[Inhuman]

The existance of whether there is a higher power or not frequently crosses my mind. I'm currently agnostic, there's theories for and against higher powers and I can't decide which to believe.

The omnipotence theory is the primary reason why I don't believe in a higher power. If there is something that can do everything, it will be able to look into it's own future. Doing so, it can see the choices it makes in the future; hence, it's future is predetermined. This results in it not having a free will, for it cannot make any choices being that everything it does is predetermined. A common retort to this is "God can always change his mind". On the contrary, if God can do anything, when he forsees his future he would have already seen the changes that he made. There's no way that there can be something that knows everything.

Our entire existence is what pushes me to believe in a higher power. I believe in the big bang theory, but what exactly created the big bang? Scientists say it was a gathering of particles that created an explosion, but where would the particles come from if there was nothing before the big bang? You can't make something out of nothing. It's like eating out of an empty bowl, somebody has to put something in it in order for you to eat off it.

This brings me to why I think science is wrong. If the big bang created the universe, and before the universe there was nothing, how much time did it take before the big bang happened? There would have to be infinite years, because there is no start of time. If there was nothing, then would there even be a value of time? Time is fictional and manmade used as a form of measurment. It's like math. We use rulers to measure things, but it is impossible to get any exact number, because they are infinitive. You can always cut a number in half. How can I trust science when two of the most commonly used elements (Time & Math) are only man made illusions?

Thanks for reading this. I'd like to hear some input!

[!@#$%!]

higher power

if you take an120V appliance and run in on 240V you'll fry it

that's my take on the higher power

oh i gotta go. have some work to catch up with...

[Gookid]

Originally Posted by Inhuman

Scientists say it was a gathering of particles that created an explosion, but where would the particles come from if there was nothing before the big bang?

Who says there was nothing before the big bang? The most likely explanation is that there's always been matter, expanding and contracting.

[LittlePuppetBoy]

how do we know the big bang actually happened?

[Daycare Nation]

Omnipotence...Don't you mean "omniscience?" Omniscience means "knowing all." I think you are confusing this with "having all power," which is omnipotence..

We have the illusion of free will. We can choose to obey God, or we can go against his will or choose to believe there is no order. When I say "God," I don't mean an entity or being such as we are. That is a popular notion called "supernatural theism," which is the thing which most atheists think all Christians believe. In fact, very few real Christians believe that God is a "man in the sky" who crafted the universe as in a workshop, and stands apart from it, observing his work.

God is that thing which you refer to, which existed in eternity before the big bang. God is outside the universe (transcendence) and yet at the same time everything in the universe exists within him.... No one thing in the universe is God, but God's spark is in all things (immanence). This idea is called "panentheism," which is distinguished from "pantheism." Pantheism is the idea that everything IS God. Panentheism is the idea that everything is IN God.

Kenosis is a theory which holds that that God emptied a part of his divinity in order for us to exist. Within this paradigm, evil and suffering are allowed to exist because God is a loving parent who doesn't want to intercede, but would rather that we grow by making our own choices as individuals. Thus, eventually, we learn to abide by the correct spiritual principles instead of aligning ourselves with inert matter, blind mechanism, and animal instinct.

As God emptied himself for man to exist, so man empties himself of his own personal will in order to become like God.

Hope that helped.

[Laila]

this board is definetly not the place to look to for help on this matter

[Laila]

my point proven right there ^

[!@#$%!]

raah

now before i forget, inhuman, please know this:

SCIENCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE EXISTENCE/INEXISTENCE OF GOD:
IT IS NOT CONCERNED WITH SUCH MATTERS AS THE SUPERNATURAL.
ONLY PEOPLE WHO SMOKE CRACK THINK THAT SCIENCE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THINGS "BEYOND" NATURE.

ok. now remember to get an electrical adapter when you travel.

[acousticrock87]

Well one way or another, there has to have always been something. Whether there's God or matter or "thoughts" or whatever you like, like you said there can't be something from nothing. Something has to always have been there, and we'll never understand it.

As for a higher power knowing the future, I don't think it's all that difficult to imagine an omnipotent being choosing to loosen control for creation, and then looking to see what happened. You can have all the power and control in the world to play everything imaginable on guitar, but that doesn't mean you can no longer play random noise. You'll be in control, but choosing not to fully use it.

However, I think stuff like that is bad for basing worldviews on. If you say "I don't like the idea of having no choice," it's kind of counter-productive. It doesn't really matter if we like something with this kind of stuff. It's not art. We're already here. Our job is to discover whether there's a God or not, whether we have free will or not, etc. - not to decide which we would prefer.

[Daycare Nation]

"You can have all the power and control in the world to play everything imaginable on guitar, but that doesn't mean you can no longer play random noise. You'll be in control, but choosing not to fully use it."

That supports what I was saying--when we create something we let go of a part of ourselves, just as God did when he created the universe. The act of creation is renunciation and self-emptying, not control of environment and tightening the reins.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Daycare Nation

"You can have all the power and control in the world to play everything imaginable on guitar, but that doesn't mean you can no longer play random noise. You'll be in control, but choosing not to fully use it."

That supports what I was saying--when we create something we let go of a part of ourselves, just as God did when he created the universe. The act of creation is renunciation and self-emptying, not control of environment and tightening the reins.

wanker

[Inhuman]

Originally Posted by Daycare Nation

Omnipotence...Don't you mean "omniscience?" Omniscience means "knowing all." I think you are confusing this with "having all power," which is omnipotence..

We have the illusion of free will. We can choose to obey God, or we can go against his will or choose to believe there is no order. When I say "God," I don't mean an entity or being such as we are. That is a popular notion called "supernatural theism," which is the thing which most atheists think all Christians believe. In fact, very few real Christians believe that God is a "man in the sky" who crafted the universe as in a workshop, and stands apart from it, observing his work.

God is that thing which you refer to, which existed in eternity before the big bang. God is outside the universe (transcendence) and yet at the same time everything in the universe exists within him.... No one thing in the universe is God, but God's spark is in all things (immanence). This idea is called "panentheism," which is distinguished from "pantheism." Pantheism is the idea that everything IS God. Panentheism is the idea that everything is IN God.

Kenosis is a theory which holds that that God emptied a part of his divinity in order for us to exist. Within this paradigm, evil and suffering are allowed to exist because God is a loving parent who doesn't want to intercede, but would rather that we grow by making our own choices as individuals. Thus, eventually, we learn to abide by the correct spiritual principles instead of aligning ourselves with inert matter, blind mechanism, and animal instinct.

As God emptied himself for man to exist, so man empties himself of his own personal will in order to become like God.

Hope that helped.

Thanks! Sorry about the confusion between omniscience and omnipotence, I often get the two mixed up. That definately helped my understanding Assuming that God is a spiritual representation of perfection clears a lot of that up; the entire omniscience part. Thanks!

Concerning the big bang, if matter always existed, then we would have to presume that it wasn't created. It fits in with the entire time portion, because if it was never created, then could only exist from time repeating itself in a circle (no beginning/end). I don't see how something could exist without ever being created

Haha, I was fully aware about getting off topic responses Laila, you really can't go through a thread without them now!

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I believe in God. But there are other higher powers, like aliens:

"I wrote a science fiction film which I'll tell you about. It's ten after four in the afternoon, and everybody in the world mysteriously falls asleep. Just like that, they are driving cars, whatever they are doing, bang!, they got to sleep, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, and the whole world sleeps for exactly one hour, till ten after five, and they wake up at ten after five, and mysteriously upon awakening everybody in the world find themselves in the pants business. Stay with us, 'cause it's brilliant.
Everybody is making cuffs and flies and cutting velvet, y'know, And a spaceship lands from another planet, and men get out with jackets and shirts and black socks - no trousers at all. They say: "Are the pants ready?" We say: "No. Could you come back thursday?". They say they must have them, 'cause they are going to a wedding, and we work dillingently and make pants constantly and they come to get them, and when they come to pick them up, they leave us with socks, hankerchiefs, pillowcases and soiled linnen, and they say: "Do it!", and the president of the United States goes on television and says that an alien superpower from outer space with superior intelligence is bringing us their laundry, and they are foiled, 'cause they travelled a hundred and seventeen million lightyears to pick it up, and they forget their ticket."



-Woody Allen

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

You are!

[Sheriff Rhys Chatham]

I believe in a higher power but not in god, as an image of man. I prefer to think we came to be from the big bang created by some sort of catastophic event, which I consider a GOD. Either way if there is a god or not we're eventually fucked on this planet, so why waste yr time worshiping something that won't help you in yr current life? Most religions nowadays don't even believe in hell, so whats it matter?

[pokkeherrie]

haha, i think diesel's posts are the most meaningful ones in this thread.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pokkeherrie

haha, i think diesel's posts are the most meaningful ones in this thread.

diesel is the higher power himself. especially when as thoroughly plastered as he is now. (i do fear for his liver though. which proves that even a higher power can get ill.)

[qprogeny79]

i love this stuff, so i'll give a real reply.

i think there's an even more damning problem with omnipotence than what you mention, inhuman, which is that if god is truly omnipotent he can suspend the laws of logic, which are, of course, inviolable. even if you grant that god created physical laws, god could not have created the laws of logic, for they hold in every possible world. there could be worlds in which acceleration due to gravity is 2 m/s^2, or in which i am a starving african kid with aids, but there can't be a world full of married bachelors or in which the proposition "if it's raining, it's cloudy" is true but "if it's not cloudy, it's not raining" isn't. so god can't be omnipotent in the full sense of the term. (some philosophers of religion retort that god is omnipotent only within the bounds of logic, but i maintain that this is a cop-out.)

referring to your big bang problem, there are quite a few scientists who assert that the notion of "before the big bang" is incoherent, because time, being a measure of motion, began with the beginning of motion -- i.e., the big bang. (as a side note, this observation, if true, would have disastrous consequences for aristotle's argument for the existence of god, in which he derives the unmoved mover from the eternality of time and motion.) the only artificial aspect of time is the way we measure it; we could easily have measured it in "plashungas" and "qawurks" instead of minutes and seconds. however, the existence of time as a measure of motion is not affected by this; time is a measure of real physical phenomena. it's the same with math. we use the concepts of number and the operations we perform thereon as tools of understanding of real phenomena (e.g., what happens when you put more apples into a basket containing a certain quantity of apples). math is a series of concepts we use, just like any other concepts, to integrate like things and differentiate distinct things; we use the concept "two," for instance, to isolate those instances of objects or ideas that occur in pairs from other objects and ideas. the "two" isn't out there in a museum or anything -- that is, it's not metaphysically real, but it is still epistemologically real (i had an abstract algebra book that lamented the designation of the number i as "imaginary" for this very reason).

you're going to laugh, but you may want to pick up a copy of rand's introduction to objectivist epistemology. it's this whole theory of concept formation and how to apply it to problems more or less like the ones you're asking. it's a bit dry at times (at least by ayn's somewhat, er, colorful standards), but it has a lot to say about the ontological status of things like time and math.

[Daycare Nation]

Originally Posted by Sheriff Rhys Chatham

I believe in a higher power but not in god, as an image of man. I prefer to think we came to be from the big bang created by some sort of catastophic event, which I consider a GOD. Either way if there is a god or not we're eventually fucked on this planet, so why waste yr time worshiping something that won't help you in yr current life? Most religions nowadays don't even believe in hell, so whats it matter?

Worshipping God (giving thanks for life) is not a means to an end--it is a reward in itself...it is our true purpose to do this, because when we are thankful in this way we glorify God and exalt nature, and we ourselves are elevated into a sense of who we are.

You don't have to do this in church. Like for instance, if you smoke a joint or eat mushrooms by a river and you are transported by the play of the sunlight on the water into a feeling of unity and completeness, then you have just had a sacramental experience and worshipped God.

[Daycare Nation]

Originally Posted by qprogeny79

i love this stuff, so i'll give a real reply.

i think there's an even more damning problem with omnipotence than what you mention, inhuman, which is that if god is truly omnipotent he can suspend the laws of logic, which are, of course, inviolable. even if you grant that god created physical laws, god could not have created the laws of logic, for they hold in every possible world. there could be worlds in which acceleration due to gravity is 2 m/s^2, or in which i am a starving african kid with aids, but there can't be a world full of married bachelors or in which the proposition "if it's raining, it's cloudy" is true but "if it's not cloudy, it's not raining" isn't. so god can't be omnipotent in the full sense of the term. (some philosophers of religion retort that god is omnipotent only within the bounds of logic, but i maintain that this is a cop-out.)

referring to your big bang problem, there are quite a few scientists who assert that the notion of "before the big bang" is incoherent, because time, being a measure of motion, began with the beginning of motion -- i.e., the big bang. (as a side note, this observation, if true, would have disastrous consequences for aristotle's argument for the existence of god, in which he derives the unmoved mover from the eternality of time and motion.) the only artificial aspect of time is the way we measure it; we could easily have measured it in "plashungas" and "qawurks" instead of minutes and seconds. however, the existence of time as a measure of motion is not affected by this; time is a measure of real physical phenomena. it's the same with math. we use the concepts of number and the operations we perform thereon as tools of understanding of real phenomena (e.g., what happens when you put more apples into a basket containing a certain quantity of apples). math is a series of concepts we use, just like any other concepts, to integrate like things and differentiate distinct things; we use the concept "two," for instance, to isolate those instances of objects or ideas that occur in pairs from other objects and ideas. the "two" isn't out there in a museum or anything -- that is, it's not metaphysically real, but it is still epistemologically real (i had an abstract algebra book that lamented the designation of the number i as "imaginary" for this very reason).

you're going to laugh, but you may want to pick up a copy of rand's introduction to objectivist epistemology. it's this whole theory of concept formation and how to apply it to problems more or less like the ones you're asking. it's a bit dry at times (at least by ayn's somewhat, er, colorful standards), but it has a lot to say about the ontological status of things like time and math.

To think of God in terms of logic is to anthropomorphize him, which is fallacious thinking. The intellect cannot grasp God.