Do you believe in God?
Why or why not?
Discussion
Trying to figure that out. Halfway through this:
Highly recommended if you have 50 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu9fa4TkWE0&list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
(There are many hundreds of threads to follow mentioned throughout the series for further depth on every topic.)
Link is wrong, start at episode 1, of course.
🤯 wow. Seems like an incredible collection of topics. It’ll take me a while, but it seems worth the investment. Setting this as a goal to finish. Can they just be listened to or do they require being watched?
I listened to them once a couple of years ago, and about a year later I went back and watched them all. I recommend watching if possible, but it's OK if not. Some episodes are more "watch required" than others, but you'll be able to tell pretty quickly when he starts pointing all over the whiteboard and stuff.
Definitely worth the investment. I don't think anybody who goes through the whole series and pays attention will be disappointed.
Really appreciate you sharing this. Always on the quest for the truth, whatever it may be. Zapped ⚡️
Craig was incredibly instrumental in helping me ask good questions and sift through good answers. I cannot escape my conclusion that God is the best explanation of reality and our only hope.
Yes of course I do. Faith
I believe there is something greater than us. You can call it God.
Why? Simply because for me it doesn't make sense the whole idea of the Universe existing without any purpose. If you start digging deeper and deeper, at some point you realize the whole thing is weird and there has to be something behind all this.
If I’m getting you correctly, you think it’s clear there is a creator but unsure of the nature of that creator?
To me, that first step is obvious. (Atheists obviously disagree.) It’s a big plunge to jump into a specific religion after the initial conclusion that we’re more than an accident.
That would be correct.
That said, I don't believe in man-made religions.
As a Christian, I don’t either. Haha
Would you consider yourself a deist then? There is a creator but he hasn’t revealed himself?
Well, kinda. I don't like thinking of the "creator" as some kind of a super man. For me it's something beyond our capabilities to understand. It's not a person, and technically it doesn't even exist because the concept of existence is undefined when applied outside of our reality.
That said, in some cases it's useful to think that it can hear you and that it has some power over you, especially when you're going through bad times. But being objective I think it's a psychological trick and nothing else.
Interesting. I’m trying to picture what you’re seeing here. I would agree that the creator is beyond our ability to understand. But I don’t see why the creator couldn’t reveal himself in a limited way that our little brains could understand.
Why do you think that God would have to exist outside of our reality and not within it? If this creator made our reality, it seems to be quite possible that he is, in a sense, here and could reveal himself to be here.
The Kalam Cosomological argument (and others) postulate that the best explanation for the existence of everything (space, time and matter) is a creator outside of space, time and matter choosing to create. If correct, that would imply some sort of personal being.
> Why do you think that God would have to exist outside of our reality and not within it?
It becomes a matter of how you define Creator, reality, etc. In my case the Creator would be the entity that created our reality, so by definition it can't exist in it.
But to be honest I don't spend much time thinking about what could lie outside of our reality because that would be just fantasy. I don't even know if Creator is a good term. Those terms such as create, entity, intelligence, matter, time, energy, etc. are only meaningful in our reality. Maybe there is nothing like that outside.
A creator of a house can reside within and outside the house. That’s at least my simplified analogy.
I guess this is where theism and your view would come to a fork in the road. If we can deduce from logic that we are created (not infinite nor came from nothing which are both illogical concepts) we can look to nature and history and ask if that creator has further revealed himself.
Two lines of evidence that suggest to me that there is clearly supernatural intrusion into our world that I’m curious if you’re aware of: modern day miracles (see Miracles Today by Craig Keener) and NDE’s (see Deathbed Experiences by J. Steve Miller).
Congrats on a note/discussion not about nostr, sats, BTC, or PV.
God? Yes.
Why? Because materialism doesn't make sense to me.
Not Man made? That remains to be seen.
Thanks! I enjoy it. Bitcoin is an amazing tool but not the meaning of life.
The man made question is a big one. If I was not a Christian, I would be a hardcore deist. It seems utterly impossible that blind naturalistic forces created everything we see, including matter itself. Throwing the chips on the table with a historical figure (like Jesus) is an intense decision.
Would you consider yourself a deist or something or have you softly landed on a religion or what?
There is a beauty and mystery to life that is only sullied by deterministic/materialistic thinking. The only thing uglier is hierarchy and control.
I was raised religious, and left it. Deist might apply. I just think that consciousness is primary, and I got there through a science detour.
Christianity? I think all organized religions, are truth that have been subverted. I think there are fairly obvious signs that christianity is a subversion.
James, the brother of Jesus said, “pure religion is to take care of orphans and widows and keep oneself unstained by the world”. So I think he, and many of us Christians would largely agree with you. Humans muddy things up, and that is why Jesus preached to the choir so much.
I would personally be very careful to throw the baby out with the bath water though. If Jesus actually lived, predicted his death and resurrection, and rose three days later, there is good reason to be a Christian in its basic sense, even if one doesn’t agree with some or many of the modern, human deviations from what Christ taught.
Man is God. Both the creator, and the destroyer.
It sounds to me like you’re bumping up against a theistic idea that God made man “in his image”, meaning many things we do, like create children, art, gardens etc. and destroy our creations are more or less reflections on who God is.
By God I was referring to an maximally great/powerful etc. being that created the world and potentially interacts with humanity.