Certainly - I’m not arguing that there’s actually evidence for the accuracy of the Bible, just that I don’t think it’s biblically justified to claim that God stays outside the range of evidence. I think both fundamentalism and a retreat into unfalsifiable metaphysics are fairly recent and biblically unsupported reactions to the same challenges. Christians have sought to provide evidence for their beliefs in the form of physical relics and other methods long before fundamentalists arrived though. The Bible is very much associated with the physical world, and if it were true, it should not be that difficult to find evidence for it. As it stands though, it is demonstrably wrong. That judgement doesn’t apply to all religions or all gods, but I don’t think other Christians are on much more solid ground.
Depends how you add it up? And whether you subtract the Dark Energy?
This just makes me think about how very few possible gods would have the inclination to create a universe of the sort we live in. The tiniest variation might well produce a god incapable of creation at all.
That could actually be a pretty cool premise for a short story.
Saying anything is Biblically justified is an act of faith. Support for the Bible as anything other than a collection of myths with some basic ground rules for Jewish living tucked into it is based entirely on how much one considers it a work of religious significance.
Religious believers when they engage in the nonsense of seeking proof, are trying to confirm their preexisting beliefs. It never works the other way around, where one believes because of the strength of evidence or arguments. Religion doesn’t lend itself to it.
Someone already did write a book on that. Frank Tipler. He and James Barrow started this whole thing with The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1988).
I didn’t read the whole thread. But, against some of the arguments made here, I would offer the idea that there is an evolving God, not yet fully realized. This relates to what Tipler calls the Omega Point, which is when the universe ends with its lifeforms completing the process of computing all possible thoughts. Panentheism of this sort actually has a long history going back to the German Idealists (if not to Plato), in particular with Schelling. God develops in, and through, the world.
Tipler is a bit wacky, and he has fallen into the Christianization trap discussed here, but I love his early ideas.
On what falsifiable reasoning and evidence would you “offer” such an idea?
I’m just saying it’s consistent with those myths and rules, which depicts a god who expects people to have faith in a reality beyond that determined by normal physical rules, but who is not afraid to give people physical evidence either. Prophets were supposed to provide evidence that they were saying the truth about the future. If the physical proof of their prophesy didn’t happen, they were not sent by God and should be put to death. If they passed the test, people still required faith that the main prediction would come true, even though they had seen this evidence. If you’re going to claim that the Bible should not be that important for modern believers, you need to be clearer about what is important and how you know. Religion works in its own way, I just think that those who spend their time seeking proof or denying that it can be proven are both reacting to the uncomfortable reality that the world is not as you would expect if the Bible were accurate (by which I don’t mean inerrant). Unlike with other religions, you should be able to make falsifiable statements if Christianity were true.
While I appreciate you taking the time to post a photo, I’m asking you, since you “offered” the idea.
IMHO, neither you nor I are lazy, we just find plenty of more interesting questions on which to spend our cognition.
ETA: I mean, you might be lazy anyway, but I ryl srsly doubt it 
There’s a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth. All this guy has discovered is self-deception.
Seems like a case study in cognitive dissonance.
Which reminds me of an excellent and entertaining popular science book on that very topic, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris.
Well, I guess what I am saying is that first you have to entertain the idea of philosophical idealism. Are you willing to do so, or are you a die-hard realist? In my opinion, the information theoretic argument in those 2 pages is the most convincing one for idealism.
Then we could talk about subjective vs objective idealism, and pan(en)theistic interpretations. But nowadays most people aren’t willing to go there in the first place.
I’m willing to entertain it, but once we go there I’d say all of your ideas become just so much blather.
Alright, then. My usual attitude toward realists is: I wish you well (but please read Max Weber and don’t be a full-on positivist).
It’s certainly a wildly speculative argument I’m putting forth, but I do think it’s interesting. My understanding when I encountered this argument was that generally if you vary the laws of physics the most likely result is a steady state, which was why there was some confidence life would not be possible, but yeah, citation definitely needed.
I’d take issue with you on your definition of consciousness though, you imply you would accept functional equivalence of consciousness as consciousness itself, I don’t accept that.
Strictly speaking the laws are invariant. It’s the values of the constants that plug into those laws which we don’t really have a good model for developing in the early universe. It’s entirely possible that our spacetime was and is more prone to be locked into more static configurations, as opposed to our rich evolving experiencing of a changing spacetime which might merely exist in the cracks that we, by our very nature, must inhabit. The passage of time itself is relative, and so “time” where energy rolls “downhill” could simply be the interruptions in a steady state cosmology due to quantum fluctuations or some other unknown disruptions. So in that sense all of time might yet occur within a dynamic universe, even if space is more stable in a static configuration, provided it’s only meta-stable and therefore gets disrupted by the occurrence of what we call time.
Does a better job as an example of why scientists/mathematicians need to stop confusing themselves with philosophers, frequently reasoning (poorly) several steps beyond what they actually have evidence for.
O/T, but in the Orthodox Church, there’s a tendency to see Thomas not as a defiant skeptic, but as a distraught and despairing friend who refuses to let others get his hopes up.
