Debunking the "God is Beyond Time" xtian response

[Jackalope]

The magical sky-daddy can be anything the assholes wish him to be.  That's part of being "magic."

Pretty much this - if there's going to be an appeal to magic at any point, anything is possible, and there's no point in trying to explain it.

[The Valkyrie]

The magical sky-daddy can be anything the assholes wish him to be.  That's part of being "magic."

Scares me to think of a doctor believing in fucking magic, though.

So long as it doesn't prevent her from doing her job professionally, I don't actually care what she believes.

Yes, it can be a scary thought that highly trained professionals can believe in such rubbish, but so long as they don't allow those beliefs to affect their profession and their patients, it doesn't bother me.

I'm quite surprised how many of the doctors, and particularly the nurses around me are very religious.  I've been invited to prayer meetings on several occasions and have turned them down.

[Brian37]

The magical sky-daddy can be anything the assholes wish him to be.  That's part of being "magic."

Scares me to think of a doctor believing in fucking magic, though.

So long as it doesn't prevent her from doing her job professionally, I don't actually care what she believes.

Yes, it can be a scary thought that highly trained professionals can believe in such rubbish, but so long as they don't allow those beliefs to affect their profession and their patients, it doesn't bother me.

I'm quite surprised how many of the doctors, and particularly the nurses around me are very religious.  I've been invited to prayer meetings on several occasions and have turned them down.

I think I told this story  long time ago here. My mom was sent to a vascular heart surgeon and in the examination room he had that stupid Jesus print on his wall where Jesus was standing behind a doctor guiding his hands. And I was screaming in my head only, "I dont want you thinking about anything but my mom if you cut her open".

I think even the religious ones for the most part they do have that concentration ability even if they do stupid shit like pray before or after. 

I do like what the Sully , the pilot said when he landed the Jet on the Hudson when the reporter asked him if he said a prayer, Sully's response, "I didn't have time". And because he concentrated all those people survived.

[Astreja]

If there were some entity acting upon Earth from some other dimension, I would think that there would be some kind of trail of unbalanced energy that would lead towards that entity. I just don't see how a god could be completely and permanently outside our space-time realm and still have any relevance to us.

[The Valkyrie]

So long as it doesn't prevent her from doing her job professionally, I don't actually care what she believes.

Yes, it can be a scary thought that highly trained professionals can believe in such rubbish, but so long as they don't allow those beliefs to affect their profession and their patients, it doesn't bother me.

I'm quite surprised how many of the doctors, and particularly the nurses around me are very religious.  I've been invited to prayer meetings on several occasions and have turned them down.

I think I told this story  long time ago here. My mom was sent to a vascular heart surgeon and in the examination room he had that stupid Jesus print on his wall where Jesus was standing behind a doctor guiding his hands. And I was screaming in my head only, "I dont want you thinking about anything but my mom if you cut her open".

I think even the religious ones for the most part they do have that concentration ability even if they do stupid shit like pray before or after. 

I do like what the Sully , the pilot said when he landed the Jet on the Hudson when the reporter asked him if he said a prayer, Sully's response, "I didn't have time". And because he concentrated all those people survived.

Yeah, I hate that pic, too.

If I could get away with it I'd put the poster on my wall of the surgeon saying, "If someone says, 'thank god', I'm putting the tumour back in."

One of the most intelligent people I knew in my early career was a devout Muslim.  One thing he always said was, "At work profession comes first, faith second. I have plenty of time to be a Muslim in my own time."

He prayed in his office quietly and kept it to himself.

[Brian37]

Greetings, AF-ers!

So.  I played the Easter Vigil Mass at a Catholic Church on Saturday evening.  I was sitting beside a friend who is in the medical profession - very intelligent, very scientifically-oriented. Her understanding of evolutionary biology is much stronger than mine.  At the Vigil, they read the "Creation story", the "Exodus", and a whole bunch of other evil bullshit. So, at one point, I just said - "So, the creation story is a complete myth, right?" -- expecting her to agree.  She didn't.  Her response is "No, not exactly.  It's just not couched in scientific terms, because it was written down by people who didn't have that knowledge.  But I believe that it is accurate at it's core, because GOD exists OUTSIDE OF TIME." Well.  It wasn't a good time for a debate.  This debate may never come up, really.  Her Father is not well - she's stressed.

But I know that I have read good responses to that "beyond time" fallacy.  I just can't find them at the moment.  I did a search for a thread here, (I'm pretty sure SOMEBODY brought it up!) -- haven't found that yet either. It boggles the mind, because as far as we can tell, nothing in this universe is "beyond time".  And she certainly has no evidence for her assertion.  

But if anyone has a really good explanation for why this is a fallacy, an illogical dodge - - or can point me to a good source - - I need to study!  Thanks team!

-- Fuzz

Every religion, bar none, have followers who can value science but only up to the point when it conflicts with what they want to cling to. NO LADY YOU CANNOT FIT A SQUARE PEG INTO A ROUND HOLE AFTER THE FACT, EVER!

Humans merely don't like the feeling of being wrong and this is all this amounts to. You by a defective product, someone tells you it is defective, but by that time you are so used to it, you don't want to admit it is defective. 

You have PHD medical and science professionals ALL OVER THE WORLD, many can and do leave their religion outside the lab, even if they try to mix it outside the lab, like this example. But every religion does this, not just Christianity. Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus too. 

It is all nonsense no matter who tries it. If science could point to a single religion or single god, considering we can look 13.8 billion years into the past, I think we could have figured that out by now. BUT guess what, we have. Evolution gives us the reason humans make up and buy bad claims. Our species evolved to form groups, but what we don't have when we are born are adult knowledge and adult critical thinking skills. So most humans end up taking the claims their parents hand down to them. That gives that society a social order, but that does not make the claim that majority has, in any given society right. False perceptions can and do lead to success and social structure. The ancient Egyptians were successful for 3,000 years centered around the false belief of their gods that never existed.

[chimp3]

Greetings, AF-ers!

So.  I played the Easter Vigil Mass at a Catholic Church on Saturday evening.  I was sitting beside a friend who is in the medical profession - very intelligent, very scientifically-oriented. Her understanding of evolutionary biology is much stronger than mine.  At the Vigil, they read the "Creation story", the "Exodus", and a whole bunch of other evil bullshit. So, at one point, I just said - "So, the creation story is a complete myth, right?" -- expecting her to agree.  She didn't.  Her response is "No, not exactly.  It's just not couched in scientific terms, because it was written down by people who didn't have that knowledge.  But I believe that it is accurate at it's core, because GOD exists OUTSIDE OF TIME." Well.  It wasn't a good time for a debate.  This debate may never come up, really.  Her Father is not well - she's stressed.

But I know that I have read good responses to that "beyond time" fallacy.  I just can't find them at the moment.  I did a search for a thread here, (I'm pretty sure SOMEBODY brought it up!) -- haven't found that yet either. It boggles the mind, because as far as we can tell, nothing in this universe is "beyond time".  And she certainly has no evidence for her assertion.  

But if anyone has a really good explanation for why this is a fallacy, an illogical dodge - - or can point me to a good source - - I need to study!  Thanks team!

-- Fuzz

I would have asked her what the "core" is. If the story is accurate at it's core then did god create a pair of every animal all at once? Create plants before sunlight? Woman from a mans rib? If none of that is accurate but only an allegory of gods omniscience then how does Christianity follow? Is the resurrection an allegory told  by scientificly illiterate peoples? If the magic of the resurrection is true then why not the magic of 6 day creation? So many questions to find bullshit answers to. That is why they call it faith.

[Sal]

I find it hard to define time other than a dimension which everything, locally, is traveling 1 second per second. But mix into this definition Relativity and that falls apart at the seams. I think time isn't a property of the Universe, kinda the same way gravity can be seen as not a property of matter, but bending spacetime, same way time can be seen as an effect of changing matter/energy states, and that the present moment is all that really exists in terms of time. This is a sidetrack, but I think time is just the change in matter/energy states going towards higher entropy; and that the "past" is when entropy was less, and the "future" is when entropy will become more. It's difficult to spin your head around these terms because our own language is drenched in time-dependent understanding, tenses, like we don't have timeless concepts the same way if we could not talk about vacuum because we wouldn't have experienced vacuum experientially, which gave the rise to the theory of an ether permeating all space - now we know better.

A god existing outside such constraints seems like it becomes even more nonsensical than what such a concept already is. With the above taken into account - outside of time - would it mean a god would be motionless? Experience no change? How could it even make any effect on the Universe if it is outside of time? With the strange implications time itself has, this becomes doubly strange to consider.

Only thing that I think would help would be reading about A-theory & B-theory of time.

A-theory of time is the classical definition, that time has past, present & future, whereas B-theory of time is that time is more of an effect of changing energy/matter states, than actual "flow of time". B-theory has no future to go to anymore than you can run faster than 1 second per second; it would be like trying to go North of the North Pole, likewise going to the past is going South of the South Pole. It is probably more like that time is a dimension than something we can travel temporally to. This takes into account relativity, where there's no universal present any more there's a single location, and that time is localized.

[Drich]

Greetings, AF-ers!

So.  I played the Easter Vigil Mass at a Catholic Church on Saturday evening.  I was sitting beside a friend who is in the medical profession - very intelligent, very scientifically-oriented. Her understanding of evolutionary biology is much stronger than mine.  At the Vigil, they read the "Creation story", the "Exodus", and a whole bunch of other evil bullshit. So, at one point, I just said - "So, the creation story is a complete myth, right?" -- expecting her to agree.  She didn't.  Her response is "No, not exactly.  It's just not couched in scientific terms, because it was written down by people who didn't have that knowledge.  But I believe that it is accurate at it's core, because GOD exists OUTSIDE OF TIME." Well.  It wasn't a good time for a debate.  This debate may never come up, really.  Her Father is not well - she's stressed.

But I know that I have read good responses to that "beyond time" fallacy.  I just can't find them at the moment.  I did a search for a thread here, (I'm pretty sure SOMEBODY brought it up!) -- haven't found that yet either. It boggles the mind, because as far as we can tell, nothing in this universe is "beyond time".  And she certainly has no evidence for her assertion.  

But if anyone has a really good explanation for why this is a fallacy, an illogical dodge - - or can point me to a good source - - I need to study!  Thanks team!

-- Fuzz

share my creation account with her..

The one that says there is not a time line between the end of the seventh day of creation, and the fall of man.

The idea the garden being created in chapter 2 was set aside while the rest of creation/evolution took place.

[Brian37]

As a physicist who has worked with higher dimensions, I'd say that it isn't a fallacy but merely an unwarranted assumption. You can e.g. postulate God having His own time or times as His temporal dimensions of movement which provide Him with something like a dynamical quality (actually doing things in our sense wrt His timeline.) while looking onto our timeline as a dimension which He can access arbitrarily and see whole. This only works if our timeline is deterministic though, but it isn't in and of itself contradictory or fallacious imho.

Indeed, it depends on one's theory of time be it presentism or eternalism or something else. As for me, I see merits to both and remain undecided. I'm not sure what theological problem the Christian friend of the OP hoped to avoid with the phrase "outside of time."

Nope I disagree, this is simply more speculation with no evidence. You can dream up countless gap answers. It really is not as complicated as the choice between a god filing in the gap, or humans making up god claims. Why is it you can accept that Thor is not a good answer for lightening? Why is it you can accept that Poseidon is not a good answer for hurricanes? Why would any of this, from the big bang to other dimensions require a super natural cognition?

Humans merely are protecting their own evolutionary cognition which is an outcome, not a starting point, not a requirement. Scientific method does not work from the complex to the simple, but starts out with the attitude that the least complicated possible answer is going to be your most likely answer.

You are still stuck with a 13.8 billion year old universe, as to which humans have only been around a fraction of a second ratio wise, speaking. Seems a waste of time, material and space, for an all powerful God to do all that, even the other dimensions if humans are supposed to be his main goal concern. It makes much more sense to me that humans merely like the idea of a super hero because what they invent as far as a fantasy reflects their own desires to have control over resources and to continue on.

13,800,000,000 years of the universe, as compared to 4 billion years of the earth, as compared to only 150,000 years for the most current form of humans, and even then only about 10,000 since the earliest known human organized writing as a formal language. Seems a waste to me to procrastinate like that.