See, if I was a scientist, I would be fascinated with the Why of things. Perhaps that’s why I’m not a scientist.
Well, there’s always a why, but sometimes (very often?) the why is a reason and not a purpose.
Beginning from “everything must have a purpose” is not an honest way to go about things.
No, you would probably be interested in the how.
Why do the major intelligent species on our planet look like us? We know how we evolved, but the why is probably random. Through a series of random events - like the asteroid hitting - some primates became intelligent. If you demand a why you wind up with theistic evolution. Which explains nothing beyond what secular evolution does.
Well… the Gospel of John says Jesus is God, and in John 14:6, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life…” so yeah, God=Jesus and Jesus=Life, therefore by the transitive property of equality, God=Life. </sarcasm>
Back when I was on my way to becoming an atheist but hadn’t quite got there yet, I often considered the analogy My Body : My Self :: The World : God. I can plainly see that my body is comprised of lots of tiny pieces, each of which are somewhat alive but have no consciousness, no self, no identity, yet taken as a whole I do have a consciousness. It is reasonable to suspect that Earth (being comprised of lots of tiny pieces, some of which are alive) may have a conscious self as well, but it’s on such a higher level that we humans are no more able to communicate with it than my white blood cells are capable of communicating with me. Or maybe the universe itself has a consciousness. You could call it God, or Life, I suppose.
But where does that get us? Not very far, actually. Just because Earth or the universe might have a consciousness doesn’t prove that it does. And since my consciousness did not create my body but rather my body created my consciousness, then our analogy suggests that God did not create the universe but rather the universe created God. And if this consciousness does exist, we have very little hope of communicating with it or even trying to figure out what it wants, let alone being able to please it and gain its favor. And there’d be absolutely no reason to believe in life-after-death, let alone have rules spelled out about what you have to do to earn a ticket to heaven. Whatever we have described here bears very little resemblance to the “God” as meant by most people alive today. It certainly isn’t all-powerful, or all-knowing, and it didn’t even create the world. Not much of a “God” there, huh. Maybe it could qualify as a god-with-a-lowercase-g. Maybe.
This thought experiment gets us nowhere close to anything described by any mainstream religion. At best, it gets us to Animism. Personally, I have no problem with Animism. I’m just saying, if you wanted to get from “Earth might be alive” to “You must be baptized in the spirit to earn a ticket to heaven”, then I’m sorry but you still have a loonnngggg way to go.
I’m an Atheist. I believe there is no God. I mean there is no all-powerful all-seeing creator who judges us and hands out rewards and punishments. Put another way, in order to make it into something I could believe in, you’d have to twist the definition of “God” so far that you’d end up with something that really doesn’t deserve to be called “God” at all. This God=Life stuff is an example of that twisting.
I already answered that question–because the laws of physics allow self-replicating molecules to form given the right conditions. The same way that snowflakes can form. And solar systems. And oxbow lakes. And cubical pyrite crystals. Because life is one of the options that every once in a while a planet has the right environment for that complex chemical reaction to happen. I’m sorry that you seem to need to heR something more profound and meaningful and mystical than that, but you aren’t going to hear it from me.
Also, I have no idea what “that carbon dioxide thing” means.
I like the way you explain things. I also like the concept that the universe created God rather than the other way around. Something to explore there.
That carbon dioxide thing is me grossly misunderstanding the entropy argument, probably because it’s over my head. You don’t need to offer up anything more mystical on my account, and the ideas you’ve proposed so far give me much to ponder. So thank you for that.
Every event that happens has one or more preceding causes. So the premise is that the deity is cause prime. Hence, if the universe created the first cause, but the first cause had to precede the creation of the universe, you end up with a paradox that can only end with: they created each other, reflexively. Which, in the realm of mysticism, is not untenable.
Or you could surmise that time itself is not that simple, that the universe has always existed and always will, in terms of how we are able to understand it. Beginnings and ends make sense to us, so that is how our theories are structured. We could be misinterpreting the data due to some missing component that would change our point of view.
If the universe were not ever created, it would not require a prime cause, and it would not make sense for such an entity to have emerged. Although, I have to admit that the Earth has given rise to some frightfully odd lifeforms with some seriously superfluous features, so it might not be unreasonable to imagine that the universe has formed some sort of vestigial appendage. Maybe they even form and dissolve with regularity. But any deity is still going to be superfluous.
Not necessarily. He could simply subscribe to a concept of the Divine which supposes that religion is an inappropriate human response to It.
Or perhaps I’m merely not interested in attaching labels to things that don’t really fit those labels?
If someone comes up to you and says, “Do you believe in God”, what do you think they mean? Is it likely they mean “do you believe in Life”? Or “Do you believe in the universe”? Or do you think they mean “Do you believe in an anthropomorphic supernatural entity that can intercede on the behalf of humans who may or may not have any number of important supernatural qualities, depending on which religion we ascribe to”? Because you wouldn’t ask someone if they believe in life. Or if they believe in the universe.
You can define “god” any way you want. Just like I can define “chair” as “a sharp knife propped up vertically”. Or “dog” as “large, aggressive apex predator with stripes who has been starved for three days”. It’s just that when I sit you down in a chair and let my dog into the room, you’re going to end up very, very confused. Because while it’s true that words have usages, not meanings, and while it’s true that you can use words any way you like, if you want to communicate with other people, they’d better understand those usages.
And some words contain baggage. For example, if I say “chair”, I usually mean something comfortable to sit on. And if I say “god”, I usually mean some form of supernatural, intelligent deity. Because that’s how damn near everyone ever has always used the word! And when I say “god is life”, I’m taking a word that has a ton of baggage and using it in a completely weird way. There’s just no reason for it, unless you’re desperate to believe in something you can call “god”, but extremely uninterested in maintaining a coherent definition of said thing. Case in point:
Okay, but the roman catholic god is CLEARLY NOT LIFE. Like, they’re not even close to the same thing. The roman catholic god has a hell of a lot of qualities not shared by life! Like timelessness, omniscience, omnipotence, and a hatred for men boning each other.
This is, again, a deepity. There is a trivial manner in which it is true - ask two Christians about their god in detail, and sooner or later you’re going to reach a different answer - and the non-trivial implications are just downright false - ask a hundred people what the word “god” immediately implies to them, and you’re going to come up with some consensus implying that they’re talking about a deity, not “life” or “the universe”, unless your sample size is severely skewed in favor of new age hippies.
Given that, in all cases, the Christian God is pretty much always the invisible man in the sky, I don’t think it would be at all surprising to find as many different variations of God as there are people. Combine that with the thousands of gods that humans worship, and I think it’s much more than new age hippies who have different versions of god. For many of us, God is simply Life itself. I don’t see why that assertion should be so upsetting.
It’s not so much upsetting in itself as it is nonsensical. It doesn’t mean anything and has no basis in anything resembling observable or even commonly accepted definitions of the two words. May as well go around saying Soap is Radio. Feel free to do so if that makes you happy, but don’t expect everyone to jump on board with your free word association.
The problem with treating “god” and “life” as synonyms is that various people have certain ideas about what “god” means, and various ideas about what “life” means.
If we try to equate them, we’re going to find that lots of people carry over their ideas about “god” and think that those ideas now apply to “life” and vice versa.
So let’s list some of those ideas about god:
Eternal
Uncreated
Creator of the Universe
Performs miracles
Throws thunderbolts at people who annoy him
Is a him
Was incarnated as a human being at one point
Is an uncaused first cause
Is a person
Thinks thoughts
Listens to people’s thoughts
Hears prayers
Answers prayers (sometimes with “no”, but still)
Has a long list of rules for people to follow
If you don’t follow the rules as per above you’re in trouble with God
Inspired a bunch of people to write stuff
We know what stuff is divinely inspired and what isn’t
Carries around a big hammer to smite frost giants
When he incarnated as a human being he had blue skin
Ordered people to cut off some skin on their penises to prove their loyalty to him
Castrated his father with a sickle on the orders of his mother
Turned into a swan and totally boned some lady
Now, not everyone has all these ideas in their heads when they’re talking about god, and some people would stridently deny that these ideas belong on the list. But they’d agree that some people did have those mistaken ideas about god, but those people were wrong.
But when we say that God is Life, do we mean that life carries around a big hammer to smash frost giants? I don’t think so. But we do smuggle in some concepts about god. Especially things like “God is a person that thinks thoughts and cares about people”.
People who talk about an uncaused first cause are guilty of the same thing. OK, either there was an uncaused first cause, or the universe existed eternally, either way it’s kind of weird. But labeling the uncaused first cause “God” is an attempt to imply that we know a lot about this unknown uncaused first cause about which we actually know nothing. I mean, that uncaused first cause didn’t have a long white beard. He doesn’t sit on an ivory throne. He’s not a he. The universe began existing at some point, but naming the cause of the universe “God” confuses everything and explains nothing. It doesn’t add to our knowledge, it destroys our knowledge. So it’s a bad practice. What’s wrong with, if we believe in an uncaused first cause, or if we speculate about an uncaused first cause, just using the phrase “uncaused first cause”? Then we know precisely what we’re talking about with no hidden assumptions built in. There are assumptions built in to the concept, but there’ not nearly as hidden as if we called it “God” or some other more confusing name.
You know, in some ways Soap IS Radio…
Of course, you should all accept that Radio is this guy that lives the next town over from me and had a movie made about him.
my friend once had a Radio-on-a-Rope
In some ways, Shit is Shinola… :rolleyes:
– Groucho Marx
Care to sit in my chair and pet my dog? 
What qualities does “god” have? Can you define “god” for me?
There’s two options here.
Option A: “god” is equivalent to “life”. In that case, there’s no reason to use the word god. It achieves literally nothing that just saying “life” doesn’t, except attaching a lot of unnecessary baggage to the term.
Option B: “god” is similar to “life” but has some notable differences. In this case, there’s no reason to use the word life, beyond saying “it’s sorta like life, but…”. It’s just confusing to call god “life” when god clearly isn’t life, but rather something that means something that is either somewhat or entirely different.
Language is about usages, but I’m asking you, why are you using language this way?
I submitpost #174 for your consideration and conclusion.