Does Covid-19 disprove the existence of God?

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, August 18, 2025 18:31
VIEWED: 13620
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CAPTAINCRUNCH

Wednesday, May 6, 2020 11:19 PM

This design... you have to say it's kind of "beautiful" in a purely aesthetic way. It's definitely not random. Recent mutations can only be seen as an upgrade from the orginal, as if there is some kind of intelligence directing it.

Can something as destructive toward mankind as this exist in a world with a God?

THG

Thursday, May 7, 2020 1:19 AM

T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

God Bashing at Its Best by Christopher Hitchens

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, May 7, 2020 9:13 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
This design... you have to say it's kind of "beautiful" in a purely aesthetic way. It's definitely not random. Recent mutations can only be seen as an upgrade from the orginal, as if there is some kind of intelligence directing it.

Can something as destructive toward mankind as this exist in a world with a God?

Sure it could.

Are you even familiar with a book called The Bible?

There's shit that happened in there that makes The Coomph look like a stubbed toe.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

SECOND

Thursday, May 7, 2020 4:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:

Can something as destructive toward mankind as this exist in a world with a God?

David Hume in "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" puts the following words into the mouth of Philo, “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he [Deity] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

Augustine wrote about the Problem of Evil:
Where does evil come from then, seeing that God, who is good, has created all these things good? - Augustine, Confessions.

I asked how he dealt with the old theological conundrum, the problem of evil. If God loves us, why is life often so painful and unfair? Why do innocent people suffer? Kauffman said his God, if He exists, is the cool, impersonal deity of Spinoza, not the emotionally volatile tyrant of the Old Testament.

For Don Page, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, this elegance goes far beyond human actions. Page is both a hard-core Everettian and a committed Christian. Like many modern physicists, he agrees with Everett’s stance that collapsing the wave function is unnecessarily complicated. What’s more, for Page it has a happy side effect: it explains why his God tolerates the existence of evil. “God has values,” he says. “He wants us to enjoy life, but he also wants to create an elegant universe.” To God the importance of elegance comes before that of suffering, which, Page infers, is why bad things happen. “God won’t collapse the wave function to cure people of cancer, or prevent earthquakes or whatever, because that would make the universe much more inelegant.”

For Page, that is an intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil. And what’s more, many worlds may even take care of free will. Page doesn’t actually believe we have free will, because he feels we live in a reality in which God determines everything, so it is impossible for humans to act independently. But in the many-worlds interpretation every possible action is actually taken. “It doesn’t mean that it’s fixed that I do one particular course of action. In the multiverse, I’m doing all of them,” says Page.
From the Quantum World by New Scientist

Problem of evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

The Problem of Evil: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, May 7, 2020 5:44 PM

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

To Kyle Harper, provost and a medieval and Roman historian at The University of Oklahoma in Norman, the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice "give us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy."

More at www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, May 7, 2020 5:49 PM

If everything was great all the time, you would have no reference point and everything would be normal.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

CAPTAINCRUNCH

Thursday, May 7, 2020 7:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:

Can something as destructive toward mankind as this exist in a world with a God?
David Hume in "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" puts the following words into the mouth of Philo, “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he [Deity] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

Augustine wrote about the Problem of Evil:
Where does evil come from then, seeing that God, who is good, has created all these things good? - Augustine, Confessions.

I asked how he dealt with the old theological conundrum, the problem of evil. If God loves us, why is life often so painful and unfair? Why do innocent people suffer? Kauffman said his God, if He exists, is the cool, impersonal deity of Spinoza, not the emotionally volatile tyrant of the Old Testament.

For Don Page, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, this elegance goes far beyond human actions. Page is both a hard-core Everettian and a committed Christian. Like many modern physicists, he agrees with Everett’s stance that collapsing the wave function is unnecessarily complicated. What’s more, for Page it has a happy side effect: it explains why his God tolerates the existence of evil. “God has values,” he says. “He wants us to enjoy life, but he also wants to create an elegant universe.” To God the importance of elegance comes before that of suffering, which, Page infers, is why bad things happen. “God won’t collapse the wave function to cure people of cancer, or prevent earthquakes or whatever, because that would make the universe much more inelegant.”
For Page, that is an intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil. And what’s more, many worlds may even take care of free will. Page doesn’t actually believe we have free will, because he feels we live in a reality in which God determines everything, so it is impossible for humans to act independently. But in the many-worlds interpretation every possible action is actually taken. “It doesn’t mean that it’s fixed that I do one particular course of action. In the multiverse, I’m doing all of them,” says Page.
From the Quantum World by New Scientist

Problem of evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

The Problem of Evil: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/

If you are interested in Multiverse plot lines you should consider watching Devs on Hulu (may be elsewhere).

I can't make these work at the same time:

"God won’t collapse the wave function to cure people of cancer, or prevent earthquakes or whatever, because that would make the universe much more inelegant.”

and

"God has values"

Unless you go to they are totally selfish values, and we're here just for his/her/its amusement.

SIGNYM

Thursday, May 7, 2020 8:21 PM

God?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, May 8, 2020 3:35 AM

He's just throwing around some Democrat Atheist tripe.

Of course The Coomph can't disprove the existence of God. What a stupid question.

Nothing is going to either prove or disprove the existence of God. Nothing that we discover or theorize is ever going to be mutually exclusive to the concept of God.

You either believe or you don't believe. It's a personal decision.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

SECOND

Friday, May 8, 2020 8:49 AM

ARGUMENT FROM MULTIPLICITY (V) (recursive internet edition)
(1) There exists a web page ( www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm )
(2) That page has hundreds of purported proofs of the existence of God.
(3) They can't all be wrong.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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