Do you believe God is up there micromanaging everyone's lives?

[God Almighty]

What if God was one of us

I am. I'm a Coli breh just like you.

 

[God Almighty]

So you believe that God could pick and choose which situations he micromanages? How do you know he isn't doing that already? How do you know there wouldn't be 10x as many such kidnappings if God wasn't stopping 90% of them?

You're either saying you believe God needs to step in literally every time (or every time that fulfills some ambiguous criteria), or you're complaining about God failing to do something that for all you know he's already doing.

I usually just let the simulation run and sit back and watch. Sometimes I push the Disaster button. Earthquake, hurricane, Trump presidency. Didn't you do that, playing Simcity? It's fun, right?

Sometimes when a person is completely alone, with no witnesses nearby, I just pick them up and throw them in the ocean. HA HA HA HA HA!

 

[God Almighty]

no reputable scientists consider intelligent design to be a scientific explanation of how the universe came to be

Correct.

Now, "got shytfaced, created a universe, forgot about it for a while and then remembered it" Design, that's another story.

 

[God Almighty]

God, Providence, Fate all have one core principle in common:

that the actions by each person dictate their path.

My homie Providence has a.... slightly different core pri̥͎n͈̞͓̤͉͉c̤i̖͉͍̫̬͡p̹͕̲ḻ̷̲͍ę̖̤̪̜,̙̩ ̖̬̟̘̭̙m̨͔̥y̴͖͚͕̺͙ ͏͎̙̜̣̟̺g̬̬̲͙͟u̳͙̕y͕.̺̞ ̖̲̟̮̖̪

 

[Thanos]

People pray to God everyday for him to intervene in their lives. How is that not asking him to interfere?

Your statement is exactly the reason why I believe that God doesn't exist or if he does it is nothing like we think it is.

I gave you my opinion based on what I would do if I was God. If I was omnipotent and omnipresent. If I could see the future and see everything past, why should the patterns and statements you made that seem complex and difficult for you, matter to me?

I would be God. I would know the best case scenario for each person based on millions of possible outcomes. Why would I want Maleah Davis to suffer?

It makes more sense to acknowledge that we are like lab subjects in a Mr Manhattan universe and leave it there, but let's not pretend that a being that mastered spacetime would be encumbered with what we think is complicated.

Maybe the best situations happen out of the worst of circumstances. Or maybe struggle/suffering brings out something even better than just giving out the good things.

If an omnipotent being knows past/future maybe that's knowledge of all paths one can take too. With this, free will can exists.

 

[the cac mamba]

Oh. About that.

It was supposed to be Free Wifi.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

No, Occam's Razor basically means that when you have two competing ideas, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is more likely to be correct. And also, saying god probably doesn't exist isn't a "theory" any more than "earth probably isn't the center of the solar system" isn't an astrophysical theory.

Saying that the Universe is self-creating/self-organizing IS a theory, tho not a particularly credible one. Dismissing literally billions of people's experience of God in order to fit your view of how Occum's Razor should work isn't very open-minded.

You've chosen to prioritise materialistic phenomena and explanations, then after the fact claim that since you only consider materialistic phenomena valid, your world makes the most sense. Your worldview is automatically self-affirming. Can you give any example of what would falsify it?

The universe isn't particularly simple with or without a creator, but we already know the universe exists whether it's simple or not.

But adding the existence of an unobservable god (while not explaining how this god came to be) just makes things more complex. Hence, Occam's Razor.

Created things have to be created, they have to "come to be" as they exist within finite space time. You see a bunch of factory products, even if the factory is unseen it makes far more sense to postulate that an unseen factory created them then that the products were randomly self-creating, especially if you have copious secondhand knowledge of said factory.

God, on the other hand, existing outside of spacetime, has no need to be created or "come to be". He is the omnipresent alpha and the omega, that which always was. That's impossible for material things, which should be a giant flashing hint bottom suggesting to you that a purely material explanation for creation is insufficient.

Something has to bring spacetimd into existence, press the start bottom, create a physical reality, otherwise there is nowhere for the Big Bang to even operate within.

I don't know where spacetime came from (or even if it had to come from anywhere) but I'm pretty sure almost no reputable scientists consider intelligent design to be a scientific explanation of how the universe came to be, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to argue otherwise.

There you go again, drawing your boundaries around what you consider acceptable answers before you've even found any. Of course God isn't a "scientific" explanation for anything, science is expressedly self-limiting to describe materialistic natural phenomena. If you try to explain God scientifically you're committing a category error. It would be like coming up on the ruins of Tikal and trying to use geology to explain their presence.

Now, if you want to argue that no reputable scientists believe in a supernatural creation of material existence, well then, you have a wide range of luminaries from Newton to Galileo to Lemaitre to Collins to take that up with.

 

[MMS]

you're on to something but you're missing a key point.

Lets take it back to the days in the garden, pre granny smith apple gate.

Adam and eve were naming animals. Running around figuring out the world that the good Lord built for them. I believe, that this kind of scientific inquiry and categorizing things is what we were designed to do. in essence, God built us, and built a place for us called earth and the heavens(space). and he did it not just so we could live here. but also for us to explore and figure out the wonders he's created. because the euphoric feeling we have when we have discovered something for the first time has to feel some type of Good to the person/being who created it for us.

imagine you make a paper airplane for your son. then imagine him getting old enough to figure out how you created it and now he can duplicate it. imagine that feeling of a proud father you would have. so multiple that feeling times billions for God. Now your son is older. imagine if you build a video game on a computer. and your daughter figures out how you pieced the entire gaming world together and how things work. The journey of your daughter trying to figure things out, asking you some questions, other times trying to figure it out for herself and finally getting it. imagine that feeling. Now multiple that times billions/zillions because we're talking about throughout mankind's history and future.

I believe we were designed to all be explorers and scientists. i think we were supposed to figure out how to manipulate things.

And that it would not have had the same consequences pre apple issue as it does now. because we do these things in some respect for our own selfish motives even when we think we are doing it for others. we still a lot of times do things for our own desire to feel loved by others who like what we did.

per the bible, the eating of that apple was one thing but the lying about it and the some what infighting between adam and eve not owning up to their parts. adam saying more or less "well...she gave it to me." like he wasnt the one told not to eat it. he gave up his manhood privileges right there. she gave up her equal privileges by not being a proper helpmeet that should've told that talking serpent No thanks. or at worse 'let me ask my husband adam what he thinks about this first. and then adam if he wasnt sure about it. should've spoke to god about it and asked, "is this that tree you said we shouldnt eat from?"

once those mistakes were made and the lack of an early on repenting spirit, it broke the world as we know it. it went from perfect to broken right along with adam and eve and all of their offspring thereafter.

thats why the real answer to all of the worlds ills is a simple one. The entire planet including all of us in it are broken.

when you sit back and hear about a child being kidnapped and killed by her father. or some fool burning his baby mama live, or some other fools shooting up an elementary school full of kids. and you say "How does god let this happen?"

the answer is, he didnt. our greatest of grandfathers and grandmothers allowed it by partaking of that fruit. and then not being quit to own up and apologizing.
That book says adam could speak to the animals and command them. i think this is something that most of us has lost due to the worl being broken. we have no idea what the earth was like before he became a broken version of itself. we dont know what type of power we had over the earth, the animals, its elements, etc.

I dont believe the adam story for the record.

that said, I dont think we have "purpose" either

as god said to Moses "I am"

we just exist. That's it. The fact we're even aware of it is why we "die"

 

[the cac mamba]

So every time anyone is about to do something bad God strikes them down with death? Everyone would notice this trend soon enough, right?
.

he turned a woman into a pillar of salt for looking back at her house. i think he has the time to finish off dikk cheney with a heart attack

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Your statement is exactly the reason why I believe that God doesn't exist or if he does it is nothing like we think it is.

I gave you my opinion based on what I would do if I was God. If I was omnipotent and omnipresent. If I could see the future and see everything past, why should the patterns and statements you made that seem complex and difficult for you, matter to me?

You're giving a version of the "why can't God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" test. God can't do that which is logically impossible or which defies his own nature. It's not about "complex" or "difficult".

Creating a world in which everyone has free will, but in which there are no bad consequences, doesn't seem logically possible to me. If meaningfully bad consequences are uniformly barred, then will isn't free. As far as we know this is by far the best of all possible worlds in which we have freedom to be as good or as evil as we want to be.

I would be God. I would know the best case scenario for each person based on millions of possible outcomes. Why would I want Maleah Davis to suffer?

It makes more sense to acknowledge that we are like lab subjects in a Mr Manhattan universe and leave it there, but let's not pretend that a being that mastered spacetime would be encumbered with what we think is complicated.

I don't think God wants Maleah Davis to suffer. God didn't do that evil thing, a man with free will did. From what we know God suffers and mourns with us when men act in evil towards others - the extremity of the cross was the defining statement of that.

To me the most plausible reading of "why did God create humanity?" is "So he could be in relationship with free beings." It's easy to understand the difference between being in love with a girl who chooses to love you, and being in love with a robot who you programmed to love you. God wanted to be in loving relationships with being who could choose into that relationship with him and with each other, who had actual free will to do good or to do harm.

A second part of that reading is that he wanted these beings to have depth of character. Think of the difference between befriending a child who knows nothing of life or how the world works, and befriending someone who has been through shyt and has some authenticity to them. Or the difference between a rich spoiled kid who has experienced nothing of life and someone who has been in the shyt. God wanted authentic relationships with developed beings, not just inauthentic bullshyt. That means he had to create a true physical world for them to develop in, one in which they would grow, would learn, would experience things, would face actual consequences of their choices, etc.

Of course, he doesn't want those beings to act in evil or to experience evil actions. But the only other options are either that they don't exist at all, or that they don't have free will. If free will is a possibility, then evil is a possibility. It's up to us to choose.

Christian theology teaches that this stage isn't the only one, and for good reason. Our lives on this Earth are temporal so that there is a clear shape, limits, and urgency to them. In this period of growth, development of character, testing, we have free reign to make the choices that determine who we will be, choices to love or to hate, choices to foster life or to stifle it, choices to do good to others or to act selfishly towards oneself. That's all part of a process where each of us gets to decide - do I want to be someone who at the core of my being is devoted to loving God and loving others as if they were myself, or fukk all of them? If we choose into the first, we will one day live on a New Earth, one in which relationship with God and others is complete and suffering is eliminated. In a sense it will not be a place of the same sort of free will as here, because the opportunity to do evil will not be there. But we had to first have the opportunity to freely choose to be the kind of people who would want a world with no evil, who got more out of loving God and loving others than we get out of being hard on hoes, fukking over the poor for riches, and getting what's mine.

If God is a God of justice, then our hope is that Maleah's horrific experience of the evil of man is only momentary compared to eternity in a new Earth comprised solely of people who have chosen to live without committing evil to each other at all. Just as in this temporal reality we have seen people grow beyond experiences of extreme suffering to the point where they feel they love their life and have had a good life, how much more so in eternity? God does not want Maleah to suffer, but evil men do make others suffer. The justice of God is that those evil men do not have the final say, but those who love each other do.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

he turned a woman into a pillar of salt for looking back at her house. i think he has the time to finish off dikk cheney with a heart attack

You can be a cynic or you can be someone who doesn't know allegory when they see it, but being a cynic AND pretending not to know allegory when you see it really doesn't go together well.

 

[jj23]

You're giving a version of the "why can't God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" test. God can't do that which is logically impossible or which defies his own nature. It's not about "complex" or "difficult".

Creating a world in which everyone has free will, but in which there are no bad consequences, doesn't seem logically possible to me. If meaningfully bad consequences are uniformly barred, then will isn't free. As far as we know this is by far the best of all possible worlds in which we have freedom to be as good or as evil as we want to be.

Let it be known that I have no problem with your belief in God, it brings many comfort in this crazy world. My point is philosophical.

What seems logically possible to us doesn't mean God would be bound by the same constraints. If we can't accept that fact we are basically assuming that God thinks like men.

Nor should we assume we know the nature of God of it exists. It makes us feel better if we think we do, but ultimately we don't.

If we approach the Maleah situation accepting those tenants, to say God couldn't have prevented it is patently false. Rather he chose to allow it to happen like the Bible says he did to Job.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Let it be known that I have no problem with your belief in God, it brings many comfort in this crazy world. My point is philosophical.

What seems logically possible to us doesn't mean God would be bound by the same constraints. If we can't accept that fact we are basically assuming that God thinks like men.

If you want to claim that nothing is logically impossible than you might as well just toss logical thought out the window.

You're right that it's possible that God is not bound by what we believe to be constraints. However, to assume that God can perform logically impossible tasks is illogical itself and an impossible place to start a philosophy from. If you assume that your logic doesn't matter for God, then how can you even judge the Maleah situation? You can come up with any justification, even if the justification is totally illogical, because you've dismissed logical processes as a constraint.

Let it be known that I have no problem with your belief in God, it brings many comfort in this crazy world. ...

Nor should we assume we know the nature of God of it exists. It makes us feel better if we think we do, but ultimately we don't.

I'll point out that belief in God doesn't necessarily make people "feel better". I look at how a lot of people live, and I suspect that belief in God would make them feel worse, considering the sort of shyt they do on the regular. Knowing that there is a just God who will put everything to rights ain't gonna fly well with the large mass of people who happily feel like they're getting away with injustice and bullshyt on the regular.

I agree that we can't assume to know the nature of God. But we do our best to understand and live accordingly.

If we approach the Maleah situation accepting those tenants, to say God couldn't have prevented it is patently false. Rather he chose to allow it to happen like the Bible says he did to Job.

I didn't say that God "couldn't have prevented it". I suggested that God stepping in to stop every evil act may not actually be the ideal way to manage the world. I do believe that God could have created a world with no suffering, but it wouldn't be full of humans, it would be scripted, inauthentic, robotic bullshyt somewhere between the most boring Hallmark movie ever and a silver spoon cocktail party. If God's ideal is free, actualized human beings who are free to choose between good and evil, who are free to choose to love each other or not, who are free to chose into relationship with God or not, then this may literally be the best of all such worlds....at least for now, as said humans work themselves into who they will be for eternity in this temporary time of trial and growth.

Comparing it to Job is poor as Job is obvious allegory (come on now, it starts with God making a bet with the devil in a heavenly boardroom, even though it claims no prophetic authorship). If you want to read deeper into what Job is about, I'd recommend Gustavo Gutierrez on the subject.

 

[the cac mamba]

You can be a cynic or you can be someone who doesn't know allegory when they see it, but being a cynic AND pretending not to know allegory when you see it really doesn't go together well.

youre right, i dont know allegiry when i see it. because i was told the bible is a factual history book

 

[Professor Emeritus]

youre right, i dont know allegiry when i see it. because i was told the bible is a factual history book

There are 66 books in the protestant Bibles. Quite a few describe factual history, though calling them "factual history books" would be a bit of a category error in the same way, say, a commemoration video of the 2016 Finals wouldn't be well-described as a "history movie."

It is definitely true that there are Christians who misunderstand and misrepresent the Bible. I think it's reasonably important to understand the origins of the various Biblical books in order to help understand them more accurately in their setting. I'm always here to answer any questions to that effect (don't want to mistakenly imply that I'm holding my breath waiting for requests, fo course).

Galileo was actually a fantastic exegete of Biblical allegory at the time, far more so than his combatants in those disputes.