GOD : OMNIPRESENT, OMNISCIENT AND OMNIPOTENT !
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Prof.. C B S R Sharma, Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences Pondicherry University [Retired] 7, Airport Road, Pondicherry 605 008 , [ Ph: 0413 – 225-7036 ]
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How nice it is to have a God.
No one sees god. But every one feels.

It is like the bird that feels the dawn when it is still dark.
It is also like the wolf that feels the dusk when there is still light.

The Pancha Bhootas, the five elements of nature were resources
to the humans, when balanced, but very harmful if imbalanced.
Both good and bad are the attributes of the same.
Humans realized ecology and called it god.

When a child is borne the mother feels the god.
When some one dies, the dear ones fear the god.

When some one kills the other without touching him, the witness sees the god. God is not merely linkages, but a web, inscrutable.

When bad people succeed and enjoy life, Why bad things happen to good people ? what is god doing? Is he existing, or if not is he also bad like the powerful. God’s duty is to protect the good and punish the evil.
An Enigma indeed.

God lies in the work. Work produces dirt. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Truth is god. But truth is bitter. It takes us to the crematorial elegy land,
the last lap of all journeys, sooner. God is a self contradiction

Myriad times I felt how nice if we have a god. Albeit, formless, faceless, flavorless, tasteless, speechless, senseless, but valuable and powerful?
God is an insatiable yearning.

No one sees god, although feel, but late.
Therefore evils and bads, flourish.
How nice it is to have a God.

I have seen god,
in the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.
And in the entire Siddhardha of Herman Hesse

I feel god, whenever good happens , rain and river banks
I deny god, whenever bad happens, heat and dust
This is the stuff of god , a summation of all probabilities
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But GOD has always haunted me and did not enlighten me..
Ecology enlightens me. And I found my God. A great necessity

Well, maybe they should, why not. As long as it comes with smart immigration policy that will help replace those creating new technologies, drugs etc. from countries like India, China and Russia – i see no problem

Gee, Mr. Cromwell, that response to my post was pretty much irrelevant.

Theism is not a conjecture. It a world-view, or rather, a group of world-views, just as atheism is a group of world-views. The atheism of Richard Dawkins, for example, is a rather naive form of radical empiricism in epistemology & materialism in metaphysics. The problems with this kind of uncritical, radical empiricism have been exposed by Popper, by Wittgenstein, by Quine, by Sellars, by Polanyi, by Kuhn, and by Plantinga.

The questions that Dawkins & Dawkinite clones across the Internet are pretty much destined to be the wrong questions. They are questioned premised upon a faulty, self-refuting world-view. They fail to provide any solid basis for knowledge-claims of any kind, theistic or otherwise.

Dawkinites are laughable in their parochialism. Not only do they assume that all rational people share their beliefs, they assume that the methods of natural science are the only rational methods of inquiry, implicitly discounting ethics, ontology, aesthetics, teleology, epistemology, history, economics, law, mathematics, and personal, relational knowledge. The contradictions are obvious. First, methods of inquiry are not constant & uniform across the various branches of the natural sciences. Second, the natural sciences are not a self-justifying enterprise; they presuppose the validity of mathematics, of logic, of induction, of sense perception, but do not provide an ultimate foundation for any of these necessary beliefs.

Theism, or Christian theism, at any rate, does provide an adequate foundation for these necesssary beliefs, while Dawkinite varieties of atheism do not. (Neither do other varieties of atheism, IMHO.) In that sense, the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris-quoting professing atheist who uses math, logic, induction, or even sense perception is (at the very least) closer to theism than atheism in his daily practice.

More could be said, but I’ve probably offended enough people for one week.

Naturally, all of this begs the question. Can we use reason to increase our knowledge in this, or in any matter? While this might seem a most treacherous notion to posit amongst scientists, the absolute nature of the question (or any absolute question, such as “does paper exist”) does in fact inspire this logical fallacy noted in the first sentence of this paragraph.

I make these comments, for the most part, in ignorance of the history of epistemology, so I apologize if I have made any basic mistakes with regard to that subject. And while I have been, more or less, resolute in my own beliefs with regard to the matter, it seems that the conflation of personal and rational beliefs is particularly poignant in this topic, as it is quite likely that our own beliefs that rationality is the ultimate path to “knowledge” is what drove many of us into pursuing careers as scientists in the first place.

There are ambiguities due to poor writing; but I take it that we are not here considering an argument about how best to write encyclopedia articles. However, the basic idea is easy enough to see; it just requires the application of basic reading skills. That’s what makes the post such a great satire of certain ID methods for criticizing their critics: it’s exactly the sort of thing they do, trading on ambiguities, lapses in good writing habits, verbal similarities, obscurity of context, etc., in order to put forward a superficially plausible criticism that doesn’t stand up to basic critical examination.

You say,

Brandon, your stance would be more compelling if you could find a way to actually reveal to us what the technical definition of “formal dogmatic atheism” is supposed to be, and cite the relevant passage in the Catholic Encyclopedia, so that we may more easily see why such a stance is self-refuting. Thanks!

I’m not sure what ‘stance’ this is referring to; but the “cite the relevant passage” part is absurd. Do you think niche encyclopedias define every technical term they use, given that they can assume that certain things are known by their intended audience? Since the Catholic Encyclopedia is a niche encyclopedia, it would require looking at the context in which it was written, namely, in the context of what would have been generally recognized by educated Catholics of the sort had in view by the encyclopedists in 1917; in the context of the article, the natural approach would also be to look at Bacon and Arnold, to whom the article explicitly refers on this point.

This is pretty basic stuff, not rocket science, as you well know: don’t quote out of context, look for the broader context of the text itself, don’t build arguments out of mere verbal similarities, don’t read into silences without investigation, in short, hold yourself at least to elementary rational standards. And the post, as I said, is a pretty decent parody of what atheist reasoning would become if all atheists argued like intelligent design theorists, since these are precisely the uncritical moves for which IDers are often rightly criticized.

A trend, come to think of it, that recedes to the beginning of recorded history, and not merely in the case of political power. One thinks immediately of Caligula, perhaps one or two popes. Unfortunately, the weapons at their disposal continue increasing exponentially in efficacy, as the terrors of the Old Testament continue to fade.
Yet, inasmuch as time and causality move in both directions, as Sean points out, did some compulsion to create the catastrophe, say, of the Iraq war produce the backwards causation for the Scalia decision declaring Florida for Dubya?

Re cogito, remember Popeye’s great self-affirmation, I yam what I yam, which may have influenced Descartes’ immemorial syllogistic aphorism.

It would seem consciousness is some form of bottom up emergent phenomena, in the sense that it is apparent in lower order fauna and there really is no clear line between biological reactive functions and conscious perception. Even much of human activity could be argued is primarily reactive while still being conscious. The intellect, on the other hand, is a modeling of reality, a top down ordering of perception. The Platonic Ideal is the top down order as absolute, of which all other form is corrupt copy. Since the unitary state is formless, there is no absolute form and the projection of one simply serves to stifle further evolution, creating a constrictive and brittle model that only serves to hinder further upward process, until it breaks down and a new form begins to take shape. “Punctuated Equilibrium,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it. So the intellect would be the construct, while consciousness is an emergent reality.

not-(I am) —> not-(I think) = non sum ergo non cogito.

To state non cogito ergo non sum implies a necessary and sufficient condition. I am not sure this obtains. Of course the statement “I am” implies some recognition of beingness. This is a bit different from saying it does not exist therefore it does not think. Of course I think that anything which is capable of awareness or thought is a physical system, but I don’t know that.

It is interesting to note that “I am” is the identification God tells to Moses. If you are familiar with the Gospels, Jesus in Matthew identifies himself as “I am,” in the temple, where upon the priests and crowd chase after him and he disappears. Descartes in making this little syllogism came close to committing a blasphemy that could have gotten his ass in a major sling. Consider that mid 17th century Europe was coming out of a serious funk over the reformation and counter reformation.

Lawrence B. Crowell

The universe will undoubtedly exist after H. sapiens is gone as well. Our species exists on very precarious terms. The biggest problem is that we are tearing down the planetary life support system. Global warming is an obvious problem, but to my mind equally disturbing are the disappearance of pollenating insects, ocean die-off and coral reef bleeching, tropical deforestation which has doubled in its rate in the last 20 years and so forth. Another disturbing trend is that we tend to place mentally disordered people in positions of great power. We have a President who learned foreign policy by playing the MB game Risk and took particular delight and glee at ordering executions as governor of Texas. This nation has been lead by a pantheon of schitzotypal personality disordered types for nearly 8 years. It appears likely that the world has not seen the last of this, and if not in the US then maybe in Russia or China or elsewhere. So to make an honest conclusion I think it likely the human species will not exist terribly much longer. Yet I think the universe will continue.

The final state of the universe is something we can talk about, though we can’t observe it. The AdS/CFT dualism and observed “eternal inflation” suggests that the final state of the universe is the AdS conformal infinity as an empty Minkowski spacetime. As the universe expands to become more deSitter-like eventually the cosmological horizon will likely emit a very weak radiation and the cosmological horizon will recede away “to infinity.”

The role of consciousness in the universe is strange. Before we ever get a handle on that we need to tackle the issue of “Why classical physics?” We might think of the universe as a grand path integral and the observable universe as some einselected state from all possible spacetime configurations. Einselection is an approach to understanding the role of classical physics according to how wave functions are reduced or so called collapsed offered by W. Zurek. In this process obviously classical gravity or general relativity emerged as well as large decoherent structures such as stars, planets and the like. I think that this einselection has some type of extremization to it where a cosmology is einselected so as to permit the maximum possible level of complexity in local regions. This might then tie cosmology to this bio-planet and the existence of ourselves.

The universe has a curious property where the most elementary of quanta or particles are indistinguishable, with some quantum statistics to go along with that. Larger decoherent structures are more distinquishable. We can fiind great differences between planets or between different species of life. The different “frames” of consciousness or POV may be tied to this.

It might also be the case that consciousness is in some ways analogous to a gauge potential. In physics there are two types of these. The first is with internal symmetries which give rise to gauge fields such as electromagnetism or QCD. Here the gauge potentials are not at all observable, and really don’t exist. The other is external symmetries which we call relativity. Here the equivalent of a gauge is a coordinate frame. This is in some sense observable, though it really is a sort of mathematical construction more than a physical one. Then of course comes supersymmetry which unifies these two types of gauge fields. If consciousness is some analogue of this then in some sense we might say that consciousness does not really exist. Of course this might raise all types of objections. Maybe mind exists in some platonic sense.

Lawrence B. Crowell

“Need anyone really need say any more?”

Pardon.

- David Lyndes

Need anyone really say any more?

Dogmatic religionists do, and how, and they yap so incessently that they hardly ever give themselves a chance to listen, or if they ever manage a moment’s worth, bother to contemplate any argument they judge doesn’t conicide with their preconceptions.

In short, ladies and gentlemen, they don’t come from a place of reason and logic. They come from a place of authoritarian righteousness.

It seems to me the issue is that while bottom up process is unitary, the top down order derived from it isn’t absolute in the sense that one frame can be derived from it. It is this assumption that this bottom up connectivity ultimately implies some absolute frame that is the basis of all Platonic assumptions, from monotheism to, as Lawrence says, Tegmark’s argument(s).
It amounts to confusing zero with one. Unitary doesn’t imply a universal unit.