“God has no religion”

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by warriorofanart, Dec 6, 2009.

  1. Nojon

    Nojon Tha mo bhàta-foluaimein

    God doesn't even go to church.
     
  2. Infrazael

    Infrazael Banned Banned

    Extremely loaded, if god was indeed there. Because, well, whether he exists or not doesn't change the fact that he is utterly impossible to perceive.
     
  3. GSHAMBROOKE

    GSHAMBROOKE Thats Tarm Sarm

    So they evolved? sounds like evolution to me.
     
  4. Stanislovas

    Stanislovas Valued Member

    At Infrazael= Hm. Nicely put. I'll have to think on that one for a bit.

    At GSHAMBROOKE= Doesn't it? I've never said anything about being against evolution. That's a proven fact. Never directly read something in the Bible that would stand as a claim against evolution, either.
     
  5. CanuckMA

    CanuckMA Valued Member

    A common answer is that G-d knows the outcome of every single decision we can make (think humongous decision tree), and that we have the free will to select the actual path. And also that G-d does not preoccupy Himself with individual lives.
     
  6. Infrazael

    Infrazael Banned Banned

    If he knows the exact outcome that is what being omniscient means. The paradox still exists. Since our decision is not actually a decision, only an illusion of decision. There is no "choice" because the "decision tree" does not actually exist. All of those "extra branches" are completely meaningless because at the end we can only reach one result. And god knows what that result will be.

    If you are saying he knows all the POSSIBLE decisions we will make but not the EXACT decision, then he is a prescient being and thus not omniscient. Thus, a prescient god does not contradict existence of free will.

    Of course, of god is merely prescient, he cannot be the Abrahamic god. So you see the problem here?

    Religious folks cannot accept the fact that their god is merely prescient, even though that allows free will to exist. They want god to be omnipresent, thus we have our little paradox.

    It would be terribly easy if they would simply accept free will as an illusion, but they cannot do this either. I don't see the big deal to be honest, if you have such strong conviction in these gods, why do you even need to feel the comfort of having "free will?"
     
  7. Topher

    Topher allo!

    Regarding free will, most religions have a conception of free will that does not conform to how we really use the term. Within theism people often take free will to mean an absolute free choice, however we use the term, in practice, to mean a non-coerced choice, which is the only meaningful/relevant definition of free will.

    I take the compatalists view in the free will/determinism debate, which basically says if we define free will in accordance with how we use the term then free will and determinism are fully compatible. There doesn't need to be a conflict; one only arises if you employ a nonsensical idea of free will.

    The theistic notion of free will just doesn't work, as I explained in post #33.
     
  8. Infrazael

    Infrazael Banned Banned

    Ah yes, good point Topher. But then again, most people don't even know what they mean by "free will" when throwing the term around.
     
  9. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    just realized something. why does an omniscient being have to be able to see the future? omniscient can just as easily mean that he is aware of everything that exists as it exists NOW. especially since the future can't be "seen", it can only be thought about, imagined and predicted
     
  10. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    I actually heard an interesting answer to this once.
    You know how Adam and Eve were supposed to be perfect before "the fall" and since then the human race has corrupted more and more, e.g. Adam lived for 1000 years, Moses lived for 120, and it kept getting lower as mankind went on.

    Well, the theory is that back in Adam's day, the people were still relatively pure so incest wasn't an issue. It was only as the human race became more corrupted that it became a problem.
    Or something like that...

    Theology is a great place for imaginitive story-telling and filling in loopholes.
     
  11. Infrazael

    Infrazael Banned Banned

    So as long as people were "pure" then they could screw each and every way that they want right?

    A little daddy on daughter action if you catch my drift.

    Maybe animal involvement as well.
     
  12. Topher

    Topher allo!

    Did marriage exist in Adam's day? If not, isn't humanity officially a *******?
     
  13. aikiwolfie

    aikiwolfie ... Supporter

    Well if you want to look at it like that then humanity is an incestuous *******. Eve was supposedly made from Adam and their sons and daughters made wives and husbands of each other.
     
  14. aikiwolfie

    aikiwolfie ... Supporter

    I've heard this one as well. It's conveniently impossible to test and people today are on average living longer than in previous years.
     
  15. aikiMac

    aikiMac aikido + boxing = very good Moderator Supporter

    By no means can I speak for all people, but in my experience "religious folk" don't always recognize the need to justify the paradox. The existence of a paradox is actually of no importance. Unexplained things happen in life. We don't have to explain everything. We cannot explain everything.

    This mindset begins in living a shared life, a life as part of a community of other people. I don't mean a hippy commune, but a group of people all sharing their lives over a long period of time. An ideal family, yes, but broader than blood line. Things happen, and you share the events: fears, hurts, joys, the good and the bad and the inbetween -- it's all there shared and experienced by the larger group over long periods of time.

    You specifically asked about the Abrahamic faiths. This hypothetical community that I'm forming is connected through an unbroken chain of communities all the back to original particular events that, if taken at face value, were genuine miracles. (Think Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Jesus, Muhammed.) Those past events were experienced by numerous people who interacted with one another and confirmed one another's experiences and interpretations of the experience. It was all shared. Nobody stood alone. Because it was shared, not alone, they believed it. They believed the miracles as a group because as a group they experienced the miracles.

    Now walk forward again in time back to today. The original generation tells the next about the original miracles. They pass it on, and they pass it on, and so on. Now and then additional weird things happen that they can't explain: modern miracles. Those shared events get told to the next generation, and so on and so on, always in a community where lives are shared so nobody is interpretting his or her experience in isolation. Nobody stands alone.

    With that background, nobody cares that there's a paradox. What they care about is the experience of actual life. Actual life is how it is, and that's how it is, whether there's a paradox or not. Nobody can explain everything in real life. Mysteries abound in the real world, so a little paradox here and there in the real world that everything is sharing and experiencing together generation after generation after generation, simply doesn't matter.

    To Moses, this paradox didn't matter. It was irrelevant to him crossing the Red Sea and so on. To Joshua entering the Promised Land it was irrelevant. To King David, to Elisha, to Jeremiah, to John the Baptist, to Muhammad at Mecca the paradox was irrelevant. What mattered was their real-life experiences shared and confirmed with other people.

    Make sense? I don't mean are you going to convert; I mean, do you understand their point of view now?
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2009
  16. AZeitung

    AZeitung The power of Grayskull

    Free will doesn't have to mean totally unpredictable.

    If you tell me what you did yesterday, now I know what you did. Does that mean you didn't have free will to do it?

    Now, suppose I build a time machine and go back in time to yesterday but I don't talk to you or interact with you or anyone around you at all. I should still know what you're going to do.

    So, at what point did your actions become predetermined? Was that in the future? Because the future hasn't happened yet.

    From a purely physical standpoint, the asymmetry of "past" and "future" is somewhat artificial although there's some sort of emergent phenomenon that allows us to know one and not the other. There's also no physical theory that gives us a "present". In this context an outside observer could know the past, present, and future, but that doesn't mean that free will doesn't exist.

    I mean, say you build up your entire universe from past to future. Looking back on it, you can have knowledge of every single event. You just have a four dimensional object that contains everything that has ever happened. But now we're saying that you're building up the universe over time--as time passes--which is really nothing more than a dimension of the universe (and not even a particular dimension, either. The direction that we call "time" depends on how you orient yourself in the universe--which changes with speed). So it doesn't make sense to be thinking in terms of past, present, and future when looking at the universe from the outside. So, why should God be limited by the universe that He created?
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2009
  17. aikiwolfie

    aikiwolfie ... Supporter

    Here's an interesting insight into how free our free will really is. There was a documentary (likely an episode of Horizon) on the BBC not too long ago which explored the limits of the conscious mind. The aim of the program was to discover how much of your brain needs to be active for "you" to still be "you". That is to be self-aware.

    Throughout the program many different research projects were looked at and the possible implications of the results. One project was involved in showing how the brain makes decisions. And this research showed that a decision was actually made deep in your subconscious mind upto 6 seconds before the concious mind was aware of it.

    Six seconds is a very long time for the concious mind to be out of the loop.
     
  18. CKava

    CKava Just one more thing... Supporter

    That you are not consciously aware of making a decision does not necessarily mean that free will is an illusion. Especially since it's debatable how far the research experiments can be extrapolated into complex decision making.
     
  19. Topher

    Topher allo!

    Although in some ways I think the paradox is a problem (especially if one wishes to maintain that their theology is logical and their god is comprehensible), I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

    A bigger mystery than this paradox is why someone would expect this supernatural being to make sense to us finite limited natural beings to begin with? Expecting god to be comprehensible to us is to expect him to function as the rest of nature does (since, as natural beings, nature is as far as our understanding takes us). Paradox's like this is what I would expect when we start to postulate beings 'outside' nature.

    Having said that, I personally would certainly be concerned if my worldview allowed or, and included things like paradoxes and contradictions. That's once of the reasons why I do not adopt a supernatural worldview.
     
  20. Topher

    Topher allo!

    I saw this show too.

    I think people only see this as a problem if they view the self/mind and the brain as distinct things, because then somehow the brain is overriding and denying the autonomy of the self/mind.

    However if you accept that the mind (the self) IS the brain, then there is no problem.

    The truth is the decisions are being made by you, because your mind/brain is the totally of who you are: your memories, your experiences, your desires, your beliefs, etc. All your decisions follow from these, however this all takes place on a sub-conscious level, and for good reason: can you imagine what it would be like to be consciously aware of everything, literally everything, your brain does! You would go insane. So it happens sub-consciously, all in the background. It only becomes conscious at the appropriate moment: when you are about act on it. However, because this is the first moment we become aware of the decision, we tend to think this is the origin of the decision, when in reality it is in fact the end of a longer causal chain which started on a sub-conscious level.

    Here's the show (1/6):

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7YtpH3M_sY"]YouTube- BBC Horizon: The secret you. Consciousness. Pt1 of 6.[/ame]
     
    Last edited: Dec 23, 2009

Share This Page