That still requires the value judgement that being represented better in the next generation is the objective.
I mean we could just as well say that the objective is extinction. It’s just that some species and individuals have traits like “fear of heights” and “enjoying sex” that make them spectacularly bad at fulfilling their purpose.
In any case, even if nature did have an objective purpose that’s no reason why humans must obey this. Who cares if evolution brought me here? I don’t owe it anything. I choose my purpose in life to be to break the coconut balancing world record.
This is always the problem. My answer to “What would convince you?” is, “I honestly don’t know.”
But here’s the thing: If the God of the Bible as described by Christians actually does exist, with the attributes they ascribe to that entity, specifically including omniscience and omnipotence, then that entity knows what would convince me. And it should be able to pull it off as well.
So, the real answer is, “God can make me believe in it by making me believe in it.”
That this has never happened leads me to one of two conclusions: either God doesn’t exist, or God doesn’t want me to believe in it. Either way, my lack of belief is therefore okay, so stop bothering me.
If you mean the fact that things in nature seem to be able to survive and go about their business in whatever place they are, it could not really be otherwise. If there were things in nature that were not able to survive and go about their business, you wouldn’t be seeing them, or at best, you would be seeing their corpses.
So this would be the case regardless of whatever mechanism caused those things to come into existence, so it’s not an argument for anything in particular other than ‘things are the way they are’.
One piece of observation that tends to counter-indicate design is that we don’t see re-use of major features (which human designers do a lot) - it would be a confounding puzzle for biologists if, for example, flying fish had the exact same design of wings as, say, puffins, or if armadillos had the same kind of shell as isopod crustaceans.
Designers, especially competent ones, often copy-paste a major feature from one design to another, rather than inventing it all over again from scratch. The only commonality we really see in terms of similar ‘design’ is entirely consistent with what we understand (for other reasons including genetics) to be the closeness of relation between species; A lot of insects use similar wing designs because of common descent; if we saw insect-type wings on something quite unrelated to insects, it would be a puzzle, for which one possible solution might be ‘a designer exists, and re-used a template’.
Now I understand why Israel’s state airline is called El Al! Because it’s first pilot was Kal-El. And he did not even need a plane! Obvious, really, with hindsight.
Not that this helps in the debate, but I always thought it was a very interesting concept from a cartoon. Maybe there is a God and he’s out there just nudging us once in a while, that’s cool. I’m still not going to go all in on the local Christian church, as if they know what’s going on.
But that just pushes the question of “Where did it come from?” back one more step. God created the Universe, fine, but then, where did God come from? We still don’t have an actual answer to “What created reality?” because this God would be part of reality.
If you say that God came into existence all by himself, then why can’t the Universe have done the same?
Well, the difference between omnipotent and nigh-omnipotent is both critical, and probably impossible for us to determine. For your example, the Book of Revelation has existed for many centuries. I’d think it a fairly trivial matter for super-advanced aliens to have acquired a copy, and thus know what “miracles” they need to reproduce to copy Revelation accurately. After that, it’s just a matter of “Can they fake it well enough?”, and with Alien Super-Science, that seems entirely plausible to me. We’ve all seen Star Trek, after all. Teleporters, tractor beams, artificial gravity, holodecks, nanotechnology - those would all work really well together to reproduce any “miracle” you might list.
Well, someone has to be the most stubborn, right? Pretty much by definition. If the Jews as we know them didn’t exist, we’d be talking about someone else. Like the Amish, maybe. They stick to their beliefs even in the face of internet porn and muscle cars! Amazing!
Yes, but as I said, “The God of the Bible (as described by Christians)”. That God is, by definition and demonstration, a Jealous God, one who demands worship and sacrifice. I can’t reconcile that God with one who is laid back enough to not care if I believe or not.
As to the subject, God used to perform miracles all day long in the Old and New Testaments. Let’s see some miracles these days, then we’ll talk. How about a prayer circle that restores all the missing limbs to all the amputees in a hospital, then it works at another hospital, then a VA facility, etc. Or, some cool Star Trek-like interference in a war, where the two sides fighting literally could no longer touch their weapons, thereby ending a war.
All the possible arguments have been tried and failed to convert the unconverted. There are no arguments you can use to convince someone that God exists, but if God wanted to convince people, He knows how.
ISTM that two things that differentiate Jews from other groups in antiquity and through to the modern era is the expectation that most (men, at least) will be literate, and that discussing and debating the scriptures (and everything else) is an accepted, even required, practice.
Literacy gave ordinary people, not just the priests and elites, direct access to scripture, which meant that dispersed groups retained the same core texts and traditions. Other groups, who only had oral traditions, would be more likely to diverge from their original sources when isolated, and eventually mutate into a new “species” of religion.
Holding to their traditions strengthened their identity as Jews, but also isolated them from the communities they moved into, which sadly led to their being scapegoated and often purged. But it also meant they could more easily join and be accepted by any other community of Jews they found in their travels.
Exactly. At some point, you either give up trying to answer this question, because you conclude that it’s fundamentally impossible for a human to answer it, or you go with the easy option - the Universe that we can see came into existence all on its own, via some natural process. Even if that’s a process that may be fundamentally impossible for a human to explain or understand.
At least with the second option, there’s a possibility that someone, someday might understand it.
Or he doesn’t care if you believe. Or he’d like you to believe, but only as an act of faith. Not arguing for these, just pointing out there are other possibilities. There could be a God completely apathetic regarding humans.
Well, yeah, to an extent that is clearly true. But it isn’t a coincidence; Rabbinical Judaism is a faith that was forged by the Babylonian exile (with OG proto-Judaism, which was a form of Monolatry rather than true Monotheism, going extinct outside of relict populations such as in Elephantine). Is it any wonder that a religion created by exile is good at surviving exile?
He also tells Abraham that he will have asamy descendents as there are stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach. So I’m gonna take that to mean that humanity will eventually colonize the galaxy, because it’s gonna take a whole lot of planets to fit that many Jews.
What I don’t like about religious people is that they presume to know what “reality” is, based off their belief system. And they tend to not react well to evidence that is contrary to what they already “know”.
That said, using your fish metaphor, a fish does not have the mental capacity to understand its “universe” beyond very basic concepts of “food”, “temperature”, “predators”, etc. A fish doesn’t grasp why these things in its watery world change or that it’s world is part of a larger and more diverse global ecosystem that is part of a much larger and more complex universe.
We humans are a bit smarter, but even with our science we still don’t understand how much of “reality” actually works. At least not as anything beyond some abstract mathematical constructs.
So could there be some higher mechanic to how the universe works that is beyond our current human perception or understanding? Sure. I mean most people are pretty fucking ignorant about how some of the most mundane aspects of the actual known world works, whether it’s why their interest rates went up or how their meat actually gets to the supermarket.
Does that mean the existence of some judgey God who will smite people for not following some arbitrary code of morality? No.
This comes up a lot in these kinds of conversations. “Well, maybe there’s a God that started it all, you can’t prove that’s not the case.” The problem is that no one in real life cares about that kind of deist god. That kind of watchmaker deist god doesn’t demand anything, have anything to do with morality or rules and regulations. It makes for a weird step – god is a watchmaker who set up initial conditions just right so that humans will evolve, therefore gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married.
Anyway, I guess I’m done with this thread unless @philipdalton decides to grace us with his presence again.
That’s probably the closest comparison you’ll find. The major distinction is that the Zoroastrians weren’t dispersed around the world, but clustered in two geographically cohesive communities in northeastern Iran and Gujarat. Someone above mentioned the Basques, but they don’t count for this purpose because they don’t have their own religion (and were never exiled). The Amish and the Mormons need to keep it up a few more centuries in order to get into this discussion.