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Why does God leave no tracks?
- Thread starter cloudyday2
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Peter1000
Well-Known Member
You are right about others seeing God.
Not to be very argumentative, but let me see if I can understand how you think about the form of God.
When you say that God's form is life itSelf, I am confused by that description. Is that a description from the bible? Because the bible seems to indicate that God is made in our image and our likeness, which seems to indicate that God looks a lot like a human.
I can get this description, but when you say his form is life itSelf, the seen and the unseen, this does not compute. Would you help me understand your description. Thanks
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I think it's a Biblical description of the from of God as seen through the lens of a person who sees the body of Christ as extending throughout the universe. I believe it's also a description of a person who has God as their reality in life.
I understand scripture to say just the opposite, that it is Human Beings who are made in the Image of God. Though I think it right that an argument can be made in which we do in fact tend to define God in our image.
It's our souls, not our body, that is made in the image of God. To take this another step towards God, personally, I see our souls as an activity of God.
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Davian
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They are not incompatible with naturalistic cosmological models. And, theological "models", being unfalsifiable, can be made to 'fit' just about any evidence. Here, one should apply parsimony.
Provide a scientific citation for this "math" you allude to.
Cosmologists and astrophysicists.
Yet we still use Newton's laws to land space probes on the moons of Saturn. Are you arguing for a god-of-the-gaps?
How do we test this "id" of yours?
<citation missing>
<citation missing>
<citation missing>
Wake me when you have something of scientific significance.
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Nihilist Virus
Infectious idea
The first cause argument asserts that there must have been a cause for the t=0 event. The problem is lies in the definition of causality:
A system is a region of space.
A state is the arrangement of matter, energy, and otherwise existing things within a system.
Causality acts on a system to take it from one state to another over a duration of time.
"Prior" to the t=0 event, space and time "did" not exist. Phrased more precisely, in a state of reality wherein the t=0 event has not occurred, space and time do not exist. Therefore, causality does not exist. Therefore, the t=0 event cannot havebeen brought about via causality.
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Peter1000
Well-Known Member
You keep quoting "Prior to the t=0, space and time did not exist".
You or anyone, including the smartest scientist on the earth, have no idea if this is true or not.
Is this statement scientifically testable?
Is this statement scientifically unfalsifiable?
If "no", then it must not be acceptable for scientific theory. Therefore, your entire conclusion about causality should be discarded.
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Nihilist Virus
Infectious idea
If the universe is infinitely old, we'd see infinitely far in all directions. We see finitely far because the universe had a beginning. Are you saying there wasn't a beginning? Are you saying there was a beginning but that stuff happened before the beginning? How is that the beginning?
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Davian
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Then you are also going to reject God? Or are you now going to back-pedal?
"The question of religious belief among US scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total."
Leading scientists still reject God
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Peter1000
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They are not incompatible with naturalistic cosmological models. And, theological "models", being unfalsifiable, can be made to 'fit' just about any evidence. Here, one should apply parsimony.
Provide a scientific citation for this "math" you allude to.
Cosmologists and astrophysicists.
Yet we still use Newton's laws to land space probes on the moons of Saturn. Are you arguing for a god-of-the-gaps?
How do we test this "id" of yours?
<citation missing>
<citation missing>
<citation missing>
Wake me when you have something of scientific significance.
Can you give me an example of a "natural cosmological model"?
We test for "ID" by using the scientific tool of probability. If there is a 0 possiblility of an event happening naturally, then we are forced to look scientifically at other options. One of those options would be an intelligent, independent agent (ID). It is a science worthy option. The universal constants
are so precision that it would take an ID to program the system, and roll it into existence. Could not be a chance random happening. IOW the universe did not just fly into existence for no reason.
So the test is to falsify everything else and what is left standing, must be the cause.
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toLiJC
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and what if any man sees God physically, but commits iniquity against His will?!, what is better, a man that doesn't see God physically, but does His will, or, a man that sees God physically, but doesn't do His will?!
how can any biological cell see the whole body in which it is just one of the smallest biological units constituting it?!, similarly, we also cannot see how the system Administrator of the universe urges/drives/moves all units of the universe at once (being omnipresent), moreover, He doesn't want to make any (be)souled unit feel like a puppet in His hands, that is why He cannot afford to be visible/perceptible in His real form of system Administrator of the universe, or would you like to feel/see how you and all other units of the universe are some kinds of puppets in the hands of one gigantic Puppeteer?!, not (that) He wants to be that way, but there is a need of someone to do it, otherwise there could be no life, and of course this honor falls on Him (just because it is His turn)
Blessings
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Davian
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The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periodsthrough its subsequent large-scale evolution.[1][2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang
Only if you have actually established this possibility, and are not simply speculating or guessing, as you appear to be doing.
<citation missing>
<citation missing>
Speculation.
Not in this case, where we do not have access to the time "before" what is described by the big bang cosmological model, and we can only speculate.
We can, however, eliminate unfalsifiable options, such "gods" and "IDs" and such, that lack a means of testing.
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First of all, apologies for taking a week and a half get this response up. I'm just not able to participate on these forums as much as I'd like nowadays, but hopefully none of my future responses to you will take as long as this one has...
But don't we still use our cognitive faculties to determine that such pictures aren't actually moving, even if we do so by means of some methodology? Why is it that we come use methodologies, unless we rely on our cognitive faculties to have told us that doing so produces accurate results reliably? Whether we use methodologies or not, I don't see any way for us to escape the fact that we rely upon our cognitive faculties to give us true beliefs, perhaps not all of the time, but at least most of the time.
I think such people have a tendency to take certain Bible stories a bit more literally than they should. I also think their efforts to proselytize tend to be seriously misguided. Beating people over the head with the Bible and telling them that God's gonna torture them forever if they don't literally believe it is the wrong way to go about preaching the Gospel, IMV.
I can certainly understand why you would think so. Something like that would certainly be radically different from anything we could directly perceive in the world of our everyday experience, but to those of us who accept such a view -- and there are many theists who do not accept it (including Plantinga and William Lane Craig, to drop a couple of big names) -- anything less than that could not be absolute and ultimate in the way that God's supposed to be.
Well, I think they're wrong.
Or at the very least, I think they have a deep and profound misunderstanding of how Christianity works.
Yes, you make a good point here. Actually, I think a third condition is needed to constitute a genuine religious experience. I should have addressed it in my last post, but for whatever reason it just didn't occur to me.
In my last post, I offered these two conditions as sufficient to constitute a genuine religious experience:
(1) that the experience be of a sort that falls in line with what we would typically call “religious experience,”
and
(2) that it have some sort of positive effect on the life of the person who's experienced it.
To those I'd like to add the following:
(3) that the experience convey to the person who's had it justified true belief to the effect that it was caused to happen by some sort of reality that is imperceptible by way of the faculties that we ordinarily use to perceive and understand the world around us.
Now, I'd like to point out that while I'm sure it's the case far more often than not that those who have had religious experiences have far more detailed and specific (and even contradictory) sets of beliefs regarding those experiences than simply what I've provided in (3), I do not see such beliefs as being always and necessarily sufficient to invalidate their attendant experiences, provided that such beliefs not be both false and directly communicated by said experiences. For example, I think it's perfectly normal for people to have a tendency to try to interpret such experiences within a familiar religious context, by using familiar religious concepts and language to try to express what it is they've experienced, and I don't see why the presence of such interpretations should serve to undermine the validity their attendant experiences. However, I think it's important to note that I do not believe that a genuine religious experience would directly communicate false information to its subject, as I think that doing so would constitute a violation of (2) above. So a genuine (i.e. a veridical) religious experience would not directly tell someone that P is the case (for any false proposition P) if in fact it is not the case that P.
I might also briefly mention that in my view (and I suspect you'll agree with me here), condition (3) is the most problematic of the lot, not only because its notion of “reality” is so ill-defined, but also because it operates on the assumption that said “reality” is, well, really real. In fact we might even go so far as to add this as a fourth condition -- and one that I think would actually be necessary for a genuine case of religious experience to boot. Perhaps you might object, “But you haven't established that your extremely vague notion of 'reality' is real.” Indeed I haven't. I'm not even sure how one would go about arguing for the existence of something that's so ill-defined, but that aside, what I'm trying to do here is establish what I see as ontologically-sufficient conditions for what it is to actually be a genuine religious experience, not epistemically-sufficent conditions for what it would be to have justified belief that such an experience has occurred (whatever those might entail). As I see it, in order for you to have justified belief that a genuine religious experience has occurred, you'd have to have justified belief that my all-too-vague notion of “reality” is real, and even if I thought I could convince you of that with some argument, that's not what I'm aiming for here.
I don't think we could ever tell with absolute certainty whether or not a case of someone else's supposed religious experience is genuine. From our vantage point, it's at least epistemically possible for any such case to be false. I mean, anyone can just lie, right? How could we possibly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that someone did not have an experience she claims to have had? I don't think we could. What's left for us to do, then, is to assign an epistemic probability to that person's claim, and our assessment of whether or not she is probably telling the truth will depend upon the epistemic resources available to us. In other words, it will depend upon what all it is that we happen to know (or perhaps otherwise justifiably believe) that's of relevance to the circumstances, and this will vary from person to person. Also, one's epistemic resources might not always be sufficiently communicable in order to convince someone else, and I think this is especially true for cases where we're talking about claimed experiences.
The cognitive faculties, by themselves? I don't see why they would.
When you look at an image, such as the one below, does your visual cortex resolve it as a static image, or one that appears to have movement? Even when you know that, intellectually, that the truth is that the image is actually static, does the perception of movement persist?
But don't we still use our cognitive faculties to determine that such pictures aren't actually moving, even if we do so by means of some methodology? Why is it that we come use methodologies, unless we rely on our cognitive faculties to have told us that doing so produces accurate results reliably? Whether we use methodologies or not, I don't see any way for us to escape the fact that we rely upon our cognitive faculties to give us true beliefs, perhaps not all of the time, but at least most of the time.
I think such people have a tendency to take certain Bible stories a bit more literally than they should. I also think their efforts to proselytize tend to be seriously misguided. Beating people over the head with the Bible and telling them that God's gonna torture them forever if they don't literally believe it is the wrong way to go about preaching the Gospel, IMV.
I can certainly understand why you would think so. Something like that would certainly be radically different from anything we could directly perceive in the world of our everyday experience, but to those of us who accept such a view -- and there are many theists who do not accept it (including Plantinga and William Lane Craig, to drop a couple of big names) -- anything less than that could not be absolute and ultimate in the way that God's supposed to be.
Well, I think they're wrong.
Or at the very least, I think they have a deep and profound misunderstanding of how Christianity works.Yes, you make a good point here. Actually, I think a third condition is needed to constitute a genuine religious experience. I should have addressed it in my last post, but for whatever reason it just didn't occur to me.
In my last post, I offered these two conditions as sufficient to constitute a genuine religious experience:
(1) that the experience be of a sort that falls in line with what we would typically call “religious experience,”
and
(2) that it have some sort of positive effect on the life of the person who's experienced it.
To those I'd like to add the following:
(3) that the experience convey to the person who's had it justified true belief to the effect that it was caused to happen by some sort of reality that is imperceptible by way of the faculties that we ordinarily use to perceive and understand the world around us.
Now, I'd like to point out that while I'm sure it's the case far more often than not that those who have had religious experiences have far more detailed and specific (and even contradictory) sets of beliefs regarding those experiences than simply what I've provided in (3), I do not see such beliefs as being always and necessarily sufficient to invalidate their attendant experiences, provided that such beliefs not be both false and directly communicated by said experiences. For example, I think it's perfectly normal for people to have a tendency to try to interpret such experiences within a familiar religious context, by using familiar religious concepts and language to try to express what it is they've experienced, and I don't see why the presence of such interpretations should serve to undermine the validity their attendant experiences. However, I think it's important to note that I do not believe that a genuine religious experience would directly communicate false information to its subject, as I think that doing so would constitute a violation of (2) above. So a genuine (i.e. a veridical) religious experience would not directly tell someone that P is the case (for any false proposition P) if in fact it is not the case that P.
I might also briefly mention that in my view (and I suspect you'll agree with me here), condition (3) is the most problematic of the lot, not only because its notion of “reality” is so ill-defined, but also because it operates on the assumption that said “reality” is, well, really real. In fact we might even go so far as to add this as a fourth condition -- and one that I think would actually be necessary for a genuine case of religious experience to boot. Perhaps you might object, “But you haven't established that your extremely vague notion of 'reality' is real.” Indeed I haven't. I'm not even sure how one would go about arguing for the existence of something that's so ill-defined, but that aside, what I'm trying to do here is establish what I see as ontologically-sufficient conditions for what it is to actually be a genuine religious experience, not epistemically-sufficent conditions for what it would be to have justified belief that such an experience has occurred (whatever those might entail). As I see it, in order for you to have justified belief that a genuine religious experience has occurred, you'd have to have justified belief that my all-too-vague notion of “reality” is real, and even if I thought I could convince you of that with some argument, that's not what I'm aiming for here.
I don't think we could ever tell with absolute certainty whether or not a case of someone else's supposed religious experience is genuine. From our vantage point, it's at least epistemically possible for any such case to be false. I mean, anyone can just lie, right? How could we possibly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that someone did not have an experience she claims to have had? I don't think we could. What's left for us to do, then, is to assign an epistemic probability to that person's claim, and our assessment of whether or not she is probably telling the truth will depend upon the epistemic resources available to us. In other words, it will depend upon what all it is that we happen to know (or perhaps otherwise justifiably believe) that's of relevance to the circumstances, and this will vary from person to person. Also, one's epistemic resources might not always be sufficiently communicable in order to convince someone else, and I think this is especially true for cases where we're talking about claimed experiences.
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Peter1000
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Thank you for the prevailing cosmological model for the universe.
An integral part of the big bang theory is the Planck Epoch. This is the most important time of all the time frames contructed by this model. The time of this Epoch is from 0 to 10^-43 seconds.
I would like you to tell me how scientists have tested this hypothesis and 1)confirmed it is true or
2)have falsified it as untrue?
Oh, there is one more option: maybe this Epoch is untestable, and unfalsifiable. Let me know if this is the case.
Thanks, this will be a great help for me.
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Peter1000
Well-Known Member
There is one other option as to what would be better. There would be nothing better than a man that has his sins removed and then sees God and then continues to do His will.
Not sure how to answer this reguarding a gigantic Puppeteer. I have never quite pictured God in that fashion.
And please explain what is in parenthasees (just because it is His turn)? Thanks
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Peter1000
Well-Known Member
I'm not sure what you mean by finite? You know that if you climb into a space ship that can travel
670,615,299 miles per hour it will take you 1,111 human years to cross the Milky Way galaxy.
If you travel 670,615,299 mph you can travel 1 light year in 1 human year.
It takes 100,000 light years to just cross the milky way galaxy.
If a man lives 90 human years, it would take 1,111 human years to cross the milky way galaxy.
It is 2.5 million light years from our milky way galaxy to the next nearest galaxy to us, the Andromeda galaxy. it would take 27,777 human lives to get to the start of this galaxy.
There are billions of galaxies just in the part of the universe that we can see. Finite is difficult to see.
When I hear finite, I think of getting into a space ship, and traveling in any direction, but because I can only go a finite distant, I will eventually smack into a wall. Or I eventually come to the universe starting line. In front of the line is a fully functional universe. Behind the line is nothing, all black or all white.
What I am saying is there was a beginning, but we do not know how the universe got started. No way to test the Planck Epoch. Nobody knows how the universe got started, except we have faith that ID was the responsible agent. How He did it is unknown to believers and scientists alike. We can see His handiwork though when we look at the universal constants. They are so precision, that it had to be an ID with the intelligence to program the elements in such a precise manner. No chance for a chance happening, too precision. A tiny amount off 1 way of the other, and no universe.
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