Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There's a reality that "created" the sun, moon, stars, planets and all life on earth, including humans. It's a reality where time is measured in billions of years and space is measured in billions of light years.
It's called the universe. It is, in the deepest sense, unfathomable and incomprehensible to us humans.
Therefore, why can't we call the universe "God"?
I agree with this.
I know that one thing in life is damned certain. Karma is as real as a mutha*****.
There's a reality that "created" the sun, moon, stars, planets and all life on earth, including humans. It's a reality where time is measured in billions of years and space is measured in billions of light years.
It's called the universe. It is, in the deepest sense, unfathomable and incomprehensible to us humans.
Therefore, why can't we call the universe "God"?
If you call the universe God, then religion X...and the atheists too, will claim you agree with them. Look at what happened to Einstein. Like this (see person 13). Famous Scientists Who Believed in God (a specific section below)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Einstein is probably the best known and most highly revered scientist of the twentieth century, and is associated with major revolutions in our thinking about time, gravity, and the conversion of matter to energy (E=mc2). Although never coming to belief in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: "Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists." This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: "I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details." Einstein's famous epithet on the "uncertainty principle" was "God does not play dice" - and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Notice how much talk of God there is...but Spinoza's God couldn't have been a god which made man in his image...unless we're talking about some extremely confusing metaphors.
The human race must have been like an endless swarm of gnats he was trying to swat away...but we just kept flying into his eyes...claiming he agrees with us...as we're still doing today.
The above paragraph on Einstein, when coupled with the Christianity-oriented website it is a section of, is a pretty good example of virulent brainwashing...considering how little the typically depicted Christian God has in common with the God of Spinoza.
Many users on here do. They simply take the universe and all that is in it, call it "god" and then say "Therefore god exists". To me it is a pointless exercise as we already have a perfectly serviceable word "universe" so why change it? And if you are going to change it why specifically change it to a word that carries a massive weight and history of metaphysical baggage? Why "god" and not "spludunky-doo-dah".
The only answer I can come up with is that people WANT to sneak in that metaphysical baggage and that answer is supported by what many of those users then go on to do. They do not just stop at their little linguistic relabeling trick. They then go on to assign attributes to the universe based on nothing at all.
This universe they call "god" is suddenly conscious. It has emotions, intentions, designs, plans, and performs actions such as taking your "soul" when you die and engaging in certain laundering and purification processes with it before making it, and hence you, eternal.
To me it is just a trick. A canard to define a god into existence and then smuggle in attributes for it at will as they suit.
I agree that assigning attributes to the universe which the universe does not have is pointless.
The bottom line for me is this: I wonder why it doesn't hit people over the head how truth is much stranger than fiction. What we know about the universe today is much more fantastic and inconceivable than what the patriarchs of the Hebrew bible could ever have dreamed of even about their God.
They imagined the earth and heavens to be only a few thousand years old? That's what they were able to conceive of the creation of the universe to be like? What a limited imagination!
I think religion needs an update of epic proportions.
I agree that assigning attributes to the universe which the universe does not have is pointless.
And yet so many people on here do, including at least one user on this thread who plays the "Everything there is is "god" so "god" exists... oh and by the way it's conscious and plays with souls...." trick all the time. In fact it is the very core of his entire "argument" on these fora.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigCityDreamer
The bottom line for me is this: I wonder why it doesn't hit people over the head how truth is much stranger than fiction.
I have at least some sympathy for those people. We have evolved over a long period to rely on our "common sense" as people call it. Most of the time it works too. We have evolved in the "middle" universe between the very big and the very small and our "common sense" only had to deal with that universe and nothing else. It therefore works very well. If life is nails then common sense is the hammer and it works quite well on nails.
Alas as we learn more about the very big and the very small, it is massively outside our common experience and "common sense" breaks down entirely. It simply does not work well any more. Try it sometime. Next time you are in the pub, pick up a sheet of paper and ask people what would happen if you could fold the page 100 times. Ask them how tall it would be. The largest answers I ever got were "Bigger than this pub, probably" when in fact the answer is that it would be so tall light itself would require millenia to travel its length.
Yet people still try to apply "common sense" to the big and the small anyway, despite its clear failure as a tool there. It results in many errors of thinking including, but not limited to, thinking there must be a god.... or that the universe/earth is 6000 years old and other such egregious errors.
So while such people are clearly very wrong, one must also maintain some sympathy for the reasons they are wrong. It is not all entirely their own fault. Millenia of evolution have conditioned them to rely on their "common sense" even in realms where it does not apply.
BTW, since string theory was brought up by one poster, I should say a few brief things about it.
Modern physics has many unresolved problems. One of them is - how do you reconcile quantum physics with the theory of relativity? Well, string theory is a hypothetical model that attempts to resolve it.
What's interesting about string theory is that it predicts there are many more dimensions in reality than just space and time. It also predicts there may be multiple universes (an extremely large number of them) that include various combinations of all these extra dimensions.
Some physicists theorize that the big bang (our universe) may have been caused by the collision or splitting apart of other universes.
Anyway, all of this is speculative at this point since multiple universes have not been seen or detected. But I wanted to get it out there since it pertains to this discussion.
Or... "UP, Up and Away, into The Vast Enlightenment!"
Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Not quite yet . . . sentience itself must still be accounted for.
Nope. Not necessary. Again, Mystic: WHY? (Two-part Question:
1) Why do we need an accountable sentience to organize the universe if there are (as we all know there are...) fully operational "natural" laws that "makes stuff happen by basic interactions", etc., and which may well exist simply "because"?
...that "because" option being: 2) a simple but operational undetermined force or focal direction! What if what we have/see/witness & experience around us is simply one self-operational option that became functional after perhaps multiple/near-infinite or even infinite, trials to date?
Sorta like the Evolutionary process you agree with?
Just curious why you demand such higher levels of organization and "Creativity"? Seems to overly complicate things, wouldn't you agree?.
Nope. Not necessary. Again, Mystic: WHY? (Two-part Question:
1) Why do we need an accountable sentience to organize the universe if there are (as we all know there are...) fully operational "natural" laws that "makes stuff happen by basic interactions", etc., and which may well exist simply "because"?
Because you are apparently too unwilling to educate yourself about the reasons it must be so and because the "natural" laws are themselves intelligible. Stuff must always happen by interactions, rifle . . . it is the SOURCE of the intelligence embedded and embodied within those "interactions and processes" that must be explained.
Quote:
...that "because" option being: 2) a simple but operational undetermined force or focal direction! What if what we have/see/witness & experience around us is simply oneself-operational option that became functional after perhaps multiple/near-infinite or even infinite, trials to date?
Moderator cut: deleted
Quote:
Sorta like the Evolutionary process you agree with?
The evolutionary process I agree with is "guided" by design and intelligence. Our ignorance and need to use probabilities to predict some of its interventions is just that . . . our ignorance of it . . . and our euphemisms to pretend we are not ignorant are meaningless and devoid of information content.
Quote:
Just curious why you demand such higher levels of organization and "Creativity"? Seems to overly complicate things, wouldn't you agree?.
No I don't agree and I demand nothing higher than what exists. It is the existential implications and consequences that you seem ill-equipped to understand or recognize in the very things you point to in support of you unsupportable materialistic position.
Last edited by june 7th; 03-08-2012 at 05:18 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Or... "UP, Up and Away, into The Vast Enlightenment!"
