selfAdjoint said:
Several thoughts on your post, Moonrat -
The attributes ascribed to God in the alleged proof are those Christians ascribe to him, omnipotence, omniscience, etc.
well, they arent just Christian, they are jewish and Muslim, and American Indian, and many others. I do think that christians do tend to put the most human face on God, that is true.
omnipotentence is in all directions. Mystery too is omnidirectional and is in all directions.
It's an old saying that these two attributes, plus the existence of evil in the world, generate a tension with the goodness of God. It's no answer to say God is a mystery; if he didn't want us to reason about him why did he give us reason in the first place?
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well, it is an honest and objective answer to say that God is Mystery, any reasoning about God without objective proof can only be belief or art. Even in the western religions God is often referred to as the 'great mystery'
it is not that we should not reason about God, it is that we 'cannot' reason about that which we do not know. we can come up with all kinds of things about what lay beyond the great mystery, but all of these ideas are just personal and subjective, which is wonderful for art, but bad for science.
To say 'God is Mystery' is the most reason we can apply to the scenario. the mind can find harmony with mystery and feel it's presence, but when it denies it is mystery, then it is participating in a false universe and not an objective one.
Second it is true that some physicists are trying to use an "Anthropic" explanation for the fine tuning problem, but others are looking more to an evolution of universes to explain it. Science as a whole doesn't give ny evidence for God
I personally think the best evidence we have for a 'higher intelligence' is DNA. I mean, DNA terraformed this whole planet from a poisonoues firey hell to what we have today.
My suggestion, which is not an original idea on my part, is that 'DNA' may be a universal constant, i.e. the intelligence that spreads and spreads...
how long before humanity can create galaxies? 1000 years? we can already create a black hole!
I don't think it is the place of science to provide proof of God, really, I don't think it can. I think it is both ART and SCIENCE which must work together on this. science cannot understand ART, and that is the clincher!
thank you for the great discussion