But almost everyone who believes in God goes well beyond this basic level. If your God is defined as having done all the stuff science can’t “prove” (actually demonstrate) he hasn’t done, fine. But even your list is wrong. Any God worthy of the name who intelligently designed us would do an optimal design, and we are far from optimally designed, worse in some ways than some other creatures not made in his image. Did your God get a D in design class? Very hard to explain why an intelligent designer would make us such a botch, easy to explain given undirected evolution. We also have the problem of why God designed the universe, and then waited so long to create our Sun. Time may mean nothing to him, but why wait? It is inefficient and also suboptimal.
The real reason, besides the impossibility of an existential disproof where the the thing to be disproven can be anywhere in the Universe, is that God is so ill-defined. If your God has only unfalsifiable characteristics, it can’t be disproven by definition. It also, by definition, can have no real impact on us, unless you count the fantasies we make up about it out of whole cloth.
Those who believe in God, and think God has communicated with us, and who also think that why we are the way we are is somehow important, need to explain why God never told the actual story to any culture. The basic idea of evolution is a lot simpler than many of the rituals described in the Torah. Did God flunk writing also?
So, what are the characteristics of this spiritual nature of God? Does it have any impact on our world? If not, science can say nothing about it, but it also doesn’t matter. Religion based on this spiritual God is just like porn based around the sexiest woman in the universe, who lives over 15 billion ly away, and who can’t be described except that she is the sexiest. You might get off on the concept, but it isn’t anything to build your life around.
Steel, though, was important, would you agree? I suppose if there was a primal moment where Christianity firmly grabbed hold of the Roman Empire, it was when Constantine embraced it, and this was after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, not the Civilized Round-table of Cultural Tolerance of the Milvian Bridge.
And germs have certainly always been a wildcard, where battles could be won or lost based on how effectively dysentery and typhus and whatnot weakened one or both warring armies.
There’s no mention of aliens in the Abrahamic religion. There’s not a lot of wiggle room in the concept of “those who don’t believe are heathens”, either, and while it’s been relatively easy in the past to convert people labeled as heathens (and when it fails, the people who tried get hailed as martyrs) that’s going to be problematic when the “heathens” have interstellar spacecraft and far more advanced weapons.
Well, that’s the point. Over the centuries, they’ve slathered on arbitrary layer after arbitrary layer, expanding well beyond “The creator(s) created everything,” even to the point of using these differences as excuses for wars and such. It’s fortunately not as violent these days, but still annoying to have the teaching of evolution challenged and such.
What doomed the native American religions, which were otherwise quite firmly established and extensively ritualized, especially within the major empires, was the appearance of a technologically superior (and disease-bearing) invader who had no interest whatsoever in preserving or adopting those religions. I’m speculating that a similar radical attenuation of Earth’s religions will occur if something analogous happens involving extraterrestrials. Possibly, post-visitation, some future analog of Mel Gibson will produce a Holovision Matrix (or whatever) called Apocrypha about a bunch of Christians going about their violent rituals (maybe chasing a Jew through Berlin or something) and the critics will marvel at how detailed the reproduction is, though of course none of them will have any personal experience to compare it to.
Yes and no. Personally, I don’t really see God as personal in the way that most Christians do, nor do I go as far as seeing him as deistic. As I believe I said, I think that, as the creator of all that is natural, it would inherently appear as though anything that God does would appear to be of natural cause. In fact, I also believe that those things that the religious experience and describe as religious experiences are probably experienced by non-religious people, perhaps only differing in the intensity of the experience and the presumed source.
My entire point is precisely that the existence and non-existence of God are absolutely indeterminable through scientific methodology. The manner in which God is explored isn’t through experimental methodology, but through experiential methodology. For me, the manner in which I differentiate the existence or non-existence of God is through evaluating these experiences and evaluating which explanation fits best. As such, the overwhelming number of coincidences that i would have to accept for him to be non-existent is difficult to swallow.
I could not disagree more with your description of religion. I very much agree that philosophy and religion evaluate many of the same problems, but I don’t see how you can claim that philosophy is open and religion not only isn’t open, but necessarily claims a deity and “provides an unjustified sense of having the answers”. In fact, I think religion is quite an open question as well, considering the amount of disagreement even among people of similar faiths. That two people of different religions both strongly believe their perspectives is really no different than two philosophers strongly holding to their philosophical perspective on an issue that is ultimately unprovable and arguing against all other positions (eg, free-will vs. determinism).
Yes, a lot of religions seem to give boxed answers to certain questions, but so do a lot of philosophies, and either is only accepted as is by the intellectually lazy. I very much believe in God, but I also can give a detailed justification for just about everything I believe, barring only those aspects I haven’t gotten to fully examining yet, and absolutely none of my justifications resolve to “because God said so”. In fact, it is precisely because of the fact that I’ve found such a high degree of overlap between the results of my examinations and my interpretation of Christianity that I have my faith.
In fact, the only real difference I see between philosophy and religion is that religion tends to have rites associated with it and philosophy doesn’t. But both religion and philosophy can easily provide justifiable answers to ethical and moral quandries, and both serve as adjucts to science in helping us understand our place in existence.
I would expect in the sense that if God is like I think he is, this would would be consistent with the way God has revealed himeself to humans.
Nowhere was I aguing that Judeo-Christianity is the “right” religion. But most religions, even prehistoric Native American ones, have some kind of creator-God myth and the idea that this God (or gods) has certain expectations about the way we treat each other.
You are confusing the position that there is no final answer, with the position that there is a final answer but God hasn’t told us it clearly enough yet - but what he has told is is a lot more correct than what that religion over there believes. Sure, from the outside it looks like all the religions are on equal footing, but from the inside there are some basic tenets of a faith, or else you wouldn’t have it. Very similar religions might have nearly identical ethics, because the difference is in an area hardly anyone cares about, but lots of religions have very different ethical systems. Very few religions nowadays are build around ritual sacrifice of enemies. If two religions both claim that morality comes from God, and their views of God are very different, so will their views of morality. If morality does come from God, this isn’t something you can compromise on. Sure, you can be polite about it, and decide that adherents of the other religion will suffer whatever penalties they get from not being properly moral, but that is different from saying that the question is inherently open.
Is this because you don’t know for sure what God said or something else? If by some means you did know that God said to do X, would you carefully consider if this was a good idea? Sure your independently arrived at morals overlaps - first, we have all been indoctrinated in Western culture and second, Christianity is not a bizarro religion which condemns all logically justifiable ethics. Prohibitions on murder long antedated Christianity and any Western religion currently practiced.
Isn’t the position that morality stems from God an important basic difference? I can imagine a philosopher making a good argument that the deliberate killing of animals not threatening us is always wrong. A western religious philosopher cannot, unless he rejects all the calls to sacrifice in the Bible as being incorrect somehow.
Scene: A priest and a band of conquistadors advance on a large Incan village. They are greeted by the Incan elders wearing voluminous robes.
Priest: Greetings, poor benighted heathens. We have come here today to convert you to Christianity and to save your souls. Please assemble in your square to be baptized.
Incan Leader: We very much appreciate your concern from us, but our gods and religions has served us well since from before we remember, so we respectfully refuse your offer.
Priest: sigh It always comes to this. Lieutenant Gonzalez, please help us to convert them
The conquistadors unsheathe their swords and begin to advance.
Incan Leader: Not so fast, mofo. The Incans pull semi-automatic weapons from the folds of their and mow down the Spaniards.
Incan Leader: What a senseless waste.
In Trinitarian Christianity (Catholics, Orthodox, and the majority of Protestants), God does, in fact, have a body, which is the body of Jesus Christ, since, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, Jesus is God.
The LDS (Mormon) faith teaches that God was once a mortal person with a body like ours, who found salvation with his god and eventually was granted godhood himself.