(April 17, 2015 at 10:21 am)nicanica123 Wrote: My few thoughts on this are as follows, 1. Why would this almighty god be subjected to what a human demands as proof? 2. Does gods creation not make him apparent? 3. If god popped up one day to make himself readily known as existing, would all people serve him any way? 4. If gods purpose as I have been taught, is that one day the earth will be a paradise like state with no evil. Back to its original Eden conditions. Proving that Satan, Adam, and Eve were wrong to reject gods sovereignty and humans are not capable of ruling themselves... how would it serve his purpose if people worshipped him out of fear of him killing them rather than from their hearts?Assuming we are talking about the god of the Bible:
1- no one can force him to prove his existence, but why wouldn't he want to do so? Yahweh had no qualms about appearing to people, talking and interacting with them, and performing miracles that they witnessed. He had no more obligation to do so back then, yet he made numerous appearances and in some cases did incredible things. Why stop? Especially if he truly wants for everyone to know him and find salvation?
2- No, otherwise everyone would believe in god. At best, if you feel that the universe and everything in it had to be the work of a divine being, you get as far as believing that someone or something of that nature exists. It doesn't get you as far as any particular god, especially one that was very involved in the lives of his creation and then suddenly stopped all communication except for the occasional image on a piece of toast.
3- Serve him? Probably not. In the Bible, many of the people who know of god rejected him, including many angels and the first humans. Later on people rejected him after seeing him perform miracles and even one of his own disciples betrayed him for money. So I doubt that everyone would drop to their knees if Yahweh showed up. We would believe he exists, since he would have confirmed it. But serve? Not everyone.
4- That's a question for god to answer, I think. But considering your question 1, I would say that perhaps it doesn't matter. If god's purpose is to clean up the world and populate it with his followers, does it make any difference to him that they follow him out of love or fear, or some mixture of both?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
