Who told you this, and what are his qualifications?
I like all things out in the open for all to see, cuts down on the insults and personal attacks.
If your own blog insults you, feel free to correct it.
Well then, according to your post we will never know whether Einstein believed in God or not. I have read many of his books and from them I believe, he believed in God. There is nothing wrong with a non-personal God. Millions of people believe in a non-personal God. However if you seek and knock you will find God is not so non-personal any more.
It doesn’t, no problem there.
God, he is the Creator of all things.
Read it in a book, or divine revelation?
Did you even read the post to which you responded? Oh well, anyway:
Statement 1 is true - the universe was not set up at all much less to please any individual.
Statement 2 is not true - I don’t know what lekatt means by free will but I suspect he’s thinking of something we don’t even have, and of course God didn’t give us anything, being fully occupied by the task of not existing.
Statement 3 is true and false - we have no reason to hurry, since there is no god to find or imposed goal at all, but we do not have an eternity.
Statement 4 is true - gravity is no respecter of persons.
Statement 5 is false and gravely insulting to the hundreds of millions of people who have made honest efforts to try to gain faith but never recieved it.
Statement 6 is false because those who actually do nothing don’t care and aren’t disappointed.
If you were really all about love, lekatt, you would never say things like statement 5.
You know, I think this might actually help clear up the discussion, now that I think about it. Basically, I like to describe my belief as saying God is the ultimate dominoes player. Being omnipotent and omniscient, God is capable of setting up a set of dominoes in such a way that he knows exactly how and when each domino in the series will fall. As such, it seems more consistent to me that God would set up the dominoes to fall exactly how he wants them to and then sort of kick them off. A God that has to keep stepping in and making adjustments seems to me to be a sign that either he didn’t know exactly how they would fall, violating omniscience, or that he wasn’t able to set them up that way, violating omnipotence. Of course, he is capable of intervening, it just seems, for lack of a better term… weak.
Now, that’s not to say that he doesn’t have a way of influencing action, but it’s all part of that ultimate game of dominoes, as he’d know exactly what needed to happen when, so why would he reach in and intervene when he could have set up the natural process to do exactly what he wanted to happen at exactly the right time?
That is, if we’re viewing something as a miracle, like say when Elijah’s challenge to the followers of Baal. Let us say, for the sake of this point, that the events happened more or less as described. Obviously God could create fire then and and there, but that is more of an interventionalist type of God. Instead, I think it was probably a natural phenomenon. The miracle in either case, isn’t whether or not reached in and manipulated the laws of physics, but that it happened exactly in accordance with the predictions of the prophet.
…I hope my explanation makes sense, it’s something I’ve had difficulty articulating in the past.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think our decisions are heavily influenced by all the factors that you indicate. In fact, in some ways our histories and physiology can eliminate or force certain options in some cases, but I think in most they simply serve as weighting mechanisms; however, I don’t see how it makes things chaotic. That, to me, seems to assume that, once those weights are established, that we’re going to choose randomly amongst them with those constraints. I get that that’s probably the only meaningful way to deterministically model it because that’s just how non-deterministic processes appear within a deterministic frame of reference.
I have a hard time buying that. Going back to the tic-tac-toe example, I could play any number of games against an opponent of any skill level and never lose; I’d say that would qualify me as a perfect player. The reason I make those decisions isn’t because I’m forced to by the quality of being a perfect player, but because my decisions will be consistent with my motivation, which is to never lose. Am I unable to make a sub-optimal move? Absolutely not.
That is, I think the description of “perfect” is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, it is an emergent property that arises from omniscience because he is able to determine, even in the massive statespace that is the universe, exactly what the ideal action is for any given state.
And this is all the makes us not perfect, is our inability to necessarily determine that a particular action will necessarily be the optimal one toward our goal. Regardless, we will always try to make the action that best fits with our motivation. If we didn’t make choices that match our motivation, then we would indeed be acting randomly.
FWIW, I’m not a creationist… at least not in that sense. It just seems to me like the problem your running into is an assumption about what God’s goals in creating us is and then believe that manner in which humanity was created doesn’t fit that goal. I believe that, as part of that goal, God wanted us to learn to choose to do good and, as such, the manner in which humanity was created is consistent with that goal.
There is, of course, another potential problem here in the assumption that creation is somehow done. In the manner that I think God created the universe, essentially setting it up to roll out and basically just tipping the first domino, exactly what is “creation”? Was it just the very first moment when things got turned on? In that case, we really weren’t directly created at all. Were we done being created the moment we became humans? Even there, you’d be hard-pressed to draw any meaningful line where one generation isn’t human and the next is. Or is creation an ongoing process where, in fact, we’re effectively still being created even now? We certainly aren’t at his goal yet, muchless whenever we may have been “created”.
To be honest, I don’t really have a good answer for this that will solve this to your satisfaction, because I think it’s really one of those things where we’d have to peer into God’s mind to really know. It seems to me that you think that evil is avoidable, and perhaps it is, I don’t know, but I don’t think that means it is necessarily inconsistent with God’s motivation and, therefore, imperfect.
I think part of the problem here is a difference in perspective. I would agree that unnecessary evil probably violates the proposed properties of God, and we can come up with countless examples of starving children in Africa, and injured children in the war-torn middle East but, quite frankly, I don’t have any kind of perspective to those sorts of events to make any sort of meaningful judgment about them for each individual life. Those are very easy circumstances to look at as unnecessary evil.
Instead, I have certainly seen a share of “evil” in my own life. But even now, in the vast majority of those cases of “evil”, I have ultimately drawn lessons from them. There are some from which I haven’t, but I can’t think of any of them that are not relatively recent and, thus, just haven’t happened yet.
Now, you may say that they’re not really comparable, and you’d be absolutely right. But my path is my path and my path alone, just as is everyone else’s. It is up to use to evaluate the “evils” in our own lives. I’ve, in fact, found that there isn’t anything at all inherently “evil” about pain, grief, sadness, suffering, or any of these other things… but perhaps that’s getting into a completely different philosophical aspect of it all.
I think it does all come down to what “perfect” means, and perhaps this is where my other philosophical aspect comes into play that might make sense, at least for why it’s my perspective. I think part of the problem arises from a common idea that most people take for granted.
Why is sadness “bad”? Is it because it’s unpleasant? There’s many things that are unpleasant to varying degrees that people would say are good. In fact, I don’t even think sadness is necessarily unplesant; surely, we’ve all had those situations where we’ve been sad and indulged in the feeling, saying and doing things that just made us sadder. Is it because it results in “bad” things? Sure it can, but some “good” emotions things can result in “bad” things too. And, in fact, sadness doesn’t have to result in bad things; for example, there’s countless works of art that were inspired by and/or invoke sadness, and yet they’re beautiful. In the end, I don’t believe sadness is “bad”, nor is it “good” either; what makes it good or bad is what comes out if it.
In my philosophy, a similar argument can be made for pretty much any emotion, and many other “bad” things like suffering, loss, and violence, as well as for many “good” things too. The problem arises in generalizations that we see these sorts of things and try to put them in a box where one size fits all.
Imagine for a moment a goal where one has a goal where he wants to enjoy himself, eating some delicious cake, relaxing, and watching a good movie would all be “good” choices to that end. Now imagine he has a goal where he wants to get in shape, those are now “bad” choices. To me, asking why “evil” has to exist would be like taking this example and asking why does cake taste so good if one can’t eat it when trying to lose weight. It’s conflating the two goals.
I’m not saying that suffering necessarily makes one better, but rather that I think it’s possible that sometimes it is the shortest path to the goal. The idea of morality, to me, is that it’s our “best guess” at a method for choosing which options to take when traversing the statespace that is the universe. One with low morality will more often choose worse options than someone with higher morality. As our morality grows, we will become more likely to make better choices toward that ultimate goal. It’s a continuing iterative process.
More or less, N/A on both things. Obviously, the first question depends one what heaven is. I see it as the dwelling place of God and, hopefully, eventually us, once we’ve learned what we’re here to learn.
The second one, really, just doesn’t make sense within my beliefs, at least. That is, I believe “before” doesn’t make sense within that context, as time is a property of the the natural world, and is not a property of God. I believe he is a non-temporal being. It’d be akin to asking who the best football player was in 1850, when football hadn’t been invented yet.
Fair questions, and I don’t really have good answers for you. Does learning even make sense for God? If he’s omniscient, is there, in fact, anything he can learn? I tend to believe, and I’m still iterating on this one, that his omniscience is actually more of an emergent property of him being a non-temporal being. That is, he knows everything, because he effectively can see everything at any time… even thought that doesn’t really make sense.
As an attempt at an analogy, imagine you’re taking an exam for a college course. If one student is taking it in a classroom, his knowledge on the material is limited to whatever he learned and studied on. Now imagine another student got the exact same exam, except he get to take it home, can use any resources he wants, and effectively has as much time as he wants. Now imagine the TA grading the exams is under the impression that both students took the exam in the classroom when grading it. Assuming the second student made good use of his resources and time, he ought to have gotten everything right, and from the perspective of the TA and the other student, he’ll appear to have mastered the material, but really, there wasn’t any way that he wouldn’t have gotten them right. This is how I view our perspective of God; being unconstrained by time, and having access to infinite resources, he inherently knows everything.
Sure thing!
Statement 5 is a contradiction, you don’t try to gain faith, you either have it or no.
But if you really want to feel the presence of God, there is a path. Jesus taught that path.
Neither, learned it from my experience.
In reference to your reference of Einstein’s faith:
Einstein’s God was similar to Spinoza’s God which is similar to God = Everything… which is similar to atheism.
If so then “Those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door open,” would be a bald-faced lie. I don’t think you were lying when you wrote it; you are clearly just having trouble dealing with the contradictions in your worldview.
And that path is a method of trying to gain faith. Yep, you have some bubbles under your wallpaper…
Yes, then black must be similar to white. Your logic is beyond my understanding.
Faith is a choice, you either choose to have faith or not. Your logic is faulty.
Voyager, I would try to answer your questions and make a comment or two to others, but what is the point now that Czarcasm’s comments have made this about lekatt.. I didn’t think that lekatt had been unreasonable in this thread.
Exercising your newly found freedom, Mr. C.?
God is interpreted by the bible and other religious texts. Just because some hairy bunch of hebrew speaking dudes claim that god does/says/is X does not mean it is true, and the same goes for arabic speaking dudes, or latin speaking dudes. God neither loves nor hates anybody, he/she/it/they simply exists.
I have no doubt that there is a spirit in all of us and in nature, I simply do not think it actively does anything except exist. Religion is simply our attempt at forcing it into a mold so we can explain and quantify something that has no physical existence. It is nice that this attempt has given us a framework of social behaviors, though the generated morality laws are senseless as I see no reason to penalize people with differing sexual preferences, or a desire to not procreate, or a differing viewpoint.
In other words it is just in your mind; you taught your self to accept your own ideas about a higher power!
Are you saying that if we exercise our free will and it doesn’t agree with what God wants we are condemned, even if it is impossible to know God’s will? It would seem that Jesus didn’t know God’s will as (in the Garden before His death) He asked the Father if it was His will to lift the burden from Him! Then said Your will be done!
If I tell my child that he may go to the movies if he wills it, but since it is my will that he doesn’t, I will kill him if he goes, that is not free will. It is just the freedom to do the parent,s will not his own!
So if you choose to want faith, try to find it and are still unable to get it, is the problem with you or is it because God as hardened your heart?