Re: Archbishop more or less admits there's no God


"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2003@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:656f7921-d387-4b7c-bbdc-93b9fe8a379c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 28 Mar, 17:43, "L. Ross Raszewski" <lraszew...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:43:32 GMT, peachy ashie passion





<exquisitepe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Andrew wrote:
On 2009-03-26 23:30:14 +0000, peachy ashie passion
<exquisitepe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Andrew wrote:
On 2009-03-26 20:47:33 +0000, alansailsb...@xxxxxxxxxxx said:

On Mar 26, 8:27 pm, Andrew <thecr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-03-26 13:38:24 +0000, alansailsb...@xxxxxxxxxxx said:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said God will not intervene to
save
humanity. Well, no surprise there as the irresponsible
baby-killing
cunt in the sky has never helped humanity from day one.

This seems to be the start of the church admitting there is no
God.
It'll take several years but expect future steps to edge towards a
more realistic view, seeing the bible merely as a guidebook
written by
man and not the word of a god. Good times! Down with God! Embrace
reality and be good to one another because it's RIGHT, not because
you
want a reward in heaven.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7964880.stm

So "God exists but will not intervene" is equivalent in your mind
(and
I use the word loosely) to "God does not exist". Fascinating.

Yes Andrew I'd rather believe there's no god than believe in a god
who
won't help humanity. Carry on worshiping your evil monster if you
need
to. It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise-rational people can
be
so stupidly gullible when it comes to religion. It's a mugs game.

So you say. And you're entirely entitled to your beliefs, obviously.
Forgive me, though, if I suggest that your grasp of what Christians
actually believe appears to be a little wanting. The "evil monster"
approach appears to me to be the flip-side of a somewhat childish
notion of God - and I intend no insult in using that description;
merely that if one imagines that God 'ought' to be some kind of
SuperDad, then when that understanding fails it's easy to flip to
'evil monster'. Similarly, perhaps your amazement is caused by a
rather facile assumption that religion is 'irrational'.
And oddly enough, I'd rather believe in a God that grants humanity
responsibility, intelligence and choice - even if that means
accepting the consequences of the way we use them - than one who did
everything for us.

Well, despite your not intending insult, you did manage to neatly
belittle the fact that I would expect a Supreme Being to act with the
same sort of caring and responsibility that I'd expect of a human.

But God is not human. If your argument is that God should respond WHILE
ACCEPTING THE LIMITS OF HUMANITY, then I'd agree. But that's not what's
being discussed here

No, what's being discussed above is that God isn't a human, so it's
okay to have a lower expectation of him.

That just doesn't work for me.

So you think it's "lower" to expect God to *maintain a consistent set
of physical laws for the entire universe*?

We live in a universe where people like us can exist *at all*. It
seems sort of petty to begrudge God the fact that life isn't permanent
sunshine and kittens in the face of that.

I really wish I'd been able to locate the NS article from a couple of
years ago about a theory about the substructural geometry of the
universe, which suggested that most possible universes would evolve
towards an end product with conditions similar or identical to those
in our universe, even if their starting properties would seem to
preclude the development of a habitable universe. In essence, it broke
the false dichotomy between "there are lots of universes and we are
necessarily in habitable one" and "it's such an astounding coincidence
God must have done it".

I liken it to natural selection - essentially, in this case, natural
selection for universes. Creationists use the unsophisticated straw
man against evolution that it's "blind chance", and infer from that
that it's more likely a God did it. Of course in reality this is a
false dichotomy, because natural selection is a non-random natural
process that can produce essentially deterministic outcomes with no
divine involvement - a dolphin and an icthyosaur would be very
unlikely to appear on the same planet by random chance, but given
similar environmental conditions, pressures, and a closely related
gene complement, it becomes practically inevitable that natural
selection would produce basically the same result on both occasions..

Same applies with the universal geometry idea - models that assume the
universe is fantastically unlikely suppose all possible universes have
an equal probability of existing. Even a slight imbalance in favour of
a habitable universe removes that objection with no need to invent
gods to fill the gap.

Phil



____________________________________________________________


Isn't that property generally labelled "emergence"?


.

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