HappyFlappyDeist wrote:This does not really seem like the position of the Judeo-Christian faith.
I can speak for Christian theology, but it does sound rather strawman-like --
something I'd expect to be written on an Atheist's skeptics website ("God created because she's egotistical").
Certainly, there would be diverse and varied positions within Christendom as to why God created.
The number one often stated is that God's love is limitless and overflowing.
Not that this is something God needs, but rather it's a part of God's nature to love.
God created rational beings, not because God desired us to bow down and marvel, but because He wanted to enter into a relationship with His creation.
Our freedom to choose is therefore something God also desires to respect. Since love is never forced.
In order to allow for the greatest good -- love -- we must be free to choose otherwise, to turn from God and choose evil (opposite of God's desires).
To just marvel at His own creation isn't really one I've come across.
Addressing the 1st paragraph, It wasn't meant to be an assault on theism, if that's how you took it. God did marvel at his creation after each day did he not? "He saw that it was good." Obviously God had multiple reasons for his creation, I stole on off the list and applied it as a possibility to Fred.
Feel free to assault all you like, I'm sure you'll feel at times assaulted.
But, I can separate "the debate" if you will from you as a person.
So it's all good.
Re: marvelling. I did mention there would be diverse and varied positions.
But, I still take exception to God or Fred just creating to marvel. Such seems like a reason assigned after the fact.
Consider something that I might create with my own hand.
I've done many renovations to my house for example, and often once finished I'll just stare and marvel at my handiwork for 5-10 mins.
But, the reason I renovated wasn't to marvel at my work. So too, if God creating just to marvel at his handiwork seems too superficial and after the fact.
Maybe after God's creative act he did marvel, but that doesn't explain the reason why God created.
In asking what
the reason God created is then, the implication is that one is looking for an explanation before the fact, rather than any consequence of having created such as marvelling.
Since you make mention of God's marveling at his "good creation" in Genesis, let me also point out God's desired relationship with humanity.
That, I'd argue, is the reason for God creating -- because God or Fred wanted to have a relationship with an sentient being and express his love.
And that is why the physical laws appears rigged for sapient life such as us.
HFD wrote:Kurieuo wrote:So, do you think your deistic God at least planned to create?
Or did some of his creative dust perhaps clumsily fall from the table and wella, our universe popped into existence?
I think this is a question.....
Yes, obviously in different words, but yes this is what I believe. Fred simply created the laws that allowed for the possibility of 'creation.'
So if Fred set out to
purposefully create the laws (which would then actually be his "creation"), then my previous argument still applies.
1) If "God" planned to create the universe then God's creation is personal to him.
2) God planned to created to create the universe.
3) Therefore God's creation is personal to him.
So then I think we actually have a form of Theism -- whether or not you see this I suppose is up to you.
But, I'm leaning towards considering you a minimal Theist unless you in fact believe God's creating was accidental.
HFD wrote:Addressing we can't understand God or his reasons"; you say this is not a Christian position, I'm in no position to disagree. It's something I thought was a Christian position but you make it sound as if it's not, which you are in a position to do as a Christian. You stated a bible verse explaining why we can know God's reasons, this does not however explain Fred's reasons. Fred does not have a Bible, I have no way of knowing his reasons.
I disagree that you have no way of knowing God's reasons.
In fact, you are willfully choosing to believe that God created and then lost interest.
Therefore you are saying something about your deist God, namely that he has no interest in us and just wanted to create for the sake of it.
So you are assuming to know that God wasn't interested to anything further beyond setting in place laws.
This seems quite unconvincing as a position, since it beggars belief why God went to the hassle in the first place.
What reason do you have for that?
A more logical position would be Agnostic Theist in my opinion.
You don't know that God didn't intervene more, or guide natural laws here and there whether through careful planning in the beginning, or direct intervention.
However, I'm picking up, that you have great fear of belief in God.
Maybe you feel that belief in God lets the "cat out of the bag" if you will.
Perhaps your perception of what is "scientific" might come crashing down around you.
I read this in how you preferred to distance yourself from an "intelligent being" to just call it "some thing".
Then how you now wish to remove the word "God" and substitute in "Fred" as though that makes a difference.
Seriously. Pause for moment.
Are you afraid of believing in God?
How does it make your gut feel?
What is so off putting?
I'll just say, that many pioneers of modern science were Christian.
Including many you highly respect.
There is nothing unscientific more or less scientific about belief in God, than Naturalism.
Seriously. Both a philosophical beliefs and of a different category to science.
As I pointed out elsewhere, to say "belief in God is more/less scientific than Naturalism" is like saying, "red is more/less rounder than blue."
So for what reason are you afraid of belief in God?
HFD wrote:Kurieuo wrote:In fact, I think if one believes in natural evolutionary laws for all life then Theism provides the best basis for belief in evolution.
One should not be a Naturalist (philosophical belief that there are no "super" natural beings like God guiding or planning anything), as it's just unfathomable to believe that pure luck could produce life -- let alone the complexities of life that we see.
To believe that everything is unguided and unplanned is to me quite naive and gullible. It is like believing someone who keeps beating you in poker, who keeps turning over a royal flush hand after hand, hasn't stacked the deck in their favour.
Why is it unfathomable? With billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets, with a possibility of an unknown amount of universe's each with the same statistics as the former list, It was bound to happen somewhere ( oof I know this is getting quoted; I.E "It was bound to happen= Fred wanted it to"). Chances are it's happened somewhere else as well, and there's a good possibility that it exists in our own solar system. Using simple statistics,
If life has occurred in 3 places( let's
assume mars, earth, and Europa) in this solar system, what's the possibility that it exists nowhere else in the billions of other solar systems? Is life guided on all these other places as well? Does God take special interest in them? We've stated that "it's unfathomable to believe that pure luck could produce life" so this must mean God wasn't satisfied with simply making us and wished to "love his creation" elsewhere as God doesn't create to simply marvel, correct?
So you think there's life on Mars and one of Jupiter's moons?
If there is any life, I doubt it would be indigenous to such planets.
Given Earth's longevity it is perhaps likely that we'll find remnants on Mars.
You sound like you have the problem to the origin of life nailed.
Maybe you should submit a paper to a journal explaining how it arose.
As you remarked similarly to someone else (fair's fair), you'll be famous and stand to earn a lot of money.
In any case, it is more than the issue of life coming to be.
You have probably heard of the ID term of "complex and specified complexity" (CSI).
To quote who I'd consider a fair-minded ID agnostic, Dennis Jones
writes in his article in discussing Dembski:
- What's important is that just as improbable as it is to be dealt a Royal Flush, so likewise the level of difficulty natural selection is up against to produce what appears to be designed in nature. And, when CSI is observed in nature, which occurs occasionally, then that not only confirms ID predictions... but also tips a scientist a clue that such might be evidence of additional ID-related mechanisms at work.
Before you dismiss, I'd recommend reading
his article in full and also
Jones' introduction to CSI.
Hold off on what you've heard. Reserve your opinion for 10 minutes or so, and take a read of those two articles. They're really good primers.
Keep in mind, this guy is agnostic and not part of the ID movement -- although he has come it seems to make a stand for the logic and rationale of concepts within.
I previously encouraged people to look over
his article on universal common descent also (which I mention, as I understand people including perhaps yourself don't like to read "creo" sites -- but this is by no means your "creo" kind of guy as you'll see
reading over this article).
I obviously disagree with his agnosticism, but he is someone I've come to recently respect.
And as he has written on things relevant to what I'm trying to get at with you, I felt he might be a good more neutral source.
HFD wrote:Kurieuo wrote:So I put forward that purely blind, random and unplanned evolutionary processes would have never lead to life as we have it. It is just as unlikely and improbable as all the fine tuning of the physical laws that we see in the cosmos.
I just simply disagree with with this. The arousal of the law's of physics do not have any coherent hypothesis (other than the absurdity that they've always existed) , the arousal of life does.
Quantum theory shows particles popping in and out of existence. Why not universes?
While going against Occam's razor, physicists not content with our universes beginning hypothesise the possibility of other universes that ours popped into existence from. Some of these (e.g., Lee Smolin) postulate the contingency of physical laws that a universe inherits, such that they could be otherwise.
So then, why is it absurd to believe that the physical laws have always existed, in some form or another?
I don't disagree with you, but I'm interested to know your answer. Actually, I found your answer from an earlier post of yours on this board.
- HFD: I believe in a god because of the apparent mathematically ordered and precise composition present in molecular/atomic/-to a certain extent- quantum physics, the absolutely insane (1 quintillionth) precision that had to be associated with the big bang for it not to collapse, as well as the dilemma of wether or not the laws of physics could have spontaneously arouse and so perfectly governed all.
So it seems that you are assigning an improbability, to reach some sort of absurdity with the physical laws always just existing especially in relation to the fine tuning of the "big bang".
Perhaps we're not that far a part. Because it certainly sounds to me like a similar principle I'm invoking when thinking of the improbability of life and evolution unfolding as it did via pure luck.
Again, what are you so afraid of in considering something of the natural order has an intended purpose?
HFD wrote:We can create models actually producing amino acids ( i'm sure you've heard this one before) which given 4 billion years, do have the ability to produce life. The watchmakers analogy isn't a viable one and neither is that absurd number ( 4^300) that dictates the possibility of life arising is impossible. Do you have any atheist threads on here arguing for the eternal existence of the laws? I'd love to read them.
A-huh, amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins and as such life.
Have you read the book,
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe?
Highly recommend it.
Re: amino acids, I don't claim to be an expert here... but I can and do read.
There are a specific set of 20 that occur in proteins.
While it is conceivable that others could fulfil the role, research says otherwise.
I came across
an article on RTB that
referred to a study published in 2011.
In this study, a team compared the range of chemical and physical properties possessed by the 20 protein-building amino acids versus random sets of amino acids that could have been selected from early Earth’s hypothetical prebiotic soup. They showed that amino acids found in biological systems possess properties that evenly and uniformly varies across a broad range of sizes, charges, and hydrophobicities. They demonstrated that the amino acids selected for proteins is a "highly unusual set of 20 amino acids; a maximum of 0.03% random sets out-performed the standard amino acid alphabet in two properties, while
no single random set exhibited greater coverage in all three properties simultaneously."
To quote from
their published study's abstract: "
Specifically, we show that the standard set of 20 amino acids represents the possible spectra of size, charge, and hydrophobicity more broadly and more evenly than can be explained by chance alone."
More than can be explained by chance alone? Wow.
HFD wrote:The only reason I believe is a deist god, as I've stated before, is because of the existence of the laws of physics. I did blindly state that Fred may have guided the big bang because of it's precision, but this is not even necessary. Given infinite time, and infinite amount of collapses it may have happened without guidance.
Why back peddle now on your previous statement?
I'm not sure that you blindly stated previously.
You made more sense previously, accepting the most obvious and straight-forward conclusion that doesn't require massive assumptions.
Law of parsimony, occam's razor, all that.
Again, I'm puzzled by what you are so scared of in embracing God as planning the world and even life?
It doesn't, and isn't, an irrational or illogical conclusion. Far from it.