Dear Resident Theists

[ignoramus]

, or a parent reality with us as a simulation.

Rob, I know your backup "pet" alternate reality explanation (tongue in cheek of course) is that we are in a VR sim.
I've been thinking about this lately...

You know the VR sim could explain the "miracles" of the past with the science of today ...
Basically the sim programmers added the "miraculous God" notion, as I mentioned before as a way of generating hope where there is none.
The idea is that the populace as a whole would survive longer.
This proved false, as it stagnated the progression of science and more entities died as a result, which ultimately produced a negative net sum.
For this reason, the "miraculous God" portion of the sim was deactivated, and we've been trying to piece together what actually happened.
That why the "sacred texts" are incomplete and contradictory...

OK, enough bullshit for one day ... Why I think we are not in a VR sim. Because creating confusion, conflict and division doesn't help anyone actually running the sim.
If he/she's had enough, just turn the bloody thing off ... No need for convoluted explanations...
What's to gain by burying dino bones and retro introducing vestigial organs, just to make us and earth look old and naturally evolved?
Shit if you're gonna believe something that outlandish, we may as well become religious...

[robvalue]

Lol yeah

Sure, I'm not saying I believe we are a simulation. I'm not saying it's even likely. What I'm saying is that if there is some sort of intelligence behind all this, it's the most logical conclusion. It's the only one that isn't downright crackers. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's 1% likely... maybe a bit less. Religious stuff being true is 0.000000% likely (rounded to the nearest whatever decimal places.) Other explanations are basically the same as this, just granting the programmer loads of weird extra attributes for no particular reason and making him obsessed with what people do with their genitals.

You're right; if we're a simulation, that could account for apparent breach of normal laws in the past. But of course, it's far more likely that the stuff didn't happen at all, whether or not we're in a simulation.

[Longhorn]

ok I'm back

For me this one is logical.  Because consciousness as we understand is an outworking or byproduct of an intelligent mind and the world is intelligible (can be understood and has order and laws) then the first cause must be an intelligent mind and therefore conscious.  Only intelligent minds with conscious can bring forth ordered, purposeful complexity.

Nonsense. Our brains evolved by natural means, and they are complex. for the prose of this argument I accept that something triggered the beginning of the universe, but you have yet to establish its interest in life on Earth.
Complexity is emergent. And we actually lack the ability to understand many of the concepts required to explain many things in the universe.
I have an issue with the word purposeful in the last sentence. What makes you say that? How do you know there was a purpose? And computers refute your assertion, despite being built by humans.

And tell me, why is it impossible for the creation of the universe to be triggered by something that wasn't conscious, like a process, force etc?

[ignoramus]

A dumb observation... Why is out traditional maths models to the base 10? Is it something simple and archaic as having 10 fingers?
It wouldn't surprise me... Then that 10 base extrapolates to all measurements and sciences...
(Forget the US empirical system ...we're talking the "modern" world, eg: METRIC.)

Then we discovered that some naturally occurring elements in the ground show signs of natural semi conductors, either on or off.
Therefore the most efficient way of automating these "micro" switches is to use a language which understands either on or off? Hence binary...
Very unintuitive to humans but without it, we'd still be using phonographs with valve amplifiers...

My point is that nothing is designed or ordered in it's place for us...
As inquisitive animals, we persevere until we find meaning out of chaos ...
The periodic table might look neatly organised but that's only because we intentionally like to rearrange and simplify things as much as possible.

Ultimately we'd like to symbolise the most complex mathematical formula into a single greek letter! But we can't .....yet!
We will always convey all things in the simplest manner possible ...hence the "convenient" illusion of a grand design...

[Longhorn]

Vic, you are right, at least in my case at approaching it from reverse.  I certainly started at Jesus and tested backwards for logical consistency and coherence.  I looked in to Islam and pantheism as well.  Muhammad was a mere man who when he was getting the revelation from Allah did not know what was happening and it was his wife Khadijah who took him to her Christian cousin Waraqah who claimed it Gabriel revealing this to Muhammad.  

Great, but that's not the logical order. You still have to establish It was impossible for the first cause not to be conscious, but what is the elimination process that led you to believing Yahweh is the first cause? Not Jesus. Just Yahweh common for Jews and christians.

Islam borrowed many things from Judaism and Christianity

Orly. I'm sorry, but it's a bit funny to hear that from the adherent of a Jewish sect. Jews in turn ripped off the Zoroastrians. And since you claim Jesus is so unique....



10 christ like figures who predate christ

I'm sorry friend, but he's really not.

and reference Deut. 18:18 as the prophecy of Muhammad.  Jesus on the other hand did not claim to be a messenger or receiving revelation from God.  He claimed to be God.  He performed miracles, forgave sin, paid the ultimate price and rose again.  Far different from Muhammad.  But if you don't accept any of those things happening in Jesus life, or even that he existed at all I can understand the difficulty in leaping.  

Did he? How much of that can you prove to have happened?
And read your bible, 'pin. Where does Jesus say he is god? He says he and the father are one, and goes on to say that anyone can be one with the father.
The divinity of Jesus was decided by the simple vote of majority in the 4th century.

Every religion is different and every religion will claim that in its own way. The revelation of prophet Muhammad was the most recent one, and ergo the most accurate. His god is the same god as that of Jews and christians, and Jesus was his prophet too.

Every religion in the world if you remove its founder or the leader of its movement, it could continue on, with the exception of Christianity.  If you remove Christ, from Christian, you are left with IAN and Ian can't help you.  

Um....Buddhism?

Even if correct, why would that make it true?

Christianity has a uniqueness in it.  In every other religion, you pay the price for your mistakes.  In Islam, your good deeds must outweigh your bad and you must follow the Five pillars.  In Hinduism every birth is a rebirth paying for the previous life until you achieve moksha.  In Christianity, Christ pays for all mankind's mistakes and one simply has to accept the gift of salvation by grace.

Well, some Christians would probably beg to differ. See, that's the fun thing about having 44,000 denominations. There's quite a bit of room for disagreement, and on pretty fundamental things, too.

[robvalue]

You think the story is more appealing? Hmm.

It's still a story. The problem is when you assume one of the religious stories has to be true. That's a wild and unsupported assumption. "God", if there is one, has an infinity of possibilities. To cut it down for convenience to the popular story books is... not sure what the word is. It's certainly not rational. It's basically an appeal to popularity.

I'm personally happy to give people deism for free, some sort of intelligent creator. I'm confident it's impossible to logically get from there to "my story book character" without extreme use of logical fallacies. I highlighted one already, just in narrowing it down to a few characters in books.

Don Baker said it best. Either this God interacts with our reality, or he doesn't. If he does, we should see clear signs of it. If he doesn't, he is irrelevant.

The "signs" people see amount to an argument from ignorance every time, simply attributing an action to their personal favourite character. And since this can be done for any potential God, it proves nothing about who actually did it, if anyone.

[Kingpin]

ok I'm back

For me this one is logical.  Because consciousness as we understand is an outworking or byproduct of an intelligent mind and the world is intelligible (can be understood and has order and laws) then the first cause must be an intelligent mind and therefore conscious.  Only intelligent minds with conscious can bring forth ordered, purposeful complexity.

Nonsense. Our brains evolved by natural means, and they are complex. for the prose of this argument I accept that something triggered the beginning of the universe, but you have yet to establish its interest in life on Earth.  
Complexity is emergent. And we actually lack the ability to understand many of the concepts required to explain many things in the universe.
I have an issue with the word purposeful in the last sentence. What makes you say that? How do you know there was a purpose? And computers refute your assertion, despite being built by humans.

And tell me, why is it impossible for the creation of the universe to be triggered by something that wasn't conscious, like a process, force etc?

here's where we have a disconnect.  I don't believe that.  We are coming from two different presuppositions that invariably rule out the other persons conclusions.  

My point here is I believe the universe to be fine tuned to immense precision to support life only on this planet.  I don't believe there is life anywhere else.   Complexity is emergent, yes, but ordered purposeful complexity is a result of intelligence.  We see this everyday.  I still do not accept that computers refute my assertion.  If a computer were to spring in to existence out of chemical reactions and start writing it's own complex programs, that would be something different, but the complexity that emerges from a computer requires the input of a mind. 

As for why it's not possible for the creation to be a mindless, unguided process, is because this universe is intelligible and is ordered.  We have testable laws of physics that the universe is restrained to.  If the universe was started by a mindless unguided process, why should we trust our own intelligence?  Each person is not making their own observations and laws about the universe there are objective laws in place that are empirically verifiable.  That screams intelligence.  An example of a mindless unguided process would be an explosion, the result is chaos.  But we have order and extremely precise order at that.

[robvalue]

Answer me this:

Why did God set up a framework so that he then had to fine tune parameters? And then, to just barely get us part of one planet to inhabit, and virtually all the rest of the universe to be deadly? He set it up so the best he could do was the smallest success possible without totally failing.

Doesn't make sense to me.

[Kingpin]

Answer me this:

Why did God set up a framework so that he then had to fine tune parameters? And then, to just barely get us part of one planet to inhabit, and virtually all the rest of the universe to be deadly? He set it up so the best he could do was the smallest success possible without totally failing.

Doesn't make sense to me.

Well, I am not God so I can't answer, only infer.  The universe is massive to a scale that is difficult to imagine with many mysteries we have yet to approach understanding.  To me, that is not a sign of God's limitation but puts us in awe and wonderment of his power and speaks to the uniqueness of mankind in God's plan.  You see it as nonsense, and a sign the creator is not all powerful, I see it as us created special for His purpose that we may not understand.

[robvalue]

Okay, well thanks for answering