Defying the Deity
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 18:15
VIEWED: 9122
PAGE 5 of 11
Quote:So, omniscience is a form of time travel into the future?
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I imagine God to be like my wife. He can impatiently skip ahead to the last page of the story to see how it ends.
But as with all time travel stories, it is only one possible future. Maybe one probable future. But I have grave objections to its being a certain future.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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I would posit it's probably less like time travel and more like existing outside time.
Quantum Mechanics seems to suggest there is only one future, and events in the future can reach back and influence the past and present. Quantum mechanics also posits that each potential action might spin off multiple "worlds" where the outcome is different, but we have more experimental evidence for distinctions of past, present and future being an illusion than we do multiple worlds.
Causality is just something humans impose over the universe for a sense of narrative. Perhaps we see the universe as expanding, and time moving forward relative to our sense of forward, but the universe is really contracting, and time is moving backwards.
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Quote:Interesting! Explain?
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Quantum Mechanics seems to suggest there is only one future, and events in the future can reach back and influence the past and present. Quantum mechanics also posits that each potential action might spin off multiple "worlds" where the outcome is different, but we have more experimental evidence for distinctions of past, present and future being an illusion than we do multiple worlds.
Causality is just something humans impose over the universe for a sense of narrative. Perhaps we see the universe as expanding, and time moving forward relative to our sense of forward, but the universe is really contracting, and time is moving backwards.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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Quote:
Exactly like Buddha.
Jesus was a person, real and whole. He was the best part of humanity IMO. Like Mother Theresa. An example of what we can aspire to in our own individual lives.Quote:
That's one of buddhist teachings.
Or it may be that God is US now, every living molecule. A walk in the skin of existence, so to speak.Quote:
That is perhaps the essence of buddhism.
this is the voice one is supposed to listen to in meditative thought. This is the voice that observes, without passion and without pain.Quote:
That's my main problem with organized religion.
All religions are inconsistent because they reflect they that created them - us - people.Quote:
Absolutely, in my opinion.
laws of the Old Testament seem outrageous to us now, they were values shared by a tough desert tribe who lived harsh lives that bear no relation to our own thousands of years ago.
I think it more truthful to say that man creates god in his own image, rather than the other way around.Quote:
One of the main reasons I don't accept a "god".
If God asks something of me that I consider abhorrent, then he/she can not truly be the God I worship. He/She may be some powerful thing, and may be able to hurt me, but that isn't my God.Quote:
A bit "scientific", but also right on, and a buddhist teaching put in a different way. All those express my own feelings in one way or another.
I believe in a 'Versal energy flow, a 'Force' if you will. We, our cats, our bacteria are all physical expressions of the multi-dimensional living spirit of high speed quantum particles.
I've related before that I began with "Christian" parents...Protestant I believe...who weren't religious at all and just went to church on Sundays. Then I had a Mormon best friend, read the Book of Mormon over and over, and converted. I don't think I was very religious even then (mid-teens), it was more that there were two Mormons who had to visit twice weekly to "instruct" me--both were young, good looking and Australian, and I've always been a sucker for Ozzie or British accents. But I DID search my soul, I DID read the Book of Mormon and truly believed I was searching. So I got "dunked". Shortly thereafter, I found out about Mormon racism--which NOBODY had told me about--was shocked and disgusted, and left. It was inconceivable to me that a RELIGION could be racist! I was real naive, needless to say. But it was the point where I probably rejected organized religion.
For decades after that I had no religion...I was an agnostic. Then I had a co-worker who was a buddhist monk, and, when questioned, what she had to say about buddhism struck such a strong chord with what I believed that I investigated it. I've been a buddhist ever since, and aside from not having decided how I feel about reincarnation, it's never gone against my conscience or given me reason to question my belief in it.
I hate religions because of all the harm they've done over the ages. They are, to me, the epitome of not having to think for yourself FOR MANY PEOPLE (NOT, by all means, all those who believe in a religion or a god). The historical power struggles and politics of "the church" (any church) say to me that religion is something humans twist to fit their own needs. I believe those who don't question themselves follow something (or nothing) blindly; that anyone who actually spends time thinking about it, honestly and with self-knowledge (the latter being by far the most important), will come up with answers which make them compassionate people...flawed, we all are, but compassionate.
The concept of a god has always been at odds with logic to me, ever since I really began to think about it and made and effort to know and accept myself and, as an outgrowth, humanity.
Now Jesus, I believe in firmly. Not as a deity, but as someone like Buddha or Ghandi; a c
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Well, it was an idea put forward by cosmologists. We don't really know how the universe begins and ends, so there's some speculation. One is that with the way the universe is growing, coupled with dark energy and matter, that the universe might grow forever, but the stars will eventually burn all available fusionable material, and everything will be so far apart that the universe will be dark and cold and lifeless. Another is that the expansion of the universe may eventually slow, then start contracting, ending in a big crunch. Still another is that the universe "just misses" big bangs or big crunches due to quantum effects and so the universe is perpetual and expands and contracts in cycles (yo-yo universe).
In any case, some cosmologists believe that space and time are so interconnected that ONLY when space is EXPANDING does time seem to move forward relative to your perceptions, and that if space started to contract, time could potentially move backwards relative to our perceptions.
The question is, if time were moving backwards, would the shattered glass reform itself and jump from the ground back up to the table, or would we even be able to notice at all? If glasses jumping to a table were the norm of an expanding timeline, but we were living in a contracting timeline, we would interpret physics and gravity as we know it.
The idea cosmologists have is that the entirety of history would retrace itself as the universe collapsed, and that the effect of an event would come before it's cause (reverse causality), but I don't think that's the only possibility, and I think there's some suggestion that physicists still don't have the relationship of time and space right.
So personally, I think it's more a bunch of hypothetical philosophy than anything. But, the yo-yo universe speculation could gain some relevance if the universe were actually the inside (or rather, other side) of a black hole.
Think about it.
In any case, there's been experiments done measuring the position of particles, and a peculiar quantum mechanical effect was observed that it seems that measurements of a particle in the FUTURE could effect the measurement of the particle in the present, but you only realize it after you've measured again in the future and looked at the data, compared to a time when you didn't measure multiple times. Yet, each time, the measurements are consistent.
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Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
The key question here is, can you change this video that God has seen before?
Can you make a different choice he has already seen to arrive at an alternate ending?
If you can't, then it feels like predestination and absence of free will to me. We would just be puppets whose strings are pulled by an already written script.
The difference is between "can" and "will". While I think it is possible for you to do something different then what God knows you will do, you simply will not.
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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Thanks, Byte. I will have to read more about this. Very fascinating.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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Other related topic, we've mapped a lot of the background radiation coming from the big bang, and while it's right with the predicted frequency for the big bang, we've found that the intensity of the waves is inconsistent and varies from place to place. This, coupled with the observation that the universe has clusters of galaxy intermixed with lots of empty space suggests that the universe expands unevenly.
And, if expansion of space IS tied in with time... Then time actually progresses at a different rate in different pockets of the universe.
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Hello,
Curious. I wonder what could cause the Universe to expand unevenly? I'd always imagined some central point of superdense stuff exploding outward.
But if the explosion was uneven, then it suggests to me that the explosion was less like a cherry bomb and more like a shaped charge.
But shaped by what? Unevenness in the core material at the point of detonation? Was the substance of the universe not evenly distributed in the super-dense point when it all went bang?
Or was there something outside the point that caused the explosion to be directed unevenly? And if so, does that mean that something was not part of the bang, and therefore a remnant of some prior quality of the universe?
Either way, it says something interesting about the moment of origin. I'm not sure what that something interesting is, but I can see the edge of a question whose answers I am not equipped to understand.
--Anthony
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"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner
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A lot of the trouble with this whole issue of time seems to me to stem from an overly anthropomorphic and, by extension, materialistic notion of "god." As if "he's" some sorta physical "guy" you could interview on the subject right now. But that ain't happening.
If god experiences all of history in an instant, what does that have to do with us, exactly? The Christians believe in a judgment day when all the souls will awaken at the end of time and be judged by god. Nobody has walked through the pearly gates yet according to that cosmology. Everyone's still lying in their graves, taking a nap. It's weird, 'cause, y'know, I don't know a lot of Christians who take notice of this.
Of course, time would be pretty meaningless to the dead, so they'd experience their death and prolly move right on to the judgment without noticing the possible eons between here and there from our perspective. So, god knowing everything that has ever happened, precisely as it has happened, from his point of view, is no paradox and interferes not at all with your free will in the here and now.
Y'know, I suppose, in that frame, if god were to come on down and visit one or several of us, it would be as if he were a time traveler from the end of all come back to see us. And if he were to do that, it would necessarily alter the future, but there again, wouldn't it be god who was altering the future anyway?
Of course, that's just goofy theology. Doesn't mean it's true. And it's certainly counter-intuitive to think that no one who has died, y'know, if they're still around somehow, has moved on yet and is just sleeping in their graves waiting for a judgment day. Seems kind of a waste of time and spiritual resources, no? But that's the opinion of linear time. Maybe linear time is simply an experience peculiar to us. We're like 2 dimensional people meeting up with a sphere--in other words, we're in no position to understand much of anything about god.
Christianity is peculiar among theologies in that it combines the notion of a creator deity and a personal god in one omni-kickass being. Strikes me as just a tad egomaniacal to think that the Creator of All is also intimately concerned with my mundane, day to day business. But that's the problem with anthropomorphism. God is simply that thing that can be aware of all people everywhere in time. That's a strange thing indeed. To my mind the Christian concept of god is kinda hopelessly mired in anthropomorphic, anthropocentric thinking; hopelessly bound up with notions of hierarchy and centralized power that have a distinctly human, patriarchal, cultural flavor and have nothing to do with the truly, definitively divine.
I think of god more as the sum total of all awareness throughout time/space. God is a descriptive term like "everything" or "big." God's will is the net consensus of all being. If I meditate on god's will, it is to connect myself to all being on a conscious level and seek to align my thinking with that consensus. From there, I look at the material time-ridden world around me and see how I can help to bring it into harmony with the all.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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