Well, if the creator was that good, he could just wire the brains of seemingly rational people to perceive the world as either being created or as being not created, which ever is more suitable for the divine strategy.
The point of origin tag is sewn on the outside, but if you look in just the right spot you can see the stitching from inside.
Well, I’m an atheist who hopes he’s wrong (I want an afterlife), but I do agree think Testament God was a complete psychopath. I also do not believe, if they should they exist, the Old Testament God and Jesus are the same person, at all, in any way. No way that guy came down here and decided to chillax.
I tend to take the deist approach if God exists. He made it, and then backed off, intervening rarely if at all, leaving men to their own devices. That would completely reconcile why earth is sh_tty. If earth was supposed to be like heaven with no problems, then what’s the point of the distinction.
Why not? Natural processes explain all of it far better than the alternative of supernatural creation. How did you come to eliminate natural selection, et al, as an explanation for what you’re observing?
Why on earth would a natural process preclude these? Why would a natural process “create” something utopian by human standards?
I had this acid trip. I became aware of the fact that the smallest entities in the universe each entirely contain the whole, and the passage of time is the paradoxical imbalance of the universe trying to resolve itself. The entity of you emerged out of the decay of a pi meson, merged with the entity of a free neutron that bound to an atom of fluorine, gradually progressing into what inhabits your present transient form.
Your metaphysique is a composite unity that will continue to progress as each of its host forms fail to support it. The end of the line is the entire universe itself, after which the greater being which you have joined will emerge from the decay of a tau lepton to continue its sojourn toward universal wholeness. Creation is not a moment but an eternity, always happening.
The downside to this view is that saving lives is not necessarily a good thing, because fighting off the inevitable might be restraining the progress of of metaphysical being toward reaching wholeness.
The other downside is that I have not been able to find the guy that made that acid. That was a fucking good recipe.
Cool trip man. My hope is that life is a video game, and after I die I can just put in another quarter. 
But only if I can buy a DLC with a million dollar bonus pack first.
my other cheat code is JESUS.
Why does he have to be either (or not both)? There are any number of open world games that let collections of players do pretty much do whatever they want. What many seem to want to do is troll, grief, hack and otherwise create a shitty experience for everyone else.
That was beautiful.
I feel like I was just serenaded with the universe song.
To the OP: Chin up, lad. It can’t be all that bad.
“The Bird is cruel!”
“What? Out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke
of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
of everlasting penalties, if broke?” :dubious:
Who needs 10 Kyears? I once did a fun talk on prediction in science fiction based on Star Trek (TOS).
You know - turbolift doors that are at almost every supermarket, Yeoman Rand having Kirk sign orders on her tablet, Uhura and her Bluetooth headset, away teams calling on their cellphones, Sulu inserting a USB memory into the nav console, McCoy using a pressure injector, etc., etc., et cetera. :smack:
I have heard an argument based on the concept that a created universe would be discontinuous and have pixels.
By the way, the Universe is discontinuous (quantum theory) and has a pixel size (Planck length) 
I haven’t eliminated natural processes or natural selection. I just disagree with the idea that they are “blind.”
I would argue that life on Earth serves a cosmic “plan,” and is modified at the macro level in order to fulfill this function.
how would you argue this ?
what is the plan?
What evidence that we are fullfilling a ‘function’ within it?
The plan is beyond our comprehension. The superbeing is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, yet somehow it has wants, it can take action (something that would seem impossible for an omnipotent entity) and it gets angry. If you cannot make sense of those contradictory properties, any “plan” is going to be impossible to ken.
Fair enough. I suppose this outcome would be “and then the cavemen found the fountain of youth and a respawning device that will restore then sans recent memories whenever they die”. 10,000 years later, these same cavemen would still be basically cavemen. They wouldn’t have created what we have created.
thats complete gobbledygook.
well spotted