Choosing a faith

I don't like the term "intelligence" as applied to gods. To me, intelligence implies an ability to learn. Why would a god have to learn?

I'm really tied up today. I don't have much time to devote to EvC.I copy from the emails and paste them into word. Then copy the post when I'm finished onto EvC.
Thanks Percy

I just didn't want to use a term that was specific to Christianity which would be Holy Spirit.

So all woo.

You probably keep Him up at night. He can't fathom a created being--a creature of His trying to lecture Him on what His morality should be or how He should treat certain situations. He likely already had a plan, but you would try and correct Him, based on the human morality that evolution gave you.You might argue that you are simply fulfilling your responsibilities in life, but since you believe that He(God) was a human creation from the start, you would have no problem correcting the archetype.The apologists would explain that the reason God kills not only the men but the women and children is twofold.
1) He gave them over a hundred years to repent and change.
2) He foreknows that the cancer is incurable and that the children would end up growing into the same decadent monsters that their parents had become.As far as God giving His favorites a pass, keep in mind that the favorites (like King David) knew enough to repent before being judged. You likely would argue that true freewilled creatures should have the option to develop and behave any darn way they choose.Which necessitated a place to be made for them.I won't try and defend either Nazi Germany or modern-day America. They are responsible for themselves and whether they will choose to repent.Make no mistake though. There is a standard and God sets it. No consensus is capable of achieving this goal.

This is just making feeble excuses for God. All standards that we know about, are human standards. No God was involved.

Since your god is not real, realize that these crimes against the people are perpetrated by your church; by your acolytes led by your priests. Now can you begin to recognize the evil involved?

But it is the same for the atheistic position. It is claimed that that altruism, along with everything else has a completely mindless root. I don’t disagree that people can be nudged towards altruism by others. That doesn’t at all preclude that the first cause for altruism is an external intelligence.
If I am right about there being a god meme, then we do unconsciously here from a deity.

As far as this discussion is concerned then yes. As I have said more than once in this thread, it isn’t about which god we choose but about the nature of the deity we choose. Personally, I believe in the Christian God whose nature was embodied in Jesus but that isn’t the point. Well, a deistic creator is simply one who kicked the whole thing off and then departed the scene. Always a possibility I suppose. As far as the universe being infinite is concerned I agree, but also apparently the universe was once infinitely small. [qs=Tangle] If you invoke an intelligent creator to explain the complexity of life, the universe and everything, you make something necessarily more complex. Hence Occam slices it away.
He can do that because he knows that every other process ever discovered in our universe occurs naturally. There have been no godlike interventions. Also, since the enlightenment, at every point where god was required by religious to step in and explain something science proved it wrong, geocentrism, immutability of species, age of earth etc.
And in any case, the causeless cause is no answer to anything. It leaves the question unanswered.
Look at it this way. If someone from 300 years ago were to be transported into today and came upon a factory with only robots producing widgets which was being remotely controlled, it would appear that the robots are responsible for widgets. He wouldn’t know that the robots were designed by humans or even that there was human input into their functioning. (you could also look at AI as an example.)

It's claimed and it's evidenced.
Plus there is no Mind that anyone can find. Nothing precludes a supernatural being that doesn't present itself to us in any way. In that respect it's Russel's teapot and can be disregarded. Why should anyone but you be interested in that?

Just sharing techniques for pros and cons. When I went online in the late 80's it was on CompServe -- no BBSes ¹, no Internet until approaching mid-90's, just CompuServe. I had to connect through a modem after warning everybody to stay off the phone -- I was married at the time with young kids. Plus they charged for every minute of connect time. All that motivated me to find ways to minimize my time online tying up the phone and accruing connect-time charges.My solution was to use a terminal emulator (TE) that came with Carbon Copy which I used at work. It had two very important features: text capture file and text file insertion (it's been more than a few decades, so I forget the exact terminology). The capture file feature would save all text received, basically like redirecting output to a file in MS-DOS and in UNIX shells (eg, dir C:\ /s > c_dir.txt). "Text file insertion" would transmit the contents of a text file as if I had entered them from the keyboard, basically like redirecting input from a file in MS-DOS and in UNIX (eg, sort < names.txt -- more commonly combine redirecting both input and output; eg, sort < names.txt > sorted.txt).So my CompuServe sessions would go something like:

1. Offline, write what I wanted to post in a text editor, saving each message or library text in a separate text file.
2. In the terminal emulator, open the capture file.
3. Connect to CompuServe and navigate to the forums I want to visit. As the text is received from CompuServe it is saved to the capture file, including the echoing back of my own keyboard entries.
4. As I return to a message thread I wanted to reply to, enter the command to reply, then use the control key to call up the text insertion dialog box and enter the name of the text file that contains the reply I wrote offline. Since that "keyboard input" gets echoed back, it also goes into the capture file.
5. At the end of my session, I disconnect and close the capture file.
6. Now offline, I use the capture file to find and copy out the messages I want to reply to, which I do in a separate text file.
7. My replies now written, I copy them out of my working file into the separate text files needed for text insertion in my next session.

This method worked very well for me for a number of reasons, only a couple of which were:

• I had time to compose more thoughtful replies. That included the time to do research for my replies; eg, I could refer to a book for the information I needed, all without having to worry about the connection meter running up my bill or the fraying of my wife's already nearly non-existent patience.
• I could take my offline reading and writing with me to work where I could work on it during lunch.
• An unplanned benefit was that I now had an archive of all discussions I had visited or all library files I had read. Decades later, I can still go back and review what had transpired.

That last ability became very important in my dealings with creationists via email. AOL's original application included the same capture file and text insertion features as Carbon Copy's TE had. Therefore, every time I connected to AOL I would open a capture file which would save all my emails to a text file. As a result, I have an archive of all my emails with creationists received through that software.I had a rather lengthy and yet very fruitless correspondence with a local YEC activist who's a legend in his own mind. He turned out to be such a pathological liar that I would frequently have to go back into my archive to quote him directly. Without that capture file feature, I could not have defended myself as well.Unfortunately, tech has since "improved" to the point of near uselessness. In my own experience:

• CompuServe came up with its own special software to manage our online experience, TapCIS, which I did try and which proved to be absolutely useless for my purposes. Basically, given a directory of captured text files you can take them anywhere on any computer and do a global search, a grep. Not only were you required to have TapCIS installed in the computer, but it also provided no such global search capability that I could find.
• Furthermore, TapCIS did not support ASCII, which was essential for the Carbon Copy TE and for my use of text files. As a result, CompuServe (CIS, AKA "CI$") started disabling ASCII access to its forums in order to force us all to using TapCIS, which was available for free, as I recall, so that was not the reason to force it onto us. As far as I can figure, their motivation was technological, that the direction they wanted their tech to go did not support ASCII.
• As a result, CompuServe forced me out as a customer by having made their product unusable -- there was a very hard-bitten Mel Gibson crime movie (Payback (1999), I'm pretty sure) where he has one of the guys who had wronged him captive, so he has the guy light his cigarette but the lighter doesn't work, so his line before killing the guy in cold blood is, "Then what good are you?" CompuServe could no longer do anything purposeful, so what good was it? None.
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  The last that I looked at CompuServe was in the late 1990's after they had switched over to the World Wide Web. No capture file? No support for ASCII? So what good are they?
• Then the new version of AOL stripped off all the email header data from the capture file (saving only the text itself, which by stripping away the context is useless, especially when doing a search), so I had to revert to an earlier version of AOL and refuse all future upgrades.
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  Finally, AOL stopped supporting that old software. I have tried their new software application with all its bells and whistles, but without that absolutely vital file capture feature for emails, what good are they (followed by a cold-blooded bullet to the brain à la Mel Gibson)?
• For AOL, I'm left with their webmail site, so I'm reduced to other less efficient methods. Basically, I'm reduced to having to save each and every email individually into text files. As a result, I have a number of pending_*.txt files to work from.

You say that you use Word to manage your offline editing. How does that not mess you up at times?I used to be active as a mentor on a C Programming Forum which is no longer. One beginning C programmer posted his very simple program (maybe a dozen lines of code) and couldn't understand why it wouldn't compile. The problem was that the compiler couldn't recognize his quotation marks -- I verified that by copy and pasting his code to a text file and then viewing it through a hex dump jproduced through the xxd command line utility. The quotation marks were not the 0x22 (34 decimal) that the ASCII-based complier expected, but rather whatever non-ASCII open/close-quote marks character codes that a word processor had generated. My advice to him was to stop using a word processor, but rather to use a text editor when writing source code. And to stick to 7-bit ASCII at that.  

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Nu? If it works it works, don't futz with it!In the meantime, what is this nonsense about "science of the gaps"?

I’d like to apologize in that I am getting so many posts to respond to I don’t have to respond properly to all that you posted and I’m not at all sure I have anything to add. I did however read and thought about your entire post. I maybe will try one other way of looking at itI honestly don’t think I have anything to add that I haven’t already said. I can’t accept the belief that intelligence and morality can evolve from mindless origins. I can accept that evolution started from an intelligent creator without need for further involvement leaving only natural processes.I want to use a quote from “The Silver Chair” by CS Lewis. Puddleglum is stuck in the underworld and which is ruled over by a witch. She keeps trying to convince that there is no world of Narnia and this is the only world there is.I don’t want to leave the impression that I am in any way accepting the non-existence of God, however I think that it is an example of how faith should be held. It is a heart issue where we are called to love truth, beauty, kindness, mercy, forgiveness etc. without any consideration of personal benefit.Here is Puddleglum”
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.”

Quick question. Have I resolved the program with my last couple of posts? I started copying from the web site rather than the emails onto word.

What does "mindless" actually mean?When we use our minds, a lot of what we are doing is simulating experiences in our thoughts and running trial and error tests on those simulations.Evolution is itself a trial and error system. It isn't a simulation, but it is real time trial and error. It should not be surprising that evolution can do what minds do. And it can sometimes do it better.You are trying to impose your ideas from human thought. Have you considered that nature may have different ways of doing something analogous?