, not from some outside source.