The Bible says...

@WassimBerbar said in #60:
> You witnessed yourself. I can't even think there are people out there that don't believe God exists.

I know, it truly is crazy what people can convince themselves to believe. To suggest order without an orderer is preposterous.

tl/dr: It's okay to feel uncertainty or hope that you cannot easily justify. It's not a sign of foolishness.

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THE central problem of modern times is that so many people have convinced themselves that we are fundamentally alone.

Why? Because to many it feels unclever to think otherwise. And, being rather insecure to begin with, most are quite afraid to feel unclever or to appear unclever to others. I sympathize with their plight and feel quite unclever for being unable to help others more effectively to find more hope.

Fortunately, feeling unclever doesn't terrify me, because I have played chess for so long that I've become quite accustomed to feeling unclever time and again.

But let me struggle to help, nonetheless: it is not unclever to believe that we are not fundamentally alone, even if we cannot see our Companion directly. My earlier post about gravity hints at this. We cannot cause gravity to make sense in the world we THINK we inhabit.

Sure, we can use Newton's simple formula to approximate its effects -- we can make it dance to the tune of our crude mathematics. But describing is not explaining. Not remotely.

The truth is, gravity is outside our real understanding, and will remain so. It is but another example of things that will not be forced to fit within a universe that we can understand. It's real. But things are not as we think or as we can really discover.

As our wisdom has grown, we have, stumbling after the excellent examples of Godel and Cohen, begun to grasp that there are some things that we can neither prove nor disprove with the tools we are able to make. Because the universe is not really how we perceive it to be, there are things that are simply beyond our ken.

I'd say "that should be our first clue" -- but it really isn't the first clue. It's just yet another clue.

At this point, somebody who is obviously not unclever will chortle something like: "oh, Noflaps, you silly fossil, you cannot leap from noticing gaps in our understanding to proving that God exists! That is far too grand a leap!"

And I would agree with that. Noticing that corners of the universe are actually, fundamentally, eternally mysterious is no "proof" that God exists. As I said, it is merely "a clue." But it is, indeed, a strong clue.

To make a leap toward God requires faith. That is why faith, which at first blush seems like a fussy, unfair requirement, turns out to be quite important. Its presence is the only tool we have to prime our intuition. And our intuition -- which powerfully operates with the machine language of our brain -- can often sense what we cannot prove. Indeed, it lies at the very bedrock of our existence and is a tool even more powerful than our mathematics. Although intuition is not deductive, it is the seed from which deduction can grow. In mathematics, our "axioms" -- the very cornerstones of our mathematics -- are .... intuitive!

When God created our universe, God could have made it so God's presence was immediately and continuously obvious and verifiable. God could have chosen continually to stroll about in glory so that all could see God plainly. But, lovingly, that is not what God did. For good reason.

God gave us mystery and free will. And thereby God made life much more challenging and therefore interesting. He gave us room to explore and learn and make decisions and mistakes and play the game as we choose to play it, within some guidelines that God has, in fact, managed to provide to us, so that we can avoid going completely off the rails.

If we could SEE the Teacher standing in the room, we would not really have free will. We'd all be walking around on egg shells, self-consciously glancing over our shoulders and not really making our own decisions. Life would feel like a kindergarten class. Sure, we might feel more protected, but we'd also quickly feel the need for more challenge and freedom, which we could never have.

God has made our lives better by making things mysterious. God has given us a real life, and a chance to stand on our own two feet and the joy of navigating and discovering on our own. God has given us a chance to become fine beings through the exercise of our own free will, not simply because the Teacher is obviously looking over our shoulder all day long.

Of course, there's a cost for this helpful, interesting mystery. Things can "go wrong." We can feel uncertainty and fear. It is a blessing to be able to learn from our own mistakes, but it is still painful, nevertheless.

But would you really want to live your entire life in a well-tended kindergarten class, where you are handed milk and cookies but constantly governed and told just where to sit?

Embrace the mystery, and don't draw from it the wrong conclusions. We are not alone. We are merely being treated with love and respect and allowed to grow. Grow wisely and well, grasshopper.

@Noflaps said in #62:
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Okay, there are lots of issues with this type of reasoning, as someone who is a pretty well-trained atheist. First of all, I'm glad you notice that your "god of the gaps" argument is invalid. I'm glad that at least some theists realize this.

But then somehow you argue that our inability to comprehend the universe is a "clue" that it might have been designed by a higher power. How does this logically follow? It seems as baseless as the previous god of the gaps. Our inability to explain something is neither proof, nor is it a suggestive, or a clue, or whatever variation of the word you want to use, of the existence of a God. All it means is we don't understand, period! It could EASILY be the case that the universe came about via natural causes, and that those causes are too complex for us to understand. Unless you explain why that's somehow less likely or less probable than the case where God creates something too complex for us to understand, this argument is really grasping at straws.

And secondly, with respect to the age-old question of the "hiddenness" of God. If that is true, then why on Earth did God apparently try to reveal his existence through the bible or the Koran? Don't people, especially religious people, feel like they are being watched anyway, especially when they feel the need to go to church to atone for their sins of debauchery, or gambling, or drinking, or cheating on their wife? So isn't your whole argument kind of self-contradictory if you're saying God deliberately hid himself so we wouldn't have to "look over our shoulder" all the time? Why did God reveal himself through his holy books? Or are you saying ALL of the holy books, especially Christianity, are wrong? Somehow I doubt that, knowing how many times you have positively referenced Christian beliefs in previous threads...

And third, yes, you point out in extraordinarily facetious language that things can "go wrong", that no one would want to live in a Kindergarten class where their teacher was there to give them milk and cookies. Okay, let me just say this is really astonishing language to use to describe the situation. Do you know how rough the real world is? You cannot even begin to describe it in these ridiculously gentle terms. Are you aware of Horton's syndrome? Do you know what it is? It is a type of "cluster" headache which is so painful, that sufferers describe it as a hot poker being driven through their eye and into their brain. People with this condition, often experience so much debilitating pain, that they commit suicide before they turn 20 (not all mind you, but many). Or what about the pinga fish, a quite brutal parasitic organism that lives in Brazilian rivers, swims up your anus, and inflates itself so that its spikes are driven through every part of your rectum, causing excruciating pain? Is that part of the f'ing lesson plan?

What about the brutal forms of torture invented and inflicted among millions of innocent people during the medieval ages, and lesser forms which still go on today? The brass bull, where people are cooked alive? Sawing someone upside down from their genitals down through their stomach? Forcing people to sit on a pyramid chair with weights, such that they are split apart from the anus upward? Having their bones broken on a rack, pulled apart by horses? Do I need to go on? Are we still in kindergarten?

The problem of evil, is not so casually thrown away by appealing to "free will", and it doesn't even work when it comes to all the forms of natural evil that exist - viruses, natural disasters, hunger, malnutrition - I don't know if you are familiar with the enormous pain your body suffers as it eats itself due to lack of food? No one "chose" to suffer those things. According to your "wondrous" vision of life, they were invented by God and inflicted on man as random, chaotic, natural punishments. No one caused a volcano to explode and burn the people who live nearby alive because they cheated on their damned wives. This is not a bloody school. You wouldn't dream of treating your children this way. And yet, apparently God treats his "children" with unspeakably evil levels of carelessness, and no religious person apparently notices the massive contradiction with the idea that God is all-knowing and all-loving and this reality. Give me a break. You have no idea how hard it was for me to phrase all this in polite language either lol

Whoever designed this universe, IF they designed this either (a) Had no clue what they were doing (b) Does not care about our well being (c) They have "mysterious ways", the most laughable, yet strangely still logical defence available or (d) it wasn't made by anyone, but randomly generated.

Now which one seems the most likely? Because my bets are either on (a) or (d). Not that any of this is even the beginning for why atheism is considered more logical, but I'll just leave it there

Do I know how rough the real world is, @kyanite111 ?

Well, I haven't been tortured, admittedly. But my lack of utter misery shouldn't disqualify me from maintaining and presenting an optimistic view of our situation, and attempting to explain why leaving us with a need for faith is not, itself, a cruel imposition without justification. Which was my point.

I was not attempting to prove that God exists. To the contrary, if such a proof were available, faith would be of little additional utility.

But the existence of cruelty and pain in our experience is no proof that God cannot exist or is cruel Himself. If we are to be free, we cannot be free only to have good or at least not unpleasant experiences. It is a universe that was designed, not an amusement park.

We have a vantage point from which not all can be seen. No matter how hard we try or how much science we apply. Gravity is a huge convenience, but it will never, and I mean never, truly to be "explained" from anyplace that we can stand in this life, no matter how much mathematics and physics we apply. Right now, you are being pulled, albeit faintly, toward objects in other galaxies. How wonderful. How inexplicable.

I cling to the significant possibility that, for now (while living in this universe), we simply lack context to ever make sense of all that we experience. I am not disconcerted by that. It doesn't fill me with rage or hopelessness or make a feeling of gratitude for my life seem "facetious" to me.

I am not declaring that your views, as an atheist, are certainly wrong. But some of them might be. With respect to some of them, neither of us can make such a determination with certainty.

What I will declare, in addition to my previous point, is this: Pascal's Wager is not facetious to make. Blaise Pascal was no fool.

@kyanite111 said in #63:
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First off, I am a Christian, so all my thoughts will be filtered through this lense. However, this does not mean that I am going to reference the Bible as truth and leave it at that.

First section: I'm not quite sure what you mean by "God in the Gaps", so I'm just gonna ignore that for now.

Second section: The inability to comprehend the universe is not a good reason for God, however the fact that the universe is complex does point towards, at the very least, some form of intelligent design. Theoretically, if given enough time, the argument is that something extremely complex could form, something possibly as complex as a single cell. of course, this assumes perfect conditions. Additionally, this assumes that "life" could form without any other form of life, which unfortunately unable to be examined, and that information could form without any intelligence to form it, which is also completely unobservable. All of these factors creating enough perfect conditions for this to form and perhaps you can get to the simplest life, but then you still have to come to a method by which more complex life could come about, which we have no good explanation for either.

Third section: God is not hidden, He is plainly displayed through His creation, and through Him revealing Himself to us. from my point of view, since God does not intend to be hidden, this argument is void. I'm not sure how to argue over the conclusion that comes from faulty information. basically, if you believe something wrong, and you come to the wrong conclusion, I can't just argue the conclusion, I have to argue the wrong information. Since the information is in regard to what God intends, I would say that the only person that can truly affirm or deny this information is God Himself.

Fourth/fifth/sixth section: God and the Evil of this world, quite the dilemma. I can't propose anything in regards to this problem except what I know from the Bible, so I will tell you the Biblical answer. God is good, He created a good creation with no problems. Absolute perfection. He also created us, completely perfect. He also wanted us to love Him, and just telling us to love Him is not us choosing to love Him. So, He gave us the choice to love Him, or to not love Him. This is our free will. Unfortunately, the original people chose not to love Him, so Sin entered the world, and now everything is broken. This is where all the problems come from, not from God, but from our brokenness. Free will is not a bad thing, it is what we do with it that is the problem. The message of the Bible is bad in the way that we are the problem, we don't fix things, we just make them worse. But the good news is that God chose to reconcile us anyways, by sending Himself into the world, becoming a human, and dying so that all of us could be redeemed.

Final sections: I prefer option e, He loved us, but we hated Him. The problem with the world isn't an uncaring or unknowing God, but that we are an uncaring and unknowing people. The solution is a perfectly Just, perfectly Righteous, perfectly Gracious, perfectly Loving God. If you want to know how to get to know Him, I can help you.

May God bless you! :)

edit: me not reloading the page and finding a response from noflaps lol.

God has nothing to do with religion as all religions throw the second commandment 'thou shalt not kill ' outta the window anytime it suits them. xxx