Posted on 07/16/2007 4:13:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Put another way, you hold two mutually inconsistent beliefs about reality, believe that they can be reconciled (by someone else), and yet assert categorically that one of those beliefs limits God himself.
When I ask you if you can imagine a God that stands outside of the natural, created universe, you talk about Pink Unicorns, and somehow compare the two, but beg the question. Can you concieve of a God outside of space and time? If you can, do you see that this God would not be limited in the same way that we are by space and time? If you don’t see it . . . harrumph to you!
What parts of the theories are incompatible? What they are looking for is a theory that unites them.
Like I said, if you can provide evidence of a nonlocal event that transfers information faster than the speed of light then you might be right. Evidence is Great ^_^
But the Uncertainty Principle is incompatible with another testable theory, that of relativity. God is testable, of course, just on a personal level.
Yes but if I test the Uncertainty Principle I can show it to you and duplicate it. What is the prediction that you can make with your God test?
You still don't see the problem in applying incomplete, inconsistant theories to God and claiming that the theories limit God himself?
What is incomplete or inconsistent with the superposition principle? Until you can demonstrate that it is inconsistent you don't have much of an argument do you?
I could go through this posting point by point and show the fallacy of each, but why bother? Atheists are atheists because they choose to be. When they decide they don't want to be any more, they'll begin seeking God and they will find Him (as He has promised).
“General relativity and quantum mechanics have disjoint experimental domains. General relativity is only observable with massive objects. Quantum effects are only observable with minute particles. Thus these incompatible theories can coexist in a temporary truce. Eventually something has to change.”
Just saying what I’ve read. You claim a future genius will reconcile. Maybe the future genius blows both theories away in the process and leaves them with limited applicability. That is the most likely result from what we saw with General Relativity and Newtonian physics. Yet you apply one theory and claim it limits God.
But God created time and space itself, it does not limit him. You might get somewhere in the argument with the created god of the Mormons who lives around the star Kolob, or with the Scientologists and thier Thetans and Xenu in their spaceships, or somesuch, but the argument makes no sense regarding God the creator of the universe itself.
Think about how remarkeable it is to have a God defined in the Bible thirty five hundred years ago that still stands consistent with the ancient text and consistent with modern knowledge!
As far as the nonlocal event that transmits information, didn’t they claim an experiment that showed faster than light motion? I remember reading about one a few years ago.
Wow, thanks Zon. I’ve never heard a stronger argument against the Christian God. It outlines and enunciates most of my previous doubts...in about the same order of priority.
To a person whose reason and logic are refined and bettered with age, the Christian God becomes more and more unlikely - like something out of a fairy tale. The self-contradictions are too apparent, especially the idea that God screwed up and therefore all kinds of people have to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to fix it...and then it will never happen again...why wouldn’t it happen again? Is it a one-time deal?
The only possible rational for the Christian God could only be provided outside of both human understanding and outside of the Bible. ‘Morality’ must be much more ‘dirty’ than we humans have been taught, or it follows a set of higher dimensional laws. God must operate under higher dimensional logics that, from our dimension, appear flawed and inconsistent. Basically, it’s impossible to prove a consistent Christian God according to our understanding and dimensions.
So your argument is that God could be justifiably much more violent against us, and therefore we should be happy he's given us SOME mercy? In other words, we should 'take the mercy we can get' from God?
Technically, if God is all-powerful, he could go back in time and correct his mistake in making Lucifer, and yet still have learned his lesson.
The only way for the Christian God to exist is for his nature to be very different from the Bible's conception of him. Death, destruction, evil, and sin must be part of perfection (maybe part of a cyclical morality), if God is to be consistent. Otherwise, there is absolutely NO reason for these things to exist.
ROTFL!!!
;-)
Isn't there some term for this, like 'battered wife syndrome'?
The response to the idea that God must be evil since evil exists is that human and created beings such as Satan have free will. Without the ability to rebel there is no free will and we would not be in the image of God but would be puppets on God’s strings. Christian theology generally conceives of Adam and Eve as without a “sin nature,” they had no compulsion to sin as we do, but rather chose to do so without any innate drive, and this choice introduced sin and its consequences into the world.
I don’t think it can be viewed as “a mistake” knowing that God is omniscient. Leibniz believed that God solved creation as a minimum problem, that this creation is the “best of all possible worlds.” Any other choices would have introduced more evil rather than less.
How would people gain character if they were not tested? Satan means “tempter.” Would a world without temptation be a better world for God’s purposes? When you defeat an enemy and gain strength of character in so doing, have you lost by the struggle? Would you really choose to be created without struggle and without free choice to disobey God; to have the end be the beginning and never know pain? I don’t think I would. It is prideful perhaps to like this life and see value in becoming rather than just being . . . but it’s how I feel.
Yours are the actions that seperate you from God, not the reverse and God welcomes you as the prodigal son when you return to him, with open arms, and the pain you have caused yourself and others through sin is forgiven . . .
That is looking at it through Christian eyes . . .
Yes without question.
and therefore we should be happy he's given us SOME ANY mercy?
NASB Romans 8:28 28 And we know that God [1] causes all [a] things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called [b] according to His purpose.
Yes we should be, but we are still fallen, I don’t always take the discipline God hands out to me with joy, though I am (often begrudgingly) thankful I have received it. Where would we be if our parents never disciplined us?
In other words, we should 'take the mercy we can get' from God?
What is there to “take”? You can’t take grace. I can’t “take” the fact that I got to work this morning in one piece; you make it sound like I chose an option? I can count my blessings and do, is that what you are asking?
Phase velocities can travel faster than the speed of light, but group velocities cannot. Information is contained in the group velocity.
There are experiments, most involving quantum tunneling (dispersion effects), which show that indeed, phase velocities can exceed the speed of light. The issue is that these inherently cannot be used to transmit information.
Of course, layman articles distort the message and this issue is often brought up.
The idea that free will and sin create the conditions for the ‘building of character’ is a pretty strong argument. Yet it doesn’t answer the question of why evil has to exist. Like someone said earlier, free will could still exist without evil or sin, you’d have a series of choices that led to different results, which could even be destructive (which is not necessarily sinful - creation implies destruction or reformation)...but the absence of a sinful nature would allow us to avoid ‘sinful’ reactions and feelings related to our decisions. The whole idea of sin seems self-referential...’it exists so that God can get rid of it in X thousand years’. Will it happen again? Will we become robots without free-will in heaven?
I did not accuse God of being evil. He must be imperfect, if he is to be a non-contradictory Christian God, and if perfection implies the intolerance of evil. I’m willing to entertain the idea that God’s moral calculus is way beyond anything we can comprehend, but I don’t like people telling me the secret to it all is as simple as basic arithmetic...because when you do the actual math, it doesn’t compute.
LOL
If God wanted to convince us of the truth in the Bible, maybe he should’ve sprinkled some little tidbits in there about science that could only be understood in modern terms. I guess God just wasn’t thinking ahead, was he?
Your arrogant foolishness is taking over your semblance of spite and destroying wharever reason you may have.
I don't think that you understand QM. Let me give you another example.
Lets say that someone tells you that I am home and that I am either sober or drunk. That would seem perfectly understandable to you. You would expect to be able to come to my home and discover whether or not I was sober or drunk.
Now lets substitute spinning electrons, S1 and S2 that are spinning up or down and are mutually perpendicular. Then we can say that S1 is up and S2 is up or down. A classical logician would then go on to deduce that either S1 is up and S2 is up or S1 is up and S2 is down. That however is wrong. The reason is that the observables do not commute with each other it is therefore impossible to have states in which they both take assigned values. I borrowed that by memory from The Quantum World, by Polkinghorne.
My point with that little exercise is that it is out of time and space. Time and space (Spacetime is a better word) is not the end all of existence.
They aren't?
As for Einstein being a father of QM- that is not being debated. His findings helped form our current understandings of it. BUT- Relativity is almost entirely attributed to him, and has only been tweaked minorly since then by others.
Have you ever heard of Galileo? He actually invented relativity. Why do you think that that Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize for Relativity?
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