Is there any place for God in the modern world?

I was pointing out a weakness in your reasoning. You said "God doesn't do miracles as He did during the time of His revelation to the Israelites," but you failed to give any reasoned explanation as to why this should be so. If you leave it for people to find for themselves, there is a natural explanation that skeptics will come upon.

You wanted an explanation for why God no longer does miracles? Why didn't you just ask?The reason is that He was demonstrating His being God to the Israelites, and through Jesus Christ, so that we might believe that He is God. That was the only reason for the miracles, to give the seal of authority to His word through His people and the written Bible. That being accomplished, He no longer does miracles. We are to walk by faith in Him through the revelation He has given.I do believe He does sometimes perform small-scale miracles for believers, but that is something else entirely, and sometimes for a testimony to newly evangelized peoples.But all that was an aside in context. My main point was that nothing happens without God. You were implying that when the "accidents" of nature I mentioned become understood, even to being 100% predictable, then God would no longer be needed to explain them either, and that their being explainable as God's work now is simply because they are still unknown, which is the God in the gaps idea. But there is never going to come a time when the entire causal chain to the millions of accidents we all encounter in our lives will be known.

Welll....*blush* He is involved in my life but I have yet to surrender the control. What I meant to convey is that God is so present in my life and yet I am so obliviously involved in trying to make stuff happen rather than surrender

Again, this gets back to my point that it all depends on who God is. Did God imagine us long before we imagined Him? We are talking on two planes of thought, here. Take the concept of "The Beginning."
Is the Beginning something defined by God...as Creator? many of us believe so.Others believe that the beginning is an event that happened and that were we to have a powerful enough telescope we could see such an event hypothetically happening....which, since we designed/invented the telescope and the theories surrounding cosmology would suggest that the source of all explanation lies within the human mind.So, to sum it up,Boolean... Do you believe that God existed before humanity could have thought Him up?This message has been edited by Phat, 03-25-2006 12:36 PM

But why is it our instinct to say 'God made it' when we don't know how those laws came to be? In this day and age we know the effects those laws have on us, something 100BC man didn't, and we don’t attribute the effects of those laws to God anymore, unlike 100BC man did. Are we just saying 'God made the laws in our world' because we lack the understanding to know how they were created yet? If we have been wrong about so many things in the past that we thought God did, how can we be sure he is in charge of any of the things we don’t understand yet?

Only if you know as little about our world as 100BC man. Why does an eclipse happen? Is it God, or is it the movement in our solar system? Why does a tornado happen? Is it God or is it a low pressure system? Ok, well those might not be God because we understand them now, but what made our solar system and low pressure systems? We dont know yet? BAM, it's God! Spot on there. That's exactly how I mean it. I’ll do a bit of poking around the internet for this God of the gap idea, since it seems to be quite close to what I’m talking about. Never is a very very strong word, and I would be hesitant to use it myself.Even in this example, it shows the pattern of thinking that mankind always seems to take: We may not understand what the causal chain of events leading up to the millions of accidents was, so we say it’s God. Once again, if we cannot explain it, it’s God. Of course in the 4000 when we can predict each and every hiccup the world has one year in advance, will God no longer be in control of the chain of events leading up to a million accidents?Doesn’t it seem odd that Gods power is directly proportional to how little we know about the world around us?

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it still make a noise? I think that as long as there is anything in our world we cannot explain, we will attribute it to a higher power. I would have to say that as long as there is someone somewhere in the universe with at least one question nobody can answer, God will still be around.So, do I believe God existed before humanity could have thought Him up? I think that there will be faith God exists as long as there is someone somewhere with an unanswerable question. We can't solve this final question, whatever it is, lest we become God ourself, but with that final question always in hand, we will put our faith in God as the answer.

since matter can both be created and destroyed, your point seems to be based in an incorrect premiss

There will always be room for God in the human imagination so long as we perceive ourselves to be a special creation.I suspect an encounter with an alien species with vastly superior technology would have more impact on religiosity than millennia of human progress.

aewrodynamics is a small picture, God is the big picture.I wonder sometimes if part of being God is gravity, the glue that holds the universe together, and allows aerodynamics to take place.gravity and the force that started the universe has to have come from somewhere. It didn't just pop out of nothing.In other words, why? why the universe?I hope you don't think because we figured out that lift is created by air flowing over the arc on the top of the birds wing, and controlled by his feathers that we somehow know everything, and God doesn't exist. Please explain exactly how a bird flies. Explain how the molecules in the air remain a certain space a part and give it it's density, and not collapse in on each other. Please exactly how electron spin around a nucleus and why, and then explain exactly how gravity works, and why it exists in the universe.There is much to learn, we are infants in what we know about the universe. The further we look, the firther we see, the smaller we look, the smaller things are.Can science explain your purpose in life? I still look at that stuff, even though I have a very good understanding of how it works, and thank God for it. I don't know, but I think we could learn a lot from the 100BC man. His life was much simpler, and maybe he could see things more clearer. Just because he contributed things to God, doesn't make him wrong. If God exists, then it's all from God. Same thing he did before.But basically it's up to you. You can be God's friend if you want to.

This certainly raise my eyebrow.For me, this would be difficult to deal with, unless they are already Christian.I am a long time contributer of SETI@home.

No, but we did go from saying ”God does that’ to ”Oh, ok God doesn’t actually do that’, which is a pretty big change. But your still attributing it back to areas of the world we don't know, that being creation. When it comes to 'how did this come to be', we have no idea, and the instant reaction to that is 'God made it'. But what about the bird 100BC man was watching? He saw it defy everything he knew about the world and fly. He tried sticking some wings on himself and jumped out his window, only to come crashing to the ground. There was a huge gap in his understanding of the world, that being he had no idea it wasn't God controlling the bird, but the law of aerodynamics that was keeping it in the air.We have now figured out HOW that bird is able to stay in the air. We closed that gap in our understanding of the world. Suddenly, God isn't responsible for that because we know otherwise (remember, just the flying action, not the creation). Was God really there in the first place? If he wasn't, and it was just because we were clueless about the world back then, how can we be sure we are not doing the same thing now?If we then move onto 'where did the law of aerodynamics come from?', straight away we go back to thinking like 100BC man, in that because we don't understand it, we just assume God must be doing it. Why? Why do we keep assuming that anything we don’t know must be because of God, and then when we do figure that area out, we shift our belief in what God actually does?As I said a few posts above, doesn’t it seem odd that Gods power is directly proportional to how little we know about the world around us? You might find this article interesting It's actually very close to what I'm talking about here.

We have supercomputers that chart the weather. We saw a colorful large round swirl coming straight at New Orleans. We were unable to predict the human error, suffering, and sociological changes that resulted from the Hurricane.Of course, we know that God did not directly cause any of the climatic events.(Most of us believe this way.)Unpredictability is always a factor in forecasting.Many of us would tend to believe that the human error associated with the disaster in New Orleans was a result of willful ignorance in planning and preperation.Just as we cannot blame God, we cannot blame the concept of spiritual opposition to human enlightenment known as Satan.The spirit of the age in which we live is a cultural swirl that is also unpredictable and which leads to at least one and obviously many more unanswered questions. Lets also conceptualize what we DO know about the vast universe!We have quite elaborate theories, physics equations, observable phenomena (through our Hubble Space Telescope) and unmanned probes that have gathered comet dust and taken advanced photography of our nearby planets. Based on the current theories regarding this universe, we are so very small and the universe is so VERY VERY BIG!I may be using a God of the Gaps analogy when I say this, but the FACT is that we are basing our entire theory of physical reality on the observations originating from the collective human mind.--The sum of all human knowledge. Notice that we two definitions: A faith based one: (God) and a science based one: (Cosmology)Your questioning, Boolean, is aimed at the development of human wisdom and of human reasoning and methodology from a scientific perspective. You have also hinted at faith by allowing for one unanswered question! I will agree that there has been no strict scientific experiments that have proven the existance of God. The Bible, surprisingly written 2000 years ago, still has some scriptures which could be said to have forseen the state of humanity at this point. This bit of scripture is commented on by Wycliffe in his commentaries. By the way, I also had to check my World Book CD on what it had about Wycliffe. Now...we could argue that Wycliffe had limited knowledge in the times which he lived. Whoever wrote Thessalonians had even less of a perspective than we do today.Perhaps the issue is whether or not truth is always a necessarily evolving concept based on information alone or whether some truth(s) are timeless and are always applicable to the human condition.This message has been edited by Phat, 03-26-2006 04:02 AM

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Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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Do you believe that God existed before humanity could have thought Him up?

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Well, Phat, don't you believe that lots of gods and supernatural entities and phenomena are/were "made up" by humanity?

Yes.And this brings us back once again to one of the classic EvC debates within our Faith/Belief paradigm.
1) How do I know which God is the real God? Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? Please stand up. Please stand up.Personally, I don't think that the God I know is Loki the trickster or Slim Shady! And the one unanswered question that Boolean may have may be different than the one that I or anyone else may have.I believe that the answer comes from a single source no matter which culture or religion we are from. For you, Schraff, the answer is not as important as the questions and the security that you derive from following human wisdom and rationality instead of superstition and folk tales.My point to Boolean is that not all answers arise from human wisdom, nor do all questions come from human enquiry.IMB, BTW,Schraff, I am seeking help for that pesky gambling! That is the real Slim Shady!This message has been edited by Phat, 03-26-2006 10:51 AM

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Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago