Posted on 12/27/2014 4:52:35 AM PST by RoosterRedux
The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.
Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?
Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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You seem to confuse science with God.
- I'm not at all confused about invisible beings who have never been revealed to a mass audience in recorded history. Not even once.
But according to biblical stories that were handed down orally from generation to generation, and not even written down until a few hundred years before Jesus birth, we're supposed to believe that these words were directly given to men from God. Some of them like Paul, had reportedly murdered his fellow travelers, including an innocent man named Stephan, had him stoned to death. But now I'm supposed to believe that this murderer of a disciple of Jesus, carries God's Word?
That's real hubris.
Your puny understanding of “physical laws” is inadequate to explain much of the physical world, let alone God Himself. God stands outside all of creation. Why do you think He would be subject to the laws of creation?
I'm not one who pretends to know God's mind. That's you, my brilliant friend. You, and your fellow unquestioning believers in the Bible - I'm just a *puny* human being who actually dares to ask fellow *puny* humans a few questions. :-)
From your first post to me:
"God stands outside the laws of physics - nor is He limited by created laws, anymore than by any other part of creation."
So let's have an understanding here, according to *your* version of God; he can violate His own laws, *except* for the law about the Original Sin? Because that's immutable, we're told in the Bible. Because man disobeyed God In the garden of Eden, all of his offspring are forever cursed to a fiery hell and damnation without a blood offering... which is why Jesus had to show up 6,000 years to pay the price after the first sin was committed...
Apparently God couldn't be troubled with just overlooking His law, like he apparently does with his other physical laws. That would have been too easy, I suppose, to have sent Jesus to earth right then and there, so millions upon millions of people could have been spared all that misery and suffering, and unforgiven sin.
- Wow, again with the silly *logic* thinking, in my *puny* human brain that God gave me. Why couldn't Jesus come down to earth back before Noah, to show *puny* humans how to love one another and not stone women who committed adultery, etc, etc, etc?
No, there had to be thousands of years of people sacrificing animals on alters before that could be done. Got it.
(My puny understanding of a loving God not withstanding. -That's some pretty amazing *science*.
I once believed all of,the Bible without question. But looking back, I can't believe how crazy that was. (It was beaten into me, by my angry father.) But that goofy thing that you mock as logic took over, and in spite of the fear of my angry father, I started asking questions like; after the world was almost entirely destroyed by a flood, WHY would God have to put the animals in an Ark, he could have just recreated them. According to the biblical narrative, only took seven days to create the entire universe. And after all, He created man in just one day. ( Genesis chapter 2 tells us that Eve was created later, after Adam got to name the animals. Sorry about your luck, Eve. :-/ )
And of course, there's the silly questions I had about the animals in the ark, what did they eat for 40 days, never mind that the lions and tigers (and bears, oh my) are all meat eaters, and would have pretty much decimated the antelope and reindeer, while they played their reindeer games. Yeah, yeah, they were all in suspended animation, I'm sure.
So many questions, all if them based on that goofy “spock” logic...
never happens
Back to the cubicle. Today Dilbert wants you at 2:30.
You and Dilbert are going to be disappointed.
“Job sat around a campfire and held a huge pity-party with his pals for 30+ chapters going all, “Woe is me. My life sucks. God, why are you so mean to me?”
-yeah, well considering that all ten of his children were murdered/ killed by some natural disaster, I'd say that's a pretty fair thing to ask of God. Let's see any of today's Christians act differently, if their entire family was murdered just to prove to the wicked one, how faithful they are. :-/
Poor Job indeed. While sitting in his own infected boils, and mourning his dead children, God just went on to regale Job about how wonderful the universe is, and how awesome He is. No, that's not the story of a loving Heavenly Father, and so, I outright reject it as a fabrication by someone who was trying to explain why really bad things happen to good people.
“You, good sir, are trying to second-guess God like Job did.”
-Actually, my friend, I'm second guessing the author of tge Book of Job. I think it's entirely fabricated, since no one in modern history has had an audible conversation with God... certainly not witnessed by other people, unless you want to take in the account of that crazy Mohammad fellow, and how he supposedly rode a winged horse up to the moon.
Do you believe Ezekiel rides fiery chariot up into heaven?
That's about as believable as Mohammad riding a winged horse, but I wasn't there, so I guess I should just accept it as factual.
"Were you there?"
No sir, and neither were any of the humans who transcribed the biblical stories from generations of people who passed them along in oral form.
"Do you know the mind of God? "
Nope. I've never pretended to know the mind of God. I'm only challenging the beliefs of those who do pretend to know God's mind.
But I'm pretty sure that the Aristotle version of the universe is incorrect. Which is what Copernicus was thrown in prison by the Catholic Church for.
“The Bible isn't a science book.”
- Oh, on this, we completely agree. It's a story book.
As long as people don't use it as a format for law, I've nothing against it. Particularly old testament laws about stoning people.
Maybe Christians could help the Muslims advance into the 21st century, by telling them that the all the BS in Deuteronomy was fabricated by mortal men, ( not a loving God,) in order to justify their evils of slavery, war plunder, ssubjugation and stoning of women, and tge murder of dissidents. Fair enough? :-/
Thanks for your (mostly) reasonable response. I will respond to a couple items in a serious way.
"One note, before I respond, to you, I'm not an atheist. I just don't believe in the angry, jealous God that the Bible portrayed; one who destroyed entire civilizations because of some evil people. I'm not at all confused about invisible beings who have never been revealed to a mass audience in recorded history. Not even once."
Frankly, that is between you and God. You believe in a god of some kind. Just one who is out there and doesn't communicate, it appears (from your description). Also one who can abide evil. One who does not intercede in the affairs of man. Perhaps you would consider yourself a deist."I'm not at all confused about invisible beings who have never been revealed to a mass audience in recorded history. Not even once."
But then, you rule out the Bible as a source of record in regard to "invisible beings" never being revealed to a mass audience. In this, I reflect back to you that what we know of history before writing is discounted by you, regardless of veracity. In other words, in a phase of history before writing, you accept nothing. Nothing of oral history. And this regardless of what happened. Oral history is discounted completely. The New Testament - though published while many witnesses of the events were living - is discounted by you."But according to biblical stories that were handed down orally from generation to generation, and not even written down until a few hundred years before Jesus birth, we're supposed to believe that these words were directly given to men from God."I take it (and please correct me if inaccurate), that despite the rise of Israel from a single man and wife, and despite the overwhelming archeological evidence that confirms the oral and recorded history of Israel, you reject it. If so, you are going out of your way to reject it before examining thousands of year of history backed by actual pieces of physical evidence.
It strikes me that you have set your own standard of proof in a way that can never be met until God, an angel or a demon presents Himself or himself to you for observation and interrogation. Presumably, you will show others to attain the "mass" portion of your required proof?
As far as your criticisms of God, as portrayed in the Scriptures, I believe they hang together. I may not understand them all, but their truthfulness is one. I also do not attempt to set myself over God as His moral judge, as you did in the section quoted above. If God will judge every single person (as the Scriptures say), that He judged nations on earth already - giving them the consequence of their evil - is not out of line. That He has the right to judge man as Creator, is not out of line. That a human presumes to judge the Creator, is out of line.
If you want to pursue this path, I'm game."Some of them like Paul, had reportedly murdered his fellow travelers, including an innocent man named Stephan, had him stoned to death. But now I'm supposed to believe that this murderer of a disciple of Jesus, carries God's Word? That's real hubris."How do you know they are from God and not just words from men?
Fulfilled prophecy. A tiny sample. More than 700 years before the birth of Christ, Micah prophesied that Messiah would be born in Bethlehem - a tiny Nothingville. God worked through history and the existing government to require Joseph to bring his family to Bethlehem. Mary gave birth there. Prophecy fulfilled. Christ fulfilled more than 300 prophecies.
That is just the prophecies about Him. God has spoken and events happened. Not bad for "oral history."
If you are intellectually honest - and I don't doubt that you are - I challenge you to examine them. There is plenty of proof for anyone who is objective. Many have trod that path before you, setting out to disprove the Bible and eventually looking at enough evidence to change to belief.
And then there are those who compile lists online of purported contradictions - without examining them - and are content in their disbelief.
Each chooses their path. You strike me as the kind of person who thinks.
Yes. It took a miracle to change him 180 degrees. I take your comment to mean you either believe men never change or you believe miracles never happen to men. I don't know of a third option. If those are your two choices, you've made your decision in how you structured your premises. Unless you predecided what you wanted to believe, I'm not sure why you would approach things that way..."I'm not one who pretends to know God's mind. That's you, my brilliant friend. You, and your fellow unquestioning believers in the Bible - I'm just a *puny* human being who actually dares to ask fellow *puny* humans a few questions. :-)"
I always question truth and belief... my own especially."So let's have an understanding here, according to *your* version of God; he can violate His own laws, *except* for the law about the Original Sin? Because that's immutable, we're told in the Bible. Because man disobeyed God In the garden of Eden, all of his offspring are forever cursed to a fiery hell and damnation without a blood offering... which is why Jesus had to show up 6,000 years to pay the price after the first sin was committed..."
Largely correct. Except that while God can violate His created physical laws of creation, He cannot violate His own nature. He cannot be just and overlook moral sin. He cannot be loving and do nothing. You are correct that because of this, He made payment Himself for your sin and mine. You will decide what to do with that. I did. "Apparently God couldn't be troubled with just overlooking His law, like he apparently does with his other physical laws." Again, physical laws are mutable to the One who stands outside time and nature. Moral laws of His nature are never changeable. You would not want a God who is capricious."That would have been too easy, I suppose, to have sent Jesus to earth right then and there, so millions upon millions of people could have been spared all that misery and suffering, and unforgiven sin. - Wow, again with the silly *logic* thinking, in my *puny* human brain that God gave me. Why couldn't Jesus come down to earth back before Noah, to show *puny* humans how to love one another and not stone women who committed adultery, etc, etc, etc?"
Indeed! Of course, you are looking at this in a one-sided way with that statement. I do not know the mind of God, the details of the invisible, spiritual battle of good vs. evil, nor the consequence of your way of solving the problem. I agree that from a limited human perspective, that appeals to me. I also know that I don't know everything."I once believed all of,the Bible without question. But looking back, I can't believe how crazy that was. (It was beaten into me, by my angry father.)"Often, I see these kinds of issues put up as a way to deflect accountability by someone who desires to be unaccountable to God - or at least feel that way. I don't know you, so I am not classifying you in that group. I do know that we are each held accountable for what we know - regardless of all the things we do not know.
I also know that God will do what is righteous, just and loving. I don't know everything. I don't pretend to. No one does.
You are not alone in the angry father category. I came to belief in Christ after I began college. Rejecting an angry father has jaundiced many a person by giving God a face He doesn't have. BTW, I'm not your angry father... just another traveler who came to know the grace and love of God along the way."But that goofy thing that you mock as logic took over, and in spite of the fear of my angry father, I started asking questions like; after the world was almost entirely destroyed by a flood, WHY would God have to put the animals in an Ark, he could have just recreated them. According to the biblical narrative, only took seven days to create the entire universe. And after all, He created man in just one day. ( Genesis chapter 2 tells us that Eve was created later, after Adam got to name the animals. Sorry about your luck, Eve. :-/ )"
And yet, in the end, we do not know why God didn't do it your way - or an infinite number of other ways. If God is infinite, omniscient, all powerful, etc., then our only conclusion is to assume He knows what He is doing - and that more than we know or understand. I don't oppose asking any of those questions."And of course, there's the silly questions I had about the animals in the ark, what did they eat for 40 days, never mind that the lions and tigers (and bears, oh my) are all meat eaters, and would have pretty much decimated the antelope and reindeer, while they played their reindeer games. Yeah, yeah, they were all in suspended animation, I'm sure."
Got me. We are not told. If God is real and was involved, do you have any doubt that He could make it happen? I do not. How? No idea. I could only speculate."So many questions, all if them based on that goofy “spock” logic... "
:-)best.
May I ask, then, what is your belief system? Do you mean you are a theist? What Higher Power do you believe in, if any? Or are you just going to retreat under the safety of lazy agnosticism? (I know you do believe in something. Everyone does. I'm just curious what your beliefs are.)
Quibbling about arks and animals and other biblical minutia makes you look defensive. I suspect you are rather young, as your writing reads like the typical run-of-the-mill deconstructionism that passes for scholarship on most college campuses today. Frankly, it bores me. It's easy to try to attack something and to try to tear it down. Anyone can do that. A child can do that. It's not so easy to try to build up something to replace it.
You state that you are not an atheist. Then I'm curious about the nature of your deity, assuming you have one. Oh, and by the way, there definitely is one. How do we know? Well, it's obvious, and you don't even need the Bible to see it. We know this from the amazing advances in physics and cosmology that have taken place during the past 20 years.
The universe is most definitely designed, and very carefully so: with DM, DE, HP, and the 10 perfect physical constants, it is clear that the physical universe has been very carefully configured juuuust right to basically make it as interesting as possible. It's too rigged, too pat, for it to be random. And it's rigged to be visible to our eyes to boot.
The only question, then, is what is the nature of this mysterious Creator of our created universe? This is where the debate must be framed. Not whether or not a Creator exists. In my opinion (based on what I know about QM and SM, etc) I believe that debate is now over. The universe was created.
So what the characteristics of this Creator? His qualities? Again, leaving out the Bible for a moment, is it possible that we can maybe learn something of this mysterious Creator simply by looking at His creation?
For starters we know that He wants us to see it. He wants us to see what he hath wrought. He's not just doing for his own amusement (otherwise there would be no reason to so carefully make it visible to lowly creatures like us). That tells us something: We are expected to respond and react to it. (Otherwise there's no point in His working so hard to make it the whole universe so visible to our eyes.) So it looks like this mysterious Creator wants some kind of conversation with us - He wants feedback from us. And that implies a relationship.
And this Creator must exist outside our physical system (this is basic QM - we exist [actualized] as self-aware entities only when we are observed from outside the system). So He is observing us from somewhere outside - call it 'Heaven' or whatever - from somewhere that is external to our 11-dimensional physical universe. And if the new HP experiments that are now underway actually do pan out and we can determine by experiment the granularity of the quantum foam - if we can find the 'pixel size' of the video game that we live inside of, so to speak, then that will be strong evidence that the Holographic Principle (HP) is true. And that will nail it: We will know that we are definitely living inside a closed system, a simulation basically, that is projected from a 2-D surface that exists at the outermost edges of the physical Universe, and that our 3D reality is just a hologram, like a video game, and one from which we cannot escape from on our own volition no matter what. (It would be like a video game character trying to step out of the screen.) So if we want to meet this Creator face-to-face He is going to have to pull us up Himself.
So why is this Creator - which for this rest of this post I'll call 'God' - running what seems to be a great big closed simulation? What's the point of it? Well, the fact that He wants us to see all those galaxies and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, as well as the amazing beauty and wonder of Earth's life itself, does imply something important about the kind of response that He wants from us, and it's easy to figure out, I think: He wants us to to give Him honor and glory and praise for what He hath wrought and who He is.
But wait, Creation includes suffering, and lots of it. Hmm. Why? If you think what happened to Job's family was bad, what do you think of what is happening to families right now in the Levant with ISIL mass raping and beheading women and children everywhere? Or the gas ovens of the Holocaust that murdered over 6 million Jews (which the Bible says are His dear firstborn children)? Or all the other 'scientific' mass murders of the 20th century for that matter, which swamped all the persecutions of the Inquisition and the Crusades by orders of magnitude? It all makes what happened to Job look like kid's stuff. And what about all of the terrible earthquakes, tsunamis, famines, and other natural disasters that wiped out millions of families throughout history? God allowed all that to happen too. Why is that?
The whole point of the Book of Job is that God wants a relationship with us despite all that suffering. Why? I think the answer is simple: Because it makes that relationship stronger. We are fallen creatures and so Paul wrote that he was made perfect in his own weakness. So are we. It is how we respond to life's challenges that matters. Job survived his trials; he did not just curse God and give up and die. He was refined like in a refiner's fire, and so now he is home with his beloved family and with Him.
The Bible is not a science book; it is a love story. Quibbling about sidereal days in Genesis 1 or the engineering design of Noah's ark or the mechanics of how the flood happened in Genesis 6-9 is missing the whole point. (FWIW, that flood is quite real, BTW, and the evidence is all over the place in ancient writings and current archeologies.) The point is that the Bible is a love story. The story begins with God's chosen people, the Israelites - the name the Lord gave to Jacob after he wrestled with the angel: Israel, 'He who wrestles with God'. The Israelites are literally the God-wrestlers. The Old Testament is a basically a love story about a parent and His wayward children. God had sent his prophets to His unruly children, the God-wrestlers, to try to bring them back home to Him. That's the whole OT in a nutshell. And He never gave up on them. And He still hasn't given up on them, and He never will.
And then, in the New Testament, the story expands. His offer is extended to all of us to become His adopted children, to cross the impossible gap with His Son - the living bridge between the finite and the infinite - to give us the opportunity to reconcile us all with Him so that we can all call Him 'Abba' (Daddy) and finally be united with Him and be raised up and be brought home to Him in Heaven. But instead we rebelled against Him. And in the worst possible way: we killed the most precious gift that He gave us, his Son. And we will continue to rebel again and again, right to the very end, until the day His Son returns and we are finally reconciled in love through Him and brought home to Abba (Daddy).
But why all this suffering to get there? Why didn't the Lord simply jump right to the end of the story? Why not just jump to the Bible's final chapter, Revelations 22, and leave out all the other 1,180 chapters and all that history, most of which was abject misery? Why not just have everyone go to live in with Him in Heaven right at the start?
I think it is because God is trying to make a point. To us. I believe that all of human history is basically a demonstration exercise. And the Bible is our roadmap that explains it. It was revealed to us in order to prepare us and perfect us in our weakness, so as to make our love relationship with Him as tested and as tempered and as strong and as intimate as it can possibly be.
You have a lifespan of approximately 29,000 days, give or take. You already have burned up a good fraction of it. Where will you be when your time expires? Where do would like to be? When the chemotherapy drugs stop working and the cancer literally eats you alive, when the pain of your heart angina is too much for you to bear, when you are finished burying your own children after the auto accident, what will you do? Will you continue to give praise and glory to Him, or will you just curse God and give up and die?
Because like it or not, God is running this great big demonstration exercise called the Bible, and it is all for our benefit. And nobody escapes it. He is watching you; He wants relationship with you. And the only question is what you will do in response.
I have done it any number of times just this month.
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