RE: Life as a Deist
February 28, 2013 at 9:42 pm
(This post was last modified: February 28, 2013 at 9:46 pm by genkaus.)
(February 28, 2013 at 10:44 am)FallentoReason Wrote: I feel like I'm going to start a series of threads where I openly talk about the thoughts I have on Deism. Since there's no doctrine for Deism telling me what to do, I think it would be good for me to figure it all out through discussion.
I was wondering today about the foundations of Deism and whether there's reason to think Deism is more than a hypothetical philosophy. Why does our universe exist, but exist with a certain structure? Could it have been possible for matter to appear from nowhere but remain a meaningless blob floating about for eternity? Not only did the universe appear, but it appeared with specific "laws" that we have now identified and they served to shape what we have to the extent that a collective consciousness (us) could be sustained and then able to wonder about its existence.
I'm not saying that life is in anyway proof of a Creator/God. We are here now, which simply means we can bring up questions like "why didn't the universe start off as a blob of matter and stay a blob of matter for all eternity"? The universe quite clearly has some pretty amazing properties and within it are embedded some elegant truths such as those found in mathematics & physics. Why did such complex things get created along with the matter itself at the dawn of spacetime?
Those are pretty much the same questions that I used to justify my deism. I used to think that while these ideas could not be considered proof or evidence in a "creator's" favor, they could certainly be regarded as a point in his favor. And this is why I was wrong:
The idea that somehow the properties of our universe are "amazing" and that they have "elegant" truths is a biased view. Even if it had started off as a blob of matter and stayed a blob of matter, it'd still have been governed by some laws of nature (different than our own), that would have been equally amazing or equally mundane.
As I found out, these questions are being asked. Scientists are looking for a theories for explain these facts of nature - and unless they find an answer, it'd be folly to assume one based on biased perspective. The thing is, even if there is a reason - and I strongly believe there is - there is no reason to assume its sentience. That is the unjustified "leap of faith" that you have to make to get from asking a valid scientific question to get to the foundation of deism.
(February 28, 2013 at 7:29 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: The answer is that God is outside of time and space, i.e. He's always been there.
That statement is meaningless. 'Always' has a temporal context and 'there' has a spatial one. Something that has 'always been there' is by definition inside space and time.
(February 28, 2013 at 8:00 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Because it's not. It had a beginning called the 'Big Bang'.
Big Bang does not indicate the beginning of universe.
