(August 21, 2019 at 9:31 pm)Lek Wrote: I'm more of a philosopher than a scientist, but I'm taking what I understand from science and I'm philosophizing. If energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, that means that they share an intrinsic quality with God. They have always existed with no beginning, and they will continue to exist into infinity. Those are qualities are also given to God. Could this match up in any way with a pantheistic understanding of the universe? If I use science as a basis for my understanding, there couldn't have been an occasion when nothing existed, so energy and matter could not have been created.
Unfortunately for this line of thinking, energy and matter do not share other typical attributes of God, like consciousness and willfulness. The only consciousness and willfulness we know of are properties of biological life.
Nor can a pantheistic concept of God be perfectly good, since we know the world better than that. A "God" which is not conscious, willful, or perfectly good is certainly not worthy of worship, and therefore can't be the usual theistic God. So why bother to call the natural world "God" at all? That just causes confusions.
Perhaps you don't like the idea that you may be heading toward atheism, and are grasping at straws.
