You said God, not the universe. And most of your questions weren’t scientific. Such as :
That’s not a scientific question. It’s the kind of question asked by a religious person who mistakes science for something as baseless as his her own beliefs. It’s the kind of attempted “Gotcha !” question asked by someone who assumes that science, like religion is based on what some prophet said, and not on evidence.
Considering that all the evidence is that you believers DO just make it all up, or are delusional, it’s quite scientific. You have no evidence for anything else, after all, and you tend to believe things that outright contradict physical law and often simple logic.
I don’t agree. If you imagine a race of two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a sphere, that surface to them is the set of all possible positions. They can’t comprehend another dimension, where you and I exist and are observing them.
I think they are saying that God is somewhere other than the space that we observe. And that’s a decent logical cubby hole for them to retreat into, because it can’t be falsified.
In this sort of scenario, you and I could screw around with this race of 2D beings. Stick our finger through the surface and they see a circular object (where the surface intersects my finger) suddenly appearing in their world out of nowhere.
On the other hand, they are still saying that God occupies space, just that it’s not our space. We live upon a 3D surface in a higher-dimensional space, and God sits beyond our surface, sometimes interacting with it.
Although we can’t logically argue that this doesn’t happen, the argument will still come down to the problem of how they know this. Sure, I can make up a bunch of fantasy scenarios of a God that can’t be falsified, but then the problem is how you know which to believe. If they’re all unfalsifiable, there’s no way to sort them out.
There is no positive evidence for any of them - no evidence of miracles, and even the personal revelation reason that most believers would give can’t be maintained given that billions of people claim to have personal revelations from gods whose existence contradicts them.
So the only reasonable position is to provisionally accept the null hypothesis, that there is no God, until/unless evidence is produced.
It’ll get us there, yes. The problem is that since it isn’t a factor for a Creator, then when they in turn affect us, we won’t be as able to connect the dots. If, four thousand years hence, humanity commits a grevious crime by the standards of that Creator, the effect of that might be that we, today, are punished for that act. We who are used to cause and effect working fowards and only forwards are going to be looking for understanding in those terms - when it may very well be that responses and signs work backwards, or even happen at the exact same time.
I disagree. The Bible (for instance) does talk about God having moods, whether they be particularly happy or angry or whatever, and him doing things while in that mood. And, beyond that, unchanging doesn’t mean unchangeable. Besides, as per magellan’s arguments, i’m trying to go with a generic Creator God as far as this goes, rather than specific deities.
Really? If that’s what people mean, then what’s with this “God is everywhere” business? That sounds to me more like my analogy with the laws of physics, which in some sense are “everywhere” but at the same time don’t have any particular location.
If they literally mean “God is somewhere, just not here in our four dimensional (*) universe” why not just say that?
(*) well, four dimensional if you count time, but ignore string theory
We dont really have anywhere near the knowledge to have an educated debate about this subject.
Much of our present limited knowledge of astrophysics is guesswork,ie. dark matter,dark energy,the fact is we dont know why the rate of expansion of the universe is speeding up,why galaxies dont fly apart and why we’ve discovered galaxies that are theoretically too big to exist back in a much younger universe according to theory.
We dont understand Quantum physics generally as an example, why one particle can exist simultaneously in two places at the same time.
Black holes are now found to expel particles which we thought they couldn’t within our laws of physics.
We have never seen,touched,smelt,heard or otherwise directly sensed physical laws though we know that they exist by their indirect actions on reality,we dont really know what time and space are .
We also use the human experience of logic in our explanations,cause and effect etc. which could well be a random blip in the multiverse and of course human expectations.
It is intellectual arrogance on our part to think that we can quantify the universe on our limited science and observation.
A little bit of self congratulatory ego massage on our part.
You might just as well find bacteria that understand the use and theory of quadratic equations.
You’re still trying to describe timeless in terms of time. I’d add that the term punishment or reward is also our perspective alone. I have to think that even the way in which we perceive time and cause and effect are also part of creation and set up to work in harmony with the timeless and to move us to that end.
Ancient man saw the sun rise and set and didn’t know why. He didn’t know about orbits , but only what he saw from his perspective. For a day to day existence of hunting and gathering and survival knowledge of the solar system doesn’t matter at all, but still something within man drove him to discover and understand and seek to improve. We’re still in that process and our perspective is still limited.
I don’t see it that way. I’m thinking of a creative force that we are connected to rather than apart from and controlled by. Our problems arise form not being aware of that connection and operating as if we weren’t connected. It’s all speculation.
I’m curious about the “Sim City” model put forth by some. If we are just characters totally under control of some ultragamers, does this totally eliminate free will and/or personal responsibility?
“I’m not a emu raper-I’m just written that way!”
Just my 2 cents but I’d say the players are the programmer{s} as well. Personal responsibility and free will are part of the program, the catch being to realize they and we are part of the program.
I think it would eliminate free will, but I don’t believe that this in turn eliminates personal responsibility – for even if your actions are totally determined by your surroundings, the concept of personal responsibility is part of those surroundings and thus, part of the determining factors of your actions. Thus, living in a society that punishes based on personal responsibility means that fear of this punishment at least in part determines whether or not a given action is carried out. That’s why the nonexistence of free will isn’t a literal ‘get out of jail free’-card.
Its a vote for its being a meaningless debate,like Swahili speaking illiterates discussing the subtler nuances of obscure fourteenth century,Polish Alchemists.
There are many people who labour under the illusion that we’ve got science in general cracked all bar the detail we haven’t.
Is the idea that God lives outside of space and time an ancient idea, or a more modern one necessitated by claims that evidence of his existence could not be found in this universe?
That’s interesting. We do see in the OT references to time even though one day for God is a thousand years for us. Of course the fact that some modern folks take that literally doesn’t mean the author intended it to be.
Dont get me wrong I think that its an incredibly interesting subject myself but I think that some people feel confident enough to make definite statements based on a myopic world/cosmological view.
We dont use chopsticks in my country therefore chopsticks dont exist as far as any culinary debate is concerned.
Of course i’m trying to describe timeless in terms of time. That’s my point - it’s hard for us to even wrap our minds around that idea. Our language is built up around the idea that time flows fowards - even the very idea of a language as most exist is dependent on being able to form sentences and an order to words. Our perceptions are incredibly strongly linked to time. It, to me, makes no sense to say that our perceptions of one thing are designed so that we are able to understand a completely different and alternate thing. The very fact that we have conceptions of that first idea pretty much says to me that we are more focused upon that.
Let me ask this of you; describe “timeless” not in terms of time, not in terms of how it differs from time as we generally understand it.
I agree. But this applies as equally to your thoughts as to mine.
This seems like a rather worrying idea, at least in terms of belief. If you agree with it, excellent, clearly you are connected to it. If you don’t agree, ah, that’s because you aren’t aware of the connection, so you can’t know the truth. It’s very susceptible to the “you can only know if you’re a believer” argument, which i’m really not a fan of.
That said, your proposal provides for a Creator interacting within space-time, so that does at least give us some area on which to study.
I think more modern, since in the old days God or the gods lived over the next hill - first inside the volcano, then on top of a mountain or over the rainbow, and then in the sky. Once we were able to explore all those places, God moved to where we can’t explore.
I don’t know of many definitions of “free will” that withstand even cursory scrutiny, under any model. Does a human with an aversion to pain have free will, despite being ‘controlled’ by their desire to avoid pain?
Assuming you can have both free will and inborn preferences, then when talking about a ‘sim city’ model the question comes down to whether there’s an engine for decisions to be made independent of any controlling gamer, and how much of your decision-making process comes from the game, and how much comes from the gamer. If we’re all being controlled directly by the gamer like the avatar in a first-person shooter, then we either have no free or we inherit the free will of the gamer without knowing it; if we’re like the sims in the original sims game, who get occasional directions from the gamer but otherwise are left to their own devices, then we have free will except when the gamer comes in and overrides it with their commands; and if we’re NPCs, we’re either relatively autonomous ones like the average monster in a game, or we’re heavily scripted ones like the dude running the counter at the shop, with our “free will” varying accordingly.