Say what? You aren’t answering question nor are you actually saying anything. You’re not even making sense to most people on the thread.
Yes, your god was invented by a great ape. You are a great ape, just as other humans are, chimps, bonobos , gorillas, and orangutans. Most gods are invented by humans.
I acknowledge, as part of myself there is a biological responsibility “to learn” which is one key to biological evolution.
Humanism and Christianity will continue to fade into a blip of history without updating to world-class science of the evolving human species. Humanism can’t because of a serious conflict of principles and God’s dogma cannot be improved with new information because it is already perfect.
brmckay, obviously you are more than just an intelligent person. I hate to see you wasting your potential. Relax; your emphatic drive to evangelize doesn’t seem to have a positive effect on yourself or anyone else.
I agree with your analysis of Reality. But what does all that have to do with God, unless you have constructed your own definition of God.
And if that is the case then your “belief” is no more valid than every other definition of God.
God is unfalsifiable. That means you can attach any meaning to God and it is all correct and all wrong at the same time. No way to prove it true or false.
This then falls under the category of sophistry. And all your apologetics are no more valid than any other theist.
Get off your high horse and listen to what other people who have studied Reality have to say. You might learn something.
Please leave “Existence” out of this - we are discussing the human mind and consciousness,
and our perception of existence.
Don’t know.
But I do know it’s a clear distillation of what we observation,
thoughts are not of material matter, they are created by material matter, sense impulses and processing - it’s not the universe that creates consciousness, it’s life interacting with creatures and minds that creates consciousness.
I dare say a whole suite of consciousness, from whatever’s happening at the cellular level, up to the most complex and everything in between.
If anything deserves credit for inventing consciousness it would be life on Earth. Oh sure distal to that would be the “universe” that created atoms and gravity and our galaxy and the solar system and Earth herself.
That’s just a confusing smash up of words. “Reality’s infinitude” - manifests life - the universe manifesting awareness. That last one begs the question, how would you define awareness. Sure gravity is aware, why not: it “knows” how much matter is piled one top of it, and reacts accordingly. Although is calling that “consciousness” a fair thing?
And the atom’s electron shells knows if they are full or not. But, is that really “knowing”.
Wow. Woo.
All understanding of nature remains outside of nature.
Ohuuummmm.
Again words that don’t actually describe or explain anything. “Innate seamlessness” of course and I sleep at night.
Ironic comment since it seems to me obfuscation is your specialty,
rather than simplifying it down to the level you can actually defend with cogent thoughts,
you reach for lyrical words that are stitched together to sound good, but that are totally confusing when one stop to ponder and decode their meanings and implications.
Which interestingly enough act more as Rorschach tests, then explications - making confusion that much more likely.
Can you explain how they differ?
Who decides what God’s dogma is?
How’s that work if god is an invention within your mind?
Oh yeah, each of us gets to decide who God is for ourselves. Nothing from out there in the universe ever offers to give us any hint, no matter how many humans have prays for a “sign from heaven”.
It all comes down to personal faith and choice. Was that an interesting shadow in the cloud or the virgin mother yourself, choice is yours own to make.
But, I guess it must be the most terrifying thing in the world to recognize that the God who’s dictated everything about one’s life, doesn’t extend beyond our own mind, because it is a creation of the human mind writ large and permeating all of us through the evolving generations of mankind.
And what is your valid justification for assuming that there is a Reality from which the Universe emerged?
Suppose that outside the Universe lies an infinitude of “permittive” nothingness and Reality emerged from necessity.
Remember you are making the claim. On your shoulders rests the responsibility of presenting evidence.
Citing God is not evident/evidence and cannot be used as proof.
That was an odd one. Not sure where it was directed
But that also disqualifies it from scientific consideration altogether.
If something cannot be falsified it loses all meaning.
From another science site:
Here’s an unfalsifiable theory: “Every object in the universe contains a weightless, invisible, intangible blob of aether which never affects anything in any way.”
This same statement can be modified to read “God” instead of “aether” and have the same “meaning”.
yes, Right you are. I think god’s dogma should be disqualified from any claim associated with a channel to science.
Hey, if Rome capitalized on the infrastructure of the flailing Empire to launch its Christian position could it work for the Church to accept more biological sciences of the evolving human species? @lausten I don’t know anything. Just musing out loud.
Amazingly. the Pontifical Academy of Science has finally accepted the concept of Evolution.
Two Popes, Francis and John Paul have publicly declared that evolution is a fact.
Of course they reserved the concept of Original Creation, else the entire creationist viewpoint would have been falsified .
Finally, Darwin has been vindicated by the Catholic church.
Unfortunately, there are still stubborn diehards who keep insisting that “irreducible complexity” exists and is proof of god’s creative powers .
Kitzmiller v Dover trial
In October 2004, the Dover Area School District of York County, Pennsylvania, changed its biology teaching curriculum to require that intelligent design be presented as an alternative to evolution theory, and that Of Pandas and People , a textbook advocating intelligent design, was to be used as a reference book.[4]
Not sure exactly what you’re proposing, but as Write4U pointed out, they have already done some of that. Religion has always followed the culture. They capitalize on whatever fears are currently in need of a fix. The successful ones do it by acknowledging the traditions and claiming to be in line with them. I’m sure a lot of them believe themselves.
Thank you and Write4U, your posts were very helpful. I’m early in a thought process of a website design that would reach out as an option for church leaders considering shutting down,
That was to brmckay.
p.s. CC
At the Kitzmiller trial the defendants introduced the flagellum and microtubule motor that causes the flagellum to rotate as proof of “intelligent design” (ID), claiming that this rotating mechanism was irreducibly complex and could only have been created in toto by an “intelligent designer” God instead of billions of years of evolution and natural selection .
The scientist witnessing for the plaintiff demonstrated that the entire assembly evolved from simpler forms of ion processing in the cell membranes and slowly acquired more complex parts that among other dynamic growth functions also evolved into an ion-driven nano-scale biological turbine and propulsion power to single-celled organims such as spermatozoa.
One good result that came from this focus on microtubules that the more science studied this little tube, the more became known about microtubules and the incredibly versatility was capable of with a simple polymer from only 2 related tubulins (dimer).
Reading about the trial got me interested in the microtubule and the more I learn about this remarkable self-organizing tubular “coiled pattern” the more I am impressed with all the data processing functions this biochemical dipolar coil is capable of.
I have been at this since 2004 and I am becoming more convinced of the validity of my initial intuitive cognitive response reaction.
These little organelles are the real thing! And recently developed abilities to perform research at nano scales (electron microscopy) is beginning to reveal the way these things work.
There is Only Reality.
Which has been my and Occam’s only point through this entire discussion. The fatal flaw dooming me to the role of universal scapegoat was innocently admitting I keep the word “God” in my vocabulary to say the same thing.
I’m sure Richard Dawkins is proud of the united front you consistently put up. I’ll have to block notifications and keep reminding myself to resist checking in.
I agree, God is superfluous in a discussion of reality.
There is perfectly suitable explanation of a “quasi-intelligent guiding principle” and that is an inherent mathematical essence to the fabric of spacetime geometry.
Causal dynamical triangulation (abbreviated as CDT) theorized by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, is an approach to quantum gravity that, like loop quantum gravity, is background independent.
This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves.
There is evidence [1] that at large scales CDT approximates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but shows spacetime to be 2-dimensional near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time. These interesting results agree with the findings of Lauscher and Reuter, who use an approach called Quantum Einstein Gravity, and with other recent theoretical work.
This inherent potential is already expressed in Chaos Theory where logical self-forming patterns become expressed via the interaction of a limited number of “relational values”, natural algorithms.
Consider the exponential function as a product of steady growth or the Fibonacci sequence as a product of most efficient use of limited growing space, that appears every where in nature.
This processing of “natural generic mathematical values” has the appearance of intelligence due to its predictable regularity that we have recognized and symbolically codified into human “standardized values” and “mathematical functions”.
The indisputable proof of the inherent mathematical nature of the universe is the remarkable (albeit limited) accuracy of human algebraics, the generic form of mathematical equations and that are impervious to subjective interpretation. You make a mistake and the equation does not work.
The Universe functions by mathematical permission and restrictions.
As Ricky Gervais observes; " if we shred all religious literature and all mathematical literature and then try to copy them 500 years later, scripture would be drastically altered, while mathematics would be exactly the same as they are today.
Max Tegmark posits: “Most scientists admit that the universe has some mathematical properties. I submit that the universe has “only” mathematical properties.”
As a retired bookkeeper, IMO, mathematics is the only proven and falsifiable logical language that describes the dynamical potentials and equations of this universe and I suspect of any other extant universe.
Interestingly, double-entry bookkeeping was invented by a monk. little did he know that he was committing heresy.
If there is a god it has to be mathematical in essence. But we already have a name “mathematics” and that makes the term “god” superfluous.
Mathematics removes the mystery from universal functional dynamics.
This is what we were referring to @citizenschallengev4. And we seem to agree that it’s odd. Can’t tell who he is saying is doing the obfuscating, or about what.
So, something got me thinking about the Euthyphro dilemma in the middle of the night last night. In memes, it’s presented in it’s basic form and usually followed by one or two objections or conclusions. There are actually a ton of them, and some “solutions”.
I discovered this morning it relates to this thread because Sir Ockham weighed in on it. I think brm is referring to how Ockham tried to simplify his response to it by saying God and “good” are the same thing, they are creation, or reality. I don’t enjoy working through these things as much as I used to, suffice it to say, it doesn’t solve anything for me. It opens the door to God commanding anything, including causing pain to us, but it’s okay because God says it’s good, because he is the essence of good.
Here’s how a quote from Ockham, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy take on it.
I reply that hatred, theft, adultery, and the like may involve evil according to the common law, in so far as they are done by someone who is obligated by a divine command to perform the opposite act. As far as everything absolute in these actions is concerned, however, God can perform them without involving any evil. And they can even be performed meritoriously by someone on earth if they should fall under a divine command, just as now the opposite of these, in fact, fall under a divine command. [Opera Theologica V, p. 352]
One advantage of this approach is that it enables Ockham to make sense of some instances in the Old Testament where it looks as though God is commanding such things as murder (as in the case of Abraham sacrificing Isaac) and deception (as in the case of the Israelites despoiling the Egyptians). But biblical exegesis is not Ockham’s motive. His motive is to cast God as a paradigm of metaphysical freedom, so that he can make sense of human nature as made in his image.
Hmmm, you are so resolute in your sharing.
It’s more complicated than a lonely monk working away in a cloister - though it is romantic as heck. Sure beats the German monk who fell into a huge vat of wine, never to emerge again.
I won’t be weighing in on that controversy.
just say’n
Does knowing who first came up with this mental exercise change anything?.
Nah, this was more a lesson in the folly of elevating assumptions to certitude.