Topic: Health and Religion - page 63. (Read 210871 times)

Much of the Bible is parable and metaphor. If you read the Gospels you will find that the teachings of Jesus are almost entirely in the form of parables. Similarly the book of Genesis must also be metaphor and parable from simple logic. Let's look at these issues in turn. First the age of the universe and the topic of creation in seven days. Here is a prior post of mine on this topic.


There is little reason to think that the day's mentioned in the Bible has anything to do with days as we measure time. In fact we know it cannot be the same unit of time as the sun which we use to measure a day was not created until the fourth day.

Next let's look at the Biblical account that man was created from dust. Does this literally mean God grabbed a bunch of dust formed it into a ball and out popped man or is this a metaphor to convey a deeper truth.

Was the Bible RIGHT about the origins of life? Scientists believe that we may have had our beginnings in CLAY

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2488467/Scientists-believe-beginnings-CLAY.html

You argue that "no one has to disprove anything, that you have to be able to prove it first". In this you error.

When dealing with metaphysics what we must do is show that the premise is not provably false, that it is internally consistent, and that it provides a rational model that holds up when it is applied to the universe.

Belief in God is all of these things. Thus it is rational and logical. If you choose to reject God the onus is on you to attempt to build an alternative rational and logical model for yourself.

Most atheist refuse to do this and get emotional and illogical at this point. Very few follow atheism to its logical conclusion.

Atheism if logically followed and explored takes one inevitably to nihilism as highlighted upthread.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.21736103

I acknowledge that I cannot disprove nihilism only highlight its consequences and argue that it is a very shaky foundation to build a life around.

Well, you are wrong. We can disprove the god from the Bible with science. For example with evolution or the age of the earth, age of the universe, all of those things disprove your god. You can also disprove your god by simply reading the bible, there are so many contradictions and just plain stupid things that can only have 2 explanations, god is not real or god is stupid. Also, no one has to disprove anything, you have to be able to prove it first, otherwise anything can be real if it's not disproved.

You can't create light before stars... are you sure about that?



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

According to current scientific models there was hundreds of thousands of years of light without stars.

Genesis 1-3:

All life on Earth may have come from clay according to new scientific research - just as the Bible, Koran and even Greek mythology have been suggesting for thousands of years.

The latest theory is that clay - which is at its most basic, a combination of minerals in the ground - acts as a breeding laboratory for tiny molecules and chemicals which it 'absorbs like a sponge'.

The process takes billions of years, during which the chemicals react to each other to form proteins, DNA and, eventually, living cells, scientists told the journal Scientific Reports.

Biological Engineers from Cornell University's department for Nanoscale Science in New York state believe clay 'might have been the birthplace of life on Earth'.

It is a theory dating back thousands of years in many cultures, though perhaps not using the same scientific explanation.

In religious texts from ancient Egypt to Chinese legends, God moulds clay into the shape of man and then breathes life into him through his nostrils.

Even Genesis talks of man being born from dust and returning to dust when he dies, with scholars translating this from the ancient Hebrew as also meaning clay or the earth itself.

In seawater, clay forms a hydrogel - a mass of tiny spaces which soak up other minerals, chemicals and tiny molecules from its surrounding area.

Professor Dan Luo of Cornell said: 'In early geological history clay hydrogel provided a confinement function for biomolecules and biochemical reactions.

Genesis 2:7: 'And the Lord God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.'

Isaiah 64:8: 'But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.'

'Over billions of years, chemicals confined in those spaces could have carried out the complex reactions that formed proteins, DNA and eventually all the machinery that makes a living cell work.'


The conclusions are based on experiments by the researchers using synthetic hydrogels, adding DNA, amino acids and enzymes and simulating the production of proteins.

Well let's break down your argument a little more systematically.

You (presumably) start with the premise that humans are foolish and make stuff up. We can verify this is true from our observations today.

From here you can infer that it is possible for a god to be made up. We can verify this by looking at the multitude of gods in human history. Their existence and teachings are mutually exclusive. They logically cannot all exist.

So far so good but from here your argument gets very wobbly. You assume that God was therefore made up presumably by a primitive and unsophisticated people because they "didn't know better".

Note that tradition and the written accounts in the Book of Exodus tell us that God was heard and witnessed by the entire nation of Israel.



It would be much much harder to falsify an event that is common history and witnesses by all then an event that was witnessed by a single individual but let's set that aside for now.

You argue that "People didn't come up with God following logic, they just invented him."

If this was true then it should be a trivial and simple matter to fundamentally disprove God's existence with modern science and logic. Our technology, educational achievements and abilities are orders of magnitude beyond what they were 4,000 years ago. We can after all easily disprove the existence of many ancient pagan deities as they were understood by their followers.

Yet interestingly we find that not only is science and logic not able to disprove God but at a fundamental level we see that science and logic will never be able to disprove God. As understood by Ethical Monotheism God is entirely compatible with science and logic.

For those who did not follow the upthread discuss see Perry Marshall essay: The Limits of Science


Indeed a critical point that is often ignored not only by the atheist but many religious people as well.

No is not and you know is not. ''consistent with what we know about God.'' First of all, there is no ''what we know about god'' God is made up, people made up god thousands of years ago so it doesn't follow that it's logical belief. People didn't come up with god following logic, they just invented him like all the other gods because they didn't know better. So don't bullshit me.

The way of a person's life IS his religion.    

After all the things that Coincube, myself, many others, and nature itself have shown you, you continue to profess your fictional idea that God doesn't exist. Your fiction will never come true, because you can't out-believe God so that God doesn't exist because of your faith. The greatest thing you will prove doing is ousting God from your life. When that happens, you will have nothing to hold you alive any longer.

Personally, I have nothing against religion, if it does not harm myself and other people. And health does not depend on religion, it depends on the way of life of a person.

No is not and you know is not. ''consistent with what we know about God.'' First of all, there is no ''what we know about god'' God is made up, people made up god thousands of years ago so it doesn't follow that it's logical belief. People didn't come up with god following logic, they just invented him like all the other gods because they didn't know better. So don't bullshit me.

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-the-cause-of-the-universe-an-uncaused-personal-creator-of-the-universe/

''We know that wherever is outside of the universe must logically be boundless, immaterial, indivisible and an uncaused cause.'' Even if we agree with that and we shouldn't, the argument says nothing against a lot of uncaused causes, if everything that's outside the universe must have no cause then it could easily mean there are a ton of uncaused things outside the universe which doesn't solve any problem.

I don’t believe in Santa Claus. I used to when I was a little kid, then my Mom told me that Santa didn’t come to our house because we were Jewish. Eventually with the help of some Hanukkah presents, I got over this loss and I soon after outgrew believing in Santa. Around that same time, I also believed that God was an old man, with a big white turban, a long white beard and sat on a flying carpet in the sky. I also outgrew believing this fantasy, and for many years afterwards, when it came to God I was an agnostic, meaning I was on the fence. I didn’t know either way whether or not God existed, I didn’t have faith in Gods existence, nor did I deny it, I just didn’t know.

During a visit to Israel in 1998, I discovered a Judaism very different than the one I grew up with. A Judaism that was a wisdom tradition, a spiritual path to awaken people their highest selves.  I also came to have faith in God, but not the childish god-concept I had growing up. In fact, the God atheists don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either. So what do I mean when I say “God”?

I can’t tell you, because its not something I can put into words. The word “water” doesn’t make you wet, but you know what it’s referring to. This is not the case with the word “God.” Rav Abraham Issac Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, a visionary and philosopher writes:

“All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any language, give us only a tiny and dull spark of the hidden light to which the soul aspires when it utters the word “God.” Every definition of God brings about heresy, every definition is spiritual idolatry; even attributing to Him intellect and will, even the term divine, the term God, suffers from the limitation of definition.”

God is beyond any concept. God is beyond even the concept of beyond. Both the terms God and Goddess have nothing to do with “God.” Thus, it would be wise to say that anything I write about God will be a metaphor, an approximation of something I can’t actually describe. Having stated that, what I hope to share with you are some of the fundamental Jewish ideas and teachings about God, the most important being that “God is One.”

First, a bit about Rav Kook and atheism. Rav Kook, who lived in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) under the British Mandate, was known for being universal, out of the box, and able to befriend and dialogue with people holding seemingly opposite ideologies from him, including the secular Zionists who were proud atheists. Rav Kook actually believed that the phenomenon of atheism was the hand of God influencing history because religious practice had fallen to a state where too many people had blind faith in a deity that did not exist. He writes:

“Since the thoughts concerning God in their basic elements are unclear, God being, as conceived by the multitude and even by individuals who should be their leaders, is that of a ruthless power from which there is no escape and to whom one must necessarily be subservient. ... No grandeur of God is then manifest in the soul, but only the lowliness of wild imaginings, that conjure up a form of some deceptive, vague angry deity that is dissociated from reality. It confuses everyone who believes in it, depresses his spirit, blunts his feelings, inhibits the assertion of his sensibilities, and uproots the Divine glory in his soul. ... atheism arises as a pained outcry to liberate man from this narrow and alien pit, to raise him from the darkness ... To uproot the dross that separates man from the truly divine light, and in the ruins wrought by atheism will the higher knowledge of God erect her Temple.”

So if atheism came to smash the idols of false conceptions of God, what is this “higher knowledge” of God that Rav Kook is talking about? Rabbi David Aaron, on of my first teachers of Torah and Kabbalah, teaches that Judaism is not a religion that believes in one God, but that God is ONE. What does this mean? When I look around with my physical eyes I don’t see God. I see trees, cars, the sky, shopping malls, but I dont see God. My experience of life is of duality, of separation, a world of contrast, of opposites, good and evil, life and death, us and them, pain and pleasure. I am a self, separate from the world, a small finite time-bound being living out my cycle of birth, life and death, surrounded by a multitude of other beings and things that are not me, and that are also destined to pass away.

Knowledge of God (called the experience of d’vekut, which means “bonding” or “unifying” in Jewish thought) reveals to me that I and everything else in this temporary world of multiplicity and separation is One with God. It is seeing but not with my eyes and knowing but through my mind, that duality is not the fundamental truth of existence. That the Infinite and Eternal One is giving birth to creation every single second, and that the flow of history is Divine intelligence unfolding through time. It’s seeing what the kabbalists teach as “Ain Od Milvado” (אין עוד מלבדו), which translated means, “There is nothing more than Him.”  Judaism teaches that although God transcends creation, everything in creation is sourced in God, is One.



This higher knowledge of God is reflected in the Hebrew names of God. The name of God most used in Hebrew (the Hebrew of Jewish sacred texts is known as Loshon Kodesh, which means the “Holy Speech” because it is a God-centered language) to refer to the Divine is Hashem. Translated, “Hashem” means “The Name” because it refers to one of the most sacred names of God in the Torah. This name is composed of the four letters (read from right to left) ה (Heh) - ו (Vav) - ה (Heh) - י (Yud) and is known in English as the Tetragrammaton, which means the “four-letter name.” This name is not spoken, its pronunciation has been lost to known history. Thousands of years ago, it was pronounced during Yom Kippur by the High Priest when he stood in the Holy of Holies, home of the Ark of the Covenant inside the Holy Temple of  Jerusalem. Hashem is the name God revealed to Moses after Moses asked whom he should tell the Israelites sent him, and Hashem answered tell them “I will be what I will Be.”

This answer, which is a name, implies that God transcends time.  A common question people ask is if God made everything then what made God? Then what made whatever made God? Then what made that, ad infinitum. Inherent in this question is the idea of causality, that A causes B, which causes C, like dominoes falling in a line, like time flowing from the past into the present into future.  God was, God is and God will be.  This concept is contained in the letters of Hashem’s name, which is a composite of the past present and future tenses of the verb “to be”: God was (היה), God is (הווה), and God will be (יהיה).  Everytime the name Hashem is used in the Torah or spoken, it is invoking and evoking that God is infinite, and beyond beginning middle and end.  

God cannot be grasped through our mind because our mind is time-bound. There is a story about a man who is found by his neighbor looking for something under a streetlamp. When his neighbor asks him what he is looking for, the man replies his keys. The neighbor then asks him where he lost them and the man replies in his house. Upon being asked by his neighbor why the man is looking for his keys under a streetlamp outside, if his keys are in his house, the man answers because there is light under the lamp and his house is dark.

This story is a great metaphor to describe the folly of searching for God with our minds. The intellect is an incredibly powerful tool. Through the power of our cerebral cortex humanity has developed the scientific method, discovered the laws of nature, put a man on the moon, ushered in the digital age and given us almost God-like powers. We are so used to using our minds to look for answers, but in searching for God, the “streetlamp” is our intellect, and the “keys” are God. No matter how much we look with our intellect and its tools, God cannot be found, and the fact that God cannot be found with a microscope or telescope does not prove that God does not exist. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So how does a time-bound being awaken to that which is timeless? The Tikkunei Zohar, a classic of Jewish mysticism, states, “No thought can grasp him.” Higher knowledge of God does not require that a person discard reason, but simply be open to the possibility that there are ways of knowing that are trans-rational. The God atheists deny is a man-made construct whose origin is in the human mind. Hashem, also known in kabbalistic terms as the “Endless Light,” cannot be grasped or conceived of by the human mind but can be apprehended through transcending the mind. Torah is the Jewish spiritual path, a set of practices to awaken to this transcendent knowledge of God. When this awakening happens we behold, that we are not alone, that there is nothing to fear and that our true source is Hashem.

May Hashem bless us with d’vekut, to see through the prison of our finite minds, and to recognize that we are all a spark of the Infinite One.  

We know that wherever is outside of the universe must logically be boundless, immaterial, indivisible and an uncaused cause. This is not an assumption but a logical necessity if the universe is finite and rational.

Is it rational to infer that this uncaused cause is God?

Well let compare what we derive by logical and mathematical necessity above to what Ethical Monotheism tells us about the nature of God.

The Nature of God
http://www.jewfaq.org/g-d.htm

Note the symmetry between what logically must exist beyond the bounds of the universe and what religious tradition teaches.

The problem is that you cannot use Kurt Gödel theorem for theology, that's the consensus. The ''proof'' used here is nothing but the same old proof, just using Kurt Godel as an authority but it's the same thing. The same old assumptions without any bases like ''Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause'' or ''then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. It’s immaterial.''
NO WE DON'T. That's the whole fucking point, we don't know what's outside the circle and even if you know it's not matter, energy or space or time you still don't know that it's ''immaterial'' You are just assuming that, what is ''immaterial'' anyways?

Even if I would agree with everything, the argument says nothing about the possibility of more causes not just one, why does it necessarily have to be only one uncaused cause and not many uncaused causes, we also don't know what that uncaused cause or causes are, you are just assuming it's god because you are religious.

God is One
God is a unity. He is a single, whole, complete indivisible entity. He cannot be divided into parts or described by attributes. Any attempt to ascribe attributes to God is merely man's imperfect attempt to understand the infinite.
...

God is Incorporeal
God has no body. Any reference to God's body is simply a figure of speech, a means of making God's actions more comprehensible to beings living in a material world.
...

God is Omnipresent
God is in all places at all times. He fills the universe and exceeds its scope.
...

God is Eternal
God transcends time. He has no beginning and no end.

There are many ways to challenge Perry Marshall's argument.

You can as aesma does challenge the claim that the universe is finite. It seems logical that the universe is finite but no one has proven this yet.

You can also argue the the universe is not rational. Just because it is rational and ordered in our section of the universe is not definitive proof. A similar argument could be made that the sun may rise in the west tomorrow.

Perry Marshall argues that if the universe is both rational and finite then it logically and mathematically follows that there is something outside of the universe. That something must logically be boundless, immaterial, indivisible and an uncaused cause.

Immaterial means it is not composed of any form of matter, energy, time, or space as we understand it.

Religion ultimately is a choice of primary intrinsic assumptions. These are the fundamental truths an individual builds ones worldview and life around. Every human being is religious even if that religion is some variation of nihilism or hardcore atheism.

The problem is that you cannot use theorem for theology, that's the consensus. The ''proof'' used here is nothing but the same old proof, just using Kurt Godel as an authority but it's the same thing. The same old assumptions without any bases like ''Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause'' or ''then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. It’s immaterial.''
NO WE DON'T. That's the whole fucking point, we don't know what's outside the circle and even if you know it's not matter, energy or space or time you still don't know that it's ''immaterial'' You are just assuming that, what is ''immaterial'' anyways?

...
The universe is infinite.

The rest of the proof doesn't matter if that basic axiom is not agreed on.

From our best observations, we know that the Universe is an awful lot bigger than the part we can observe. Beyond what we can see, we strongly suspect that there’s plenty more Universe out there just like ours, with the same laws of physics, the same types of physical, cosmic structures, and the same chances at complex life. There should also be a finite size and scale to the “bubble” in which inflation ended, and an exponentially huge number of such bubbles contained within the larger, inflating spacetime. But as inconceivably large as that entire Universe — or Multiverse, if you prefer — may be, it might not be infinite. In fact, unless inflation went on for a truly infinite amount of time, or the Universe was born infinitely large, the Universe ought to be finite in extent.

The biggest problem of all, though? It’s that we don’t have enough information to definitively answer the question. We only know how to access the information available inside our observable Universe: those 46 billion light years in all directions. The answer to the biggest of all questions, of whether the Universe is finite or infinite, might be encoded in the Universe itself, but we can’t access enough of it to know. Until we either figure it out, or come up with a clever scheme to expand what we know physics is capable of, all we’ll have are the possibilities.

OK so I've read it. Let's say I'm unconvinced. For example this : "Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle we possibly can – around the whole universe."

This is stated like this, without any explanation. I disagree that we can draw a circle around the universe. The universe is infinite.

The rest of the proof doesn't matter if that basic axiom is not agreed on.