And it’s an open book test. But it is not a test, it is the test.
A lot of people rebel at the idea that our time in this life is some sort of test. But I’ve never heard any real reason for objecting to it other than it being a matter of pride. “I resent God testing me like some rat in a maze” or some such sentiment. Usually the objection is given by atheists because it places them lower than #1 on the food chain of the universe.
Besides having a proving ground for the soul, which would make the most sense for why God would have created the universe, the fact most people miss is that while God may have set it up this way, we are the testers as well as the testees. We are the judges of our own performances. This is a stage on which we can improvise the lines we use in our lives and make our choices without the divine strings, so that in the end, we will deal with ourselves stripped of our self-delusions, stripped by the light of undeniable Truth.
That’s my working theory of “Why we are here”, set before you to trash, treasure or trivialize as you see fit.
You cut to the chase. The e’splination is a bit complicated, and I’m afraid, very controversial.
At what point do we start making moral choices? Is it not when we weigh our egos against those of others, and learn (or should) that to place the value of our rights (inherent worth) above others is wrong? Are we capable of doing that at birth? No… What I can’t avoid saying here is that our sense of right and wrong, our souls, arrives much later than birth, and may never occur. It may seem heartless for God to dismiss those who’ve never arrived, but what alternative is there. The morally unaware are not self-aware, they’re innocent, like the animals. What happens to them I can’t imagine, all I feel sure of is that they are not capable of being tested, judged or exalted.
The most supposed “senseless” death is a monument of God’s commitment to our free will. Is an evil, absent or nonexistent God a better alternative?
No the test is not if we like Him or not (there’s no real evidence whether He exists or not anyway), the test is what we do with our lives, meaning IMO, pursuing the Truth. And we judge oursleves.
I don’t believe in hell. Why would God (or the heavenly host) seek such revenge or want to spend eternity listening to the howls of the damned, or even know that there was such suffering going on. My model is that the good (Truth) in us survives while the bad/evil is merely humanely flushed into oblivion. For some there would be little if anything left.
I figure I exist because teh spighetti monster created me and is now testing/judging me.
I’ve got teh authoritarian complex where I think there’s moral judges and exercutioners above all of nature, because I came from a society in which people feared the law and the higher social powers. That’s right I came from a theocracy where the state’s laws and God’s laws were the same. Ancient israel is the way to go.
I don’t know what free-will has to do with say, the thousands of parasites some of which feed on the eyeballs of human children, ones which are specifically adapted to do so. When someone can explain to me, what that has to do with free-will, maybe God could be excused for that, If he existed, which theres no reason to believe in the first place.
I don’t know how you would tell an evil god from a apathetic one, or a friendly one, looking at natural selection it would be pretty naive to assume the architect of such a plan, if conscious, was anything but apathetic at best.
The question isn’t whether the alternative is better off; a god, an evil god, or no god. Thats like asking the question, which alternative is better, owning a magic broomstick, a magic wand, or owning a pencil. I’d like to own anything but the pencil, but realistically I don’t, theres no evidence for either the wand or broomstick, talking as if they exist without massive evidencee in the face of that statistical probability would just be making emotional claims.
for a statue of mary to wave its hand is so improbable that anyone who understood the statistical probability, the numbers envolved would never even dare postulate it. Infact, the people wouldn’t dare postulate it because they’d realize their minds could only vaugely grasp such massive improbability. 1 in 10000 <-(with so manyy zeroes after that you couldn’t write them in billions of years) no one would ever make the claim that a statue could wave its arm, sensically. Let ALONE making the claim of this super complex creator-god.
Thats why its an issue that people should educate themselves on bayesian logic and issues of statistical probability, but almost no one on this site thinks that is necessary, or wildly misjudge probability due to emotional reasons/human fallibility.
Richard Dawkins.
The reason a lot of people refuse to beleive this is a test, is because, theres not a shred of evidencee to the contrary. Just like I wouldn’t believe a farmer who said a dragon was snatching his cows out of his field at nighttime. (though the possibility of that is a great deal more likely then a god or creator of a universe)
I only believe that God, if He exists, is interested, and that the Prime Directive for free will has to be non-intervention.
You and Dawkins are still picking on the easy target that is revealed religion because they don’t fit in with any reasonable theory for the nature of God what with the total lack of evidence for them as you’ve pointed out unnecessarily. If you want to talk evidence and odds, the odds that the Big Bang was a supernatural event (producing a natural universe) are still 50-50. We know absolutely nothing, and can’t even propose a coherent theory, about what preceded it or what could have caused it.
Thats a personal feeling which isn’t reflected by the real statistical probability of the situation. Theres no evidence for dragons, and i’m not prepared to say the chances of dragons are 50% (though they are infinitely closer to 50% then the idea of a supernatural big bang).
Why would you just assume that the probability for supernatural big bang and a nonsupernatural one were the same? They’re not, not even close.
You have evidence of a natural cause for the Big Bang then?
It’s not a personal feeling, there is no evidence whatsoever either way. What is the “statistical probability” for the cause of the Big Bang? There is no evidence, so it can only be 50-50. There is no evidence for dragons but we are faced with the creation of the universe.
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Because there’s no evidence for a cause, either way, but it’s here, unlike your dragons or unicorns or whatever mythology you care to throw up against the wall. Dodo birds and dinosaurs leave skeletons, dragons and unicorns haven’t, unless you’re privy to such information.
When the ancients had no idea what caused lightning, earthquakes and etc, they thought it must be supernatural powers or gods at work, surely they thought that the certainty was much more then 50% that lightning was a god’s tool. However, they were 100% wrong, talking about statistical probabilities being equal because we’re ignorant of 100% of the anwser to X is incorrect.
We don’t understand how the universe came to be, that doesn’t mean its a 50/50 toss up with some kind of supernatural creation/natural one. For example, if we don’t understand how the human brain works (its super complex, its there, it functions) it doesn’t justify talking about magical brain gremlins, because we don’t know how they work/yet they still do, we can’t just decide that the possibility of A/B for concept C is 50%.
that doesn’t make any sense.
Also, you’ll have to define what kind of ‘supernatural’ you’re specifically talking about for this conversation to be meaningful in any way.
I think probability is a very bad litmus test. If I deal out a deck of cards that I have shuffled, assuming I shuffled it well, the chance of whatever particular order the cards are in is something like 1:52!, which is an absurdly large number (1:8.07x10^67, to give you some perspective, one million is written 1x10^6, so that number is one hundred million million million million million million million million million million), so does it follow that I didn’t deal out the cards in that order? Of course not!
And that is a concrete example that we can actually calculate. What about one where rampant speculation is involved? Like the other night when I came home at 4:32 AM, puked on the floor three minutes later, and passed out on the couch shortly thereafter. What are the chances that I would have come home at that time to that apartment, puked not only at the time I did, but on the spot that I did, and passed out at the location and time that I did. If you speculate on those issues, the chances become incredibly remote.
Instead I think explanations should be evaluated on the following criteria, irrespective of “probability.”
Parsimony. Does it fit in with other things that we know/understand?
Predictive power. Does this model make testable predictions and do these predictions (generally) come to fruition?
Retroactive explanation. Does this model account for known events in the past and clarify them in a way they could not be previously?
Utility. Can it be used?
The better a theory fits those criteria, the more it approaches truth.
For the ancients, lightning would have been a 50-50 proposition, but they assumed 100% God with no evidence but the lightning itself. Once evidence became available, they were 100% wrong. Until science can gather any evidence beyond the Big Bang, we can do no more than 50-50 if were going to use the scientific method.
For the ancients, lightning would have been a 50-50 proposition, but they assumed 100% God with no evidence but the lightning itself. Once evidence became available, they were 100% wrong. Until science can gather any evidence beyond the Big Bang, we can do no more than 50-50 if were going to use the scientific method.
mumbles something about existential striving, how limits are made to be shattered, yada yada It’s actually an example from a good number of years ago, but shhhhh. Never let facts get in the way of a good story.
Cyrene,
Because probability tells us nothing, see above. Am I to conclude that I didn’t deal the cards the way I did because the probability of doing so is astronomical? Probability is a bad metric, especially since it involves a lot of ad hoc speculation (see the puking example). What is the probability of diseases being caused by biological factors vs. evil spirits? I don’t know, because there is no way to quantify it! But I can say that antibiotics work a heck of a lot better than incense. Without resorting to probability, I can show how the germ theory of disease meets the criteria I listed whereas the miasma/demon theory does not. Furthermore, it avoids the “so there is still a chance!” syndrome that discussions of probability invite.
See, this thread is rampant with what I am talking about. Justify your probabilities without resorting to assumptions. Try it. It doesn’t work very well. Probability, as a tool, only works when there is more known than not because the variables have to be controlled, or at least effectively justified.
