Omniscience and quantum mechanics

God's healing might sound irrelevant but it has brought Christians closer to him with stronger faith. Witnessing and meeting these saved Christians can make athiests change their minds about evolution.

Actually seeing and hearing these saved Christians should be enough decide the outcome. I think God is cheating a bit with his healing method to encourage the right decision to choose Christianity.

I believe God can see through people's hearts, and if you remain an athiest on the outside and a believer on the inside to avoid embarassing your reputation then God understands your fear. You might find that your athiest friends might be pretending to be athiestic because of fear of losing friendship. You can't judge a book by it's cover.

Sin is an extremely difficult subject and if God explained to us through our normal senses of sight, hearing and sound, we would not fully grasp the seriousness of the deception enhanced by the power of evil by Satan. Adam and Eve could not see the difference between obedience and disobedience without trying. Their mistake cost us our lives but God is giving us one chance to accept Christ to bring our lives back through life after death in heaven, or when Jesus returns unexpectedly.

It's like putting us through a virtual 3D world where sin can be felt through all our five senses, the other two being touch and smell. Once we understand the power of sin then God is giving us a choice to make the right decision, which unfortunately, as I see it cannot be reversed if you make the wrong choice.

MY FRIEND,

It all has to do with FREEWILL--God's greatest Gift to His creatures. (Or, of course, greatest curse if you happen to be an atheist.)

CASE IN POINT: Nietzsche, whom i assume one of your favorites from the quote you use, exercised his God-given freewill to rebel against what he knew to be the Truth--his biological father's Christian beliefs.

You know, it is kind of ironic that you choose to display the cute little quote below:

because look at where his mindless rebellion against the Truth got him--it drove him to insanity and eventual death in a mental institution.

Are you suggesting that God should have healed Nietzsche in spite of his arrogant rebellion and "God is dead" philosophy?

So God only heals those who want to be healed? Or he only heals those in a particular religion?

Why not heal those who need to be healed? Why let anyone suffer?

How do you know he rebelled against what he knew to be the truth? That seems rather presumptuous of you. Besides, it's not entirely clear just what Nietzsche's religious beliefs were, Christian, atheistic, or something else.

Yes. Should a doctor refuse treatment just because the patient doesn't like him?

God heals to bring about something He wants to happen at the time.

Yes, why let H1N1 or AIDS die. God's God of more.

In point of fact, there's a reason to suffer. Suffering accomplishes things. Sometimes it accomplishes hugely eternal things.

Hm. Ecce Homo? Thus Spake Zarathustra? That guy? It's clear.

It's not clear what Kierkegaard's religious beliefs were. Maybe that's what you meant?

Hm, I see it another way. Should a doctor refuse to heal a person who's intent on corrupting and doing more and more evil? Especially when -- His primary job isn't even as a doctor, He has no job nor requirement to do so?

I thought God was compassionate and merciful?

Such as?

No.

Should a man not help someone who's fallen over, even though it's not his job?

Uniformly, universally? No. It's not "quid pro quo" mercy, either, but God's not some nice guy approaching every stranger the same way. He's not Santa. Goodness does not imply He will be all sweetness and compassion toward evil.

The Atonement.

OK. There're no counterindications when it comes to Nietszche. Provide support and I'm interested to hear.

Hm. The model doesn't even fit.

Do you help all worms off the burning pavement after a rainstorm? How about grubs in your yard -- you allow them all to feed while they destroy your lawn? Do you arbitrate conflicts between birds and cats? Between birds and worms?

Should a man not help someone who's suffering? Let's get to brass tax: is it your responsibility to do all these things? Are you saying it's your responsibility to help inferior life forms, even those ultimately destructive of your positive goals?

[snip]

Well, we have suffering for some reason, and I guess it's useful? (I apologize, but I looked back a few posts, and I'm not exactly sure where I was going with this.)

Yes, but we wouldn't consider them unselfish people. It would not be good if it were done for themselves.

I didn't say there was no satisfaction in love. Mutual satisfaction is the idea, really. I'm just saying that self-satisfaction cannot be the aim. It's a paradoxical thread which runs throughout Christianity: the first will be last and vice versa, the least will be greatest and vice versa, "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." The only way to find and keep your self, is to lose your self.

The Trinity is love eternally, before creation. God sent the son to us as a gift of love, not because we had anything God needed. Christ is the God who washes the feet of His creatures (John 13). And this is why God does not compel himself upon men's minds - love does not insist on its own way; "love is not self-seeking" (1 Corinthians 13:5).

If the universe is all there is, and there's nothing outside it to influence it, then every action has to attributable to the laws inside it, right? Everything would have to be pre-determined. The laws of physics and chemistry cannot be broken, and they would have to account for everything. No scientist could ever say "I just had a thought which was a true insight or inference about reality" because every thought would be a mere accidental product of the mindless reality itself.

The idea which science depends on, is the same idea which undermines science. Science depends on an orderly universe, but if it is truly orderly, then it is "ordered" in every sense of the word; it is dictated from the beginning. Every landing of every butterfly, and every thought of every man, is a result of a previous movement of atoms, which in turn was caused by a previous movement of atoms, right back to the beginning. Only if there is an external God can science be true. If not, science is like a dog chasing its tail; science will never arrive at any truth because there is no truth.

What do we want? Happiness? Freedom? Both simultaneously?

Work like that does go on, and some people, like Simon Greenleaf, famously, look into the evidence and decide the evidence is sound. But I doubt you could ever get a scientific consensus that Christ is Lord.

I'm not sure all animals' lives are as hard a work as you describe. Plenty of animals seem to have lots of leisure time. Some mammals hibernate almost half a year. If leisure time leads to philosophy, bears should have been the first philosophers!

You're right about ancient animism, and you may be right about God being an amalgamation. In fact, Paul may have expressed the same idea in Athens, when he said he was declaring the "unknown God"; he could have been to talking to all of the ancient peoples that came before him. But still, it's beside the point. Animism itself needs explanation before you can use it to explain something else. You push the question back a step, but still beg the question: why did man invent spirits?

Plus, you could say modern scientific theories are amalgamations of all previous scientific thought about the world, but that doesn't discredit the theories; actually it strengthens them.

Okay, say the universe is void of life, and God wanted it that way...so what...what can we infer from that?

Here's a thought, and I'm not asserting it as fact, it's just a thought, but cosmic rays and things like neutrinos are interacting with Earth at every moment, in ways we don't fully understand. A lot of this stuff emanates from outside our solar system. It could be that, even the most distant bodies such as pulsars, quasars and such, or the entire interactive universe, might be working for the support of our little Goldilocks speck. Who knows? I mean atoms are a lot of empty space, and they do a fine job of "doing" reality, so how do I know the big empty universe isn't performing the job of "doing" reality for us humans?

Obviously, he's considered theistic claims, and he's formed a belief about them - he believes the claims are wrong. I don't see any doubt to give him the benefit of. Everyone knows what Richard Dawkins believes (or affirms, or thinks, or feels, or supposes, or whatever other word you might substitute).

You're right about that. I did misspeak. I meant to say we should respect people's right to believe what they believe. I hope Dawkins agrees with you and I on this, but I really don't know. When he talks about how children should be raised (children other than his own) he comes pretty close to going over the line I think.

Why is that? Coming from an atheist, that seems to bring up a conundrum: if there is no Truth with a capital "T", why not believe whatever makes you feel good? Kind of like masturbation, there'd be no effect, it wouldn't matter, but the net result is, you'd feel good. Why does an atheist want to be an atheist? Most of us think it's okay to lie to children about Santa Claus and such because it adds happiness to childhood. So why not lie to yourself, and make your life happier?

Consider the Douglas Adams quote: "Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" But remove the fairies, and a thoughtful, honest person will not see any beauty. An honest person will see a transitory accident which natural selection has programmed the vision interpreter in his brain to attach the arbitrary emotional response "this is beautiful".

Humans instinctively know that beauty is only beautiful because we perceive that there is meaning underlying it. We want truth, and there is no truth in beauty apart from meaning, because if the natural course of evolution had tweaked the course of events slightly differently, we would see some ugly things as beautiful, and vice versa. If our brains were wired slightly differently, we could perceive clanging metal pots dropped on the floor as music.

Apart from religion (specifically the idea that there actually exists a Way, or Tao), no I can't justify the idea. Neither philosophy nor biological science are capable of telling me why what I know is true, even though I and everyone else knows it's true.

Every atheist on CF is eager to tell me that they are a good person without God. Why? Why are they so eager to have it known that they obey some meaningless biological conditioning which is actually an abstract concept, and which does not even benefit themselves, if and when they can get away with disobeying it?

It's almost as if they were walking in the woods and came upon a tree that had fallen over, and said "I'll walk in the direction this tree is pointing" as if there were some meaning or intention behind the tree's position. The tree fell the way it did naturally, and the same goes for the selection of genes which result in human consciousness, human morality and human societies.

Without an external basis of morality, none of us are under any obligation to obey any emotional impulse, neither for society nor posterity. In fact I'd say that one would be foolish to obey anything other than one's own will.

I agree, that's right that we trust logic because it's never failed, but we do have the separate idea that logic cannot fail (and I think you extend that to include in any possible world, which I don't necessarily).

A few days ago in your other thread, you told me a thing cannot be both illogical and true. But the idea in quantum mechanics that a single thing can physically be in two places at once is fundamentally illogical, isn't it? How can that illogical observation be true then?

If our perception of reality is fully controlled by evolution, it can't be right or wrong since there is no right or wrong.

It's absolutely unreliable because whatever you think is right is merely a perception. If you tell me, as a Christian, that my perception that there exists a real morality is mere illusion, I can in turn say the same thing of your perception that there exists a real logic.