The Step of Reason from Creator to God

I have noticed a theme revolving around the universe being intelligently designed recently, here as well as other media sources. I even called in to a radio talk show on the topic of I.D. beeing taught in science class at public schools.
I personally don't feel the universe is, but if I am to play devil's advocate and assume for the sake of a discussion that it is, I often find myself asking those who propose I.D. on what grounds they make the leap from creator and designer to loving God.
Many of them often use "science" to "prove" their creator, which I'm ok with the attempt. But I it brakes down, for me at least, at the next steps in logic.

So, my question is to those of you who believe in intelligent design (or those who understand those of you). Can you outline your reasoning clearly?

Proof of God (off topic from I.D. but my question was ignored)

Intellegent and fine tuned = God

Not arguing for either side here, just bringing up a valid point.

Can you disprove it?

No, nobody can. So why do we bicker and fight over this topic? Nobody will know the answer until they are dead, so why fight and argue about it?

Originally posted by Philodemus

So, my question is to those of you who believe in intelligent design (or those who understand those of you). Can you outline your reasoning clearly?

There is hardly anything substantial to the universe. A single atom is 99.9999999999999% empty space.

The universe as a whole is like that too.

But we don't exist in a way where we observe empty space. We see in terms of the non-emptiness. In our observational world, everything is not mostly empty space, although it really is. Why is that?

It has to do with relativity. If we shrunk down to the size of a proton, we would see the emptiness of an atom, but if we grew to the size of the atom, we would not see the emptiness within ourselves and the atoms around us would be our world of observation where we would observe their occupying forms within that space and not the empty space that makes them up.

The rule to remember is that emptiness is only observed directly in objects greater than you. So even though atoms are nearly 100% emptiness, we can't tell. But we can see that the larger universe is nearly 100% emptiness.

Observations are relative. Even though the entire universe is nearly 100% emptiness, to us it seems like it isn't empty at all.

To summarize, the fullness of the universe is possible by the relativity of consciousness. Without consciousness, relativity would not exist. Without relativity and therefore without consciousness, the universe would be seen for what it is. Nearly 100% emptiness. To me, this seems to indicate that 100% minus the 99.9999999999999% emptiness of the universe equals the consciousness that has the sole ability to say contrary to the truth, "This is not empty". Therefore, all form is one of the many forms of consciousness.

The important thing to learn from this is that EVERYTHING that you call anything is alive. There is one consciousness presenting itself in many forms. This is the next big scientific discovery that we should be working towards.

Life can't come from something not alive. The fact that we exist at all is proof of a primal intelligence template for our emergence.

Also, life emerged already equipped with survival mechanisms and the ability to reproduce. Its as if life knew before it came into being that it was going to want to make copies of itself and propagate its existence and also as if it knew that the environment it was emerging in would require adaptation.

reply to post by ArrowsNV


Thank you! Thank You! Thank You!

I have been guilty of becoming involved in religious debate, to shed light on the fact that no matter what you believe it is just a belief, but this is the correct response.

Namaste

Originally posted by smithjustinb
Life can't come from something not alive. The fact that we exist at all is proof of a primal intelligence template for our emergence.

Are you saying god is alive? Is a planet alive? It's a fact that life comes from planet earth

If god is alive, does he eat and breath and have sex? Do you think we are the progeny of god?

I sincerely believe that Gaia, Planet Earth, Terra Firma, is in fact a sentient, living being, a Womb that is a Wellspring of Regenerating Life. I call this the Divine Mother. All who are born on Earth are Her children. All that you eat, drink, breathe, touch, hear, and feel are Her Queensland. Her consort and lover is the Sun, all powerful, his warming rays have warmed and lighted the world and humankind for millennia. These rays pierce the Womb, and brings forth life, plant, animal, cellular, and all other forms of insect and sea life. This is a never ending cycle, it is born anew, it lives for an appointed time, and it dies, to be born again. Mother Earth, and all who live upon Her follow this cycle of life, death, life.

Originally posted by windword

Originally posted by smithjustinb
Life can't come from something not alive. The fact that we exist at all is proof of a primal intelligence template for our emergence.

Are you saying god is alive?

Yes. I'm really saying something more like God is life. But that could be an understatement.

Is a planet alive?

Well of course it is. If there is life on a planet, the planet is alive. If there is life in the universe, even if it is only on one planet, then the whole universe is alive because life exists as part of it.

If god is alive, does he eat and breath and have sex? Do you think we are the progeny of god?

God is life. Life does these things so it is God doing it.

reply to post by Philodemus


I copied this from someone's avatar on ATS, but I think this is a good representation of the universe and the cosmic serpent.

The serpent represents the force which caused the previously inactive mass to become active and to form itself into the universe.

. . . on what grounds they make the leap from creator and designer to loving God.

I believe in a design, but not so much a designer as a person in our way of understanding what a person is. Whatever it was that came up with the thought which did start things into motion which resulted in the universe would not have continued to exist as it had, beyond a point in the actual creation process, when there would have been at least a rudimentary form of the universe present. It would have had a reason to create the universe, and I imagine that the reason it did was so there would be a place for it to exist as a person, so create it did, and a universe there was, and persons were there inside that universe, in greate number which is the legacy of that original thought, and it includes us as people as minor players, in what we can do individually but all important in terms of what we do to fulfill the desire which created the universe in the first place.

reply to post by jmdewey60



Thank you for what is so far, one of the more "on-topic" replies to my O.P.

I still fail to see how the jump can be made when reading the intentions of the creator. How do we know he is not an evil demon that is playing a twisted game with us as his pawns? I would like someone to outline the benevolence or show me the case for lack of malevolence.

reply to post by smithjustinb


.more]

That is a large statement you made. What happens when we find the other half of the amino acid puzzle floating in space in conditions we hadn't anticipated? What if RH and LH can and do exist somewhere out there independent of each other? What if we find them joined already, just whizzing about? If we do, the likelihood of your "impossibility" is dramatically reduced.

reply to post by Philodemus

I would like someone to outline the benevolence or show me the case for lack of malevolence.

Going back to the photo I used in the post above:

[color=DarkSlateGray]..The dragon is this huge and powerful beast that can fly around and around in a great circle and cause a wind like a great hurricane. It is not evil or good but makes a force from its own strength.
[color=DarkSlateGray]..Within this circle is the primordial mass that is spun by the cosmic wind to form the fabric of the universe. From the perspective of being inside that circle, there is the mixture of the good and bad, seeing how it is forming out of a violent chaos.
[color=DarkSlateGray]..God is not the mass, or the chaos, or the wind, or the dragon. God did not exist when the dragon was born. It came from the plan of the collective consciousness of all the individual thoughts of what was to become every person who would ever eventually inhabit the universe that would be the result of it.
[color=DarkSlateGray]..In the reenvisioned Battlestar Galactica TV series, the goal which becomes apparent as it progresses, is to reunite the "final five" who were responsible for creating the main seven humanoid Cylons. None of them individually could have done it themselves. That is a concept that someone who actually sat through the four seasons, and the pilot miniseries, and the prequel, would understand. I just finished all that and it took me two weeks to do, but I did get that as one of the useful tidbits that can serve as an example through the aide of being made into a movie type experience.
[color=DarkSlateGray]..So, what I am trying to illustrate is how the reasoning behind the existence of the universe is God, in a way, though God in actuality existed in its current form, as a being, only after the universe came into existence for there to be somewhere to exist in. The dragon being a metaphorical device and not an actual being in the normal sense of the word. The universe coming into existence created an inverse situation of the collapse of the void where those thoughts existed, and so forced them all eventually to make their appearance in the universe as beings, regardless of the dangerous condition of the universe, still suffering under the dragon wind that is still working and forming and is not going to die out any time too soon.

Originally posted by Philodemus

So, my question is to those of you who believe in intelligent design (or those who understand those of you). Can you outline your reasoning clearly?

I don't believe they can. Some will state that Intelligent Design can't be DISproven. If that argument were valid then we should all believe in unicorns because they can't be disproven to have ever existed.

Some will say that because we don't know how the very first living cell came into existence, then a god must have created it. Though even I am perplexed by this, I am still holding onto the belief in a natural cause because we once didn't know how the planets orbited the sun, but sooner or later we figured it out. We figured out how and why volcanoes erupt, how storms are formed... Sooner or later all of the secrets of the universe will be revealed to us - through logic and science.

reply to post by jmdewey60

You have illustrated very well what you hold as your theology. Thank you for taking the time to do so. But I am still in the dark with where you stand on the good or evil of said God. Are you trying to imply that God's intrinsic nature up to our collective design?

Within your theology, does your God have any real power or being that it is a creation of the consciousness of the universe is He merely a very large pawn? Can you outline (briefly, considering it is off topic) the omnipotence of your God?

reply to post by jiggerj


Thank you for your reply. I too share your outlook on the universe around us and I have the utmost confidence that our species will unravel the mysteries of the cosmos....given enough time. I still do my best to understand those who have differing opinions than I, and in an attempt to do so start threads like this, where people have the platform to explain to me things that I might not understand about their viewpoints. Too bad, that as far as this post is concerned, I have yet attract such a person that could do so.

Until then, you and I can rest assured that there is neither proof for a good or an evil God and that there is little in the way of evidence for leprechauns either, thankfully.

reply to post by Philodemus


God would be the forerunner, being the first to take the step from out of the nothingness and into the somethingness.
The somethingness is the material universe which of course includes the seen and the unseen.
So the universe does nor exactly create God but God becomes a being by existing in the universe.
Now the reason I would go on the quest to find this explanation is to find the solution to the problem of evil.
That was not something I was aware of until a few years ago when I had it pointed out to me while posting on what had become basically an atheist forum.
What I describe is a God who has very extraordinary power but not unrestricted power, or what gets called "omnipotence", which is one possible translation for Pantocrator, which ends up in the New Testament by way of quoting from the Septuagint, which uses that as the Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew word El Shaddai, which would be better interpreted a sovereign.
The idea is to limit the liability of God for the responsibility of evil, by pushing it off on Anankē who is not a god but a primordial quasi-godlike entity that was responsible for the actual initial structural formation of what became what we think of as the universe. She was tasked with that duty by the collective consciousness within the pre-universe void, which includes you and I, thus making all of us responsible through our desire to become beings in the first place, and thus have no room to complain.

reply to post by jmdewey60


Ah. Thank you. So your theology is broad in its foundation by taking in all (or most) holy books and finding common ground? I can appriciate that approach. What writtings do you place the most "faith" in?

reply to post by Philodemus

What writtings do you place the most "faith" in?

I don't have some sort of magic book and I try to maintain a certain level of skepticism.
I think there was an oral tradition which comes through in fragments in what we have today as writings.