I never heard of QANON, but there seems to be evidence of some Satanists eating babies according to the former FBI special agent Ted Gunderson In Charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI .
You can’t blame people for coming up with conspiracy theories when Government officials in the US show evidence of the existence of Satanists in high places.
What I do know however is that there is an inhumane subculture, worldwide. Inhumane meaning they have no conscience and no empathy and they do harm others around them in relationships, though I don’t know of any that do obvious ritualistic damage. I would estimate that there are around 1.5 billion of them judging on the disease figures.
I don’t submit God to any theory and I certainly don’t put God to the test of any sort. I am primarily a conscious being and a lover of The Beloved, God. Loves may come and loves may go, but the One Love forever flows.
Now, I have various hats and sure I have a scientific hat. With that hat on, one can see evidence that points to creation of the material world and everything in it, including every living form.
I don’t try to explain it as evolutionary in nature. What I am seeing is atheist scientists have come up with a theory that suits atheism and is trying to sell it to Christians and other theists. So they are trying to make a case of “look there was a little bit of nothing that exploded and condensed to become physical matter. The physical matter self organized and became living. And having random mutations, the odds are that some are going to make sense and be useful so are naturally selected. And that is the way God chose to do it.” So it suits science and accommodates theism for those who want a foot in both camp, i.e., evolutionary theory and theism.
The DI however are not prepared to do the hard yakka to show the matter of Intelligent Design. Maybe that is why they avoid the caps, IDK. I wrote to them a few years back but they didn’t answer. It is dangerous business though, so I can’t blame them. Thus, they are pointing to a few things, but nothing that is substantial.
Blasphemy is when someone tries to misrepresent God. Seeing evidence in God’s creation for the fact that God created everything including the human and animals is hardly blasphemy.
ID can be a scientific theory if the research was done properly and not just pointing here and there.
“cdesign proponentsists” appears to be c[reation]design proponentists, so maybe they are trying to get creationism taught in schools. BUT on the flip side it is also true that big pharma (the real outlier) has a heavy hand in what is taught and what is not taught. People are given to believe that they are meat robots, machines that can only be either damaged or malfunction. This facilitates the notion that they need fixing. And of course often “fixing” means “make permanent”, most commonly in psychiatry but not only. So the drug river flows. This is issue is mega and one that the DI could address but it doesn’t seem to have… “what it takes”. The day is soon to come when people realize the power they have in their hot little hands when they are prepared to take, even a sideways look, at what is implied by creationism. They may be able to take control of their own health.
Al-Ghazali essentially said that nothing is caused by natural causes as in the interactions of the physical objects. He said that as far as the physical world is concerned God is the sole cause of everything . Now he attributed this phenomenon to the notion that “God is rational”, but it would be better to see that God has given the source of the physical, which is information, rules or meaning. You can see that physicists like Leonardo Susskind of Stanford University acknowledges that all is made from information, but he is trying to make a case for the information to be physical.
Al-Ghazali also said that all interactions between mind and body are mediated by God. And certainly this has been misinterpreted by many people and no only Westerners.
And here there is a parallel between ID and occasionalism, if the full implications are considered. It is a shame that the DI are not interested. I think to some extent you are right that they are trying to push theistic science. May they don’t appreciate the full implications of creationism or maybe they have a narrow minded agenda.
I will try and give you a parallel, from my own understanding of occasionalism using the example of virtual reality. Say you have been able to create a virtual world and some characters in it, to whom you have been able to give consciousness. Some of those characters will see and study the objects around them in the virtual world and find that they obey certain laws. However, others will realize that the interactions of those objects and the laws that can be discovered dictating how they act/ react are not due to the objects themselves. The objects and the way they interact are at their source, information. And more than that the information has been given meaning or conditions in the program that created the virtual world. So the reactions seen are governed by the information and its conditions in the program.
Similarly God created the universe(s) from the relevant information that exists, from the infinite source of information, in The Mind of God and has given that information meaning or set of rules if you will. This happens when God upholds the information in the Divine Consciousness. We cannot define what is “Mind” so I have represented it as a point in my illustration below.
Some of the evidence comes when one realizes that one can toggle that information, i.e., set conditions or directives to the Universe. I have many example, if you want I can share some of them with you.
Where Intelligent Design is considered, as per the DI, is with respect to living organisms. This is the second condition of Al-Ghazali. That is that God control the interactions between mind and body. The “mind” though has a cap, i.e., “Mind”. Science has tried to justify the many minds theory, but not only can no evidence be shown for it, there is stark evidence to be seen for a One Mind or The Mind of God as the physicist Paul Davies has attempted to explain.
The basis is the same as for the natural world, but in a living organism the rules that govern it give it also involve the conscious being that inhabits the body or is connected to the body. The conscious being is a co-creator. So while God handles the “house-keeping tasks”, the conscious being can brings about changes when reacting to ideas or more correctly ideas that are upheld as real or true, i.e., beliefs. So for instance if a danger is perceived and the conscious being reacts with fear, this in effect raises the metabolism to a high level.
Where I see people misunderstanding occasionalism is when they try an attribute all actions between Mind (information with meaning) and body (created form arising from that information). So you hear people say that God caused them to have cancer or heart disease etc. This is not so. And I have seen that it is not only Westerners, but also some Muslims / Easterners that have interpreted occasionalism in this way.
True it is that Al-Ghazali was very influential, however the downfall of the Golden Age of Islam was due to the Mongols invaded of Baghdad. Baghdad was the intellectual centre and the cultural centre of the Islamic world. And the Mongols killed millions and destroyed many books.
The books I have read were from a library of a Sufi group in Sydney that I had attended some thirty or more years ago. I don’t recall any of these books well enough as to recommend, sorry.
Thanks, Merv.