(November 15, 2016 at 6:40 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: Okay so if god exists how do we get to step 1?
Well that's a different question right?
The thread's title is conditional, and so I understood it as a given. "Supposing there is a creator..." I answered the thread's question, therefore, from my understanding of what "there is a creator" means.
Supposing there is a creator and being-a-creator means what I think it means, the relationship between it and you is something to care about.
Some people thought this relationship is no more meaningful than the human relationship with oxygen. I said this was a workable analogy, and I think so in the following sense:
There is a direct and ever-present relation between you-being-you and oxygen-being-oxygen. It is so basic that our bodies do most of the "caring" about that relation, and we seldom consider that relation to have much meaning for us. A person can live just fine without ever caring about oxygen, its relation with us or what it means to be-oxygen. Even living as-if-oxygen-is-not-real won't change a great deal about your day-to-day action. However, failure to account for oxygen-being-oxygen and its relation with being-you and being-other-things means a failure to account for a full picture of reality, AND can get you burned in certain situations involving the presence of oxygen.
Unlike oxygen, EVERYTHING'S most fundamental and ever-present relation consists of the relation between it-being-it and god-being-god. It is so basic that simply being-anything-at-all means that the relation is maintained, so we seldom consider that relation to have much meaning for us. A person can live just fine without ever caring about god, its relation with us or what it means to be-god. Even living-as-if-god-is-not-real won't change a great deal about your day-to-day action, but (if god is indeed real) living in this way will never lead to a full and whole human life. However, accounting for god-being-god and its relation with being-any-thing means accounting for a full picture of reality, AND can show us what it means to live a full and whole human life.
IF the Christian god as I understand it is real, then its relation to you means that you-being-fully-human will become you-being-divinely-human (i.e. the divine relation with you changes from participation to union, whatever that means).
Are you now asking me how would we otherwise arrive at the knowledge that there is indeed a creator?
