An argument I need help analyzing

When I have read comments by you and @Vinnie, I have noted that both write points where I can agree, at least to some extent. Maybe it is like blind persons trying to describe what kind of creature is an elephant, based on which parts of an elephant they are touching.

If we think who God is and what kind of actor He is, Vinnie is lifting up an essential point. God is who God is, essentially so different from the humans He created that He is outside the ‘normal’ approaches and standards of how we judge other humans. That is something tied to essence, although I think the essence of God is beyond our ‘normal’ understanding. Philosophical descriptions about the essence of God may be the best human guesses but not necessarily fully correct.

What philosophical approaches can do is to form a logical mental image that may or may not have something to do with the real God. I suspect that many of the descriptions of God we have are so limited or somehow twisted that they present twisted (false) images of God, not the real God. That may be true for the images drawn by the logical philosophy but it is more likely true for many non-philosophical images that are based on intuitive, emotional opinions or uncritically adopted teachings of a particular persuasion.

Although I agree to some extent with Vinnie at this point, otherwise I find your approach closer to how I think.

One problematic point with viewing God through the moral understanding of humans is that we do not have all the knowledge God has. God can know all the consequences, both to the network of events that happen now and to what happens in the future. The optimal decision weighing all the consequences may be different than our emotional reaction here and now.

Another point to consider is that God seems to have delegated responsibilies to the created beings. The creation & Eden stories in Genesis suggest that humans were given the role to be ‘images of God’, some kind of vice regents within this creation. When God delegates responsibility/tasks, He does not necessarily micromanager everything within that task. If God somehow guides a human to a spot from where the human can see how a small child is drowning, there is an expectation that the human should react. I do not buy the assumption that if God does not personally lift a drowning child from the water, God is somehow evil.

Often we simply have to accept what happens even when we do not understand why God let it happen. One of my friends have often told about the times after their son died. The son died to a disease in a military hospital while doing the mandatory service. My friend described how the months after the death was a very special time in his life. The loss was mentally very hard - he said he would probably have ended in a mental hospital if God would not have acted. Instead of feeling the crushing loss, he said he felt the love of God in a way he has not felt otherwise. He said he could emotionally feel and tell to the others how good God is, even in the middle of the greatest loss of his life. That experience of being surrounded by the love of God carried him through the following months without any bitterness, anger or blames towards God.

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It seems to me that beyond all the arguments, what keeps people Christian for the long term is their experience of God’s love and presence in very personal ways. If you don’t have those encounters with God to ground your faith in, eventually logic and reason and arguments are going to come up short, because some of what we are claiming is true doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

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I find substantial agreement with parts of the video. I would nitpick here or there and take these facts in an anti-scientism manner instead of doubling down on that philosophy itself to draw conclusions. It is fascinating and humbling to think that in the far future people wouldn’t be able to discover the expansion of the universe.

The author tends to view things from the perspective of scientism. I agree that the universe is not a thing like an apple or dog but philosophers would consider it an aggregate of things. An army is a real thing. I don’t reify the abstract mathematical models of physics like the author does or think things are only ontologically real if they are subject to scientific testing. That is the problem with his “framework” pivot. Mathematics describes reality but the equations do not have physical causal power. They provide a map of reality, but are not reality itself. A map has to be a model of something or else it is not real. If the universe is not a real thing then the mathematical models of it are not either.

Vinnie

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Worm theology" made me think of something my grandmother used to sing at us:

Nobody likes me; everybody hates me – I’m going to the garden to eat worms!

Yeah, I’m thinking in terms of people setting certain standards and refusing to acknowledge how far someone has come until they meet those standards.

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