God

Logan wrote: A little bump since I think Condor came up with an interesting topic here, but my babble may have maimed this thread. I've been thinking more about concepts of the divine of late.

It's man ability to form concepts and ask questions about the divine, the afterlife, etc. I don't think it's within man's ability to answer them. I like the mystery of things and I suppose that's another trait man has, not to know all the answers and be quite happy with that. I'm rambling too but what the heck.

The religious person might say we can know God through revelation.

Interesting post; it makes me we wish I could jot down some meaningful equations. I've mostly heard Lawrence Krauss talk about this universe from nothing.

Nothing (the absence of something including space, time, any sense of dimension, energy, no physical laws, no quantum gravity) is physical in a sense, in an another sense it's not concrete. Of course when talking science one should try to speak in scientific terms and nothing is not just some philosophical concept, of course, it's very much a concept of science.. If nothing is non-existence, it can be described as non-physical (its certainly not quantifiable) but it can also be described physically. Quantum gravity, of course, is still very much a work in progress, and I'd need to brush up on the theoretical frameworks (just understanding general relativity relatively well took time). Nothing is considered unstable in this and indeed it's said that instability gives rise to something frequently due to the laws of quantum mechanics (gravity plus quantum mechanics can create space itself).

Incidentally, I wish I hadn't talked about a universe without matter or energy in the multiverse (there are requirements to have space itself and things come into being....).

Edited by Logan - October 29 2017 at 21:51

Logan wrote: It certainly might seem ungracious to pray hard for a sign and then casually reject it. The setting: a sunny day in parched lands. Moses wanders alone. Moses: "Yahweh, give me a sign!" God conjures up a rainbow Moses: "I don't find that sign very convincing. It could be a natural phenomenon. Give me another sign!" God sets a bush alight Moses: "That could still be down to natural causes. Give me another sign!" God: "Oh for heaven's sake!" [strikes Moses down with lightning] Moses [badly singed]: "Yeah, I think that will do, erm even if it... [Moses thinks better of it as thunder rumbles] No, never mind, that will do very nicely thank you."

lmao.. exactly.

Logan wrote: Yes, I have thought that if such a higher intelligence r power existed that could create our universe likely would be outside it and would be more likely to be on a plane of the "metaphysical". Another dimension perhaps outside of time and space ... especially if that designer operates somewhere else (such as the metaphysical plane that twseel speaks of) or elsewhere outside of space-time which doesn't operate according to our physical laws

I think you've hit on it there.

Logan wrote: Another example instead of mechanical devices would be genetically engineered lifeforms since they might be less distinguishable from the so-called natural world

There you go. Or why not a combination of both? Just think what technology might be able to do 500 years from now.. I mean 500 years ago was 1517. There wasn't even electricity back then, or cameras, or radios, or phones, etc. So 500 years in the future.. God only knows what all there'll be!

Again my thing is I, very sincerely, asked for a sign and then that night I got one! So I'm not going to now say, "no you know what.. that wasn't good enough. I need more." No, I asked for something and got it. So for me God is real, period. And I know the rest of you will find that out as well eventually. All I ask is just be open to it.


Edited by YESESIS - October 29 2017 at 17:22

I should try to quote, but Captcha hates code in my posts. This will not be terribly coherent. I have just woken up and am in a rather delirious state (fun time to write).

Yes, I have thought that if such a higher intelligence r power existed that could create our universe likely would be outside it and would be more likely to be on a plane of the "metaphysical". Another dimension perhaps outside of time and space, or perhaps, to come across as rather metaphorical and fanciful, the Divine is the resonance of the strings in the String hypothesis, or we and this universe are merely a part of the body of God, but this wouldn't imply intelligent design -- it would be an unintentional biological process.

I don't think to have an intelligent designer one must necessarily need a designer for that the designer that designed us -- especially if that designer operates somewhere else (such as the metaphysical plane that twseel speaks of) or elsewhere outside of space-time which doesn't operate according to our physical laws (the interstices of dimensionality or void perhaps, which can bleed into our reality -- a little like the Upside Down). There might not be just a huge and mysterious universe out there, but a huge and mysterious multiverse and other planes of existence. When you're dealing with the infinite (even if our particular universe is finite), things can be infinitely possible. I suspect that there are being that are more intelligent out there and there could be something divine that corresponds to a deology or theology (or every theology and deology -- something like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land conception perhaps where all Gods/ religion can exist for the individual).

As for the robot analogy, I see what you're getting at, but I'm going to expand on this in whatever stranger directions my mind takes me. The question that super robot A might ask is "Is there evidence that we may have been created by a higher intelligence?" So Robot B says, "No, there is no evidence for that because then that which created us would need a creator" (okay, to explore your notion I don't need to mention evidence, but....) It's an interesting analogy and interesting that the robot's "first" cause was a creature of less intelligence and biological than likely mechanical. I say first cause since people might have created programs to design those robots (they may have been designed by, say, AI, which was designed by other AI but we got it started, or for today's Theist, God got it started). I suspect that AI will eclipse us in generalised intelligence and already technology is being used to create better programs.   The robot may have been designed by AI, which may have been designed by other technology, which may have been designed by humans. A question would be, is there physical evidence that the robots are not "natural" (not that the robot might use the term, but in our terms)? Do they believe or know about biological life? Could they assume that a biological lifeform would be capable of creating them? Is there evidence to assume that they could be a technological construct that could not have developed naturally/ is there physical evidence that our design ("our" is me speaking as a robot) could be a natural phenomenon. What limitations they have to work with depends on their environment and their programming. I'm differentiating this from purely ontological reasoning and I don't know that one can argue for God without taking an ontological approach.

Interesting to think that if super robots could have been create by inferior intelligences, then could humans have been created by an inferior intelligence?

Another example instead of mechanical devices would be genetically engineered lifeforms since they might be less distinguishable from the so-called natural world (although the robot one works especially if the natural world is gone or inaccessible so less evidence to work with).

Perhaps later I'll try to write something more coherent. Even without quotes Captcha still thinks I'm a robot -- perhaps I am of a sort.

Edited by YESESIS - October 28 2017 at 19:57

^ Good point about nothingness and every possible reality, tweeel, I was going to touch on the same.

YESESIS wrote: Logan wrote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That watchmaker analogy (known as a teleological argument or argument from design) offers a very poor analogy and I don't think many logical people would be swayed by it unless they were looking to be and prepared to be swayed by it. Especially if the aliens they had had had some sort of parallel technology (rather than, say bio-tech, which I'll leave the possible implications out for now), then the aliens would very easily recognise the watch to be a mechanism/ artifact with a designer rather than of natural causes. The brain's development, on the other hand, being organic/ biological can be explained by natural evolution (technology vs. biology). If the brain is a trillion times more complex than a watch, and you think that because the watch required a more complex designer than itself (which it did), then wouldn't the designer of the human brain also be more complex than the human, and so by following the argument, wouldn't the designer being much more complex than the human require another designer and so on (ad finitum -- infinite regress)? Linked is the first cause argument, which is a Philosophy 101 thing. if the comsos required a designer, what was required to create God?   The counterargument from theists often being God always is and always was, or one could say that God exists outside of time and space and outside this universe across the multiverse and other planes of existence do not need to operate according to the laws of our universe. Perhaps we are bio-technology designed by aliens, who knows? Or computer simulations? Anyway, I don't want to negate your experience, but I do believe that it says far more about your own psychology, biases and persuadability than the existence of God. I once heard a voice seemingly not my own in my head which I equated with God which said, "You must die before you live". A Christian friend was excited when I told her and said that was a true sign from God that I should become born again. I say it was a neurological event. Don't know if you've seen this, but this banana one is amusing: In your video Kirk Cameron talks about the human eye.. Which happens to be a great example of the awesome power of our brains. https://www.livescience.com/3919-human-eye-works.html - The last sentence under the section "The retina"  But of course no intelligent design went into this, it.. it developed by random chance. Yeah that's the ticket, that has to be it. Actually, why does ANYTHING exist at all? Shouldn't there just be absolute nothingness... forever!? Wouldn't that make the most sense? Oh well, maybe the 'Row Your Boat' song had it right all along.

I'm agnostic on the matter, but I don't think that intelligent design is a necessary assumption to explain us or the cosmos. If our complexity requires an intelligent designer, might not that intelligent designer also have needed another intelligent designer to become into being and so and so on in an infinite regression?

I don't know of evolutionary biologists think that it is just random chance (incidentally, in a sense being a determinist I believe in less chance than most, although that mainly come up in free will arguments). Natural selection supports the survival of mutations that provide an advantage -- mutations may be chance in a sense, especially if one considers chaos theory, but mutations that are not advantageous are less likely to be passed on (for reasons that should be quite obvious).   So it's not just some accident that the eye developed how it has. Theories of evolution, by the way, have "evolved" a lot since Darwin made that statement. As for the banana analogy, bananas were not always shaped that way -- the modern banana is a hybrid developed through cultivation by man.

If one accepts the mutliverse, then yes there can be universes without matter or energy, but to say to absolutely nothing implies even a lack of space (no an emety void that goe on forever, but not even a void, total non-existence). There's an interesting hypothesis, by the way, that before our universe came into being (cosmic inflation) there was literally nothing (no universe where ours exists), not even space, and that early on our universe was spatially minute. By the way, if only nothingness existed nothing would make sense becaue nothing could make sene of anything.

Which reminds me of an old "mutton is better than heaven" joke my dad told me (quite irrelevant, but has nostalgic value for me):

Mutton is better than Heaven because nothing is better than Heaven and a leg of mutton is better than nothing.

On another note: I'd think it less presumptuous to believe in some vague Spinoza-like conception of god than a belief in a personal God that answers prayer, which requires yet more assumptions. I wonder if you are also an atheist when it comes to other conceptions of God? Do you believe in Zeus, for instance? Not all atheists deny the possibility of God and one could even be a deistic atheist because theism commonly implies a personal god. Many religious people buy into a whole lot of mythology (mythology that conflicts with other mythologies and conceptions of God or gods). In the video Cameron says it takes more faith to be an atheist (atheist simply mean without theism), and that is a bogus claim. Agnosticism is a form of atheism, and not all atheists are hard atheists that claim that there can be no God, it simply says a lack of belief in God. The atheist sees a lack of evidence to assume that God exists, the theist commonly claims that the atheist is blind to the evidence. Knowing something that can not be proved requires more faith than not knowing. Furthermore, it requires more faith to believe in a specific God and follow a particular faith than believe in vaguer conceptions of god. Religious people commonly not only believe in God, but they think that they know what God wants of us and follow texts that claim to know God's will. Theism requires more assumptions than atheism, and hard atheism is more of a belief system than soft atheism (agnostic atheism) as it entails a belief in the non-existence of God. I used to call myself an agnostic but that implies that we cannot know and never can know if God exists. I doubt that there is a God, but I don't know (there may be out there in the multiverse, if the multiverse exists, and we might have been created by some superior intelligence, our universe could be some cosmic experiment).

Edited by Logan - October 28 2017 at 10:31

I don't have a grudge against religion but I don't understand how the concept of 'God' even came about, I have as far as I have noticed no spirituality in me and I really don't see why it wouldn't just make sense that we came from natural chaos and only look for meaning because that's a useful way of thinking for our survival, and that doesn't mean it has any use on a metaphysical level. The too-much-of-a-coincidence argument bothers me because of that, it's reverse logic; if you look at every possible reality, and it doesn't even have to be a real multiverse, just a hypothetical one, most would be pretty empty, to our 'meaning' at least, and the rare ones where conscious thought does take form will all have the conscious thinkers realize how much of a coincidence it is that they exist, while all being created at random.

condor wrote: What does the word god mean to you??