Topic: Scientific proof that God exists? - page 417. (Read 845565 times)

Rather than know god by reading scripture, try the great experiment.. If you want to of course, express a genuine emotional curiosity to feel the emotion or love of the creator - maybe a genuine desire to get to know who this being is - If your desire is pure and emotion is put behind it (not just a mental desire but an emotional longing) what will happen next will show you who god really is and bring an understanding that is not wholly from you.

Try it  (Unless you have already in which case awesome sauce)
http://www.reddit.com/r/CreatorOfTheUniverse/comments/2l0lga/the_great_experiment/

What we "believe god to be" is completely irrelevant. 

I had a theology professor that once said he was annoyed with all the bumper stickers he was seeing around at that time that said, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!."  He said that they should read, "God said it, that settles it" because it really doesn't matter if we believe it or not.

I think many people are in danger of making god "in their own image" which really is a form of idolatry.  To really know God, we have to study His character and this is done by reading the Bible in it's entirety, both the Old and the New Testament.  We can also "know God" by spending time in prayer as well. He says, "His sheep know His voice."  Unfortunately it seems lately the world likes to focus on the attributes of God that they like and just ignore the parts that they don't like.  I have heard way too many sermons about "Gods grace" for example.  Sure, God is gracious and forgiving and has endless love for those that are repentant and seek Him, but God is also a God of judgement for those that mock Him and those that are proud and deny Him.  This should bring comfort to those that do feel that there are "horrors" in this world.  God will eventually make all thinks right.  Those that have hurt others, if unrepentant, will pay the penalty for their actions.  All wrongs will be made right in the end. 

I read God's scribes and messengers and all teachers of the law. I especially listen to those teachers who acknowledge God as headmaster and who claim to have a specific teaching mission.

I always read multiple sources for this kind of stuff (law). God says "read it all and discern in Wisdom" (of knowledge).

Seek it out and ye shall find. God sends his messengers to you so that you might understand and have responsibility when it comes to the Laws.

Unfortunately most people are only following the standard of their fathers, and they are ready to crucify any messenger who tells them that they are acting irresponsibly (Matthew 23).

More from Spencer:

"How truly its central position is impregnable, Religion has never adequately realized. In the devoutest faith as we commonly see it, there lies hidden a core of scepticism; and it is this scepticism which causes that dread of inquiry shown by Religion when face to face with Science. Obliged to abandon one by one the superstitions it once tenaciously held, and daily finding other cherished beliefs more and more shaken, Religion secretly fears that all things may some day be explained; and thus itself betrays a lurking doubt whether that Incomprehensible Cause of which it is conscious, is really incomprehensible.

Of Religion then, we must always remember, that amid its many errors and corruptions it has asserted and diffused a supreme verity. From the first, the recognition of this supreme verity, in however imperfect a manner, has been its vital element; and its chief defects, once extreme but gradually diminishing, have been its failures to recognize in full that which it recognized in part. The truly religious element of Religion has always been good; that which has proved untenable in doctrine and vicious in practice, has been its irreligious element; and from this it has been undergoing purification."

This seems to be an error we are fed all our lives, a wrathful or vengeful god. This is not an expression of love and not what I believe god to be either.

Indeed, thinking about the horrors of this world makes me sad, too. How can one bring themselves to appreciate such a horrific god that would condemn any life to such terrors? That's definitely not a loving god. Not the way I understand love to be. 

I suppose god set it all up. I'm just left here to watch it unfold. I haven't seen or heard from him. Have you? Has anyone here? Are most of us here just part of countless numbers who are left out of loop. Believing in the wrong god, or religion, or neither one. Are we all therefore condemned to some unpleasant afterlife? Seems rather torturous don't you think?

Also want to start this convo on reddit guys..
http://www.reddit.com/r/CreatorOfTheUniverse/

Wrote this there as well thought I should share..

Imagine if we lived in a world where we were taught how to process our emotional damage in a responsible or loving manner.. One could feel anger in a way which would not damage another soul. Unfortunately on earth its become common place that everything we do or strive to do is driven by a desire to dodge our emotions through our addictions.
When a person feels a negative emotion in public the level of discomfort that causes people is tremendous, most people either block their respective feelings or look away. If a man cries he is called weak and perceived as lesser, if a woman feels anger she is not lady like. We have created constructs we honor which literally force us to die weak and frail ridden with ailments. please note I say WE... Because though I know this my fear of feeling emotion has stopped me for a long time. Terror is the last emotion I have yet to unlock... we bottle this shit up for so long and act like everything is perfect on the outside, or we prefer to feed our respective addictions:Eating,Sleeping,Physical Pleasure and a myriad of hobbies to name a few. We take medication to run from both our PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL baggage but we never truly find happiness.

We are all so arrogant as beings of this universe, we assume we either created it or it created itself. We are so rebellious and self reliant that we attempt to interact completely independent from the laws which have been lovingly put in place in our universe. Until we grow in humility and try to nurture a genuine EMOTIONAL desire to experiment with the possibility of developing an actual honest relationship with the creator of the universe, we will continue on this path of destruction. We must learn to open our hearts and stop running from our pain.

Living in complete emotional ignorance – irresponsibly hating and projecting on everyone around us.. All the while we are controlled by an emotionally damaged few who are ignorant themselves in why they really do the things they do? The answer is we haven’t ever been able to.. Look at the world around you. Parents/guardians rape/abuse their children in complete ignorance (more than likely they themselves experienced deep seated trauma) and then tell the child I did that because you deserved it..Or I only did this because I love you… This is just ONE example out of millions… Now this child has ingrained in him/her the feeling that it deserves to be abused… Fast forward 28 years later and you have a 32 year old woman who lives with a man who beats her every night and she stays because she ‘loves’ him.. How will we ever break this cycle if we are not taught this in school? Now we have people making statements like Love hurts… No… Love cannot hurt – This is a construct of man induced by fear... Love is creation, Love is healing.. – .. Anger hurts… Sadness hurts… Rejection hurts… Fear hurts.. Pain Hurts… This stuff is not taught to us – we run around our day to day lives just fighting to keep our head above our debts and we treat each other with no respect or love… and then our physical bodies die.. Am I the only one who is saddened by this?

Why would god need messengers? If god has a message for me, I'm positive sending a messenger or using some middleman is just highly gratuitous and I assure you completely unnecessary. Hell, in this day and age, we could even email or a text on my phone.  

Spencer says:
"The Atheistic theory is not only absolutely unthinkable, but, even were it thinkable, would not be a solution."

no tenable hypothesis can be framed

All atheists are humanists, since what else could they be? Agnosticism is not a third position, it is tacit atheism,
SO
as all ultimate religious ideas are literally unthinkable, we come back to the question being asked in this thread:

WHERE do YOU take God in your life journey?

So what you're saying is:
 No need to bring up God's messengers? Or his Laws?

No need to bring up Herbert Spencer's ideas, which are far more expansive than the ideas that you have mentioned here?

Here is a choice passage that results from these ideas:
"The beliefs which Science has forced upon Religion, have been intrinsically more religious than those which they supplanted"
and another:
"the most abstract conception, to which Science is slowly approaching, is one that merges into the inconceivable or unthinkable, by the dropping of all concrete elements of thought."

That should be said, and much more...

I believe you were referring to -

The belief being, that god would need to explore his surroundings. As in, god chose to "forget" at the moment of the Big Bang.
However, there is no exploring, as there is no beginning or end. No not knowing, then knowing or vice versa. I believe this god character is all (always) knowing, if it truly exists.

From an agnostic point of view, god is infinitely unimaginable. Therefore, you cannot make assumptions of god, like "I believe that our logic and mind functions exactly the same as god." There's infinite levels in the "God-level theory of reality". Ones that you literally can't even imagine.

Using the multi-verse theory as an example. An infinite number of universes having an infinite amount of possibilities. You won't ever come close to imagining the unimaginable, even if you started right now and thought about it for the rest of time. (ie. The laws of physics and time don't exist.) Universes where anything you can imagine does not exist, replaced by the unimaginable. 'Words can't describe' kinds of unimaginable things, whereby you would de facto be in the wrong if you even tried using words to describe it.

All there really is to say is... Have a nice day.  

NO IDOLS, NO FALSE IMAGES

This means that there is NOTHING in material manifestation for you to worship as your GOD. You are the temple. And so with this truth in mind you might ask yourself, WHERE do YOU take God in your life journey?

This includes placing the attainment and hoarding of "worldly" treasures (e.g. strippers, beer) above the attainment of your spiritual wisdom and perfection.

Lower-order levels of logic are essentially the exact same as higher-order ones, just infinitely smaller. It's my opinion that this is what is meant in the Bible when it says man was made in God's image.  I believe that our logic and mind functions exactly the same as god, except at an infinitely-smaller level.  Logic is a closed system, and inasmuch as we use logic as the only basis to rationalize about the Universe, it is possible to construct a perfectly self-contained logical theory of the Universe which would essentially equate to a God-level theory of reality.  The only criteria is that it must be self-contained and consistent throughout, and must be capable of explaining not only everything the Universe contains, but also itself.  Therefore, its structure must be self-reinforcing and circular such that any attempt to deny it only reaffirms its existence.  

An example of such a self-reinforcing and circular argument is the argument for absolute truth, for any attempt to deny absolute truth, e.g. "There is no absolute truth" automatically invokes the unspoken assertion, "It is the absolute truth there is no absolute truth."  Of, if someone said, "There is more than one truth," or, "Truth is relative," it is the same as saying "It is the absolute truth there is more than one truth," or, "It is the absolute truth that truth is relative."

In the same way there is no possible way for an ant to conceptualize our galaxy, we do not have ability to know the mind and ability of an omnipotent being. This is basically agnosticism in a nutshell.

Religions claim to know the mind and ability of (their) god(s).

It's the "beyond anyone's comprehension or judgment" part that I'm having trouble with here.  I would agree that in a literal sense, this omnipotent ability is beyond comprehension.  But in a conceptual sense, it isn't.

Something interesting I've learned about logic is that it is hologrammatic in structure, e.g. in the same way that spatial dimensions are holographic in structure.  For example, the third dimension is the infinite sum of possible combinations of the second dimension, the fourth dimension is the infinite sum of all possible combinations  of the third dimension, etc.  Similarly, logic can be conceptualized as operating similarly on higher- and lower-order dimensional planes.  For example, a higher-order logic can be used to explore a lower-order logic function because it yields a vantage point from which one can comprehensively view everything going on in the lower-order level.  Conceptually, God, if it exists, operates at the highest possible, prime level of logic.  We need a way to occupy the same vantage point to talk about God rationally, and this is possible.

Imagine if I draw a tesseract on a piece of paper, which would be the representation of a 4th-dimensional structure on a 2nd-dimension piece of paper interpreted by 3rd-dimensional beings, us.  By taking a higher-order dimension (i.e. the 4th dimension) and literally thrusting it down into the 2nd-dimension (i.e. the piece of paper), we can gain insight into the 4th-dimension even though we are only 3rd-dimensional beings who have no direct ability to perceive the 4th-dimension from the appropriate vantage point.  Accordingly, we had to 'pretend' that we were 5th-dimensional beings analyzing the 4th-dimension in the same way that we as 3rd-dimensional beings analyze the 2nd-dimension.  

If we can do this with logic, i.e. by 'pretending' that we already occupy a higher vantage point by thrusting higher-order levels of logic below us in the same way that we thrust the 4th-dimensional tesseract onto a 2nd-dimensional plane on paper, then we have it made -- we then have a method to rationalize about God.

Exactly! This is the point! If god can appear as a man in the sky, or a burning bush, or (forgive the pun) god knows what, then god can also appear as a teapot, FSM, as well as every hair on your head, all at the same time. God theoretically assumes every possible form, however seemingly impossible they may seem, meaning god can assume every imaginal form and infinitely more unimaginable forms, all at the same time beyond anyone's comprehension or judgment, omnipotently.

Taken from, "A creed indeed."

Quote

FSM is ageless, timeless and all-encompassing...
FSM has created all there is for our entertainment and sustenance, and has given unto us the mental capacity to adapt the mythologies of This Universe to aid and comfort us here, until that day we are able to join together at the foot of the Beer Volcano and enumerate our specifications at the Stripper Factory so that happiness and contentedness and good cheer be present for all, forever and forever.

R'Amen.

Before I start on my rant, I know a lot of us don't see eye to eye on this stuff, but.. I enjoy hearing the perspective and certainly respect everyone's choice to believe in anything they want... it's what makes us human.

With that said, in the thread I've seen many people saying that a person who believes in God doesn't need evidence, they just need faith, I think that's a bit belittling... In reality, the same can be said for someone who believes in evolution... that may evoke a chuckle, but hear me out... the fact is (and please, prove me wrong if you know something different), science has yet to provide one concrete piece of evidence of a true evolution of one species evolving into another totally different species, which is what true evolution is. Adaptation over time (not to be confused with evolution), yes, loads of evidence for that (Darwin's observations of the finches beaks changing over time to adapt to changes in the environment being the one example often brought up).. but at the end of the day, the finches were still finches, they were still birds, still the same species. That was not the evolution of species jumping from one kind to another, that's adaptation and science can verify that through observation. What it cannot provide, however, is cold, hard evidence of one species transforming from one to another, which is where evolutionists say is where man came from. So with no proof of that ever happening to support that view, then it also requires... faith.

But yeah, from my perspective, I actually see just as many gigantic leaps and bounds for a person believing in evolution, because there's simply no concrete evidence of it ever occurring.. no logical answer to how there was nothing and nothing exploded and created all the complex elements needed to create life and the entire universe... many more examples, but... it's a gigantic stretch for the imagination. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the biggest, most well-known proponents of evolution can't provide any scientific answers, so he's going by faith in what he believes, and that's good enough for him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rgtN0pCMQ

You could call God the limit of theorization, i.e. a theory that explains the Universe at the highest possible level of generality.

How can you be so sure what is GOD? Have you met him/it/she? It is impossible to tell.