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.)
Who He ultimately wants, which is everyone, is not the same as who He actually has at any moment – and His prayer was for those He actually had.
I actually saw this used effectively in evangelism once: the High Priestly Prayer was presented to show how Jesus intended to keep and guard those the Father had given Him, and from there the invitation was to become one of those.
Some people didn’t like that approach for about the same reasons as some here wouldn’t like it: there was no mention of Genesis, and there was no harping on sin and repentance, there was only the demonstration of a loving Savior and the invitation.
That would be all of humanity then,
Richaed
Exactly – which is why I don’t see your problem.
Because certain people here seem to think that God’s providence is only for the favoured few and that He ignores everyone else, or even worse, deliberaely brings calamity on them as some sort of discipline.
IMO there is much in the world that God chooses to allow rather than specifically makes happen. God does not deliberately cause harm, that would be evil and be cmtra to the teaching of Jesus. There is no excuse for violence unless it is as a response to violence.
Richard
The converse to your question would be, 'Is God a mistake? A mistake can only be made if there is an intentional creator of something that is not what the creator intended it to be. The God of Genesis gives identity and meaning for the Hebrew people. Whether or not there is a ‘mistake’ involved is not relevant. Humans need identity and meaning in life that goes beyond basic survival. What that is may be different for different people and cultures. The Christian is taught to believe that their identity is in Christ. It should be noticed by their love for God and others and a forgiving nature. What that means for the believer is that it provides a better life than they would experience without it. There is no way to test that, but it does appear that people who find a compatible faith community to be a part of do experience a more meaningful life. The problem seems to come when some group of people thinks that their way is the only way and everyone needs to follow it. The Jewish people never did that.
To the Jews, the foreigner or alien was to be accommodated and to a greater or lesser extent cared for but they were not expected to be part of their religion. But, as Judaism has no concept of Heaven or the afterlife as such it did not matter.
It is only because Christianity has this notion of continuance that exclusion/inclusion becomes important.
Richard
The most parsimonious answer would be that the Bible is a composition of scriptures aimed at giving Israel a national narrative and that God, Elohim, Jahveh, or whatever name you give the deity, is ineffable but has many names in the many cultures that were and are. The OT is an attempt to give identity and meaning to a defeated nation, to build it up and enable a future. That seems to have been achieved.
Jesus, the Aramaic-speaking Jehuschua or whatever his original name was, was perhaps a prophet in the tradition of the latter prophets of the OT, perhaps a healer, perhaps calling for inner freedom from the oppression Israel was suffering, and rejecting the literal interpretation of the Torah, he seems to have seen love as the power that could free Israel, and the key to unlocking the deeper meaning of the Tanakh. Thereby, he disputed the authority of the Scribes and Pharisees, denied support to the Zealots, and redefined what a King of Israel should be. This got him killed.
Whatever inspired Paul, it was not the Aramaic-Hebrew provincialism but a vision of a cosmic Christ, come to call all of humanity into the covenant, and he saw himself as the most qualified person to do that in the name of Christ, declaring the crucifixion to be the personal sacrifice of God to pay, once and for all for the transgressions of humanity. As with Moses, he raised the cross like the brazen serpent, upon which humanity must put their faith to be healed. For Paul, too, love is the key to salvation, first the love of God and secondly, the responding love of the followers of Christ Jesus.
It is a wonderful narrative, but if it is taken literally, it opens up so many questions, many of which cannot be satisfactorily answered and consequently have been the cause of torment and anguish amongst believers for centuries. In all these questions that shackle us, the key is love, to which we must surrender and serve.
For one thing, human behavior is more complex than that of the physical universe. Since human behavior is more complex, there are going to be more possible ways that it could go wrong. There are not too many ways that at an atom could go wrong. In fact, it doesn’t really even makes sense to speak of an atom as “going wrong.” Morality after all is an emergent phenomenon that only emerges above the level of the individual atom. Morality requires self-aware social beings, for one thing.
For another thing, love does require freedom of choice, so I think God did give the universe freedom to evolve in its own way which is why we see things in it that do not seem to be according to God’s purpose. Just because it looks bad, though, doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of God’s plan or that God is being careless. God after all sees the entire universe, past, present, and future. We on the other hand only see a cross section of it in spacetime. Since we don’t see reality in its entirety, I don’t think we have enough data to say that God is being careless or that he does not know what he is doing. The “mistake” in creating humans or allowing them to evolve may only look like a mistake to us.