Searching for GOD...

[ekim]

What do people think of panentheism? Non-sarcastic, leprechaun-free answers would be appreciated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

It is probably the original basis of the religious practice of meditation particularly within the mystical element.  Transcendence of thought and emotion is seen as the way to know the truth of the 'divine' by merging or union.  It seems to me that prayer, however, tends to objectify the divine and separates rather unites.  Religious doctrine can make use of this by emphasising separating influences as sins and 'thou shalt nots' which can then become a source of control through a reward and punishment system.  Those who teach otherwise often become persecuted.

[Alan Burns]

That there is a creator God is an extraordinary claim for which we have no evidence in cosmology, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of evidence.

“We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion ‘letters’ – the longest ‘word’ yet discovered?”
Professor John Lennox

[The Accountant, OBE, KC]

Likewise the muslim can point to the revelations of Angel Gabriel that supercede the gospel stories, and can say "That is all the evidence I need". You are just setting the bar very low, these are claims, not evidence, they are claims used to justify a faith position, they are not evidence that would stand scrutiny in science or law.  That there is a creator God is an extraordinary claim for which we have no evidence in cosmology, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of evidence.  The reasons why people accept religious beliefs are all to do with social, cultural and psychological values and nothing to do with genuine truth seeking.

I would agree with you - my experience is that seeking the truth about religious beliefs doesn't get you very far, given that the substance of the belief is not testable.

The beliefs themselves and acts of worship have been useful to me so engaging with religion in the way that I have has been a more productive exercise for me than my previous atheism when I was younger. For example I have found the concept of a higher power useful for psychological, cultural and social reasons e.g. to humble myself, change my perspective, change my reaction to events, interact with others, regulate my emotions, make decisions.

But given the psychological component of human behaviour, religious concepts or any other abstract ideas are likely to have a different effect on different people - as the mind is unique to the individual's nature / nurture. So my reactions to specific religious ideas were different when I was younger to now and no doubt will change as I get older. While my reaction to some beliefs about a supernatural entity have changed, what doesn't seem to have changed much is my lack of interest in the Christian message of crucifixion and resurrection.

[Nearly Sane]

I would agree with you - my experience is that seeking the truth about religious beliefs doesn't get you very far, given that the substance of the belief is not testable.

The beliefs themselves and acts of worship have been useful to me so engaging with religion in the way that I have has been a more productive exercise for me than my previous atheism when I was younger. For example I have found the concept of a higher power useful for psychological, cultural and social reasons e.g. to humble myself, change my perspective, change my reaction to events, interact with others, regulate my emotions, make decisions.

But given the psychological component of human behaviour, religious concepts or any other abstract ideas are likely to have a different effect on different people - as the mind is unique to the individual's nature / nurture. So my reactions to specific religious ideas were different when I was younger to now and no doubt will change as I get older. While my reaction to some beliefs about a supernatural entity have changed, what doesn't seem to have changed much is my lack of interest in the Christian message of crucifixion and resurrection.

Agree, and I, unlike some, put my atheism in pretty much the same position. I don't not believe in gods because of 'reasons', though I can make the arguments.

[Dicky Underpants]

You imply that my thinking must be hindered by my Christian faith.
I have a very enquiring mind .....

To such an extent that you can type such whoppers as:

The Gospels and New Testament writings clearly indicate that Jesus was God in human form

How odd that the enquiring minds of the first few centuries of Christianity took such a long time to come to any agreement on this. And that the disagreements in one form or another have continued down the centuries.
Perhaps your faith is hindering your thinking a little more than you are prepared to admit.

[Stranger]

“We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion ‘letters’ – the longest ‘word’ yet discovered?”
Professor John Lennox

Utterly absurd. We have a much better explanation for DNA, and, if it were designed, it wasn't designed very well. It's remarkable as the outcome of a natural process but, like lots of details of life, as engineering it would be incompetent, especially if the designed was supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. Look how many diseases are the direct result of genes - not to mention all the parts that don't work any more or don't do anything.

It also ignores everything we know about life, and hence designers, that it requires a universe and a particular environment, not the other way around.

As I pointed out before (and you ignored), you cannot explain complexity in terms of something even more complex and that it is mathematically impossible to add a creator/designer and make things any less improbable.

    Prob(universe with life) ≥ Prob(universe with life and creator/designer).

This cannot fail to be true directly from the mathematics of probability.

[Dicky Underpants]

Could you explain how Mark clearly indicates this?

Quite right. He doesn't.

[Sebastian Toe]

“We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion ‘letters’ – the longest ‘word’ yet discovered?”
Professor John Lennox

Well, now that record has been comprehensively beaten, and then some.....
From Wiki;
The Australian lungfish has the largest genome of any animal so far sequenced. Siegfried Schloissnig at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria and his colleagues have found that the lungfish's genome is 43 billion base pairs long, which is around 14 times larger than the human genome.


You can now say with great confidence Alan, that a lungfish is the pinnacle of God's creation and not Man.

[Outrider]

“We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion ‘letters’ – the longest ‘word’ yet discovered?”
Professor John Lennox

And how much greater still must the special pleading be to avoid the next step of 'well how fucking spectacular must whatever have made god be', because that sort of complexity doesn't require a designer because magic/faith/special pleading/reasons* (* delete as inappropriate).

O.

[SteveH]

I don't know where Alan Burns said this, quoted by Dicky Underpants above:

The Gospels and New Testament writings clearly indicate that Jesus was God in human form.

but it is not true. The NT is decidedly coy about the relationship of Jesus to God. Jesus himself never says bluntly "I am God"; he always says rather more equivocal things, such as "I and the father are one" and "He who has seen me has seen the father", none of which necessarily mean that he was God incarnate.

[Maeght]

I don't know where Alan Burns said this, quoted by Dicky Underpants above: but it is not true. The NT is decidedly coy about the relationship of Jesus to God. Jesus himself never says bluntly "I am God"; he always says rather more equivocal things, such as "I and the father are one" and "He who has seen me has seen the father", none of which necessarily mean that he was God incarnate.

I think John certainly presents Jesus as being God incarnate. Matthew and Luke less so. Mark presents Jesus as Son of God & Messiah which don't mean God but more so a special human who God is working through to achieve his aims. There is a difference of course between what Jesus may or may not have actually said and meant and how the Gospels writers are presenting him. Whether people writing the Gospels decades later represent Jesus as God incarnate or not reflects the beliefs of the writers and the communities they live in and even if they do or did it doesn't mean it is a reflection of reality.

[torridon]

I would agree with you - my experience is that seeking the truth about religious beliefs doesn't get you very far, given that the substance of the belief is not testable.

The beliefs themselves and acts of worship have been useful to me so engaging with religion in the way that I have has been a more productive exercise for me than my previous atheism when I was younger. For example I have found the concept of a higher power useful for psychological, cultural and social reasons e.g. to humble myself, change my perspective, change my reaction to events, interact with others, regulate my emotions, make decisions.

But given the psychological component of human behaviour, religious concepts or any other abstract ideas are likely to have a different effect on different people - as the mind is unique to the individual's nature / nurture. So my reactions to specific religious ideas were different when I was younger to now and no doubt will change as I get older. While my reaction to some beliefs about a supernatural entity have changed, what doesn't seem to have changed much is my lack of interest in the Christian message of crucifixion and resurrection.

This says that beliefs are useful, and whether or not they are true is not the primary concern.  I get that people gain peace of mind and a centering and re-balancing of mind and the continuity of these beliefs represents something steadfast and unchanging in a world otherwise subject to constant disconcerting change. However most western religions (at least) are based on truth claims.  It's in their DNA so how do you disentangle the value of religious practice from the objective truth of the claims that the practices are founded upon ?  I put it down somewhat to the fact that all humans are mildly schizophrenic, having essentially two brains, left and right hemispheres, which have different agendas and different ways of understanding the world. Maybe people who gain benefit from religions are those who are successful in quietening their left hemisphere that constantly seeks to rationalise what the other hemisphere believes.

[Alan Burns]

And how much greater still must the special pleading be to avoid the next step of 'well how fucking spectacular must whatever have made god be', because that sort of complexity doesn't require a designer because magic/faith/special pleading/reasons* (* delete as inappropriate).

O.

This is a common misconception quoted by atheists.
God does not exist in time, so there can be no concept of who or what created God.
God created time.

[Stranger]

This is a common misconception quoted by atheists.
God does not exist in time, so there can be no concept of who or what created God.
God created time.

This is a common misconception of theists who don't think about their silly assertions. Time has nothing to do with it. One could say, from the point of view of general relativity, that "the space-time manifold does not exist in time, so there can be no concept of who or what created the manifold. It contains time". See?

Asking the question of why something exists, rather than something else or nothing at all, can be applied just as well to any god you postulate as it can to the universe.

This is why making up a god explains exactly nothing fundamental at all. It just moves the questions around a bit. You think the universe is, in some way, improbable, then so is any god. You think the existence of the universe requires explanation, then so does the existence of any god.

This goes right back to the point I keep make and you keep on ignoring. Adding an evidence-free creator inevitably makes things more improbable. You've just added to any improbability you're trying to explain. It's a giant leap in the wrong direction.

A god cannot explain complexity or improbability. Claiming them as evidence for a god is trite, simplistic thinking.

[Stranger]

This says that beliefs are useful, and whether or not they are true is not the primary concern.  I get that people gain peace of mind and a centering and re-balancing of mind and the continuity of these beliefs represents something steadfast and unchanging in a world otherwise subject to constant disconcerting change. However most western religions (at least) are based on truth claims.  It's in their DNA so how do you disentangle the value of religious practice from the objective truth of the claims that the practices are founded upon ?  I put it down somewhat to the fact that all humans are mildly schizophrenic, having essentially two brains, left and right hemispheres, which have different agendas and different ways of understanding the world. Maybe people who gain benefit from religions are those who are successful in quietening their left hemisphere that constantly seeks to rationalise what the other hemisphere believes.

I quoted this earlier in the thread, but I think sums up this sort of thinking very well. It's from Rationality by Steven Pinker.

People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face, the memory of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives. People have mostly accurate beliefs about this zone, and they reason rationally within it. Within this zone, they believe there’s a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false. They have no choice: that’s the only way to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed. Call it the reality mindset.

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway peoples and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical. People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying. Whether they are literally “true” or “false” is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. Call it the mythology mindset.

Bertrand Russell famously said, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” The key to understanding rampant irrationality is to recognize that Russell’s statement is not a truism but a revolutionary manifesto. For most of human history and prehistory, there were no grounds for supposing that propositions about remote worlds were true. But beliefs about them could be empowering or inspirational, and that made them desirable enough.

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Not everybody even wants to be a "universal realist", which I guess is okay if they are aware of what they are doing. The problems arise when people try to claim their mythological beliefs are actually objectively true and can be derived from evidence or reasoning.

[Sebastian Toe]

This is a common misconception quoted by atheists.
God does not exist in time, so there can be no concept of who or what created God.
God created time.

Just to be clear, you are saying that anything that exists, outwith time, cannot be created?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

This is a common misconception of theists who don't think about their silly assertions. Time has nothing to do with it. One could say, from the point of view of general relativity, that "the space-time manifold does not exist in time, so there can be no concept of who or what created the manifold. It contains time". See?

Asking the question of why something exists, rather than something else or nothing at all, can be applied just as well to any god you postulate as it can to the universe.

This is why making up a god explains exactly nothing fundamental at all. It just moves the questions around a bit. You think the universe is, in some way, improbable, then so is any god. You think the existence of the universe requires explanation, then so does the existence of any god.

This goes right back to the point I keep make and you keep on ignoring. Adding an evidence-free creator inevitably makes things more improbable. You've just added to any improbability you're trying to explain. It's a giant leap in the wrong direction.

A god cannot explain complexity or improbability. Claiming them as evidence for a god is trite, simplistic thinking.

And of course public atheists should know since they seem to be in the business of making up straw man versions of God.

[Alan Burns]

I don't know where Alan Burns said this, quoted by Dicky Underpants above: but it is not true. The NT is decidedly coy about the relationship of Jesus to God. Jesus himself never says bluntly "I am God"; he always says rather more equivocal things, such as "I and the father are one" and "He who has seen me has seen the father", none of which necessarily mean that he was God incarnate.

Who else but God would have the authority to forgive sins?

[Alan Burns]

Just to be clear, you are saying that anything that exists, outwith time, cannot be created?

Anything which is created must exist in time because it cannot have existed before it was created.

God is the ultimate source.  God is simply "that which exists".

[Nearly Sane]

Anything which is created must exist in time because it cannot have existed before it was created.

God is the ultimate source.  God is simply "that which exists".

Existence is a time based concept.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Existence is a time based concept.

Positive assertion....please justify.

[Stranger]

Anything which is created must exist in time because it cannot have existed before it was created.

If this is true, then from this and general relativity, we can conclude that the universe (the whole space-time manifold) was not created. You've just made your god redundant.

God is the ultimate source.  God is simply "that which exists".

This is no more (or less) absurd than saying the universe is simply "that which exists".

[Stranger]

And of course public atheists should know since they seem to be in the business of making up straw man versions of God.

Examples...?

Since there are so many contradictory theist versions of god(s) they clearly do a pretty good job of just making shit up themselves.

[Nearly Sane]

Positive assertion....please justify.

Conceptually to have existence and non existence you need time for both to be possible. Note this is not a physics statement, it's a logic statement.

[Stranger]

Existence is a time based concept.

From a general relativity point of view, I'd have to disagree. Time is simply an observer dependant direction through a four-dimensional manifold. The manifold has to exist independently for there to be any such thing as time.

Conceptually to have existence and non existence you need time for both to be possible. Note this is not a physics statement, it's a logic statement.

Don't see how you can claim this as just logic. You can't just ignore the physics. (Space-)time is not nothing, so you cannot have the non-existence of the manifold within time. You've either got to conclude that the manifold doesn't exist (defying endless evidence) or that its non-existence would be impossible (difficult to justify).

There is nothing logically impossible (they can be constructed mathematically) about manifolds with no time dimension, or, for that matter, multiple time dimensions. There probably wouldn't be observers in them but they remain as logical possibilities.


From: Anthropic principle §Dimensions of spacetime