You don’t seem to understand. It is not about me, it is abut my view of God. I do not want to worship a God who only cares about a fraction of his creation.
Richard
Humans are not a mistake or on purpose. There is no design to our bodies or our natural history as seen in the theory of evolution and abiogenesis while still be explored most likely won’t require a supernatural hand to make the process work.
Humans evolved without a purpose outside of ecology and social developments. At some point a god reached out to humanity and here we are.
God gave set the laws of nature at the beginning but gave the universe a certain freedom. The same freedom has a downside with biological defects.
Ogden Nash’s “A Bas Ben Adhem” expresses some doubts, as does
The Bible says rather less about “why” than we often ask but more about trusting.
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- Another goofy thread …
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This one might interest you.
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That pretty much says our bodies evolved as a response to the environments we encountered and the other creatures we shared the world with. Since God is the source of all of it, we are are essentially evolved from nature which already and always reveals the hand of God … what is this debate about?
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You don’t seem to understand how clearly you are contradicting yourself by saying it is all about you. “It is about my view of God. I do not want…”
(Me, myself and I. ; - )
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You also don’t understand about skeptical theism, that you feel perfectly competent to dictate to God how he must be.
The OPs statement just seemed to imply design of some sort and that we are just experiments or caught up in one. I was countering any form of intelligent design and therefore there is no such experiment happening with anything from a creator.
As far as it all somehow being traced back to a creator at some point. The beginning of laws and so on. Or the creator of another universe that can explain our universe out of a multiverse and so on. It’s all just something I don’t have a strong opinion on.
As far as evidence goes it’s not there. It’s just gaps of what we know and what we don’t even know we don’t know. Theologically, the argument is definitely there in religious beliefs including an interpretation of the Jewish and Christian Bible. But then accommodation can also just say those verses are just statements made to ancient people. It may not be literal. So since it’s not a concrete theological or scientific explanation I just can’t do anything with it personally.
Yeah I personally don’t think much tinkering was involved. I think creation was more a work of art and love, very little to do with nuts, bolts, muscles or sinews. But I know that isn’t the Christian account, leastwise not at the street level. God as engineer, in my opinion, is pretty insulting because instrumental mastery over mechanisms isn’t what I think of as the sacred domain.
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God in general makes no sense to me. I just accept it as faith and don’t really scrutinize things beyond knowing.
I try to imagine god as a being that has always existed. But that in itself is weird. Existing prior to time. Existing prior to something is just weird. But I guess it’s not any more weird than realizing the universe has always existed in some fashion. Scientifically speaking, as far back as you keep going, there was something before that. It could not have just been a blank emptiness void of anything. They say it was just space , emptiness, with energy and that energy caused space to expand. But where did the energy come from. I don’t know enough about cosmology. Maybe one day I’ll dig into it as a hobbyist. I just am caught up with other things. It will take several lifetimes just to learn all the insects, plants, mushrooms and lichens in my one county and that’s just the stuff alive right now. I’ll never learn everything I want to learn just about plants and mushrooms in my county. So I may never ever expand to the universe.
So I can’t do anything reasonable with the science or theology to make it make sense. So I ignore it. When I think about it to much, and it’s annoys me, I lift weights, run, watch horror movies and pet my cats listening to audiobooks lol.
I just hope God knows everything. It’s going to be annoying if he does not. Because that means if I exist after this body dies for all eternity, and he’s already been here for all eternity, if he does not know everything that’s a eternity of me also always having headaches of the unknown. But I guess headaches of the unknown also means learning and exploring and that’s better than the boredom of knowing everything. Knowing everything may be worse than just knowing a lot of things lol.
No more than you or anyone else.
You may be happy with a God who has favourites but I am not.
Richard
It’s too bad your Bible probably looks like Thomas Jefferson’s.
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- I eat my humble pie in private too.
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No, it is not about the Bible. The Bible is the start of faith, not the be-all and end-all.
We have been here before. I am not a Jew, and I do not believe what you do.
Richard
I’m going to be pedantic and point out that in Genesis 1 it is Elohim, not “the Elohim”: the moment you add the definite article you may be talking about multiple entities, which (with one likely exception) are not found in the first Creation story.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
What I find as a “sick joke” in terms of asbestos comes from a full day’s lecture on the substance from one geology professor: he explained the chemical composition, then showed that this mineral comes in three different forms, and that of the three only one is detrimental to human health.
The “punch line” was that the asbestos companies’ science people knew this, and thus the executives were perfectly aware of it, yet they ignored that fact and went right ahead mining in a way that mixed the dangerous form right into every batch they made for sale.§
Nor, for that matter, do many of our fellow humans.
= - =
§ of course the argument was economic: sorting out the detrimental form from the others would have nearly doubled the cost of production
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You wouldn’t want to worship a God Who gives preference to all His image-bearers? Who wants to gather them all in to be with Him?
Jesus has favorites – just read the High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel.
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This is something people who ask “Who made God?” are missing: that question applies regardless of one’s view of existence because given that there is something, then there must have always been something – the only question is whether the always-existing something is just matter-energy ‘stuff’ or if it is intelligence.
A number of cosmologists maintain that it came from a “quantum fluctuation”, which is actually no help because there has to be something for the quantum fluctuation to take place in. One cosmologist made this point to others in a forum hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he said that if there’s something where a quantum fluctuation can take place then you don’t have nothing.
As a high school student working at the county fairgrounds one summer the entire grounds crew was working on repainting all the buildings. The near-continuous discussion jumped at one point from relativity to heaven via someone saying that he wasn’t interested in understanding relativity now because in heaven we would know and understand everything. One of the other guys declared that if that was true then he had no interest in heaven because he would no longer be able to enjoy discovering and learning new things.
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You seem to be saying two different things there maybe? Or I am misunderstanding something. (And maybe several of these belong in the universalism thread – my fault for first mentioning children, I suppose.)