Is science at odds with philosophy?

[partinobodycular]

And I can only start by asking you, "If there was a God, and He was the absolute highest God above and beyond all and everything, etc, what do think that One, or such a One, would have to, out of necessity, be like, etc...?"

Impotent

 

[Neogaia777]

Impotent

Really...? The most highest God in the entire universe and/or beyond it, etc, would have to be "impotent", etc...?

Because that doesn't even make sense...

Please use your brain and "think" please, etc...

What would such a "God", who was that high, or who was always that great, or whatever, etc, have to be like, if such a "God" does actually exist, etc...?

And again, please use your brain please, etc...

Otherwise we will be getting absolutely nowhere, etc...

God Bless!

 

[partinobodycular]

Please use your brain and "think" please, etc...

Ditto...

 

[Opdrey]

This post is so full of wrong, it's not even funny.

I understand that you DISAGREE with my points, but that's the wonder of the Bible. You and I have both read the Bible front to back. And we've both read books about the Bible. For me the "inerrancy" and "perfection" of the Bible are not a pre-requisite so I am freer to look at it as the work of human actions. It so perfectly fits for how humans do things that it seems obvious to me that it is little more than that!

That isn't to say it doesn't contain many good things! In fact Paul's invention of the Christian faith as something different from a subsect of Judaism is a wonderful thing! The idea of a loving God as opposed to a vicious partisan who commands the murder of women and children is a refreshing an frankly welcome evolution.

And I even totally understand why Dispensationalism is attractive. The Marcionites wanted to cut out the Old Testament version of God and move forward. But the Old Testament is still integral to the faith so it remains and Marcionism is a long-dead heresy. But the need for a "divorce" from that older version of the eternal unchanging God is strong.

I don't have a problem with Dispensationalism. It's a great way to square the circle. It helps to allow the faith room to evolve. And evolve it has. We hope that for all faiths. Look at Islam. At one point it was one of the most progressive religions on earth then it slipped backwards into a locked-in form of hyperfundamentalism and it took a long time for the faith to recover. Nowadays we have a small subset of the fundamentalists who, in adhering to an unchanging doctrine, are causing untold amounts of pain and anguish for millions of people.

Religion has to change and adapt to the world around it. As humans work to strive for a fairer and more just society, a society that actually espouses the best parts of the New Testament they have to move away from the foundations that were laid in the Old Testament.

Religion, however, is not itself built to allow for change. Eternal Gods don't turn on a dime. In fact they don't turn at all. What was truth is still truth. How could it be otherwise? So we add to the faith, we come up with "loopholes" that allow us to still live the lives we as humans want to live and we find ways to mold God to our needs. And He is malleable. Thank heavens.

 

[Neogaia777]

Ditto...

Why don't you just at least try answering the question, etc...?

Just at least give it a shot, and at least just try, OK...?

Call it a thought experiment, and at least just try, OK...?

God Bless!

 

[Opdrey]

I could walk you through it and give the right "key" if you like...?

What makes you think you are the one I can get it from? I have done quite a bit of reading of my own.

And I can only start by asking you, "If there was a God, and He was the absolute highest God above and beyond all and everything, etc, what do think that One, or such a One, would have to, out of necessity, be like, etc...?"

That being than which none greater can be conceived cannot not exist.

I honestly don't know what features that being would have. In fact I doubt any human who tells me they know. The logical difficulties with cases like "God" are so immense.

Some things I hope are true about this God are:

1. He doesn't like genocide and would never allow 1Samuel 15:3 to be attributed to him or his prophet on his behalf.

2. He would make himself clear and obvious for all. The stakes are so high (eternal damnation is a pretty steep sentence for failure to get the faith perfect in a short 70 year lifespan).

What would such a One "have to be like", etc...?

I like logic. So God is all-merciful and all-just. Those are diametrically opposite.

God loves all the world so much so that he incarnated himself and then arranged to have himself sacrificed to himself to atone mankind to Him. Blood was necessary. An analogue of the blood sacrifices that were pleasing to the Lord in the Old Testament. The final blood sacrifice. Because God is, at heart, a God who values pain to atone to Him. Because he loves everyone. Unless they fail to accept His gift. And then He is saddened to send those people to damnation. But to damnation they go. The saddest part is that all they had to do was accept that gift. Even the people who, millennia after the blood gift was given, fail to see evidence of such a blood gift.

God would never put a stumbling block in front of anyone. Except to create a world that by every metric looks as if it is very old and life arose and changed and evolved, in direct contradiction to the words of Genesis. And evidence for the single most important concept in all of human history is...lacking at best. Absent at worst.

God would never create someone for whom worship of Him would cause pain and agony. But the OCD wings of hospitals across the globe are filled with people for whom faith is pain worse than you can imagine (trust me on this one). How cruel would it be to create people who dearly want to worship Him correctly but for whom that task becomes so impossible that life stops being life and becomes a form of hell? Answer: very cruel. Cruel beyond reason. Cruel beyond logic.

Now before you launch into a zillion exegeses and explanations of how these people have "faith all wrong" I will just go ahead and stop you there. This is a likely feature they were born with and it relates to serotonin reuptake in synapses in the brain. Medicines can help. God usually seems to turn a blind ear to the pleas of those who want that cup taken from them.

I'm not saying God is a "bad being". Quite the contrary. I'm saying the concept of God is loaded up with so many logical difficulties as to beggar the imagination as to how God could simultaneously exist and reality be reality.

 

[Neogaia777]

What makes you think you are the one I can get it from? I have done quite a bit of reading of my own.



That being than which none greater can be conceived cannot not exist.

I honestly don't know what features that being would have. In fact I doubt any human who tells me they know. The logical difficulties with cases like "God" are so immense.

Some things I hope are true about this God are:

1. He doesn't like genocide and would never allow 1Samuel 15:3 to be attributed to him or his prophet on his behalf.

2. He would make himself clear and obvious for all. The stakes are so high (eternal damnation is a pretty steep sentence for failure to get the faith perfect in a short 70 year lifespan).



I like logic. So God is all-merciful and all-just. Those are diametrically opposite.

God loves all the world so much so that he incarnated himself and then arranged to have himself sacrificed to himself to atone mankind to Him. Blood was necessary. An analogue of the blood sacrifices that were pleasing to the Lord in the Old Testament. The final blood sacrifice. Because God is, at heart, a God who values pain to atone to Him. Because he loves everyone. Unless they fail to accept His gift. And then He is saddened to send those people to damnation. But to damnation they go. The saddest part is that all they had to do was accept that gift. Even the people who, millennia after the blood gift was given, fail to see evidence of such a blood gift.

God would never put a stumbling block in front of anyone. Except to create a world that by every metric looks as if it is very old and life arose and changed and evolved, in direct contradiction to the words of Genesis. And evidence for the single most important concept in all of human history is...lacking at best. Absent at worst.

God would never create someone for whom worship of Him would cause pain and agony. But the OCD wings of hospitals across the globe are filled with people for whom faith is pain worse than you can imagine (trust me on this one). How cruel would it be to create people who dearly want to worship Him correctly but for whom that task becomes so impossible that life stops being life and becomes a form of hell? Answer: very cruel. Cruel beyond reason. Cruel beyond logic.

Now before you launch into a zillion exegeses and explanations of how these people have "faith all wrong" I will just go ahead and stop you there. This is a likely feature they were born with and it relates to serotonin reuptake in synapses in the brain. Medicines can help. God usually seems to turn a blind ear to the pleas of those who want that cup taken from them.

I'm not saying God is a "bad being". Quite the contrary. I'm saying the concept of God is loaded up with so many logical difficulties as to beggar the imagination as to how God could simultaneously exist and reality be reality.

What if I told you that the kind of questions I just asked you just now previously, were once pondered by Jesus, and that He came to the conclusion that there had to be a higher God than God in the OT and/or YHWH in the OT, and then started having revelations of who They both were, or are, or were, and the differences between Them, etc...?

And then also started to see Himself in that equation also, etc...

What would you think then, etc...?

That's why I told you to forget about the Bible for now, etc, and just use simple basic logic and/or reason with this "Highest God" for now first, or at first, etc...

And we can get to the rest later, etc...

God Bless!

 

[AV1611VET]

I understand that you DISAGREE with my points, but that's the wonder of the Bible. You and I have both read the Bible front to back. And we've both read books about the Bible. For me the "inerrancy" and "perfection" of the Bible are not a pre-requisite so I am freer to look at it as the work of human actions. It so perfectly fits for how humans do things that it seems obvious to me that it is little more than that!

That isn't to say it doesn't contain many good things! In fact Paul's invention of the Christian faith as something different from a subsect of Judaism is a wonderful thing! The idea of a loving God as opposed to a vicious partisan who commands the murder of women and children is a refreshing an frankly welcome evolution.

And I even totally understand why Dispensationalism is attractive. The Marcionites wanted to cut out the Old Testament version of God and move forward. But the Old Testament is still integral to the faith so it remains and Marcionism is a long-dead heresy. But the need for a "divorce" from that older version of the eternal unchanging God is strong.

I don't have a problem with Dispensationalism. It's a great way to square the circle. It helps to allow the faith room to evolve. And evolve it has. We hope that for all faiths. Look at Islam. At one point it was one of the most progressive religions on earth then it slipped backwards into a locked-in form of hyperfundamentalism and it took a long time for the faith to recover. Nowadays we have a small subset of the fundamentalists who, in adhering to an unchanging doctrine, are causing untold amounts of pain and anguish for millions of people.

Religion has to change and adapt to the world around it. As humans work to strive for a fairer and more just society, a society that actually espouses the best parts of the New Testament they have to move away from the foundations that were laid in the Old Testament.

Religion, however, is not itself built to allow for change. Eternal Gods don't turn on a dime. In fact they don't turn at all. What was truth is still truth. How could it be otherwise? So we add to the faith, we come up with "loopholes" that allow us to still live the lives we as humans want to live and we find ways to mold God to our needs. And He is malleable. Thank heavens.

This post is so full of wrong, it's not even funny.

 

[Opdrey]

Hermeneutics can be a dangerous thing, and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Just ask the Crusaders, or the South before the Civil War.

Excellent examples. People who, in the zeal of their real faith in God found ways to do the most ungodly things imaginable in His name.

That's why I like to accuse those who say slavery is condoned in the Bible

Which it clearly is.

... accuse them of wanting to start another civil war.

Because no one really thinks slavery is a good thing. Because humanity has evolved sociologically.

Doesn't that make sense? Their old faith books are from a time when slavery was a fact of life. So of course it was not deemed an evil. Now it is. And instead of simply saying "Guess the authors of that old book from a time when slavery was OK and perfectly accepted were wrong." you have to come up with arabesques to twist the words on the page. To infer things that were not in the Bible.

Either way it's a GOOD thing that you who worship God via the Bible are willing to do so. The rest of the world is quite happy you are able to justify doing a good thing using a book that clearly justifies doing the opposite.

And you don't need to waste your time telling me why the Bible DOESN'T say what the Bible clearly says. I've seen it all before. Honestly. And so long as you aren't going around killing "witches" and stoning adulteresses and being OK with slavery I'm happy. You can believe as you like. Just so long as you are able to get along with the rest of the world.

 

[partinobodycular]

Why don't you just at least try answering the question, etc...?

Okay, I'll give it a shot.

Logic says that God must be impotent and we can best illustrate this by using two simple concepts...evolution and the Euthyphro dilemma.

On the one hand evolution is in its concept all powerful and all knowing, it decides what lives and what dies. And it never makes a mistake. Neither can it be bargained with, nor reasoned with, nor intimidated. It is in its actions always perfect.

And yet for all of its perfection, it's impotent. It's governed by laws over which it has no control, and no ability to change.

God faces the same duality, and we see this duality illustrated in what people have long recognized as the Euthyphro dilemma. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

The problem is that to be perfect one must be left with no choice, and if one is left with no choice then one is impotent. Like evolution God may indeed be all powerful and all knowing, yet all this does is render Him impotent.

 

[Opdrey]

This post is so full of wrong, it's not even funny.

Excellent example of someone who is unable to defend his own beliefs but relies on merely accusing others of being wrong. Ex Cathedra.

Almost as if you have come to sit at the Right Hand of the Father!

I know there's a chance that everything I say could be wrong. And living that way is not as comfortable as squeezing your eyes closed and simply decreeing everyone else is wrong and ONLY YOU see truth.

 

[Opdrey]

Okay, I'll give it a shot.

Logic says that God must be impotent and we can best illustrate this by using two simple concepts...evolution and the Euthyphro dilemma.

On the one hand evolution is in its concept all powerful and all knowing, it decides what lives and what dies. And it never makes a mistake. Neither can it be bargained with, or reasoned with, or intimidated. It is in its actions always perfect.

And yet for all of its perfection, it's impotent. It's governed by laws over which it has no control, and no ability to change.

God faces the same duality, and we see this duality illustrated in what people have long recognized as the Euthyphro dilemma. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

The problem is that to be perfect one must be left with no choice, and if one is left with no choice then one is impotent. Like evolution God may indeed be all powerful and all knowing, yet all this does is render Him impotent.

POINTS FOR THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA!

 

[AV1611VET]

And so long as you aren't going around killing "witches" and stoning adulteresses and being OK with slavery I'm happy.

In spite of what academia thinks the Bible says, or with respect to it?

 

[Opdrey]

and that He came to the conclusion that there had to be a higher God than God in the OT

Ooopsy, you are dancing VERY close to the line of "Dualism" here. That's a heresy that was stamped out of Christianity LONG ago.

That's why I told you to forget about the Bible for now, etc, and just use simple basic logic and/or reason with this "Highest God" for now first, or at first, etc...

Which I did but you simply chose to ignore so you could squeeze in a few more preachings.

 

[Opdrey]

In spite of what academia thinks the Bible says, or with respect to it?

More word games.

You know, I actually put some effort into responding to your stuff. But your "blow off all comments" approach feels pretty disrespectful.

Should I not put any effort into responding to you? I guess that's what you want.

Are your points REALLY WITHOUT ANY VALUE?? That's sad. I thought you cared about your faith.

Oh well. Luke 6:31 is a very helpful verse to identify those who want to tell you something but are afraid to say it out loud. You clearly want people to blow you off as well. Because your points aren't worth anything either.

 

[AV1611VET]

Excellent example of someone who is unable to defend his own beliefs but relies on merely accusing others of being wrong.

And I'm not going to do a point-by-point refutation of your Gish gallops.

You make posts that are two feet in height, then evidently expect me to parse them; and I won't.

If that makes me "unable to defend my own beliefs," then so be it.

YOU should be able to defend my beliefs, as I not only detail many of them in my profile:

1. Independent Fundamental Baptist
2. King James Version Only
3. Seven Theme Dispensation
4. Verbal Plenary Inspiration
5. Literal Creation
6. Pretrib Rapture
7. Premillennial

... but I show how I arrive at many of my beliefs as well:

1. Bible says x, Science says x = go with x
2. Bible says x, Science says y = go with x
3. Bible says x, Science says ø = go with x
4. Bible says ø, Science says x = go with x
5. Bible says ø, Science says ø = free to speculate on your own

Prime Directive: Under no circumstances whatsoever is the Bible to be contradicted.

But no, it's easier to say I am unable to defend myself, isn't it?

 

[Neogaia777]

Okay, I'll give it a shot.

Logic says that God must be impotent and we can best illustrate this by using two simple concepts...evolution and the Euthyphro dilemma.

On the one hand evolution is in its concept all powerful and all knowing, it decides what lives and what dies. And it never makes a mistake. Neither can it be bargained with, or reasoned with, or intimidated. It is in its actions always perfect.

And yet for all of its perfection, it's impotent. It's governed by laws over which it has no control, and no ability to change.

God faces the same duality, and we see this duality illustrated in what people have long recognized as the Euthyphro dilemma. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

The problem is that to be perfect one must be left with no choice, and if one is left with no choice then one is impotent. Like evolution God may indeed be all powerful and all knowing, yet all this does is render Him impotent.

All wrong, sorry...

The very most highest God would have already directed the course of everything else in the universe from the very beginning of setting it all in motion, or would have already determined or predetermined it all from the very beginning, etc, so from that point onward, would have no reason to interfere or intervene, because all of the whole entire universe has been 100% completely deterministic from the beginning, and He is the One who determined it, and there is technically no such thing as "choice" from that Ones perspective, because He is all-knowing, and knows everything, etc...

He does not worry, and does not fret or stress or get upset, or have any kind of more human like emotions or states of mind over His creation like we do, because there is no such thing as anything ever not going according to the way He already determined or predetermined it to go at all ever, from a very, very, very long, long, long time ago, etc...

He has others for that, and to show us Him, etc, but I'll get into that a little bit later on, if we get that far, etc...

God Bless!

 

[AV1611VET]

Should I not put any effort into responding to you?

If it's going to hurt and have a temperature, please don't bother.

You should know how I'm going to respond, before I respond.

I'm pretty thorough in what I believe, and how I arrive at those beliefs.

 

[Neogaia777]

Ooopsy, you are dancing VERY close to the line of "Dualism" here. That's a heresy that was stamped out of Christianity LONG ago.

Which I did but you simply chose to ignore so you could squeeze in a few more preachings.

OK, whatever, but just think about what I just said, OK...

"Search your feelings, and you will know it to be true", etc...

God Bless!

 

[partinobodycular]

The very most highest God would have already directed the course of everything else in the universe from the very beginning of setting it all in motion, or would have already determined or predetermined it all from the very beginning, etc, so from that point onward, would have no reason to interfere or intervene, because all of the whole entire universe has been 100% completely deterministic from the beginning, and He is the One who determined it, and there is technically no such thing as "choice" from that Ones perspective, because He is all-knowing, and knows everything, etc...

He does not worry, and does not fret or stress or get upset, or have any kind of more human like emotions or states of mind over His creation like we do, because there is no such thing as anything ever not going according to the way He already determined or predetermined it to go at all ever, from a very, very, very long, long, long time ago, etc...

There are a number of problems with this argument, but I'm going to try to stay focused on my original premise for the moment, that God is impotent.

Theists often like to argue for the existence of God by using the fine tuning argument, which posits that if the fundamental constants undergirding the universe were even slightly different then we couldn't exist. The conclusion being that therefore there must be a designer. But this not only constrains the fundamental constants, but it constrains God as well. God had no choice in how to design the fundamental constants. Therefore He had no choice in how to create reality.

So just like the Euthyphro dilemma God doesn't decide what is true, rather God is constrained by what is true. And if He is constrained in what He can do then He's impotent.