Parky60 Loc: People's Republic of Illinois

Pretty close-minded of you to say that I have nothing to offer. Isn't anything you say also a "sales job?" What I offer this discussion is the t***h. To reject it is your prerogative.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

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There must be t***h in what you say. Energy is fundamental. I lean towards God is Mind as well as Body, thus Mind came first, that God's Mind is Universal, Timeless and Infinite, has an extension that is Universal and reachable, and He is capable of forming and sustaining energy as He wills, and thus He formed energy into a Big Bang, matter, life, and consciousness, and our bodies in His image, which He also sustains. I will not even try to substantiate these ideas, but they seem to follow Genesis fairly closely. Then too, there seems to have been a void that one could say was devoid of energy until God filled it with energy. "Let there be light..." I am very open to discussion here...

It could follow from this that he did in fact form a Strong Anthropic Universe that is perfectly conditioned to sustain life and Man. So many constants in the Universe are necessarily fine-tuned and stable for Man to exist. One list I read had about 36 principal constants that must not very by the smallest of amounts or we are goners! I wonder if there are other types of men on other planets that because of this Anthropic Universe are formed very much like we are.

As quantum theory suggested, undetectable communication at a distance by sub-particles has been demonstrated, which opens up a massive flood of speculation as to just what this can mean. Can thought be broadcast? Is there undetected but real body to body communication taking place all the time? Will we be able to discover how such communication takes place and use it? and so on... Then, given the Universal Mind, can we access it and use the information correctly? This so far undetectable means of communication needs to be known!

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

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It aways becomes an issue: Where did God come from? I have adopted the position that God is the final entity, He is the end of the logical chain, He is the Uncaused Cause God. I do not see any way to prove this or disprove it. Believing it is far simpler then disbelieving it! I do not recall any passages in the Bible that clarifies this point.
An infinite regression would otherwise occur, which is delightful to sidestep!

JW

It's not a matter of open or closed minds, and I am not intending a sales job. The problem is that your position is not falsifiable. If I say that God could have evolved from pure energy, you can say, and probably will say, that God has always existed. How can I argue that? Any point I might want to discuss that falls outside of your orthodoxy can be dismissed by saying that isn't what the Bible says.

We need to be able to argue our cases from the standpoint of what can be proven or accept that the point must be left h*****g and move on to another point. That doesn't work if your answers all hinge on, the Bible says. If you can get past that, join in, if not, there is no point.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

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My comment is--that proof is not going to be the main show here, simply because such a thing as proof will be impossible. H*****g difficulties will be the norm whether one is following the Bible or some other schema. It is the nature of the beast! I just posted on OPP my opinion on the question of God's origin, or who made God, etc, the infinite regression problem. I have adopted the position that God is the Uncaused Cause, the only member of the regression, i.e.Himself. There is no proof to be had here, but to allow an infinite regression is simply not on!

Earlier, I adopted the position that God came first, before energy, that He made energy, and out of energy came the Universe and Us. Can't prove any of it! But it is an operational position. We are at the which came first, the chicken or the egg point. I feel the need to follow the Word of the Bible, lacking any other guideline, and move on to contemplating God's Universal Mind idea. You and others do not have to buy into my positions to move on, for we will be moving into a far more open area, UM, with an equal lack of provable aspects.

In fact, we will not have any reliable guidelines at all, merely people that claim to be able to use the UM, or people like sky and to some extent me, that have had some highly unexplainable experiences.( not possible to prove how, why, or who, just a what, a where and a when.!)

I suggest that there is just one thing we can do usefully in this research, and that is to discover for ourselves whether we can use the UM, and never mind taking the further steps of definition and description.

Parky60 Loc: People's Republic of Illinois

You're talking in circles JW. And how do you argue the case that God could have evolved from pure energy? You can't prove it.

RobertV2

I agree with this part: "creat[ing] the universe through natural law, which includes the laws that made the Big Bang happen ... is [or would be] a far greater accomplishment than the supreme being saying Abra cadabra, and more believable."

RobertV2

I agree. In particular, the Bible is not useful for answering such questions as in the Original Post; the Original Post shows that a different kind of answer is wanted.

The Bible (or other books in religions) may be useful for other things though.

RobertV2

I agree.

JW

I agree, essentially. Where I run into trouble is the idea that the universe was created for us. I find it easier to think we were created for the universe.

JW

How so?

Most of what will be covered in this discussion won't be proven. That is where the problem you present resides. Your position is that you have proof. The aim of this discussion is to ATTEMPT to make our case, mostly by inference.

JW

It's not that what religions teach that is the problem. It's their insistence that theirs' is the only acceptable answer.

RobertV2

The way I look at it, there would have been two possibilities: Possibility A is that there would never be anything anywhere at any time. It would just be absolute nothingness everywhere forever. Possibility B is that there would, at some time, be something. It doesn't matter to me what the something is; it could be a speck of dust, or something more elaborate.

I don't know which, Possibility A or Possibility B, is the more likely to occur. I _feel_ like I know, and will proceed to argue the point, but it might be a question that we are incapable of fully answering. And that's ok. (There are two possibilities there also: Possibility X is that we are capable of answering all conceivable questions. Possibility Y is that someday there will be some question that we are incapable of answering.)

Scholars (and not just religious ones) have already written about this. Here's a book I found about it:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-universe-from-nothing-why-there-is-something-rather-than-nothing_richard-dawkins_lawrence-m-krauss/279762/item/4860998/?mkwid=%7cdc&pcrid=77515727468767&pkw=&pmt=be&slid=&product=4860998&plc=&pgrid=1240249359902158&ptaid=pla-4581115209376248&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Bing+Shopping+%7c+Science+and+Math+%7c+HIGH&utm_term=&utm_content=%7cdc%7cpcrid%7c77515727468767%7cpkw%7c%7cpmt%7cbe%7cproduct%7c4860998%7cslid%7c%7cpgrid%7c1240249359902158%7cptaid%7cpla-4581115209376248%7c&msclkid=5feefe0209a11b78f7689ff6c7b8f59a#idiq=4860998&edition=7010740

I started to read this book, a few years ago. After about the first quarter of it, I found it tedious because it goes on and on longer than I have patience for. However, if I remember correctly, this or some other author wrote that space is never completely empty: an empty space has infinitessimally small periods of time when it develops a negative charge and an equivalent positive charge, and these pairs wink in and out of existence very rapidly. This is not conclusive; but: I imagine that this could lead to "something" eventually appearing in what was empty space. It could happen by random accident: a couple of similar charges get close together at the same time, and thereby, suddenly, there's a little area of space which is not perfectly balanced; and so, voila', there is a thing there, like a tiny bit of energy or a speck of dust that remains in the space. So I imagine. Given an infinity of opportunities, it seems likely to me that something of the sort would eventually happen.

But set that book aside, and let's get back to my mainline argument. I find Possibility B (that there is eventually a "something" somewhere at some time) more likely or plausible, than Possibility A (the idea that there would never be anything anywhere at any time: just nothingness everywhere eternally). Possibility A requires perfection; if there were a speck of dust or an imperfection or the tiniest bit of stray energy -- or even a stray thought -- then that would be a Something. Who are we to suppose that such perfection (perfect nothingness for all space and all time) must be the case everywhere for all time? Who are we to say that just that particular kind of perfection is the most plausible scenario -- or, yet more extremely, the only possible scenario?

I settle on Possibility B (Something) as the more likely scenario.

Upon allowing that Possibility B can happen, the rest is a piece of cake. The entire universe as we know it would easily develop, as easily as falling off a log. All it takes is similar reasoning: step by step, we find that imperfections can occur and eventually lead to other imperfections. (The way I first imagined it, the first Something couldn't perfectly hold together for all of infinite eternity, and finally accidentally started to disintegrate into two or more Somethings; and so on. But now I just think a variety of Somethings arise out of empty space.) So a variety of Somethings arise. And physical laws arise, just because they're more likely to occur than a perfect lawlessness everywhere for all time; to wit:

Given that a Something occasionally exists, we can easily suppose that it is extremely likely that there will be many Somethings; and then we can easily suppose that (Rule 1) some Things last, or tend to last, longer than other things. The alternative to Rule 1 is that all things last exactly the same amount of time, or that they all behave in the same exact way; and that would be a perfection, but I think an occasional imperfection is more likely than absolute perfection for all time and all space. So I settle on Rule 1.

Given Rule 1, there is physical evolution.

(By the way, the game of Conway's Life illustrates how order can arise from chaos. I find that similar to my thoughts about Rule 1 and physical evolution.)

With all that, I'm satisfied that I have created our universe, conceptually.

(By the way, G-d could arise out of that physical evolution, or could arise out of some other kind of evolution, such as an evolution of thoughts.)

There's an additional idea -- or maybe it's an alternative idea: that universes pop in and out of existence all the time (and I suppose there's an infinite number of them). (This too (many universes popping in and out of existence) has been written about by some author or authors.). I feel that all possible universes exist, and maybe the vast majority of them fizzle out and don't amount to anything. At least one of them is a universe of complete nothingness, but some of them have Somethings in them. In all the vast infinity of possible universes, one of them happened to turn out like the one we're in: That one has a vast amount of empty space (or what looks empty to us), with some widely dispersed specks in it, so many specks that it boggles the mind to try to imagine how many there are. The vast majority of those specks don't amount to anything; they are barren as rocks -- or more barren than rocks. But they're not all perfectly barren; some of them got contaminated; and among all _those_ contaminated specks, a few of them got some physical evolution going, just by random chance (matching the concepts described above); and one of _those_ kind is Earth, and we happen to be a kind of Thing that can exist on Earth, and since it's the only world we're familiar with, we think it's the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese, and that G-d must love us a lot to have created such a perfect world, but the only reason we think it's perfect is that this is the world that we happen to be on. Some other odd creature on some entirely different world in some entirely different universe would think the same about its world.

And in this particular universe, some of us laud how wonderfully fertile it is to have produced _us_, while a few of us glance out into the vast barrenness and wonder why the vast majority of the universe is so inhospitable to us -- could it be that G-d h**es us so he made vastly more area hostile to us than favorable to us? But no, I say, G-d doesn't h**e us; rather, mere randomness and physical evolution produce us, and produce G-d if there is a G-d or G-ds.

JW

Interesting thoughts. I need to read it a few more times before I respond.

JW

It is said that God is omnipresent. That has always caused me difficulty as a concept. How can God possibly be everywhere all of the time? The idea that He might have agents observing for him belies the concept of omnipresence.

There is a way that God could be present everywhere all of the time. If our minds were connected to His, He could use His power to monitor all of us, all the time. From that comes the universal mind model. Is it possible that we can use that connection? Is it possible that we do use that connection?