My "god"
Offline Take off your logic hats please. I am trying to provide context about just who the hell wavefreak is.
I believe we are not alone. It just seems absurd that we are the only sentient being that exists.
I believe that we are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. This place is just to frickin big. If we are the best thing going I would be sorely dissappointed
I believe that since humans show thing like compassion, that what ever is "out there" that is "bigger" than us can also show compassion.
And it may be possible that this sentient being (or race of beings) may just so happen to be aware of us and have some type of compassion (or whatever) towards us.
If you want to talk about infinite gods, leave me out. I get confused too easliy.
Also, I am irreverent, sarcastic and generally a little bit touched in the head. I'm am very likely to toss out things just to shake the tree and see what falls out.
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People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
{Picture me tugging and pulling at my own head, cursing the name wavefreak}
Sorry, dude. The hat's stuck, but I'll try to work around it.
I also think it's kind of goofy to believe that we're alone in the universe. As for alien intellect, who can say? The universe is spectacularly old, but then again, if our current understanding is correct, it takes several stellar cycles before you start getting into habitable solar systems, so any other life that's out there wouldn't have too much of a head start on us, and intelligence, after all, is not always a particularly useful survival trait. (Out of all the life on the planet, only one species managed to get smart enough to believe in Raelians, you know!)
Where I am puzzled is the disconnect between 1) There is probably other life in the universe, and 2) Therefore god exists. That seems, how can I say this diplomatically... insane. I dunno. It just seems to me that we show compassion because our primitive ancestors that had no compassion pretty much all died lonely deaths. Compassion in species that raise their young is a marvelous survival trait.
I'm also kind of puzzled that you'd think they even know we're here. Too many Star Trek reruns, methinks.
LoL... trust me, your confusion is justified.
We'll have no irreverence here!
I think this is the best sig of any theist who's ever graced the boards.
Anyway, thanks for the two-cent tour of wavefreak's brain. Even if we disagree, it's nice to have you around. Debates just aren't much fun when there's only one participant.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Why do we have to use the term "god" in the first place? That's a red herring.
hmm, well it sounds like you agree with evolution, hence you agree that our compassion was created by natural selection reacting to a need for compassion, probably related to a mothers need to keep her baby safe. How can god also have compassion unless he developed it in a similar fashion. You could argue this but ofcourse we see not one shred of compasion beyond what we foolishlly create in our own stupid heads.
It is only classical theism that insists god "always was". That idea loses coherence for me as soon as I consider that time is apparantley an artifact of the big bang. "Always was" implies something about time. Too much effort is spent trying to figure out how god came to be. For me it is a useless excercise. So is talk about a static, unchanging god. Everything I see and perceive changes. Why not god?
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I think I can safely add a little more to my conceptualization of god.
God is material. I accept that the terms supernatural and immaterial are broken concepts. Exactly what that material of God *is* may or may not be something yet known. But it must be able to interact with the known material universe. Clearly, that interaction is required otherwise there is no possibility of communication with God. If an Christian insists that God is spirit, to me that "spirit" is just a form of materialism. Analogous to water and steam. Both are different aspects of the same thing.
God is dynamic. This follows from God is material. If God is part of the material universe then we already observe that our little corner of existence is constantly changing. That is enough to say that the whole is changing and as the whole contains God, God is changing.
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If you believe that God is material then perhaps you'd like to get a book on Spinoza? Spinoza's God was the materialistic pantheistic God that Einstein believed in.
This one looks pretty cool. I might even get it myself sometime!
This one looks good as well.
You might identity with Spinoza on a number of levels.
On the one hand he believed that there was something 'real' to God, yet at the same time he severely criticised dogmatic religions of the time, being the first to give the Bible an honest critique and reveal its contradictions about 200 years before "Age of Reason".
It is very hard to imagine that we are the only planet able to hold life in the universe. For a start the universe is mind-bogglingly enormous! But again we might well be the most intelligent life. Up until a few hundred thousand years ago there had never in the whole history of the world been a species as successful as ours. Intelligent life of our callibre is an extremely recent outcome of evolution, veloceraptors may have had the smarts, although evidence for this is scant. There may be life in the universe somewhere much more intelligent than ours, so much so that to us they might seem like Gods. As for the interstellar federations we see in Star Trek, much less likely. Even if we could travel at 1% the speed of light it would take more than our life time to actually reach another planet capable of maintaining life and even if that were the case would such a planet really have intelligent life such as ours. Perhaps they might have life as intelligent as humans but less scientifically developed, as humans were only 100 years ago.
We can be fairly certain that no alien life has ever reached earth (no matter what a few nutjobs in the Arizona desert might believe). So a galaxy conquering form of life has not evolved yet, we may be the closest to that in at least our galaxy and we've only been to our own moon! Of course our galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies. I do not dispute that there may be more intelligent life than ours. Perhaps if we hadn't had a massive comet strike the earth 45 million years ago there would be much more intellectually and scientifically advanced species than human beings.
In all likelyhood there is other life on other planets. There is no evidence per se but our own existence would support such a hypothesis. What I don't get is your extra terrestrial life = God mumbojumbo.
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Surely any God is extra-terrestrial. But, for me at least, not one of the Roswellean Little Green Men. That's far too Hollywood for my sensabilities.
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I took a quick Wikipedia look at Spinoza. Definately something I need to look at in more detail. Thanks.
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Take off your logic hats please. I am trying to provide context about just who the hell wavefreak is.
*tugs* GRRRRR. Sorry, it wont come off. It is now...a part of me. It will be forevermore.
I believe we are not alone. It just seems absurd that we are the only sentient being that exists.
*Adopting my Carl Sagan voice*. From a probability standpoint, there is a good chance that you are absolutely correct. Just check the most recent numbers for the Drake equation and the number of planets/stars/galaxies in the universe.
I believe that we are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. This place is just to frickin big. If we are the best thing going I would be sorely dissappointed
Absolutely. You have already read what I wrote on Sentience Quotient
.I believe that since humans show thing like compassion, that what ever is "out there" that is "bigger" than us can also show compassion.
That may be a little speculative, but OK. Remember, it would depend on how that intelligent being evolved, which is what I wrote in an essay called Crossing the River out of Eden:
Look at man! The pedestal of four billion years of painstaking progress, a drive upwards which has been wrought with death and the ruthlessness of nature in symbiosis with the fragility of life. The instincts imprinted onto man, instincts which no doubt had tremenous Natural selection benefits, are no doubt self-intersted and violent. Every time a rush of adrenaline (a mechanism which has existed in animal life for many millions of years) shoots through your bloodstream, you will understand the feeling of power and narcissism. Yet...it has also given us a flexible set of tools for getting what we want. Whenever you see a chimp picking the lice out of the back of one of his fellows, whenever you see birds feeding each other, for no apparent gain to themselves, you are witnessing altruism.
Although evolution creates selfish organisms, they co-operate to form societies whose mutual benefit thusly maxamizes the rewards of the individual. Human society of course rests at the top of it now. And what would seem best of all from our standpoint, is that we have broken free from the Selfish replicators. As the socities we create no longer have foundations in the instincts with two million years on the African Savannah fine-tuned, our evolution is not genetic but cultural, a unit of information which can move many million times faster than the genes. As evolution has given us abilities like empathy (which is the result of a mirror-neuron wiring, quite a recent introduction into animal neurology) as well as altruism, we have turned the tables on the genes, once our lords and masters. Now, we exist in organiztions which to the genes must surely seem so unnatural, and so unusual. Yet they were their own undoing. They gave us neuroplasticity, they gave us endocrine balance, they gave us mirror neurons and altruistic tendancies...
And it may be possible that this sentient being (or race of beings) may just so happen to be aware of us and have some type of compassion (or whatever) towards us.
You are stepping off the far end of low probabilities. If they knew we existed (highly unlikely. We have only been beaming out radio signals for 70 years) and they were compassionate, they would let us know.
If you want to talk about infinite gods, leave me out. I get confused too easliy.
I see you have already read what Pineapple and myself wrote about infinite conciousness?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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I would very much like to read this essay cover to cover.
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