Are religions manmade and natural or supernaturally based?

Thread copied here from the Are religions manmade and natural or supernaturally based? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Hi Faith,I'm not moderating this thread, but I will step in to express my concern about this since it's been a longstanding issue with you in so many different threads: You've been warned about this many times. If you're here to discuss then please discuss. Do not just claim to have already said things, unless you immediately follow it with a restatement or paraphrase of what you said, or a quote from where you said it.And do not tell people that if they aren't persuaded then you're going to stop discussing. If you're through discussing then leave the thread. Do not say things like "there's nothing more to say" and then keep posting.Please, no replies to this message.

In Message 189 I said I would begin moderating this thread today. That was before Faith got herself suspended for a week, but I will begin moderating anyway. I have this ruling:

• Faith's arguments for the credibility of Biblical authors are based upon style, despite her contradictory denials. She can either engage the discussion about style as evidence of credibility, or she can drop the issue, but she cannot claim she isn't basing her credibility claims on style.

I don't understand Faith's position that her arguments about style aren't actually about style, and if anyone does then I am listening, but to me it seems like nonsense. Avoiding nonsense in discussions here is one of my goals.Edited by Admin, : Typo.

This is evasive, not to mention inconsistent since you seem to know so many intimate details of God and his actions. That was just Straggler's latest formulation of the question. In attempting to get you to answer the question he has phrased it in several different ways, for instance this way back in Message 196: Straggler paraphrased your answer from Message 198 in his own Message 200, "He exists because we do," which makes no sense. You wouldn't think sensible the answer that "The universe exists because we do," so why are you offering the nonsensical answer, "God exists because we do"?You originally asked why the universe exists rather than nothing. Because you believe God existed before the universe, Straggler quite reasonably asked the obvious next question, "Why does God exist rather than nothing?"If it was a reasonable question for you to ask about the universe it's certainly a reasonable question to ask about God. Could you please answer the question?

Hawking and Mlodinow's quote from The Grand Design:

quote:

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"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

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Kbertsche's comment: It might have been more clear had Hawking and Mlodinow began, "Because there are laws such as gravity...", but given just the quote and without having read the book it almost seems like they're saying that the laws of the universe existed before the universe. If so, isn't Kbertsche's interpretation worthy of serious consideration?It would also be welcome to take this closer to the topic, a supernatural origin for religions, and by extension the universe.

Your message wasn't a reply to any specific message, so in case you didn't see it let me repeat what I said in Message 255: It might have been more clear had Hawking and Mlodinow began, "Because there are laws such as gravity...". Given what Hawking and Mlodinow *did* say, Kbertsche's misinterpretation seems an honest one. Or so I rule.If your message was intended as a reply to my Message 255, my main thought was that Kbertsche's comment about Hawking's opinion that natural laws caused the universe seemed worth commenting on. Or is there a different interpretation of what Hawking said that you had in mind?

Hi ICANT,Tangle raised the correct issues in his Message 264, so please respond to him, not me. I'm just going to clear up some confusion before it goes too far. The question was, "Why does God exist rather than nothing at all?" Your answer is equivalent to, "A supernatural power exists because we exist," just as Straggler stated. Colliding branes is just one theory of the origin of the universe, but in any case, in this theoretical view other branes do not reside within our universe. Other branes can exist without our universe existing.

I'm going to have to correct what I said earlier. I found some of the surrounding context from Hawking's book The Grand Design, and here's an excerpt where he's explicitly saying that the universe exists because gravity exists:

quote:

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"If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there is a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound system, such as the earth and moon. This negative energy can balance the positive energy needed to create matter, but it’s not quite that simple. The negative gravitational energy of the earth, for example, is less than a billionth of the positive energy of the matter particles the earth is made of. A body such as a star will have more negative gravitational energy, and the smaller it is (the closer the different parts of it are to each other), the greater the negative gravitational energy will be. But before it can become greater than the positive energy of the matter, the star will collapse to a black hole, and black holes have positive energy. That’s why empty space is stable. Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can."

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So when Hawking writes, "Because there is a law such as gravity...", he really *is* saying that gravity is responsible for creating the universe. As he says later on:

quote:

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"Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

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Hawking appears to be implying precisely what Kbertsche said he was, that gravity existed before the universe, that it isn't just descriptive but an active player.I haven't actually found a complete copy of the book online, just lengthy portions at Google. I don't claim my interpretation is without error and would appreciate corrections and/or improvements.Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

Ah - that was my original interpretation. But my post was a result of a search for longer excerpts from Hawking's book, some of which I quoted, and even though longer they still stressed only gravity. Does he make the quantum implications of gravity clear elsewhere in the book? But in the portions I read that's exactly what he appears to be saying. Does he make his true position clear somewhere in the book?Or is Hawking writing books that only communicate the right impression to people who already know what he's talking about? This isn't to say that he should communicate a scientist's understanding to laypeople, but he shouldn't communicate impressions to people that when they come to website's like this and repeat what Hawking said are told that that's *not* what Hawking meant when it *is* precisely what he said.Apologies for not sifting through more of Google's partial copy of The Grand Design. Lack of time, plus it's just painful trying to read books in fractured form.

I didn't say you did. I said that your answer is equivalent to it. You said: All one has to do is follow the very simple logic: If you're having trouble following the logic, let me illustrate the same logic but with different objects: The logic is *extremely* familiar and *very* old, usually attributed to William Paley over a couple hundred years ago.The original question to you was, "Why does God exist rather than nothing at all?" You seem to have provided an answer in Message 277: That seems pretty clear to me. You don't seem to be claiming to have physical evidence supporting this belief, so discussion should focus on the theological evidence behind it.

He *does* say physical evidence.

As I said, the watchmaker analogy was William Paley's from a couple hundred years ago. It's famous, and it illustrates the logic you're using perfectly. Surely you're not ignorant of the watchmaker analogy. The whole reason I used it is because it's familiar to everyone, or so I thought. I figured just calling this famous analogy to your attention would settle the issue, because Paley raised it to make precisely the point you're making. Yes, you're correct, there's no physical evidence that allows us to select between brane collisions or quantum fluctuations or any other theorized cause. That's why I was trying to make sure you're arguing from a theological standpoint. If you are instead arguing from physical evidence (like Faith) then though this is the wrong forum for those kinds of discussions I don't think it would be much of a problem to let an evidence-based discussion continue here.So are you arguing from theology, or from physical evidence?

OP's are often points of departure for subtopics, sometimes many different subtopics, and our recent exchange was about a subtopic, not the original question in the OP. It was about your position on the origin of God. You're being evasive again. Please, no more evasions - last warning.The question was whether you'll be providing support for your beliefs from theology or from physical evidence?

Most likely this saying did not originate with any of the people it is usually attributed to. My favorite form:

Cicero, a Caesar contemporary and dissenter, wrote a review of Commentarii de Bello Gallico.