God, The Bible, The Creation of the Universe.

[noblok]

1. by definition, if its random then there shouldnt of been any thought in it. but thats impossible, you cannot truly randomly pick something. in some way you would of throught about it

2. i dont feel bad

1. It is determined, but by a fundamentally free subject. This means that the subject has the possibility to transcend all extern determining factors. When I pick a random number it is not determined by my brain structure, social status, upbringing, etc. It is determined by me.

I have no proof for this, but I'm trying to explain that the impossibility of picking a completely random number does not exclude free will.

2. Do you never feel responsibility either? If someone stole your car, wouldn't you be angry with him? Don't you ever want revenge? All of these imply free will.

 

[crispy]

1. by definition, if its random then there shouldnt of been any thought in it. but thats impossible, you cannot truly randomly pick something. in some way you would of throught about it

2. i dont feel bad

3. no its not odd. if you dont have a ticket how can you win?

1. Yes you are right about it being hard to pick random numbers, but who said it should be random? The fact that people don't act random does'nt make their actions predetermined. Of course it's impossible to either prove or disprove either side of the view, so it's only interesting to discuss the consequences of predeterminism. Hence question 2.

2. Hah, got you Why do you even bother to make appointments if you believe its predetermined? Unless you really ain't 100% sure about predeterminism. But if you are 100% sure youre just standing there lying to whoever you made your promise to... - so do you believe youre predetermined to lie?

 

[Jeremiah]

Do you mean sin is the reason for death or do you mean that death is the punishment for sins?

Good question!

Just so this answer doesnt sound out of context, I'm talking from a Christian p.o.v which is the world was created by God, and when it was created it was perfect! And, as I'm sure you'd agree, in a perfect world there would be no death.

In the bible (I promise I wont preach!) we are told that the result of sin (of all mankind) is death. So death is in the world because of sin, and since (I believe) we are all born as sinners (so yes, theres nothing we can do about it) we will all die. Not because of anything we do, because of the sinful nature of humanity. Yes, I agree - this seems uberistically unfair to those who have no choice in life of what to believe or follow (be it because of age, time or other things) but God didnt put death in the world. He didnt create it so that mankind would always die. Theres no "rational" reason I, or anyone else with a belief in a God of any kind, could give as to why the innocent people in this life die - it something we can ask him later I believe children who never make the double figures go to Heaven, regardless of anything they ever do in their life.

I'm really sorry if I seem all preachy, I'm trying not to be. I do respect people's opinons when they differ to mine - thats the beauty of freewill I can understand people not believing what I believe, because we live in a world of science and proof - but believing in anything takes faith

 

[Svartmetall]

"The Bible says God created the universe in six days and indicates the passage of only about 6,000 years since then. Science currently estimates the visible universe to be about 13 billion years old, give or take a few billion. Schroeder reconciles the two, explaining that the six days of the Bible refer to a different measure of time."

Oh please.

When science turns round and disproves religious dogma - in this case, the claimed age of the universe - religion tries to move the goalposts by saying "ah, but when we said six days, we didn't mean six days!"

Utter bollocks. Has the ring of sheer desperation to it.

 

[Svartmetall]

So death is in the world because of sin

God created everything, therefore God created sin. And death.

He didnt create it so that mankind would always die

Why did he create it, then?

...the beauty of freewill

The problem with freewill is that it doesn't hold up as a way to run things. To create people, give them supposedly 'free' will, then say "you'll die and burn forever if you don't do what I want you to with your freewill" is a bit off, really, isn't it? In Judeo-Christian mythology, God created everything. There is nothing, therefore, that exists without God's tacit approval. It's the most stacked deck imaginable.




This is why freewill, in the context of the Judeo-Christian myth structure, does not work: if you're walking along the road, minding your own business, and someone comes up to you and sticks a gun in your face...which would be the sane response, to be grateful to them for taking it away, or to be angry at them for sticking it in your face in the first place?

 

[Tualatin]

God is a sadist.. that explains all tbh

and taken from a movie:

If you want something really hard, and direct your prayers to the 'above'.. God is the person who ignores you

Anyway, we'll find out (or not) when our life cycle ends.. won't we? And on top of that... the only thing really certain is death.

\\on topic:
I have more 'faith' in the bigbang and darwin theory.. then some ppl who made the bible. In all history, you read up that and that war (because of faith).. how much people were so poor, and churches rich. So, something doesn't add up. Also, who says 'God' is actually the one god? Allah is one too.. all with their own interpretation. I just think that religion is something so people can hold on too.. and more a buisness then actually being the church.

 

[Jeremiah]

God created everything, therefore God created sin. And death.

God couldn't create Sin and Death - it would go against the very nature of God being God. As I said, sin seperates us from God. If he loves humanity so much (which I believe he does), then why would he create things that would seperate us from him?

Why did he create it, then?

What I meant was that he didnt create the world just for us to die - I worded it wrong

The problem with freewill is that it doesn't hold up as a way to run things. To create people, give them supposedly 'free' will, then say "you'll die and burn forever if you don't do what I want you to with your freewill" is a bit off, really, isn't it?

God didnt give us free will and then turn round and threaten us. In the creation story, when God created man they had a perfect relationship - God provided everything and Adam in turn did his will. It was only when he turned his back on God that the perfect relationship was destroyed. It was Adam's choice to do that, since he had free will. He knew the consequences in advance and did it anyway. And like wise, the whole of humanity can choose whether or not to believe in God or not - that is free will. Saying there is consequences for you choices doesnt take your free will away, it merely gives you a more informed choice. Of course God wants us to choose him, but he isnt going to twist your arm about it.

If you want to argue it isnt a fair choice if one way leads tho heaven and one way leads to hell, then sure - I know we would all want the "Heaven" option, but there are pre-requisits of that choice that the whole of humanity struggles with.

In Judeo-Christian mythology, God created everything. There is nothing, therefore, that exists without God's tacit approval. It's the most stacked deck imaginable.

This is why freewill, in the context of the Judeo-Christian myth structure, does not work: if you're walking along the road, minding your own business, and someone comes up to you and sticks a gun in your face...which would be the sane response, to be grateful to them for taking it away, or to be angry at them for sticking it in your face in the first place?

Have you ever read our "Mythology". If you did you'd find out that we dont believe God is responsible for everything. Yes we believe he created the heavens and the earth - physical things. And that we (mankind) are created in his image (and like wise with his emotions) but no where does it say "God created everything". In fact, you'll find out where we believe death comes from

Dont get me wrong, I can understand if you dont want to read them cos you are going on things you've heard from other people (things do get a bit messed up in translation from Hebrew to English), or because you arent interested. But if you are going to attack our "Mythology", at least be clued uo

I'm posting far too much in here - Sorry bout that - I'll be good from now on :touch:

 

[tris-]

2. Hah, got you Why do you even bother to make appointments if you believe its predetermined? - so do you believe youre predetermined to lie?

i dont understand what you are saying here. so i dont want to answer it fully and sound silly

1. It is determined, but by a fundamentally free subject. This means that the subject has the possibility to transcend all extern determining factors. When I pick a random number it is not determined by my brain structure, social status, upbringing, etc. It is determined by me.

when you say "by me", what exactly do you mean by 'you'?

 

[Karl]

"The Bible says God created the universe in six days and indicates the passage of only about 6,000 years since then. Science currently estimates the visible universe to be about 13 billion years old, give or take a few billion. Schroeder reconciles the two, explaining that the six days of the Bible refer to a different measure of time."

Oh please.

When science turns round and disproves religious dogma - in this case, the claimed age of the universe - religion tries to move the goalposts by saying "ah, but when we said six days, we didn't mean six days!"

Utter bollocks. Has the ring of sheer desperation to it.

But... NON-religious people have agreed with this theory and backed it up, even worked on it.. Schroeder himself was an athiest originally. Its not like religious people jumped in there and started making up crap when scientists disagreed... the scientists who were trying to prove thier disagrements wrong or correct came to this theory.

 

[Marc]

If a superior being didnt create the universe, what did? The big bang? Well what created the gases that created the big bang, etc ,etc. Everything has to have a definitive start and end.

ask a scientist this question and they stamp their feet and come up with "well the gas must of always been here". Wow, what a scientific reply.

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

...Everything has to have a definitive start and end...

That's bollocks

 

[tris-]

saying for certain things started like this n that means you believe you can fully grasp everything in the universe.

as it is, we cannot fully grasp everything there is.

 

[vavires]

Load of rubbish

and god strike me down if Im wr.........................arggggggggggggggggg!!

Smite sounds better

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

I'm soo getting tired of so-called religious people claiming that science claims to have an answer for everything.
It doesn't, they never said it did and moreso, a good scientist KNOWS they will not. They will just try to explain as much as what's in their power. for the rest, well that's each his own choice to believe...

And I get soooo frustrated with people that "know" that their faith is the one true faith and try to convince everyone they meet with this so-called truth. The word "FAITH" within its specific meaning already states that it is an unproven thing, that you cannot prove it and have to trust someone elses word on it. You cannot check it, you cannot prove it and will never be able to. When you will be able to it will no longer be called faith...

*sorry, had to air a bit*

 

[crispy]

i dont understand what you are saying here. so i dont want to answer it fully and sound silly

Doh, must have edited some part out...

Think there should have stood something like this:

You do afterall make promises to people by saying 'I will be there' or 'I will see you at 8'oclock', but since you can't keep your promises (because your actions are determined by fate) you must be lying to people when you make thoose promises (unless you don't fully believe things to be predestined). Therefore you are destined to lie.

In other words: why even bother to make an appointment with someone when its destined if you'll be there or not?

 

[tris-]

i think you are mixing pre-determinism with girly magazine fate/fait what ever the spelling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predeterminism

 

[crispy]

ah yes probably

But i can't see the big difference between the history of man kind being predetermined and fate of the individual. Because in most cases history is formed by a single human being, and if he/she were to die 'before' they had filled in their part of history the predeterminism of mankind would be a little different. And that means that people around them would have to act in a certain way ie. not kill them

Well i might still not understand you, but if you believe in predeterminism you'd automatically have to believe in fate to a certain point.

 

[Tesla Monkor]

Personally, I'm not convinced there's any 'higher' being(s) that looks down on us and judges every single action of ours against a standard of 'good' or 'bad'. People live the way they want to - for good or bad. Luckily most people have the decency to realise that while we're all locked up on this ball of mud, it's better to cooperate than go around and murder each other on a whim.

There's a great many things that science can't prove... YET. The keyword being yet. There is, however, nothing that religion can prove.

Science is progress, religion is stagnation and inevitable degeneration as it is accepted and implemented by growing numbers of people. People have to accept science - whether they believe it or not, reality is the way science proves it to be. Religion adapts to it's believers when it's comfronted with incompatibilities that it cannot overcome.

To claim that 'god' and science can coexist is just a sloppy way of saying 'I don't know how this is possible, and I can't be arsed to figure it out'.

The world is a harsh, realistic place. People like to coat their experience with a warm-happy-fuzzy-reality-filter of religion, to give them the belief that it's not all for nothing and that they're working towards a bigger goal.

I'm not saying there aren't races that are further along the evolutionary line both biologically and technologically than we are, but I can't really imagine them keeping an eye on us. They probably have better things to do.

I'll finish with a favorite quote:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen F. Roberts

 

[tris-]

Well i might still not understand you, but if you believe in predeterminism you'd automatically have to believe in fate to a certain point.

depends on how you are saying fate though.

a )"omg i met teh man of my dreams, it must be fate! great aunt bessy said it would happen, she seen it her tea leaves!"

b)"this has happend for a reason, dont know why but i guess i will find out soon enough"

 

[Outlander]

think of it as infinite number of roads starting when your born till when you die. off each road are alleyways that lead onto ajoining roads which in turn have alleyways. there is an alley for every choice you have to make in life (alot ) and as you make those choices you just take another alley then carry on down lifes road. its free will to make your choices, but the results of all your choices are already taken into account. hard to explain

 

[noblok]

when you say "by me", what exactly do you mean by 'you'?

Good question. I'm not quite sure about what defines a subject. I would say self-consciousness* is an important factor as well as freedom. Those are the two main factors I can think of now, there may be more though. I haven't quite figured this out for myself yet.

I think in the meantime it's probably best described as the 'origin of my thoughts'. I know it's vague, but the best I can do at the moment. This does not coincide with my brain though, since my brain is merely impulse -> reaction, it has no freedom.

What's important for the reasoning though is that this subject makes a choice in all freedom. This choice is influenced by all kinds of factors, but not completely determined.

* I haven't really got a definition of self-consciousness either, sorry.

 

[noblok]

To claim that 'god' and science can coexist is just a sloppy way of saying 'I don't know how this is possible, and I can't be arsed to figure it out'.

Not really. As long as religion stays away from the subjects of science there is no reason why they can't. I think the main problem with the atheists nowadays is that they still see faith as the christian Church in the Middle Ages. This obviously isn't a role which faith should try to fulfill now and which she probably shouldn't have fulfilled back then either.

You can also see faith as something else though, if you stick it in the domain of 'sense-giving'* for example. Faith as something which gives everything in our world a second, greater sense, according to the discrepance immanent - transcendent. In this way my belief in free will is a faith as well. Free will can be seen as something transcendent (there is no scientific proof to support it). It doesn't give everything a second sense though, but it does give human actions a secon sense through repsonsibility.

If a superior being didnt create the universe, what did? The big bang? Well what created the gases that created the big bang, etc ,etc. Everything has to have a definitive start and end.

Then what created the superior being? Everything has a start and an end, but there's no end or start to everything. In case this isn't clear, I'll reword it. Every single individual thing has a start or end (maybe some things don't. I'm no scientist, don't shoot me), but everything as a whole has no start or end. The only sensible thing you can say about the origin of the universe is that there always has been something and will always continue to be something.

And, as I'm sure you'd agree, in a perfect world there would be no death.

Not really, I don't see death as such a bad thing. I don't see why non-existence is considered so bad. The process of dieing may be bad, but the fact that you don't exist anymore isn't bad. It may be bad in that way that it is an absence of good, but it's not bad per se. I'm still not quite sure whether death is a punishment or a result of sin though, so I'll just write my view on both ideas .

I can live with bad things being the result of sin. Well, I don't see how Tsunami's, natural deaths and the like are caused by sin, but in general I think it's true that bad things are the result of sins. Sins in a non-religious way would just be amoral actions, these actions are amoral because they have bad results.

Death as a punishment I do have a problem with though. For one: children who die before having had the chance to sin. Why would God punish them? For the sins of their ancestors? I'm sorry, but I cannot believe in such a cruel god who punishes innocent people, because their ancestors misbehaved.


*(literal translation of a Dutch word, because I like it and don't know a good translation).

 

[Ctuchik]

Due to the large amounts of faith related threads here recently I thought I would share this.

Personally I have seen a large shift of scientists move from the view point of "God and Science can’t co-exist" to a "God and Science may well link together."

Even Stephen Hawking in his book "A Brief History of Time" put across convincing arguments that the universe was created by an intelligent being, although, he does vow to keep on trying to dis-prove his beliefs... as any good scientist should do.

Below is a link to a book named "The Science of God" It talks about the creation, the 6 days in which genesis states the Earth was created and the 7th Day (This Era) in which God rests. It describes these days as not actually 24 hour days that we experience here on earth but as days from the viewpoint of somebody standing at the Point of Quark Confinement (God), this is where the universe began, all matter was confined into a small space and as the universe expands the "Perceived Days" Standing on from the point of quark confinement get shorter and link in extraordinarily well with how Science understands the various era's of the universes/earths creation and what happened at those times...

Have a read of this review...

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/RelSci/Schrev.si.html

If any of you are interested further, buy the book, it is a very interesting read... even from a non-religious standpoint... It really does make you ask questions.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076790303X/102-6123774-2767301?v=glance&n=283155

Discuss if you wish.. its interesting in my oppinion.

and AAAAAAALLLL of it is so bloody vague it can mean pretty much anything.

 

[noblok]

But i can't see the big difference between the history of man kind being predetermined and fate of the individual. Because in most cases history is formed by a single human being, and if he/she were to die 'before' they had filled in their part of history the predeterminism of mankind would be a little different. And that means that people around them would have to act in a certain way ie. not kill them

Well, I'll give this a shot. Fate usually implies that there is some greater meaning behind it all. That there is something/someone which has decided all events before they actually happen.

Scheme: (F=faith, -> = causes/determines, A/B/C/... = events)
F->A, B, C, ...

Pre-determinism means that everything is fully determined by other factors. For example, if I were to kill someone this would be determined by by social context, brain structure, etc, which were all in turn determined by other factors.

Scheme:
A->B->C->...
(note: One thing can determine and be determined by several other things, but it would be to complicated to draw )

 

[Karl]

and AAAAAAALLLL of it is so bloody vague it can mean pretty much anything.

Hence the... "If you are interested... By the book" comment...

Im not trying to convince anyone with that statment im just explaining about this book and "Vaguley" whats inside... like a review does

Also.. if you do a bit of research... its not so vague but givs away a lot in the review!

 

[tris-]

I think in the meantime it's probably best described as the 'origin of my thoughts'. I know it's vague, but the best I can do at the moment. This does not coincide with my brain though, since my brain is merely impulse -> reaction, it has no freedom.

What's important for the reasoning though is that this subject makes a choice in all freedom. This choice is influenced by all kinds of factors, but not completely determined.

sorry if i mis-understood you (you are clearly more intelligent than me so it wouldnt suprise me, lol), but are you saying then, that you believe there is a soul? that the soul makes the decision and then its brain > impule > reaction?

i dont know what else there could be outside of your brain except the soul. or a god. and this god/soul is determining what you should do so...

 

[noblok]

Yes, something along the lines of a soul. The soul isn't something which decides for me though. I am that soul. I don't know about you, but at least I have the experience that I am a subject. I am something more than just my body. In a deterministic view this subject is fully determined by extern factors, in my view this subject still has some autonomy.

I suppose that this soul is quite heavily interweaved with my brain structure though. I'm not that naive to discredit all science in favour of an independent soul. I don't think the soul is only my brain, but I don't think it can exist without it either. The question still remains how an immaterial soul can cause material reactions, I'll admit again that I don't know how it's possible. It's just how I experience things.

 

[tris-]

i suppose pre-determinism and 'not-pre-determinism' is ultimatley down to experience.

i may of have experienced the things you mention when i was younger. but now. all my experiences are to do with that thing i cant be arsed to spell again,

 

[Naetha]

If [general people on this board] believe there is no "superior being/creator/god-like-figure" due to lack of scientific evidence or reasoning, then, what is their scientific evidence or reasoning for a soul? Most of the people that have posted so far believe that there is some part of them that is more than the sum of their physical parts, but what is this?

Maybe "God" is the soul of the universe?

 

[noblok]

It all comes down to experience for me. I have a strong sensation of free will and responsibility. I haven't had a religious experience (yet). This is why I believe in free will and I don't believe in a god.

I have said before how similar this belief is to faith though. I'll never try to deny that, nor have I looked down on belief in a god. It's just something I can't believe in.

Maybe lack of scientific knowledge was worded wrong (if I did word it that way, I can't remember). A combination of lack of scientific knowledge and lack of experience would be more accurate.