God is source of infinite possibility of "the rules" that can be expressed into any number of possible realities. I keep telling you that you can't cast the logic of the higher-level abstractions on the lower-level events, and you keep trying to force the conversation in the direction of the logic of the higher-level abstraction, insisting that there must be a continuum there... and that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do.
Why do you think that would be the case?
I never said that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do. I've allowed you to make the assumption that he can create a square circle. Or have you not been paying attention?
It's not a better or worse. In order to judge "better" you need some reference as to what you are claiming it to be better at. Naturalism is reductionist. It's great at chunking up the reality, describing it, and then measuring ratios of one sets of events to other sets of events. That methodology is good for describing consistent recurrences of reality in some reductionist setting, but it really can only work as a reductionist concept.
Religion deals with fundamental as it relates to our being. You can keep running pragmatic calculations, and correlating the brain function with perception, but you can't distill functional description consciousness out of that. It's a useless pursuit, because it's irreducible experience. So, there's some things that naturalism can't do, and claim that because it may in some future we should avoid millennia-long philosophical context for discussing fundamental nature of our reality and its source.... that would be more irrationally exuberant than religion could ever be.
We seem to be way off topic here.
Do you understand what apologetic is for? It's here to lay out MY framework that explains and defends as to why I believe what I do. I'm not attempting to reconcile naturalism with Christianity. And I'm not here to prove Christianity to you from a position of your naturalistic assumptions. I've said it many times, if you have something to bring to the table in which we can discuss some concepts on which both of us could improve our belief system... fine. But this sophomoric "you tell me your reasons and I will shoot it down" approach to discussing these issues is both unwarranted (since you never actually justified your beliefs to me), and unproductive.
It's unproductive to eliminate bad ideas?
Likewise, you seem to think that there's some monolithic "Christianity" and "religion" concept that you can argue against, when it's largely personal understanding derived through philosophical framework of certain narrative.
There are many versions of Christianity, but if someone lacks a belief in either the creation of the universe by God or in the death and resurrection of Christ, then that person simply is not a Christian. In regards to those two issues, Christianity is a monolith. Absolutely.
I can't take the above seriously for a couple of reasons:
1) You are abstracting the generic progression of humanity through its moral path, and you are pinning isolated historic narrative as "terrible crimes" that are committed by religion against humans in the past, etc, etc. While at the same time you are ignoring that it's been the case for generic progression of humanity. Tribal warfare and endless conflicts and conquest is how we progress to our peaceful state today with a millennia worth of experience.
2) You are ignoring that the fact that Christian narrative is a progression of human choice of rejecting God and progressing through the path of "trial and error". So...
Romans 1:24 Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity for the dishonoring of their bodies with one another.
would be the context for God honoring human choices, while at the same time setting limits and directing those towards some viable outcome.
So, yes, and no.
Because it would be like asking a .NET developer to write software by explicitly writing instructions at the level of the electric charge manipulation. It's too complex for any human to grasp. We generally have illusion of understanding, while all we have is our models.
Church is people, so you are talking about people torturing people. People are complex beings, and as such, their motivations are complex and driven by a wide range of factors. So, to say that their torturing ways was motivated purely by religious narrative is absurd!
Likewise, human rights are secured by contractual agreement among people in a civilized society to uphold ideals. Whenever you are dealing with ideals you are exiting materialistic context. You can't claim that we are just bunch of chemicals shuffling around, and at the same time we should have standards as to how these chemicals mix or move. If you merely appealing to your preferences... then it's just a tyrant of preferences that you enforce on those who disagree?
This is off topic, and I contributed enough to derail the thread. You can have the last word on it.
For your reading the story today... yes. It only exists as a reference narrative for us that communicates broader reality that we never see. But the ideals of that narrative structure our and direct our individual behavior towards these ideals.
Ok so Jesus didn't actually have to die on the cross, but he did so anyway. Despite pleading with God to find another way. Interesting.
You can take it as Christian existentialism as the base, and transcendent experience at most. In either case, it's a narrative first that structures a worldview.
I don't know, and I don't really think we can know. Just like we can't know the fundamental structure of reality. Again, that's like asking .NET developer to write a software in machine code. They wouldn't have a clue. We operate at the higher level of perception of reality. We've never observed a single electron. All of our "observations" relevant to subatomic processes are circular feedback of instruments that were built with assumptions that are driven by chunking aggregate into ratios that line up. But, because we can correlate ratios to events doesn't mean that our picture of reality is accurate.
Hence, I don't really care what God acted on to create this reality. We can go with Eastern idea and think that everything is God's dream, and God is dreaming a billion dreams for each of us. Or we can go with Western thought, and think that God spun up and maintains events that manifest as reality running on "God machine"... as per Whitehead, for example. I have no idea, but that's not really relevant as to the vastly diverging perspective that our conscious experience is a byproduct of expansion of eternal matter that happened to localize and assemble into you and I....
If you don't care about what God acted on in creating the universe, then this thread is not for you. That is the central question and you're telling me you aren't even interested. So there's nothing left to discuss.
That would be an appeal to magic. A conscious mind creating reality as it imagines it... is something we do every night.
But at any rate, how could we ever know that, given the subjective limitations of our being?
Again, we don't have a "better explanation". Before you get to "better" we have to agree on parameters of making these judgements. If the parameters are structured from vastly different frameworks, then you screaming "Mine is better" is merely a preference.
And I'm man enough to admit that mine is a preference driven by necessity for my worldview to be coherent. Again, it stems from a simple fact that self-assembled chemicals observing themselves and structuring intentional .... seems incoherent as a worldview.
But you don't get to do that here. I've given you multiple reasons for why I hold my worldview. You don't get to sit and shoot them down and then claim that these are wrong because these are not living up to the preference of your satisfactory philosophical standards.
First prove to me your worldview as a standard, or at least let's agree on some common ground from which you can make these claims. Otherwise, you are like a 7 year old claiming that anything that they don't understand is boring and stupid. If that's the case, then go play computer games or something and stop wasting my time.
You didn't answer my question. I'm aware of this problem, and that's why I'm pointing that each of us gets to set a fundamental assumptions to create coherent models of reality.
You seem to think that accidental explosions of some uniform matter can produce complex variations with various distinct properties that eventually result in some localized parts of that matter assembling into entities having a capacity of subjective thought and creativity. And you don't seem to find a need to explain that fact before you accept it as a default.
So, you assume that whatever we observe validates this position, and you raise yourself in some intellectual high-horse where I have to launch ideas at you that you get to either accept or reject.
Care to validate your own assumptions?
I see you're asking me questions here. I see the question marks but I'm not reading the questions. Not if you came to this thread in bad faith. It's a waste of my time to respond. You go ahead and make a thread to discuss your topic. I won't discuss your topic here.
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