A Working Definition of God

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Either I have read you wrong, or you didn't realize that you were rather unclear to what you were referring (the topic or the site), but let me review so you see why I replied how I did...

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MtW: Don't waste your time. Mike's fundamental dogma is elementary principles of naturalism. He only accepts evidence if it fits his premise of naturalism. If it doesn't, it doesn't exist in his world.

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Faith: That seems to be the case with many on this site. Sad but true. I don't know if it's a waste of time. I may come to that conclusion eventually but up to a point it can be an entertaining challenge to try to explain something to people from a totally other frame of reference. You never know who's reading and may get the point in spite of this nutty naturalistic dogma here.

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Schrafinator: Hmm, the idea of verifiable, reliable cause and effect in nature that anyone, regardless of religious belief, can also witness and observe and experience, that ha led to cures for disease, space exploration, vaccinations, and computers.
Yeah, that's pretty nutty.
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Silly, one might say.
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Totally, when it comes to this topic.
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As you might notice above, there qwas really no indication in your message that you were referring to this topic only. In fact, it certainly seemed as though you were referring to the whole site.
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MTW said (bolded above): "He only accepts evidence if it fits his premise of naturalism. If it doesn't, it doesn't exist in his world."And I answered (also bolded above): "That seems to be the case with many on this site."Which I believe is true, that there are many on this site who believe that nothing exists if it can't be validated by naturalistic assumptions. And that's about this topic because it is about things of the spirit that can't be validated naturalistically. According to many here there is simply NO way to establish the truth of ANY spiritual claim -- God, witness testimony to God's words and actions, anything along these lines -- unless it can be established naturalistically, which is impossible with such claims. In other words if it can't be established on naturalistic assumptions it doesn't exist.

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It's great for cures for disease, space exploration, vaccinations and computers but it's absolutely irrelevant for knowing anything about God or spirit beings or anything else having to do with spiritual life. It's the wrong tool for the job, and insisting on making it the method and the standard where it is unfitted to the task IS pretty nutty.
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Well, I generally agree, and I wouldn't have commented the way I did if I thought you were referring to just this subject.

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I hope it's cleared up then.

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No, it's my view of evolutionism which is not science.
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Biology isn't science?

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How so?

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Biology is science, evolutionism isn't.

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No, it's a definition of science when it pretends to be able to pronounce on the nature and reality of things outside its area of applicability.
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"Bio" means "life".

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"Ology" means "study of".

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So, "Biology is "The study of life".

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So, is it your contention that those who are trained in "Biology" should not be studying life?

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What should they be doing, according to you?

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Biology should be doing what it is doing, but they should do it without the evolutionism.

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Finally figured out that MOY means "millions of years." Yeah, isn't it amazing how whatever really does falsify the idea of MOY doesn't even get a blink of recognition from them? They just toddle right on MAKING the data fit the theory, denying the contradiction. That's the problem with a theory that can't be falsified, but is all a matter of interpretation -- we can interpret ad infinitim without ever having to touch down to reality. So now it's soft dinosaur parts. It would be hilarious if it weren't just, well, nutty.

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Yeah.

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All of those scientists are just a huge pile of steaming LIARS, aren't they?

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Not an honest one among the entire bunch, those scientists. They must take classes at scientist school on how to be a really good LIAR. That way, when they go to the secret Illuminati-style meetings (usually held every February in Vegas) they can all figure out how to best maintain THE BIG CONSPIRACY TO LIE TO THE ENTIRE WORLD ABOUT EVERYTHING IN SCIENCE THAT CONTRADICTS A LITERAL READING OF THE BIBLE.

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I hear the head LYING SCIENTIST gets to wear a cool cape.

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Well, maybe only SOME of them are LIARS. The rest of them are IDIOTS. Utter, raving MORONS who just follow the LIARS. It's a wonder that they got such good grades in all of those difficult college courses, passed all of those graduate school entrance exams, survived Prelims, and went on to complete their PhD dissertations! How did such clearly RETARDED and MORONIC people manage to do that? You tell me!

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And to THINK that we trust them to try to cure DISEASES!

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Man, I don't know about you, but I'm ONLY going to trust my health to the FAITH HEALER down at the local Pentacostal church from now on.

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If you're through raving, my answer is that none of what scientists do requires any notion of millions of years. It's just hung on their work, it doesn't have anything to do with their work. It's just a habit of thought they all take for granted but it's completely irrelevant to the actual work of science.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-20-2005 11:50 PM

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actually, that's more or less impossible. see, without evolution, there's no taxonomy. and taxonomy is a BIG part of biology.

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Totally false. The taxonomic chart was invented long before evolutionism. It was simply a classification system, implying nothing about descent of one from another.
Taxonomy - WikipediaThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-21-2005 12:05 AM

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Mathematically, a taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects

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tell me, what does a tree structure imply when dealing with animals?

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Nothing more than a tree structure that organizes the files on a computer implies. It's a way of organizing phenomena. Now it implies evolution from one to the other, but that's no more necessary than the idea that one computer file begets another.

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try again. the correct answer is "common ancestry."

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Right. That's the Politically Correct Answer. And woe be to anyone who knows it's false.

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if it weren't right, every end on the tree would have the same number of branches. and they don't.

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Now, THAT makes NO sense at ALL.

Huh?

How's about we close up this one for this thread, and maybe you can all get together and show me what an idiot I am about taxonomic mathematics on another thread sometime. Not too soon I hope. I have quite a backlog of threads I have yet to get back to if they're still there.

[text=red]Please do not reply to this post. It is off-topic. --Admin[/text]

Is that anything like being too thick-headed and set in your naturalistic {edit: should have said "evolutionistic"} closed world view to know that the idea of common ancestry was simply imposed upon a simple classification system with no justification whatever?This message has been edited by Faith, 04-21-2005 10:56 AMThis message has been edited by Admin, 04-21-2005 11:04 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-21-2005 11:06 AM

[text=red]Please do not reply to this post. It is off-topic. --Admin[/text]

Again, this isn't about science. My comments are not about science. My comment was about the idea of millions of years on planet Earth(I'm not going to get into astronomy) which is not a scientific concept because it is not testable, replicable, falsifiable and so on, it's just a matter of belief and it affects nothing substantive that is done by scientists. The survival of any dinosaur soft tissue DOES falsify the idea of millions of years conceptually speaking, rationally speaking, but since evolutionism and the Geo Time Table are not falsifiable by empirical tests, it is simply easily denied.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-21-2005 01:45 PMThis message has been edited by Admin, 04-21-2005 01:55 PM

[text=red]Deleted continuation of off-topic discussion. --Admin[/text]

This message has been edited by Admin, 04-21-2005 03:47 PM

There's really no point in trying to convince you that the Bible is THE truth, but that's basically all the first points in your point refer to, so I'll pass by those for now at least.

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The confusion your predicament is causing you is made clear by these contradictory statements from you. You both exclude evidence of God from the natural world, and claim God performs physical deeds, which by definition can only take place in the corporeal world and would thus leave physical evidence. Once you see that the Bible is just one tiny piece, and not the most significant one, of God's Word then these contradictions begin to melt away.

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The miracles of God simply left no physical evidence. Some physical events do not, especially none that could be detected after thousands of years. But except for the miracles all I mean is that God influences everything that happens in the world and most of that fits the naturalistic laws so I wouldn't expect it to reveal God anyway, except to the extremely spiritually sensitive who see God in the fluttering of every leaf -- and I've had some moments like that myself, just not many of them. As for the miracles what kind of evidence would you expect from the pillars of cloud and fire? No reason to think they even touched down to earth. From the parting of the Red Sea? It went back to normal afterward. From the giving of the manna? Should we comb the desert to see if a grain of it managed to remain for 2500 years? There's always the lost Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of Moses I guess. I wonder what the chances of them turning up are? Some things there COULD be some evidence for I guess, but it's not hard to understand how over thousands of years none remains. Once in a while we get some nice corroborations such as archaeological corroboration of the discovery that the Hittites were a real people when Bible debunkers claimed that was made up; and the Dead Sea Scrolls that contain most of the same OT to show that at least the Old Testament hasn't changed in 2000 years which is another false claim. But after so long little evidence is to be expected from physical events. And some of it wouldn't leave any evidence anyway. What evidence would you expect to remain from the resurrection of Christ? The evidence that DOES remain is that the tomb was empty and no body was ever found. That IS "physical" evidence but anyone with a mind to it can always insist that the disciples were crafty enough to find a way to hide it so that nobody could ever find it -- that kind of imaginative scenario often passes for evidence these days but I digress.

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There is no such thing as something's being true for one person but not for another, and scientists have not been known to accept such relativist nonsense either. I'm rather surprised to hear it from you as a matter of fact.
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But we're not talking of science, we're talking of truth. Science doesn't deal with truths, religion and spirtuality does. And the topic of this thread is God, not science.

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There is no such thing as ANYTHING being true for one person and not for another if we're talking about objective claims. If God exists then He is something with attributes apart from anything we think or feel about him, no matter who believes or doesn't believe in Him. If Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life and nobody comes to the Father but by Him, as He said, then believing that Zarathustra is the way to God is simply not true for those who believe it same as for those who don't, it is false because Jesus is the only way to God.

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And NONE OF THIS is "testing God" in any case. I have no idea what that could possibly mean. Testing God is expecting him to save you from dangers you've purposely put yourself in the way of.
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Your definition is far too limiting. Asking for evidence of God, any evidence at all, is testing God, for evidence is the opposite of faith.

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Oh not so. God GIVES evidence, He WANTS us to seek evidence for Him, He INVITES it. He claims there is evidence throughout the creation, but I've never been very sensitive to it myself. Fortunately He gave me the help of leading me to His word. He's given the main evidence in His Bible you see, SO much evidence, and if you look for it outside the Bible you aren't going to find Him. He's also been known to supply people with more evidence than that when their faith fails them, as He did for Doubting Thomas who refused to believe what the other disciples had told him. He still does that for the weak in faith in many ways. It's not at all against God. We MUST have evidence. That's the way He made our minds to work. And He Himself has provided EXACTLY the kind of evidence needed.

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Adding personal danger to the test merely adds drama, nothing else. If you believe because you think you have physical evidence of God then you believe for the wrong reasons. But don't reply to this particular portion yet, because I address issues of evidence further on.

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I keep saying I DON'T have PHYSICAL evidence, Percy. Why do you keep repeating this idea that I do?OK you'll address it later, and I have to go back to work anyway, so all for now.

FMy point was that there really ISN'T a coherent explanation of the confusion anywhere else, but the Bible's explanation is comprehensive and truly illuminating. I don't depend on my own ability but trust God based on His word, and trusting in God according to His own instructions is the opposite of arrogance. The huge variety of beliefs is in fact explained in the Bible and nowhere else. People's interest in spiritual things and gravitating to what they agree with is of course true, but there is no way to derive from that fact a determination of which views are true and which false. That idea of "many ways" is in fact the dead giveaway that your views are very very different from mine. Jesus said clearly there is only ONE way. He said it, I didn't. Yes, that could mean he and I are not in agreement on some fundamental points, or it could mean that he is trying to come at the problem from a different perspective for the purpose of better communication, which is what he seems to be saying. I don't grasp some of his position but we'll see how it develops. None of the definitions anyone gave was complete, yet all were orthodox Christian, including your dictionary definition. I assume that if there were definitions from other religions to be had here they would have been posted. I thought Dan simply wanted whatever definitions people have, for some purpose of his own, and I still do not understand why he couldn't work with the definitions originally given him. He was looking for something else I can't figure out, so I really can't participate in that part of the discussion. I suppose this one is off topic but since you are the director of the place who am I to object? I am not in a predicament, Percy, you are projecting that on me. The only reason I exclude evidence from the natural world is that it's not evident to most people, not that it doesn't exist. Some people see God's hand in every aspect of his Creation, but most of us don't (Fallenness explains this too). God certainly DOES perform physical deeds, every day upholding this entire universe and being the remote cause of every physical occurrence -- traceable effects of his natural laws being the proximal cause. But the kind of evidence that you all demand at this site for such things as Biblical miracles is not in fact "in evidence" but we have the witness evidence of the Bible instead. Miracles do not leave the kind of evidence you demand. We are left with either believing the people who witnessed them or not believing them. I believe them. After what I worked my way through to arrive at the conclusion that the Bible IS absolutely THE significant and definitive word of God, and after experiencing confirmation of its truths in personal direct ways over and over, there's no way your view holds any conceivable attraction to me. The universe is at best both predictable and unpredictable, coherent and incoherent. For one thing it is not as it was originally created as the Fall brought destruction and death into it. ONLY the Bible gives us this information and without it the universe cannot be fully apprehended. The words "true" and "false" and "truth" versus "error, falsehood" and so on, are everyday English words that apply to science as well as to everything else. You seem to want to use the idea of "truth" in fact to deny truth and relegate it to something subjective and inconclusive. To say that a proposition or belief can be true for one person but not for another is in fact to deny the meaning of the word. Again I disagree. Objectivity simply means honesty and accuracy in apprehending and describing anything whatever. It is not the exclusive possession of science. Objectivity used to be the standard for journalism for instance, in which the reporter worked to keep his own opinions out of his description.I don't know what to say about your definition of faith except that it's about as far from anything I believe as it can be. Peace and goodness and caring and compassion? Nothing to do with it. Those things may exist and be cultivated without any faith in anything whatever. To have faith is to put one's trust in something or someone. That's what the word means. It has been corrupted in many ways to refer to things it can't possibly have anything to do with. Wrong idea I'm afraid, as most accusations of Biblical contradictions are. We don't HAVE the ability naturally to obey this command at all, can't even come close, not with heart or with mind or with soul, because of our fallenness. It is something we can only begin to do in the power of God, and that is not possible without BELIEVING in God -- believing in Him according to His word, not according to some sentimental idea we make up about what we want him to be like -- and trusting Him and obeying Him. IF we are doing that then He will gradually change us into people who can more and more love Him as He commands, with heart and soul and mind. But the natural man cannot. There is no point in appealing to anybody's heart. Pascal did us all a great disservice with his famous statement that "the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of" --although in context he is simply opposing the idolatry of Reason. But in practice in our time it tends toward a silly sentimental idea of religion. If the mind is not engaged there is no way to have true faith. It comes from neither place, certainly not through the senses but not the heart either, although the heart will certainly be engaged when God is known. It comes from BELIEVING God's word. That's how it came to me. That's not the senses and it's not the heart. Believing is the same as KNOWING God's word is true, taking it at its word, believing it with all your heart and mind, and ACTING ON IT with all your heart and mind. See above. The contradiction is in your mind, not mine. 1) The evidence is everywhere only most people can't apprehend it as such, as it follows natural laws and 2) the physical evidence people want for miracles is unavailable because they left no physical evidence. You may have a problem with this but I don't. What we have is mostly witness evidence. That's the way it is.TO BE CONTINUED.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-22-2005 12:54 PM

So do you just ignore Paul's statement in Romans 5:12: Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned... ? If death came into the world with Adam's sin then obviously there was no death in the world before that, which contradicts evolution. And that includes animals as they were cursed along with the Creation as a whole because of the sin of Adam. Funny that instead of feeling locked in by it I find it the most liberating illuminating exciting key to Everything, and only expect more and more of same yet to come as I continue to plumb its depths.