I would think that we are all part of a Grand Play of Cosmic Proportion.

Another thing for thought is these scientist, while looking deep down in to things are beginning to relize that in realilty that nothing is there.
The universe is the real virtual reality.

The Cosmic Matrix, Question why would the speed of light been faster right after Big Bang than now.
This is going to make a lot people redo there calculations on the universe.

And I think E=Mc2 would be good one for Albert. But Edison is the one that kept Tesla from getting his due credit back in day.

Originally posted by sir_chancealot
Great.

Call me when you get around to that "Walking on Water" and "Raising the Dead" stuff. Until then....

Later.

You are confusing "god" with "religion/dogma".

If there is a god, don't you think god would have been around a little while before the so-called miracles you describe?

God doesn't = religion.

Originally posted by rikk7111

Originally posted by sir_chancealot
Great.
This Einstein will agree with you sir_chancealot............ We are a product of God....... Until someone takes nothing and makes it something (hence creation).. I think we are far from being gods.

True we are but the creatures, the Creator made, but the seed of the Truth of Creator is within all.

St. Matthew; 5:48 "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in Heaven is perfect".

Originally posted by bwinwright
Oh well, I decided to go with the only philosophy that actually makes sense to me, which is that this thing we call God is actually OMNIPRESENT, OMNIPOTENT, and OMNISCIENT. That is, the God I believe in is everywhere at once, occupying all space, simultaneously, possesses all of the power, and knows everything too.

Just supposing this is true, that makes YOU and ME 100% God, right? Just like a shirt is made of 100% cotton, we are each made of 100% God, right?

Just supposing this is true, that means we really are equal, right? I mean, how can 100% God be either inferior to or superior to 100% God? It can't.

Just supposing this is true, that means that we are each part of the whole which contains everything, right? Therefore, we already possess everything and lack nothing, right?

These are all exactly the things I believe. I don't consider myself Christian for other reasons, but I don't think the words really matter. It's what the words stand for. And I think you are absolutely correct.

We are walking/driving/swimming around in God's body, as it flies around in the form of so many galaxies in so many spirals. We're like "his" blood cells. We're truly insignificant and yet the whole fractal scheme is laid bare everywhere if you just stop and think about it, all for us to experience and be enriched, because in a way it's all for us. It's amazing, this is like wonderland.


Check this out:


It's almost frightening how huge our universe is.

[edit on 2-2-2009 by bsbray11]

S&F props for this thread. you sound like myself ha! if everyone looked past race and sex, tall, short, ugly, beautiful, then we would all be getting along alot better. skin color and sex has nothing to do with the soul inside. i mean the deeply seated soul, beyond the ego.

getting people past the illusion is getting them to perceive in a different light. and its tough. i found the only time people open up, is when they are at their lowest. and finding and knowing the tao is the most rewarding experience ive seen in others and they in themselves.

super sweet

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
I don't think your theory holds much water. Even if I was willing to grant you the statement "order requires intelligent design" unconditionally, you are still left to explain what you mean by "order."

Too often people are convinced there is a God because they see "order" in nature. (living animals with specialized organs, senses, etc. an earth that supports life and is the perfect distance from a star so that the climate permits life, etc) The fact is, what appears to be order is nothing short of chaos. Human babies are sometimes born with tails, our bodies are no longer covered with hair, yet most of us get useless "goosebumps," killer asteroids sling around the universe in what appears to be nothing short of a cosmic shooting gallery, over half of our DNA is useless "junk" that has been collected over millions of years of evolution and no longer serves and purpose in the modern homo sapien, etc.

These are just a few examples of what many people take to be "order" and that, upon closer examination, dont represent the sort of "order" that an all-knowing and all-powerful God would create.

In my opinion, you need a whole lot more than this "one and only one point" if you are going to consistently argue for a God.

Just because you can't comprehend the scale of the order does not make it not in order.

I can count the number of cars driving around the road. They are in order and have a purpose and such, but too count everything in the universe and match and measure it up with everything else is just impossible right now at our current point in " time".

There is order, but because we dont' know all, we can't perceive it and understand it, so we dumb it down to what we can understand. WE as humans, once we add too/ or understand more, we add it too it to compare and evaluate the old and the new data and use it to come to an understanding.

Since we don't know of soooooooooooooooooooooo much about this universe, how can you say for sure that the stuff you mentioned above is not in order.


We are speaking in a matter of if's and asking questions.

You are speaking in the " as a matter of fact / ( know it all ) and that is the first and biggest problem. Once you can open your mind to the idea that you don't know everything and hardly know anything at all in comparison to what there is to still know, then you might start to think how some of us already are.

Me, the OP, others on here are not saying WE ARE 100% GOD, He ends it with questions by saying RIGHT ? meaning, that he is asking us for help to understand to further our knowledge.


____ . this is how much we know. ___________________________. this is how much we could know, but if we think that all that exists is ___. then we will never know what is beyond that.

This is becoming all too wishy-washy. The original objection to the post came because the author of this thread claimed that the argument "order requires intelligent design" is a viable, discussion-closing argument for the existence of God and thus, is a viable, discussion-closing argument against Atheism. THAT ARGUMENT has been used on numerous occasions by creationist who argue that the "order" they perceive in the world is such an order than cannot be created by any other thing other than an all-powerful, all-wise, all-benevolent god. That argument is false - for example, evolution (without a gods help) give us sufficient evidence to conclude that order, in this case in the animal kingdom, can be readily explained by natural evolutionary processes (NOT supernatural). However, in such a case that this argument were true (that order requires intelligent design), there are still two enormous arguments against the author that have yet to be addressed in subsequent postings:

1. How is "order" defined? This was brought up in the original objection to the topic. If order is defined as the way life evolves, the way planets rotate around the sun, the way gravity behaves, etc well then yes I would agree that that is indeed an "order" of things, but it still leaves no reason to jump to the point that this order MUST have been the creation of an all-powerful being. It is certainly possible that this particular order is the only way the universe could exist in the first place.

2. What you say is "order," may not even be very orderly to begin with (at least not the kind of order than an all-powerful, all-wise God would create)... as the previous objection to the post stated, there are many examples of a complete lack of order of things. Asteroids possibly colliding with Earth and destroying the population, subatomic particles behaving, as many of us have studied, in a completely random (chance) way, random genetic mutations, babies will tails (sure we all have tails during our development but why, in an orderly universe, would God allow some of us to be born with them?). etc etc etc.

In closing, the point here is this: The original premise that the author made AGAINST atheism simply doesn't work. Natural evolutionary processes easily explain what at first may appear to be "irreducibly complex" organisms and structures. Furthermore, even in the event that that author's premise was correct, we are still left with 2 questions that must be addressed...

As far as I'm concerned, exceptional claims (ie. that there is an actual benevolent, loving God who created all that is and all that will ever be) require exceptional evidence. Not only can many of you who agreed with the author not provide that evidence, but you actually turn the argument around on the atheist as if somehow the onus is on them to provide the evidence that there is NOT a God and for all of you to sit back and relax secure in the knowledge that your claim requires no evidence.

If I were to say that I carried around 7 invisible, golden fairies in my back pocket who were responsible for creation, it would be up to me to prove that not for you to disprove it...

[edit on 3-2-2009 by n757pm]

Originally posted by n757pm
1. How is "order" defined? This was brought up in the original objection to the topic. If order is defined as the way life evolves, the way planets rotate around the sun, the way gravity behaves, etc well then yes I would agree that that is indeed an "order" of things, but it still leaves no reason to jump to the point that this order MUST have been the creation of an all-powerful being. It is certainly possible that this particular order is the only way the universe could exist in the first place.

My question is: what's the difference?

Because I don't see that there is one.

2. What you say is "order," may not even be very orderly to begin with (at least not the kind of order than an all-powerful, all-wise God would create)... as the previous objection to the post stated, there are many examples of a complete lack of order of things. Asteroids possibly colliding with Earth and destroying the population, subatomic particles behaving, as many of us have studied, in a completely random (chance) way, random genetic mutations, babies will tails (sure we all have tails during our development but why, in an orderly universe, would God allow some of us to be born with them?). etc etc etc.

I think your interpretation of the word "God" in these cases is very shallow. Given I am not a Christian, so I can't be said to be defending a Christian position.

I come at it from a different perspective: there is consciousness in the universe. Therefore the universe can said to be conscious. Just as you are conscious, even though your fingers or feet taken by themselves would not be conscious, or would only be conscious on a different level (cell level?).

If you can have a quantity of electricity, I think you can have a "quantity" of consciousness, and it is the same as awareness. And this is ultimately what makes up the universe, and you can call it what you want. Consciousness, condenses to energy, condenses to light, condenses to electricity, condenses to fluids, condenses to solid matter. Everything is ultimately made of the same stuff though, which just "is," and that is the same as awareness or the state of "being." Just my take on it all.

The bottom line is I am 59 years old and nobody has come up with any theory of it all that everyone agrees with. Hell, there are still people who reject the idea of God, preferring to believe all this just HAPPENED by luck?

But... if you believe in God, then where did he come from? Doesn't that just open up more questions? I mean really, who created God? How did he come to be? And WHERE DID HE GET HIS POWERS?

That is the main question here, god is NOT a being, I will NEVER believe that god is a "he" or a "she", even if I'm contradicting my first sentences. God is not a simple human in heaven that is pulling some switches and designs or whatever, god would HAVE to be the universe, there is NO way god is a simple being. I will not believe it. I will never.

This is what I think is a possible theory, when we die we are supposed to become one with the Christ, that kind of sounds like a large energy of souls that make up one big version of God.
Maybe Adam and Eve spilt that God up and we all became separate beings that are why God does not like suicide and other crimes against the Body because it is all interwoven. We are not God but an image of God, but since Christ found a way to interlock us to save us we need to go through a process of becoming like him in order to reach the next level of afterlife.

Then again if we were just a likeness then we were never God but just his children but the next process is to unite as one and be like God and we are just halfway through the process. A process that brings man such thoughts because we can sense the next stage and need for uniting with God again.

Originally posted by The time lord
This is what I think is a possible theory, when we die we are supposed to become one with the Christ, that kind of sounds like a large energy of souls that make up one big version of God.
Maybe Adam and Eve spilt that God up and we all became separate beings that are why God does not like suicide and other crimes against the Body because it is all interwoven. We are not God but an image of God, but since Christ found a way to interlock us to save us we need to go through a process of becoming like him in order to reach the next level of afterlife.

Then again if we were just a likeness then we were never God but just his children but the next process is to unite as one and be like God and we are just halfway through the process. A process that brings man such thoughts because we can sense the next stage and need for uniting with God again.

The next level in the afterlife? I don't follow, I personally believe upon death my soul or spirit will not 'ascend' to the next 'life', but I will evolve. Not my body, of course, this body is only physical, it's a spiritual vehicle that my consciousness took over in the womb. Of that I am positive, and I believe that when I die, I will evolve into a being of pure energy, free to do as I wish, invisible to all, but able to freely travel the universe and see sights that humans will never see!

Originally posted by Deus Ex Machina 42

Originally posted by The time lord
This is what I think is a possible theory, when we die we are supposed to become one with the Christ, that kind of sounds like a large energy of souls that make up one big version of God.
Maybe Adam and Eve spilt that God up and we all became separate beings that are why God does not like suicide and other crimes against the Body because it is all interwoven. We are not God but an image of God, but since Christ found a way to interlock us to save us we need to go through a process of becoming like him in order to reach the next level of afterlife.

Then again if we were just a likeness then we were never God but just his children but the next process is to unite as one and be like God and we are just halfway through the process. A process that brings man such thoughts because we can sense the next stage and need for uniting with God again.

The next level in the afterlife? I don't follow, I personally believe upon death my soul or spirit will not 'ascend' to the next 'life', but I will evolve. Not my body, of course, this body is only physical, it's a spiritual vehicle that my consciousness took over in the womb. Of that I am positive, and I believe that when I die, I will evolve into a being of pure energy, free to do as I wish, invisible to all, but able to freely travel the universe and see sights that humans will never see!

We both saying the same thing, I am just saying it won't be a lonely journey of us turning into positive spirit energy but unite as one, or maybe some will be more individual but we won't be alone.

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
I don't think your theory holds much water.

The fact is, what appears to be order is nothing short of chaos.

In my opinion, you need a whole lot more than this "one and only one point" if you are going to consistently argue for a God.

I have butchered this quote but this is what I believe as well.

I see no order in countless babies starving to death each and every day while rich tycoons sit on thrones their entire lives and leave bank accounts to their children that could feed all of Africa. It makes me sick and if there is a God, he is obviously not in control. There is nothing but chaos in the world, order is just an illusion.

Originally posted by bwinwright
having spent probably 5,000 hours or more reading articles, watching videos,

[...]

I argued that "order requires intelligent direction". That's it! No atheist could ever explain how this is false. Therefore, it must be true.

5000 hours to arrive at that flawed thesis?

because no one can explain why it is false.....does not mean it is true

it does not automatically follow.....

a thought experiment if you will......

"order does not require intelligent direction"....can you prove that statement false?

thats a good test for any thesis.....just turn it around and see if it is the same