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We don't just willy-nilly toss "Nature" around in the same way that theists do with "God", Mystic.
Ah . . . but you do. Every phrase that describes something as JUST a "natural" process . . . (as if that is somehow different from a God designed process) . . . you are throwing "Nature" around willy nilly to deny God.
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In our case, we only seek to actually understand the simplest possible version of HOW things may have happened, and by what reasonable process, and by golly, durned if we haven't discovered many things that even you agree on. How toasters work, or that new HD TV you just bought. Or how different species arose.
You just choose to add in a completely unnecessary component, one that adds nothing to the rationale, and in fact, as to the OP's excellent and logical points, simply clouds up the waters.
No . . . rifleman . . . we choose NOT to ignore and then deny the "elephant in the room" behind your "natural processes" descriptions. As to the rest of your rant. I know you are most comfortable and find it easiest to attack the religious nonsense (especially literal Abrahamic) that so many of your favorite punching bags use (C34, et al.) I am staying entirely in your bailiwick (science). I suggest you do as well . . . even though you will therefore fail to support your atheism against my theism.
Ah . . . but you do. Every phrase that describes something as JUST a "natural" process . . . (as if that is somehow different from a God designed process) . . . you are throwing "Nature" around willy nilly to deny God.
When I see the term "natural" applied to something, I interpret it as a descriptor that something conforms to laws of the universe whose existence we have empirically verfied. There is no implication that we know how those laws came to be in the first place. So it's not merely a substitution for "God designed," which does imply knowledge of how those laws came to be. In the event that God's existence is someday proven, then "natural" and "God designed" will mean the same thing -- but for now, I don't see them as being interchangeable.
By the way, I agree with your post about the wave/particle nature of reality (that's how I understand it to be, too), but it still doesn't resolve the "God/no God" question, unless you're defining God as "that which caused the universe to come into existence" and leaving it at that. I've read enough of your posts to know you don't view God as the Abrahamic "hairy cosmic thunderer," as National Lampoon once put it, but do you have a notion of God that isn't so vague as be meaningless? That's the corner I eventually backed myself into: I finally decided that, if there is a God, it's so far beyond human comprehension that we can't speak about it meaningfully. Describing God as "All that Is" without being able to elaborate further isn't far removed from "We don't know how the universe began."
When I see the term "natural" applied to something, I interpret it as a descriptor that something conforms to laws of the universe whose existence we have empirically verfied.
Sorry Honuman . . . laws without a legislator is just "elephant in the room" denial.
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There is no implication that we know how those laws came to be in the first place. So it's not merely a substitution for "God designed," which does imply knowledge of how those laws came to be. In the event that God's existence is someday proven, then "natural" and "God designed" will mean the same thing -- but for now, I don't see them as being interchangeable.
Not true. The universal field is what accounts for their existence. What we lack is a source for it. My view is that the consciousness of God is what creates the universal field within which our reality exists. The alternate view is . . . "X"-designed meaning we don't know, Nada. That is the problem with "natural" . . . it masks the design as if there is none. But there clearly IS one . . . or we could not investigate, describe and predict ANYTHING about it.
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By the way, I agree with your post about the wave/particle nature of reality (that's how I understand it to be, too), but it still doesn't resolve the "God/no God" question, unless you're defining God as "that which caused the universe to come into existence" and leaving it at that. I've read enough of your posts to know you don't view God as the Abrahamic "hairy cosmic thunderer," as National Lampoon once put it, but do you have a notion of God that isn't so vague as be meaningless? That's the corner I eventually backed myself into: I finally decided that, if there is a God, it's so far beyond human comprehension that we can't speak about it meaningfully. Describing God as "All that Is" without being able to elaborate further isn't far removed from "We don't know how the universe began."
Once we realize that our reality is in the consciousness of God and that our consciousness was created in His image and likeness (not our puny physical bodies) . . . things become easier to understand, Honuman.
What culture exists absent of ANY religion of any sort? I can't think of a single one.
I concur. I should have said that those other cultures existed without the specific Ab.-God as a model. All cultures older than say, 1960, had to have some means of explaining the inexplicable. So they each, according to the cleverness and imaginations of their societal elders, made up some very creative stories.
Of course, Christianity got a leg up with help from the Council of Nicea to "nudge it along" as The Official Religion. "Or else we'll publicly lop off your head, so get with the program! Nunc. Statim!"
Mystic, I have nothing to say, except you make a lot of official assumptions. Too many for my simplistic mind; I need a more.... oh what the heck. I'm tired. Besides, re Honuman: what HE said!
If this is true . . . why hasn't the same thing happened with the use of "Nature?" Why not us the word "Nature" . . . which is what is actually done. You mean like this: "Where did the matter/energy for the Big Bang come from? "Nature did it". It sounds like I gave an explanation, but I proposed no mechanism, so I never really answered the question or explained where the matter/energy came from. So the question still remains. Yet, some theists criticize atheists for not having a definitive answer for this question. My point is that theists don't have an answer either. "Nature" by itself is not an answer. Where did "Nature" get the matter/energy from? "Oh, IT just is." That is not an explanation. I could claim the same for Flying Spaghetti Monsters or Invisible Pink Unicorns"
I have consistently acknowledged that scientists don't have it all figured out. Scientists do ask themselves the question of where did the matter/energy for the Big Bang come from? There is work going on into that question as we speak. The point is, we don't just satisfy ourselves with a pat answer that "Nature did it". We recognize that is no answer at all. Yet, many theists do satisfy themselves with the non-answer "God did it". Do you agree then that the explanation, "God did it" is not really an explanation at all?
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
This exhibits serious misunderstanding about the nature of our reality. Materiality is the illusion. The quark/gluon plasma thought to be the essence of our reality (with the Higgs Boson as the ultimate "God particle") reflects the strong conditioning of "materiality" on our thinking. There are no "particles" of any kind . . . just vibratory "energy events" in the "perfect fluid" of the universal field that comprises our reality. The materiality comes about by the aggregation of these "vibratory energy events" through frequency interference, resonance and dissonance . . . like energy "traffic jams" that our senses and their extensions can detect. The "semi-permanence" we see results from the "standing wave forms" of these " vibrational energy traffic jams."
I am familiar with this. We still can speak of objects as a wave or as a particle. Physicists do it all the time.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Our consciousness is the purest form of vibratory energy and . . . as pure energy . . . is eternal.
Here is where you leave science and enter speculation and belief.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Strawman . . . ALL of our "forces" are of unknown origins . . . despite our naming them. Materiality is simply a range of vibrational energy aggregation ("traffic jams") within the same range as our sensory system.
I believe that I have already acknowledged that. "[u]nknown origins" includes the possibility of coming from a god or not from a god.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Because everything that is being done is of God.
Here again is where you make your error. You declare this as a fact, when it has not been established. You jump to a conclusion you like. As an atheist/agnostic, I acknowledge this is one possibility among many. The point of my OP is to show that saying "everything that is being done is of God", you give the illusion of an explanation, without really explaining anything. Added to that, now you have the greater problem of explaining god.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
God is NOT separate from the reality we inhabit.I hope my clarifications in red were helpful. Why must God be this uber-complex additional thing? Why are they NOT the same thing we already have?"
If you are saying that god is the exact same thing as everything that is, you have said nothing, but have only given another name to "everything that is". But, you seem to mean more than that. I detect that you mean that this god is a designer, and thereby have made this god more complex than "everything that is". To be a designer, one must at minimum be able to recognize what is, imagine a different way things could be, perceive how to get from where things are to where things will be, ability to make it happen, and an intent to do it. So, now you the "believer in God" must explain all those things, so the problem is bigger than the original.
Believe it or not, it is quite possible to visualize all that is without a designer. Forces and cosmological constants could exist without a creator and blindly (directionlessly) work upon matter/energy and organize it with no plan or purpose. Now, could there have been a creator that created the forces and constants? Sure, I must acknowledge that possibility, but I don't think one is needed or is necessitated by what we do know.
We have some explaining to do. We are not there, yet. "Nature did it" is not an explanation, but that is not the topic of this thread. The point of this thread is to get theists to recognize that "God did it" is not an explanation, either.
I have consistently acknowledged that scientists don't have it all figured out. Scientists do ask themselves the question of where did the matter/energy for the Big Bang come from? There is work going on into that question as we speak. The point is, we don't just satisfy ourselves with a pat answer that "Nature did it". We recognize that is no answer at all. Yet, many theists do satisfy themselves with the non-answer "God did it". Do you agree then that the explanation, "God did it" is not really an explanation at all?
Yes I do.
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I am familiar with this. We still can speak of objects as a wave or as a particle. Physicists do it all the time.
Here is where you leave science and enter speculation and belief.
This is one of the difficulties of carrying on a conversation at this philosophical depth. Much of the macro world can be and is successfully dealt with in the simple terms of our sensory perceptions. When we begin to talk of the essence of things . . . we enter a more rigorous realm. Seemingly simple words (like abstractions, illusions of Self, consciousness) can no longer be used willy nilly. Either they have a concrete reality to them composed of some form of energy or they do not.
Melody is a pure abstraction referring to a "sequence of notes" recognizable by a consciousness. It only truly exists phenomenologically as the individual "sound waves" . . . so it remains an abstraction. Our conscious Self is called an abstraction or illusion that only exists as a sequence of individual "brain waves" . . . but it actually EXISTS as a "composite"(Self) . . . (NOT individual "brain waves") . . . and interacts with the universe, you me and everything else AS that recognizable composite by our consciousnesses. Honuman is definitely NOT rifleman or Konraden or me. Abstractions and illusions cannot do that! Therefore . . . it MUST be comprised of some form of energy AS A COMPOSITE . . . not the individual waves that comprise it. If the "molecular speed" of the composite is determined by individual brain waves at the speed of light . . . the composite must be at the square of the activity that comprises it = square of the speed of light or pure energy.
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Here again is where you make your error. You declare this as a fact, when it has not been established. You jump to a conclusion you like. As an atheist/agnostic, I acknowledge this is one possibility among many. The point of my OP is to show that saying "everything that is being done is of God", you give the illusion of an explanation, without really explaining anything. Added to that, now you have the greater problem of explaining god.
Forgive me, Honuman. But I do have personal experiential evidence (valid for me only of course) that everything I am saying is fact. I just forget to pretend that I am neutral. I will deal with your other issues later. But one bit of good news for you.
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The point of this thread is to get theists to recognize that "God did it" is not an explanation, either.
Congratulations . . . you got me to do that in the very beginning of this post!
When I see the term "natural" applied to something, I interpret it as a descriptor that something conforms to laws of the universe whose existence we have empirically verfied. There is no implication that we know how those laws came to be in the first place. So it's not merely a substitution for "God designed," which does imply knowledge of how those laws came to be. In the event that God's existence is someday proven, then "natural" and "God designed" will mean the same thing -- but for now, I don't see them as being interchangeable.
By the way, I agree with your post about the wave/particle nature of reality (that's how I understand it to be, too), but it still doesn't resolve the "God/no God" question, unless you're defining God as "that which caused the universe to come into existence" and leaving it at that. I've read enough of your posts to know you don't view God as the Abrahamic "hairy cosmic thunderer," as National Lampoon once put it, but do you have a notion of God that isn't so vague as be meaningless? That's the corner I eventually backed myself into: I finally decided that, if there is a God, it's so far beyond human comprehension that we can't speak about it meaningfully. Describing God as "All that Is" without being able to elaborate further isn't far removed from "We don't know how the universe began."
When I see the term "natural" applied to something, I interpret it as a descriptor that something conforms to laws of the universe whose existence we have empirically verfied. There is no implication that we know how those laws came to be in the first place. So it's not merely a substitution for "God designed," which does imply knowledge of how those laws came to be. In the event that God's existence is someday proven, then "natural" and "God designed" will mean the same thing -- but for now, I don't see them as being interchangeable.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Sorry Honuman . . . laws without a legislator is just "elephant in the room" denial. Not true. The universal field is what accounts for their existence. What we lack is a source for it. My view is that the consciousness of God is what creates the universal field within which our reality exists. The alternate view is . . . "X"-designed meaning we don't know, Nada. That is the problem with "natural" . . . it masks the design as if there is none. But there clearly IS one . . . or we could not investigate, describe and predict ANYTHING about it.
By the way, I agree with your post about the wave/particle nature of reality (that's how I understand it to be, too), but it still doesn't resolve the "God/no God" question, unless you're defining God as "that which caused the universe to come into existence" and leaving it at that. I've read enough of your posts to know you don't view God as the Abrahamic "hairy cosmic thunderer," as National Lampoon once put it, but do you have a notion of God that isn't so vague as be meaningless? That's the corner I eventually backed myself into: I finally decided that, if there is a God, it's so far beyond human comprehension that we can't speak about it meaningfully. Describing God as "All that Is" without being able to elaborate further isn't far removed from "We don't know how the universe began."
Once we realize that our reality is in the consciousness of God and that our consciousness was created in His image and likeness (not our puny physical bodies) . . . things become easier to understand, Honuman.
But they aren't criitcal of the wild fantastical ideas that their physicists toss around are they? With those they practice suspension of disbelief in order not to appear-errr, antiscientific.
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