The existence of God and the efficacy of prayer

[PartSkeptic]

At one time, before the advent of what we now call "science", beginning very slowly from roughly the time of Galileo (c.1600), people did not realise that genuine measurable and reproducible confirmed evidence was required to consistently established the truth of anything. Instead they believed through religious faith (and unfortunately also through the philosophy of the time), that they could determine the truth merely by deciding in their mind whatever they thought (or wished) the correct answers to be.

What science showed, was that notion of determining right form wrong merely by philosophical or theistic musings of the mind (mostly by wishful thinking), most definitely does not work. And in fact it had never worked to actually discover or explain anything properly at all.

Science dispelled the "myth" that the Universe was created from nothing in seven days and said it always existed, and was stable.

Shock - horror. Science found out about the Big Bang. So now Krauss and many other scientists believe the Universe was created from nothing. And in a very short time as well. But they still cannot say who or what was the cause, but are sure that God is not a possibility.

The Greeks intuited the atom. They were centuries ahead.

 

[PartSkeptic]

I am going to end. I have to handle some commitments.

Blue Triangle. You have my support and I think you are making some good points. I will add my support later.

 

[Donn]

It is logical. Everything we know about the Universe is logical. If God exists then logic would apply.

Yet you state a god exists; where's the logic?

 

[blue triangle]

I am going to end. I have to handle some commitments.

Blue Triangle. You have my support and I think you are making some good points. I will add my support later.

Thankyou. Likewise, you're making some good points, despite the onslaught of nitpickers, naysayers and ne're-do-wells we always attract.

 

[Pup]

Science dispelled the "myth" that the Universe was created from nothing in seven days and said it always existed, and was stable.

Shock - horror. Science found out about the Big Bang. So now Krauss and many other scientists believe the Universe was created from nothing. And in a very short time as well. But they still cannot say who or what was the cause, but are sure that God is not a possibility.

The Greeks intuited the atom. They were centuries ahead.

I've noticed this in Christians a lot (may be among other religions too, I'm just not around them). There's an implicit belief that the scientific method is reliable when the result is what the religious person wants, and that the scientific method can't be trusted when the result isn't what they want.

That's not how the scientific method works.

In the above example, there's an assumption that the Big Bang is the right answer, and all science about the formation of the universe was wrong up until that moment. Yet the Big Bang is no more guaranteed to be right than the steady state. It's just the best model we have currently. The scientific method is not inexorably getting closer to proving the Bible true, hence the creationism-evolution kerfluffle, among other things.

Dealing with that sort of provisional knowledge and uncertainty intrinsic to the scientific method is difficult for religious people to handle, because they have chosen the certainty of their religion (which other religions declare is wrong, of course, with no better or worse evidence).

 

[Delvo]

All gods invented by man have been described as having various powers.

Assumption. Invented by man. How do you know God does not exist?

Actually, that statement did not specify whether or not Yahweh was among the "gods invented by man". With or without that being the case for Yahweh, the sentence as written still describes all those other gods. The remainder of the paragraph was just comparison.

Also, even including Yahweh in that category, calling God a human invention, is a statement of known historical fact, whether a creature matching its description coincidentally really exists or not. Not only does the Bible contain anachronistic traits from earlier versions of that character, which somebody obviously just missed when trying to clean them out, but we also have non-Biblical and pre-Biblical texts which shed even more light on him. It is absolutely clear and inescapable that the version we finally ended up with in the latest versions of the books that eventually ended up in the Bible was the result of ages of modification by human authors, whose work we can see in progress at various stages, derived not from observations of reality or even from philosophication about the universe needing a Creator, but from a member of an earlier pantheon which would surely be declared fictional by modern Christians, like Chronos and Baldr and Ganesh and Amaterasu. (In fact, Yahweh's role within that pantheon includes getting invoked in treaties to punish kings or kingdoms with destructive storms if they violate those treaties, making him essentially the deity of punishment... now which modern Christian character does that sound like?)

If a real thing like the current trendy Christian concept of God actually exists, then it's a tremendous coincidence that one version of the fictional character called "God" finally happens to have anything in common with that entity right now.

Science dispelled the "myth" that the Universe was created from nothing in seven days and said it always existed, and was stable.

No, science dispelled the myth that it was created in seven days and noted that there was no available sign of its actual age, just that it was clearly older than that. You are lying.

(And not even lying about the right thing; the important part here is the dispelling of the religious myth, which didn't change after the Big Bang was discovered anyway; Creationism was still a dispelled myth.)

Shock - horror. Science found out about the Big Bang.

No shock or horror. Just a discovery that many people didn't expect... which, for scientists, is fun & exciting. You are lying.

Science found out about the Big Bang. So now Krauss and many other scientists believe the Universe was created from nothing.

No, the "universe from nothing" idea is not based on the Big Bang. It's about the amounts of matter & energy and the curvature of space. Krauss has described this on many occasions which are easily available to the public, including several iterations of different lengths & amounts of detail on YouTube. These things have nothing to do with the discovery of the Big Bang (although they do fit together with it well enough). What connection this has with the "debate" between Creationism and science is also not much of a connection itself, although there's no point in getting into that with someone who claims Krauss was talking about the Big Bang in the first place. It would be like debating whether a new modern plane's engine should be a turboprop or a high-bypass turbofan with someone who just said Boeing's most popular commercial model flies by flapping its wings.

And in a very short time as well.

Trillionths of a second are not a day or a week, thousands to millions of millennia are not a day or a week, the events that happened in that time are not the events the Bible depicts, and even an explanation that pretends the Bible uses metaphors for the real events and a metaphorical time frame still puts the Bible's metaphors in two different wrong orders. Pretending that this has anything to do with the Bible being proven right is lying. (And it's also tacitly admitting that science, not religious stuff, is the only actual way to determine truth, since it's treating science as the standard which the Bible needs to meet, not the other way around.)

But they still cannot say who or what was the cause, but are sure that God is not a possibility.

Another lie.

The Greeks intuited the atom. They were centuries ahead.

Wow, people can think of questions and guess at the answers centuries before the relevant evidence is available? What a meaningful revelation.

 

[blue triangle]

Blue triangle

I note that you have apparently chosen not to reply to my question about prayer, as you are of course free to do. However, I wonder why this is and hope you will answer.

Perhaps it will help if I repeat the question here: When you pray, either aloud or silently, what do you think happens to those words - I am presuming you expect them to be heard by God who will then decide whether to take action or not; how will you know whether whatever happens next is the result of God's action or would have happened anyway?

No offense intended. I've been busy. Okay, an answer. Using words like 'prayer' and 'God' and 'answering prayers' is really only an entry-level approximation of what really goes on. I've gone along with traditional usage for the sake of simplification and easy understanding, but the reality is a lot more complex. It's really about opening and maintaining a channel of communication between you, that is, your conscious mind, and higher levels of mind, the highest level being next to God. You don't have to speak your prayers. All you have to do is think them. The nature, sincerity, intent and emotional energy behind the prayer play a big part in determining whether it will be 'answered' or not, but there are other factors.

If you pray for good weather for your barbecue (as I once heard an immature Christian request) I have a feeling that wouldn't be answered, although one can never tell. "What? God would rearrange world weather patterns to give Sue a nice day for her family barbecue?" I hear the scoffers asking. I doubt it, no. But it's possible that if it suited God's purposes (not Sue's selfish purpose) one might get that good day by, say, an event occurring that forces Sue to put it off until next week, when the weather is better. Maybe Sue's sister will met the man she is supposed to marry. Whether that would have happened anyway without prayer is a good point, but the prayer is a signal of intention, and of your agreement to submit to the guidance of a higher power. That is energy that can be used by that power. In other words, if you expect a lot from God, and if you turn ultimate authority over to God, and give Him your time and energy, you are more likely to get 'answers'- although not always in the way your ego would like.

It is the biggest decision you will ever make. You are literally handing your entire life, all of it, over to a higher power (which is really turning it over to higher levels of your own being and ultimately to your Creator). You are admitting that you need the assistance of that higher power, because you literally do not know what you are doing here - in every sense. But God does know what you are meant to be doing here, and will help you to remember it.

 

[SusanB-M1]

Blue Triangle

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately for you, there is zero evidence for any 'higher power'. Any communication ;you think you are engaged in is in your imagination only.

 

[Donn]

It's a higher power, but it's god. It's your own being, but it's your creator.

It's hot, but cold. Forward in reverse. Truth is fiction, it's next to fact which is only opinion.

The big picture merges all dichotomy into soma.

 

[blue triangle]

Blue Triangle

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately for you, there is zero evidence for any 'higher power'. Any communication ;you think you are engaged in is in your imagination only.

That's it? You pester me for days for an answer to your question, I give you a carefully considered reply, and then I get . . . two lines that might have come from the mouth of a know-it-all teenager. Go pester someone else.

 

[blue triangle]

I've noticed this in Christians a lot (may be among other religions too, I'm just not around them). There's an implicit belief that the scientific method is reliable when the result is what the religious person wants, and that the scientific method can't be trusted when the result isn't what they want.

That's not how the scientific method works.

In the above example, there's an assumption that the Big Bang is the right answer, and all science about the formation of the universe was wrong up until that moment. Yet the Big Bang is no more guaranteed to be right than the steady state. It's just the best model we have currently. The scientific method is not inexorably getting closer to proving the Bible true, hence the creationism-evolution kerfluffle, among other things.

Oh, I don't know. 100 or so years ago most physicists thought the universe had existed for ever. Only the Bible said it had a beginning. So science in that respect has moved closer to the Bible. In fact, if you look at the actions of God in Genesis 1 and order of creation, ending with man on the sixth day, its not too far from what modern earth science and evolutionary theory are now saying. Yes, it didn't happen in six literal days, but the Hebrew word Yom as well as meaning 'day', also means an unspecified period of time. If you don't take it too literally, it doesn't do badly at all for a creation myth,

 

[Donn]

Indeed, as a myth with poetic leeway it's up there with humanity's best literature. As a map it has no value, placing the altitudes in the platitudes to eschew the compass.

 

[ComfySlippers]

No offense intended. I've been busy. Okay, an answer. Using words like 'prayer' and 'God' and 'answering prayers' is really only an entry-level approximation of what really goes on. I've gone along with traditional usage for the sake of simplification and easy understanding, but the reality is a lot more complex. It's really about opening and maintaining a channel of communication between you, that is, your conscious mind, and higher levels of mind, the highest level being next to God. You don't have to speak your prayers. All you have to do is think them. The nature, sincerity, intent and emotional energy behind the prayer play a big part in determining whether it will be 'answered' or not, but there are other factors.

If you pray for good weather for your barbecue (as I once heard an immature Christian request) I have a feeling that wouldn't be answered, although one can never tell. "What? God would rearrange world weather patterns to give Sue a nice day for her family barbecue?" I hear the scoffers asking. I doubt it, no. But it's possible that if it suited God's purposes (not Sue's selfish purpose) one might get that good day by, say, an event occurring that forces Sue to put it off until next week, when the weather is better. Maybe Sue's sister will met the man she is supposed to marry. Whether that would have happened anyway without prayer is a good point, but the prayer is a signal of intention, and of your agreement to submit to the guidance of a higher power. That is energy that can be used by that power. In other words, if you expect a lot from God, and if you turn ultimate authority over to God, and give Him your time and energy, you are more likely to get 'answers'- although not always in the way your ego would like.

It is the biggest decision you will ever make. You are literally handing your entire life, all of it, over to a higher power (which is really turning it over to higher levels of your own being and ultimately to your Creator). You are admitting that you need the assistance of that higher power, because you literally do not know what you are doing here - in every sense. But God does know what you are meant to be doing here, and will help you to remember it.

Bollocks

 

[Delvo]

.....

 

[tsig]

Oh, I don't know. 100 or so years ago most physicists thought the universe had existed for ever. Only the Bible said it had a beginning. So science in that respect has moved closer to the Bible. In fact, if you look at the actions of God in Genesis 1 and order of creation, ending with man on the sixth day, its not too far from what modern earth science and evolutionary theory are now saying. Yes, it didn't happen in six literal days, but the Hebrew word Yom as well as meaning 'day', also means an unspecified period of time. If you don't take it too literally, it doesn't do badly at all for a creation myth,

How do we know what parts to take literally?

 

[logger]

That's it? You pester me for days for an answer to your question, I give you a carefully considered reply, and then I get . . . two lines that might have come from the mouth of a know-it-all teenager. Go pester someone else.

I'm impressed to see another who loves the lord and you've done a great job at trying to engage people here. But I'm sure you'll see this quickly, most here will only troll you.

I've enjoyed your responses tremendously, don't give up, you're truly doing the lords work.

 

[tsig]

That's it? You pester me for days for an answer to your question, I give you a carefully considered reply, and then I get . . . two lines that might have come from the mouth of a know-it-all teenager. Go pester someone else.

Name calling, lo how the mighty have fallen from contemplating the mysteries of god to third grade language.

 

[logger]

To what end? So that you can create a bigoted sound-bite dismissal of all of us here who find your sophistry both ignorant and arrogant, plus a waste of time?

Or so that you can feel proud of exposing yourself to a bunch of heathens in your religious duty of witnessing?

Or do you really want to understand where "we" are coming from? If that were so, a simple respectful discussion of attitudes would be a more useful approach.

But you have gone from an attempt to pretend you are a mystic sharing esoteric knowledge to becoming a resistant apologist for faulty brain habits and old time religion. None of that is anywhere close to "showing [us] evidence that god is real".

If you had any interest in how we think, you would have given up this charade before you even went down this disingenuous poll about a hypothetical universe that doesn't exist, pretending that an acid god exists above and beyond the holy texts it wears as dirty dirty coagulating bs and nonsense clothing in this, the real world.

Thus I have lost interest in you and your pretend "discussion".

The whitewashing of the evil doings in the bible is a ******** protest from deeply corrupted minds who refuse to see the consequences of the worship of a Lord whose texts clearly show the lord as unworthy of respect, let alone worship!

Pretending that it is those of us who have taken a cold clear look at the holy texts who are straw manning is precious! "God is love" is not supported by the text. Nevermind a "second channel"! The first one is a complete cock-up!

I've had it. Goodbye.

This has to be the most incredible and illustrative post yet.

He has clearly and completely offended you by simply asking a question. I love how you leftists get so offended when a Christians invades this dead place.

 

[logger]

Name calling, lo how the mighty have fallen from contemplating the mysteries of god to third grade language.

Lol

Here is another BT, you must be perfect in a place that is so defective.

 

[Donn]

I love how you leftists get so offended when a Christians invades this dead place.

For Christians are all out on that right wing? And too, could you resist or desist the necrophiliac invasion.