Neo Deist
Th.D. & D.Div. h.c.
Yet here you are six post later still talking about it.
Yep, I like to keep the children entertained. It's what a parent does.
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Christians, how does God demonstrate he "loves us", without referencing a human sacrifice...
- Thread starter OnePointSix18
- Start date
Yep, I like to keep the children entertained. It's what a parent does.
OnePointSix18
Member
I'm not sure that this is what I'm looking for. It is very weak and nonspecific as to what God did and that you don't have to stretch it into this clearly shows him performing an act of love. It is clear that god is not impregnating these women with male children, i.e., Jacob says: “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?”, indicating that it is he that is fathering these children. Another example you give that god spared the life of Joseph but Genesis says that in the two cases where there was consideration to kill him it was either Judah or Reuben that talk the others out of it. I'm not convinced these are God's direct doing. There's just too much outright giving credit to god i.e., for children, when he wasn't the one that did the deed. Afterall what is it that God is really doing? Is he not simply living up to his duty in the contract made with Abe? Couldn't one argue that he is simply doing the things he has to do in order to satisfy the covenant?
Skwim
Veteran Member
Continuing to talk about irrelevancies entertains your children? How strange. How v e r y strange.Yep, I like to keep the children entertained. It's what a parent does.
Neo Deist
Th.D. & D.Div. h.c.
20,000 feet and climbing...
ThePainefulTruth
Romantic-Cynic
Hawking, in his later years, has had to retract his position that there is evidence from before the Big Bang (time zero, whatever), and has had to back off. I'm afraid he's become bitter in his old age, though given his circumstances I find it hard to judge him, except when what he says interferes with the Truth. What he has said:
Stephen Hawking (atheist?-skeptic) A Brief History of Time (1988)pp. 8-9
“An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!". (note: an expanding universe was initially considered a blow to atheism since it indicated a beginning as opposed to the Steady State model. But that, ultimately, is unable to sidestep the issue of a beginning anyway.)
“I’m not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.” (Quoted in “Stephen Hawking prepares for weightless flight”, New Scientist [April 26, 2007])
“Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticizing Hawking's work and complaining that Hawking's "celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have."[289] The particle was discovered at CERN in July 2012: Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet[290][291] and said that Higgs should win the Nobel Prize for Physics.[292]”(Wikipedia)
“Our universe didn't need any divine help to burst into being,” famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night (April 16,’13). IOW, he’s not saying it didn’t happen that way either. It’s a big difference from his previous statement that God did not create the universe in his 2010 book Grand Design.-- http://www.space.com/20710-stephen-hawking-god-big-bang.html
Hawking has also said the Big Bang Theory was wrong, black holes don’t exist, Einstein was wrong when he said “God doesn’t play with dice with the universe”, and the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist. I think what we have here is a case of pity and celebrity worship.
____________________________________________________________________
In any case, the Big Bang is more generally accepted now by scientists than it ever has been. I believe that our 4D universe was extruded from a more all encompassing aether (for lack of a better word) wherein either time didn't exist, or it was nullified by a greater/infinite number of spatial dimensions. That separation could only have been either an act of will, or happenstance. The ascendant interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Transactional Interpretation, as well as other observations such as the EPR Paradox, support the idea of such a timeless environment in which our universe is "suspended".
BTW, FWIW, the greatest physics genius of the second half of the 20th Century (and maybe the whole century), was Richard Feynman.
Under my proposed model of there being either only a deist God, or no God, the question of which is the Truth must remain unknown to us, in order that our free will to remain absolutely free from divine influence. So far, that question remains 100% unresolved, and the Big Bang appears to be an impenetrable firewall between our quantum computer cum universe, and whatever is "outside" or "came before" it.
You would think that if the Big Bang was not an act of design by a divine will, but one of happenstance, that there would be evidence for what caused it, instead of such a perfect lack of evidence. It seems that would be a mild case for such a divine will. But, unfortunately, we can't use a lack of evidence, as evidence. Still.....
In any case, we apparently can't know if there is a God or not, but we're still free to speculate about what "if". I can think of nothing that an omnipotent God couldn't create instantly, except creatures with unfettered free will. For that It would appear to require 14 billion years of separation from us and our genesis in order to discourage and limit inquiry into how something could be so perfectly impenetrable. BTW, Planck spacetime is another entity which appears to be scientifically impenetrable. That's the gap between Time Zero, and the first 10 to the -43 seconds, AKA, the Planck Epoch, which could accommodate anything downwards of 10 to the -infinity meters/seconds.
Back to the companion argument: How could an omnipotent God deal with boredom?
Ain't cosmology a hoot.
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Yet, it can hardly be argued that man rather than any animal does exercise control over the earth. I do not believe it was God's will for men to ruin the earth and plunder it's wealth. The Bible speaks of the time when, under God's rulership, the peace and harmony that existed in the beginning between animals and man will be restored. (Isaiah 9:4-11)
Midnight Rain
Well-Known Member
It can be argued and I do. Humans don't control the earth. They have no hope of that. What power is in the hands of collective humanity is the DESTRUCTION of the earth. That isn't the same thing as control. Set a man and a lion in a pit together and see who survives. My money is on the lion.
OnePointSix18
Member
Hawking, in his later years, has had to retract his position that there is evidence from before the Big Bang (time zero, whatever), and has had to back off. I'm afraid he's become bitter in his old age, though given his circumstances I find it hard to judge him, except when what he says interferes with the Truth. What he has said:
Stephen Hawking (atheist?-skeptic) A Brief History of Time (1988)pp. 8-9
“An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!". (note: an expanding universe was initially considered a blow to atheism since it indicated a beginning as opposed to the Steady State model. But that, ultimately, is unable to sidestep the issue of a beginning anyway.)
“I’m not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.” (Quoted in “Stephen Hawking prepares for weightless flight”, New Scientist [April 26, 2007])
“Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticizing Hawking's work and complaining that Hawking's "celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have."[289] The particle was discovered at CERN in July 2012: Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet[290][291] and said that Higgs should win the Nobel Prize for Physics.[292]”(Wikipedia)
“Our universe didn't need any divine help to burst into being,” famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night (April 16,’13). IOW, he’s not saying it didn’t happen that way either. It’s a big difference from his previous statement that God did not create the universe in his 2010 book Grand Design.-- http://www.space.com/20710-stephen-hawking-god-big-bang.html
Hawking has also said the Big Bang Theory was wrong, black holes don’t exist, Einstein was wrong when he said “God doesn’t play with dice with the universe”, and the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist. I think what we have here is a case of pity and celebrity worship.
____________________________________________________________________
In any case, the Big Bang is more generally accepted now by scientists than it ever has been. I believe that our 4D universe was extruded from a more all encompassing aether (for lack of a better word) wherein either time didn't exist, or it was nullified by a greater/infinite number of spatial dimensions. That separation could only have been either an act of will, or happenstance. The ascendant interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Transactional Interpretation, as well as other observations such as the EPR Paradox, support the idea of such a timeless environment in which our universe is "suspended".
BTW, FWIW, the greatest physics genius of the second half of the 20th Century (and maybe the whole century), was Richard Feynman.
Under my proposed model of there being either only a deist God, or no God, the question of which is the Truth must remain unknown to us, in order that our free will to remain absolutely free from divine influence. So far, that question remains 100% unresolved, and the Big Bang appears to be an impenetrable firewall between our quantum computer cum universe, and whatever is "outside" or "came before" it.
You would think that if the Big Bang was not an act of design by a divine will, but one of happenstance, that there would be evidence for what caused it, instead of such a perfect lack of evidence. It seems that would be a mild case for such a divine will. But, unfortunately, we can't use a lack of evidence, as evidence. Still.....
In any case, we apparently can't know if there is a God or not, but we're still free to speculate about what "if". I can think of nothing that an omnipotent God couldn't create instantly, except creatures with unfettered free will. For that It would appear to require 14 billion years of separation from us and our genesis in order to discourage and limit inquiry into how something could be so perfectly impenetrable. BTW, Planck spacetime is another entity which appears to be scientifically impenetrable. That's the gap between Time Zero, and the first 10 to the -43 seconds, AKA, the Planck Epoch, which could accommodate anything downwards of 10 to the -infinity meters/seconds.
Back to the companion argument: How could an omnipotent God deal with boredom?
Ain't cosmology a hoot.
Interesting question. When we talk about boredom we are referring to the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest, according to Websters dictionary. To ask the question, how could an all powerful God deal with being bored, supposes a bunch of stuff. First, we empathize and begin to imagine what it would be like. We would be presuming we could be in, as you describe, a position of "omnipotence", which necessarily implies omniscience. One would have to have some sense of what it is like to know everything, - be in complete control of everything, and then contrast that against the only perspective we know of the state of boredom, which is solely based on our personal experiences.
I think the notion of the state of boredom is tied up, temporally, and cannot be conceptualized in regard to the God that is traditionally believed to be eternal and outside of time. To my feeble mind it would seem that something that is eternal would experience everything at once. There cannot be change. Now that the Red Pill is kicking in, - it seems that everything completely falls apart here. We only know things in the 4d ways and it is not just a lack of imagination that holds me back but an apparent impossibility. I don't understand how a God knows, that he knows everything, and cannot be wrong.
ThePainefulTruth
Romantic-Cynic
So if God couldn't get bored, and has no need for external stimulation or companionship, then it's a moot point. God wouldn't create entities with free will and would stick with the status quo.
But.....
But It only knows everything over which It has control. Thus, with self-aware creatures with free will, It doesn't know everything, and thus the potential for delight, surprise, disappointment etc. That's why free will would not only be a gift to us, but to Itself.
Unless the man is Daniel. (Daniel 6:16-22)
Midnight Rain
Well-Known Member
Or superman. Or Heracles, or Achilles ect.