My Beliefs- GDR

It was more an expression of astonishment at what seems like blatantly back-to-front thinking. You consider the created (i.e. us) to be more complex than the creator (i.e. God).I find that position astonishing. One can always say it's "possible" that God exists in the realms that current knowledge places out of reach. One could say it was, at the time, "possible" that God existed across the seas that our ancient ancestors considered uncrossable. Or above the sky that our more recent ancestors considered to be God's unreachable heavenly dwelling place. Now we have you placing God in mysterious parallel universes and the other dimensions suggested by theoretical physics.Whatever arena human knowledge of the day considers plausible but out of reach is where theists seem to place their gods. You are following the same pattern. If we could reliably discern that which objectively exists by "knowing through our heart" we wouldn't have to bother with the methods of science at all. Unless you are able to discern the objective existence of something more concrete using this method why would anyone think you could possibly discern the objective existence of something as ethereal as god? So if it's all part of a an elaborate and purposeful masterplan designed by a hyper-intelligent eternal being it's less elaborate than particles interacting without purpose........Colour me astonished again!!

You never quite get it do you. I didn’t say that it is about believing His message of love - it isn’t about believing anything. It is all about having a heart that desires His peace, love, justice etc.Look at what Paul says in 1 Cor 4.

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1 So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God. 2 Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful. 3 I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. 4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. 5 Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God.

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It is all about the heart, not what we believe. Yes if we choose Christ and allow the Spirit to change our hearts then yes that’s great, we have been made right with God, but it is still about the heart.My point that I made that if salvation is a matter of believing the right theology then it has become salvation by works and there is no grace.Look at Matthew 7:

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20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. 21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' 23 Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'

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So it is about doing the will of the Father. Jesus tells us what that is when He says that all the laws and the prophets can be condensed down into love of God and love of neighbour. We are called to love our neighbours as ourselves.Love of God and neighbour comes from the heart. I can act loving towards my neighbour but to truly want good things for him is something that comes from the heart.

That's a good argument against intelligent design. All sentient life can do is manipulate existing natural proceses.

Your heart cannot be right if you are not saved by faith in the flood of Christ.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If that's your gospel it's pretty much worthless.

Shouting doesn't make it any more correct. You have such faith in the Bible as the God speaking directly to us. Why then don't you believe what it says? Essentially you have decided what it says before you read it.And again, you are making faith about works. The work that you say makes you right with God is to believe something. Jesus, and Paul for that matter, tell us that it is about doing the loving thing for its own sake without thought of reward, whereas you are saying that if you have faith in in the blood of Christ then you get eternal life. You have turned faith into a selfish thing.

Really well put and I get your point but I still think that you're wrong.
I believe that our fundamental reality centres around consciousness and time.Here is an interesting article by Stuart Hameroff where he quotes Barbour and Penrose essentially saying that our understanding of time flows from our consciousness. The point is that time isn't a reality in the way we experience it. If time isn't just simply the one dimensional thing that we experience but is something more, then the idea that the intelligence that created us being eternal makes a lot more sense, and less complex in that we don't have to consider the creation of that intelligence.So, if God is eternal then we have done away with the turtles. Also we know that our perceived universe isn't all there is and maybe we are just one aspect of an eternal universe. Sure that is speculative but, I know we disagree, I find that solution far less complex than the idea that we essentially evolved from what amounts to nothing. I agree. Whoever wrote Genesis was using the best science he had available at the time and yes that is what I am attempting to do with my limited knowledge. I assume that as science advances theistic views will change again. Our knowledge of the natural world and God continues to evolve. Am I suppose to disregard new findings? But I don't claim that it is objective. I can objectively say that I have had these experience which I believe are in some way of God, but that conclusion is subjective. I can't know that in the way that I know the sky is blue. There's that incredulity again.

Just so we don't get our terms mixed up, I am not a proponent of the ID Movement but obviously I believe we are intelligently designed.We, as sentient beings can only manipulate existing natural processes but we aren't able to create or change those processes.

Exactly. So you can't invoke the claim that a sentient being is required to do what we do in the lab.You actually seem to be talking about three levels, not two:

1. Natural things that can happen without manipulation.
2. Natural things that can happen only with intelligent manipulation.
3. Things that can only happen through God's manipulation, by circumventing natural laws if necessary.

You're palming the pea, sometimes putting #2 in with #1 and sometimes putting it in with #3.Edited by ringo, : Added zinger.

Well my original point was that if some scientist in the future is able to create a single cell out of strictly inorganic matter the it will show that it took sentience to make that happen. I am not saying that it is conclusive proof that an intelligent designer is required but it also isn't proof that one isn't required, as I've seen suggested on this forum a number of times.1/ Yes, for example it seems that evolution is a natural process, although I remain sceptical that it wasn't manipulated along the way, but those that know far more about it than I do say that it wasn't so I'll yield to their vastly greater knowledge. From a theological POV it doesn't matter to me one way or the other as it is only a matter of interest.2/ Sure, we can manipulate natural laws by combining minerals and chemicals for example.3/ I do believe that God does sometimes manipulate natural laws, or at least natural laws as we understand them.I also agree that sometimes it might be difficult to distinguish one from another. The question is though, does natural law require an intelligent designer.In the Hameroff article that I linked to Straggler he talked about how time slows down for some athletes or for people in stressful situations. I remember coming off my bike years ago and what took a split second to my wife watching took several seconds for me, allowing me to have several thoughts and to be able to lift my head so that it wouldn't crack on the pavement.Was that a suspension of natural law? Personally I don't know, but it definitely did happen that way and many others have has similar events in their life. I also had it happen to me once while driving.Edited by GDR, : Used there instead of their. ugh!

Alright, i'm just here to make a few clarifications about a detail ^^ It is a matter of statistics here. There was an ocean of primordial soup that stayed for at least several thousands years. Who know how many billions of lipid bubbles formed in that ocean? Even if there is only 1 chance out of 1 billion to have a cell spontaneously form, as long as we don't know how many of these lipid bubbles formed we can't know what the odds were to have a cell form from one of them. Keep also in mind than it was a primitive cell, not as complex as today.I like to take the example of a type of glass that only have 0.1% chances of breaking when falling. In a shop full of those glasses, the boss yells at the employees because one glass broke. He says "there is only 0.1% chances of the glass breaking when falling, it means one of you broke it on purpose !". But he doesn't know how many glasses fell. If it is a large storehouse and an earthquake happened then maybe several thousands glasses got thrown down on the floor. What are the odds then for each of them staying intact?I'm not saying it can't be the work of an intelligent being. I'm just saying as long as we don't have more accurate numbers, we can't know if it was likely or not for a cell to appear. It is similar in a way to what i say in this topic : EvC Forum: Is the Bible the inerrant word of God? Or is it the words of men? ^^I had no reply so far, and i have no way to know if it's because nobody look at this forum anymore or if it's because nobody had anything to say (which i doubt^^) --As for the rest of the post, i don't have any opinion about it. I made the choice not to believe in anything and say to the question "do you think there is a god or everything is the result of chances?" "I don't know". I'll learn about the world as much as i want or can, but i promised myself to never believe in something. Either there are evidences and i know, either i don't know. And for now, there are no evidences about God existing or not.I see the sharks coming for an easy kill, but no believing doesn't prevent me to make hypothesis. Doing an hypothesis doesn't mean i believe it's true, just that it is a possibility. Just as God or no gods are also possibilities.Sorry if all that has already been said before.Edited by Zift Ylrhavic Resfear, : typos

Then God seriously messed up. Because Jesus story took a very long time to reach parts of the world like the asian, australian, north and south pole or american continent.Are you saying God abandoned them by not allowing them to reach him just because they didn't even have the possibility of believing in the Christ?To me, it seems like you'll be saved if you are good and compassionate, not if you believe in him.

So do you consider a human (i.e. the created) to be more complex than God (i.e. the creator)? Or not? You've done away with an infinite causal chain at the expense of invoking a more specific and thus more improbable 'something'. Something, rather than nothing, exists. This is the starting point for analysis. The more attributes that are required of this 'something' and the more complex it is the more improbable it's existence becomes.For this 'something' to possess the additional attribute of being eternal (on top of being hyper-intelligent, moral, able to create universes, able to interract with billions of people simultaneously etc. etc. etc. etc.) only adds to the increasing improbability of such a something just existing rather than not existing. This isn't about cause and invoking eternality doesn't resolve the issue. Questions
Which, in your view, is more complex?A) A universe containing interracting partciles
B) GodWhich, in your view, is more likely to be the 'something' that just exists rather than nothing?A) A universe containing interracting particles
B) God Again - My astonishment in and of itself is not so much an argument but more an expression of bafflement at the positions theistic beliefs require those that hold them to adopt. Positions regarding complexity and probability and the like. Well if God has no objective existence and is a purely subjective phenomenon then he has no existence outside the minds of humans. Whilst I would agree wholeheartedly with this assessment I very much doubt this is what you meant.Do you think God objectively exists? Unless you are able to discern the objective existence of something more concrete using this "knowing through our heart" method why would anyone think you could possibly discern the objective existence of something as ethereal as god using this same method?

Wouldn't you want to see how he did it before you jumped to that conclusion. If the scientist of the future manages to create a cell by simply mimicking natural, unintelligent, processes, then that would seem to show exactly the opposite of what you suggest. Even taking what you say at face value, what you describe would not require that some funky thing to happen to time. A change in the way humans perceive events would be sufficient, and might not require any suspension of natural law.

Hi Zift and welcome to EvC. Good to have you here. You are right of course. The likelihood of a cell forming from a soup of particles is impossible to define accurately. I have read figures that the 4.5 or so billion years of this planet doesn’t allow for sufficient time for the evolution of life as we know to have occurred but I’m not at all qualified to speak to that.In spite of what Straggler says I do consider an outside agency for sentient moral life more plausible than the idea that life just happened along from our particle roots. I guess that there are different levels of knowing. I know that there is an intelligence beyond human that cares about me and cares that I am a moral person. However, I don’t know it in the sense that I know I’m wearing blue jeans right now. It comes from life experience and a few decades of being a Christian and worshipping God as I understand Him. I don’t have all the answers and I don’t see the Bible as being inerrant. I am sure that some or many parts of what I believe are wrong but unfortunately I don’t know which parts those are.I am firmly convinced of the truth of the Gospel accounts of the bodily resurrection of Jesu which is why I am a Christian. If I didn’t believe that I would leave the Christian church and just try to serve God as best I can through other venues.I do think though that it is a good thing to try and sort out what to believe even if you aren’t going to get the kind of certainty that we as humans like. I contend that our desire for certainty is one of the primary reasons that we have people understanding holy books as being inerrant. Tell me about it. Just read through this thread.