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[manwithkiwi]

How can someone believe that there is no god? Or, at least, some sort of being that exists outside of the dimensions we perceive? The universe had to come from somewhere. Even if you believe in the big bang, where did those materials come from? You can explain it with physics, but there's an unbreakable physical rule in the three-dimensional world

Comments

[manwithkiwi]

A+

[techdaddy]

A Hindu I roomed with in San Jose, California once said that it was foolish to believe that there was no higher power, whether you believe it is God, Brahma, or whatever you may have.

He also went to a Catholic school and has thus been exposed to probably a lot of what we have been exposed to. I'm curious how much his religion, which seemed to be more something forced on him by his family the more I talked to him about it, influenced his thinking and how much the schooling did. He wasn't a practiticing Hindu from what he told me, though his grandparents were. He was a very interesting kid.

[maddict]

Who says the universe started?

Linear cosmology is peculiar to Western metaphysics. Every other culture that has asked the question of origins has imagined cyclicism. The Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Afrikan, Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Mongol, Russian nomad, and Native American all observe the universe as a composition in circles. A snake is coiled around the egg of reality and at the end of existence the snake will swallow the egg, only to poop it out and coil around it again

[techdaddy]

God exists outside of time because God created time.

And for whatever dimensions there are, God must be present in all of them and have complete power over them by the very definition of being God. If did not have complete and total power over everything or were not everywhere, then God is not God by the three qualities that define God: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

[starrynightt]

Chris didn't bring up "time," which is a human creation anyway. There is no proof of time, we just made up some numbers and arbitrarily counted it. As for it as the 4th dimension, by all quantum physics it is an enigma, because there is no rational for why it can go forward but not backward, or why past affects present. But a cycle would explain this. And that honestly doesn't have shit to do w/ god, because whether he existed inside of it, outside of it, under it, above it... just doesn't change things. You have no proof you exist inside of it or outside of it. You don't even really know what it is, because no one else does

[techdaddy]

You're right. I can't prove it. That's the beauty of my faith.

[starrynightt]

One of Aquinas' (or was it Augustine? fuck whoever put them in the same chapter of our philosophy book, b/c i confuse them) proofs for god was pretty much just what you stated: the Arguement from Original Design (i think? studied it 3 years ago...) which says the universe had to come from somewhere, so it had to be created by God

[manwithkiwi]

As for Evangelical Christian oppression... I agree with you for the most part. People started saying "Jesus Christ!" as an expletive not because they were trying to oppress Christians, but because Christianity is regarded as the religion of America

[starrynightt]

the funny thing about American society is its hypocrisy on (among the millions of other things) encouraging diversity. There are months for people -- women's history month, african american history month, hispanic month --, scholarships, laws, etc. But still, we have oppressed minorities

[maddict]

What about omnibenevolence?

Omniscience and omnipotence are logically impossible. And when something is logically impossible, it does not exist. It's like a married bachelor, a circular square, or a pregnant virgin. If God can't be mistaken, that's a limit to his power. He is incapable of being wrong. What's more, he's incapable of doing anything contrary to what he knows will happen. His infinite potentiality is narrowed from innumerable to one. Furthermore, if God is everywhere, then he is powerless to not be everywhere. The conditions of omniscience and omnipresence negate the possibility of omnipotence.

Trying to qualify God is a fool's errand.

And it's not hard to exist in all dimensions at once. I exist in all dimensions at once. That the universe is composed of numerous dimensions necessitates that anything in this universe is also composed of numerous dimensions.

And what does it mean, exactly, to have "power over" a dimension? I mean, I can do whatever I want in the third dimension, or any other spatiotemporal

[manwithkiwi]

Matter fundamentally is energy, and all material objects are abstract concepts. The same way you see a group of trees and call it a "forest", or a group of people and call it a "crowd", we see a group of neutrinos and call it a "cat" or "house" or "sister" or "planet".

Yes. This is neat to think about ... and from here you can get to the idea that there's no such thing as change in the physical world except what we ourselves decide to point to and say "Oh look, it changed." If atoms are always in motion, then change is a constant thing, always happening... so it really doesn't exist.

[maddict]

If things are always changing, it doesn't mean change doesn't exist. If change didn't exist, there would be no change, and thus existence would be static. Constant flux is still flux. (Ask Caroline about Heraclitus.) Let's compare existence to a fire. A fire is always changing, never the same. What we have is the everpresence of change, and the only thing that can be said to not exist is stasis. The existence of change never changes, and so the change in change does not exist. Stasis in change does exist--and that's what Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is getting at when they talk about "stillness" in a swordfight.