hinduwoman

IF God does not interfere in our lives in a way we can sense Him, then even if He does exist , his existence is irrelevant.

Stephen T-B

Ah well...
The point is, Believers believe god does interfere in their lives in a way they can sense him.

In the same way people who believe in fairies believe they interfere in their lives in ways they can sense.

I know this as a result of a long chat I had with a highly-educated chap who does believe in fairies.

long winded fool

This is an interesting wording because some kind of location in space and time is required for something "to exist," and God is presumed to be "outside" or "beyond" or otherwise "not subject to" space and time. (a meaningless notion in itself.) If this is so, God's existence really does have no meaning. Existence can never apply to the notion of God so long as he is not bound by space and time. Of course if he voluntarily became bound by space and time by taking the form of a human, he could then be said to exist for as long as the human exists. But this then would create a paradox, because how can something that doesn't exist at all become a collection of matter and energy that exists?

Darth Dane

But this then would create a paradox, because how can something that doesn't exist at all become a collection of matter and energy that exists?


Yeah, quantum physics struggle with that same question.

It seems the very existance of matter and/or energy has the same "properties" as "God" has: Why?

This web that these physicists call it, could be "God" to others. What keeps this web of matter and/or energy together? I don't know. But Love as an idea keeps things together. God could keep this web together, maybe God IS the web.


Imagine that the things we see have a tendency to exist, it looks as if it exist.






DD - Love & Laughter

SignOfTheCross

No, your arguements are spurious, for if God does have a purpose, He has chosen not to reveal this to us.

Peace,
SOTC

Stephen T-B

What do you mean, spurious?

Jamie’s saying that some people think we need to have been created by a divine entity in order for our existence to have purpose. And if that be the case, he says, then presumably our Creator should itself have a creator in order that its existence have purpose.

Indeed, why should it be excluded from this basic principle?

Which brings us to that deeply unsatisfactory theist solution to the problem of how the universe came into existence.
It tells us God brought it into existence, but cannot then suggest an answer to the even more impenetrable problem of what brought God into existence.

The “Goddit” hypothesis simply provides an answer which begs a question.

joedad

This creator being supposedly created everything, was still not satisfied, and so created more images and likenesses of itself. That's us. Therefore, theologically speaking, humans (the bible-stories types), by their existence, bestow meaning and purpose on their creator's otherwise meaningless existence.

long winded fool

If we assume for the sake of argument that God does "exist" apart from the space-time continuum, then it is not irrational to exclude God from the cause and effect scenario, it being dependent upon the space-time continuum. All laws which are necessary for human beings to function and for the universe to operate would not logically apply to the creator of those laws. I think it is a logical error to apply created laws to their creator.

If things which exist in the universe need to be created in order to have purpose, there is no reason to assume that this must be the case "outside" the universe. (Again, assuming that this notion could even be rational.)

Stephen T-B

Good point.
But I think it raises another issue, which I shall try to explain. (It’s just a matter of getting my thoughts sorted out.)

The original Judeo-Christian God was a fairly basic deity who lived “out there” somewhere. I say "out there somewhere" because I’m not sure Genesis actually states he resides in Heaven - this being another term to describe the “Firmament” which separates two watery environments. (The underneath one has some dry land, and constitutes the Earth.)

The idea evolved over the centuries and God came to reside in Heaven, which was definitely “up there” - probably among the clouds.

He had a beard and long hair and could stop the sun in the sky, make donkeys speak and do other weird stuff. He was exclusively interested in the Jews - his Chosen People - and while there’s not much to suggest he concentrated his attention on every single individual Jew (he wipes out a significant number, quite casually, it seems, to punish David for carrying out his census,) he certainly has a lot to say - via his prophets - about their political leaders.

Then Jesus Christ came along, and this austere Cloud God becomes a Loving Father in Heaven, interested now in each individual Jew.

Peter expanded this notion, and the Loving Father in Heaven becomes interested in everyone - Jew and Gentile alike: he is now a world-wide deity, but still residing “up there,” somewhere, and still with a beard and long white hair.

Come the Enlightenment and the subsequent explosion of scientific inquiry, doubt is cast on the Seven-Day Creation, the Earth being flat and at the centre of a 6,000-year old Universe. Educated people come to know that our world is very, very, very insignificant in terms of its size, and that God does not live anywhere “up there.”
He is becoming a mystical, inexplicable “presence,” but still interested in the performance of each individual human being, of which there are now several billion (as opposed to a fee thousand Jews, as in the early days.)

For non-Fundamentalists, he is now even more remote and indistinct than ever before, because it is conceded by sensible believers that he exists outside the space-time continuum, and therefore is somehow “beyond” our Universe.

In this universe there are not only more than six billion human beings, but more galaxies than we know about, each with more stars in it than an average person can envisage as being a feasible number, plus all sorts of exotic features like black holes and quasars. God, presumably, permeates the whole lot with his something-or-other (though not his presence, because god has no presence) - and at the same time he retains this intense interest in the behaviour and beliefs of each one of us as part of his plan in which we are able to chose whether to obey him and “live for ever” or not to obey him, and die.

Personally, I think it is an absolutely ludicrous concept that the god which created and runs the universe is also my Loving Father in Heaven, and the Loving Father in Heaven of all six billion of us, including babies which live for eight days in Ethiopia and then perish through malnutrition.

Frankly, I can’t be bothered to try making sense of an idea which we inherit from primitive peoples; their ignorance about almost everything - save how to survive in a pretty hostile world - makes their ideas about the cosmos and its origins and a deity worthless.

long winded fool

Well, I wouldn't necessarily call ancient peoples ignorant. In fact, some of their greatest thinkers were far wiser than today's greatest thinkers IMHO, and many of them still believed in a geocentric universe. Sure they postulated things about science that were later proven wrong, so they were ignorant of modern science, (and often they were as sure about those wrong ideas as we are about our "right" theories,) but physics aside, there was far more to their knowledge than mere individual survival in a hostile world. I think that today's world is just as hostile on the whole, and yet today's world also seems to have fewer rules regarding behavior and morality. Maybe learning how to deal with human hostility is something that we ought to focus on a little harder, like the ancient peoples, and maybe our knowledge of quasars and black holes can be shifted just slightly behind this far more immediately valuable understanding. From an objective point of view, religion goes much further into solving this problem than science does. Science merely describes the problem. Religion and philosophy attempt to correct it. Failing to correct it doesn't make it bad or worthless. It simply shows that it's been used incorrectly. (A problem that science is just as susceptible to.)

And I don't think that ancient myths which conflict with science can be discarded as worthless either. Hebrews especially were known for using layered symbolism and allegory. The ancient myths may be literally false, but they might still be allegorical for something true that we haven't yet come to be conscious of. This seemed to be Jesus' message to the Pharisees about the Old Testament. That if you don't understand what the literal symbols figuratively represent, you don't understand the scriptures.