“I’ve never come across any religious discussion dealing with God in which ‘I don’t know’ seems a viable response.”
You’re in one now because I don’t know. I believe to the strongest extent based on my personal analysis on these matters, but I don’t ‘know’. And that’s the problem with this whole thing. A lot of arrogant people claiming wisdom and knowledge beyond their actual inventory.
Kind of a random way to get to the point, but trust me, I’ll get there...
The holodeck/Matrix comparisons have been brought up so I’ll add another. Some years ago I caught a (British?) TV show that had an earthling ripped out of our reality and brought before God. Turn’s out that God was a college kid doing a science experiment in his higher plane of existance and our reality was that experiment. “God” knew no more about his “God” than we new about him.
With that in mind, consider this....
Less than 1000 years ago many still believed the earth was flat and the heliocentric theory was blasphemous. They knew nothing of atoms, quantum physics or genetically modified crops. Most still survived wearing animal skins and gathering food from the surrounding area.
There can be no doubt that we have evolved by orders of magnitude. But when one takes a hard look at what ‘science’ “knows” today, it’s surprisingly little. In a universe so vast that the entire planet is less than an atom in an ocean by comparison, a planet that only recently discovered that other planets exist outside our solar system, a planet that collectively does not yet ‘know’ that life exists anywhere but here....
How can anyone definitively assert something as bold as “There is no God”, much less what he can/did/didn’t do, when that same person cannot with any scientific accuracy show that there are “no” bacteria on Mars?
My point is this. We as a species are not capable of even formulating rational questions pertaining to “God”, much less give definitive answers about him. We cannot predict our own weather but we are purport to to “know” whether or not the entity that is responsible for it even exists? The sheer arrogance boggles the mind.
For the scientifically atheistic minded out there I would ask this...
If it’s perfectly logical to believe that a universe sprang into being from nothingness, poof! there it was!, can you explain how/why an ultimately powerful being is not equally logical?
Well, I guess it is, as long as we restrict our inquiry to that time and place, as it were. This was the issue of Deism, which found a focus in the dedicatory "Ode to Newton" composed by Edmond Halley for Newton's Principia Mathematica. It contained a brief line, in Latin of course, seeming to imply that God's creative action was restricted to the founding of the Universe and its Laws. This was seen as a denial of "Providence", the ongoing intervention of God in the events of the world. Due to the zealous actions of an interested clergyman, whose name escapes me, the Ode was henceforth edited to make it less objectionable. Fortunately, from my point of view, the original was at length restored.
Huh? This track sounds like the one that comes right before F#ck Western Civilization. You can't be serious. What on earth can you mean? If politics is for real, it is imperative to answer the God question. There is no way around it.