Sure like to each his own and all that.... but for some reason this tilts me so bad.

Me 2. But mainly because PTB breaks my otherwise flawless observation that people who post with highly unothordox posting styles (their own quoting schemes, colours, typed out signatures, etc) are universally terrible posters. He is the only counterexample of which I am aware

Nice;

And yes, putting semicolons in front of smileys counts

Then, that leads to inevitable question.... did Neanderthals have a soul? did Cro-magnon man have a soul? Did **** Erectus? At what point in evolution did man transcend biology for the divine?

All I'm saying is that for a leader of a religion that continual encourages the flock to bear witness, God seems to expend most of his energy trying not to spread the good word. If the idea was for Jesus to sacrifice himself to save everyone in the world, wouldn't it be better for it to be done in a way that 95% of the known world at the time would have heard about it in their lifetime.

If I'm helping those less fortunate than me, I would expend a lot of my energy trying to make sure that as many people as possible are able to take advantage of whatever I have to offer. That is the right thing to do. Some would say that is even the "Christian" thing to do.

-Angel wars

-losers are sent to earth for reform school (incarnation)

-Moses lays out God's perfect governmental model - "the kingdom". Jesus preaches the gospel of the kingdom, laying aside selfish ambition and showing the "way" (not presenting a magical chant for people to learn "Jesus died for my sins")

-Those who "evolve" are admitted back to heaven, the rest are reincarnated and try again.

-Time to get it right expires.

According to archaeological evidence, at some point in evolution, possibly at about 70,0000 years ago, **** Sapiens made a great leap forward in intellectual capacity that no other species has even come close to doing. We gained higher level reasoning, abstract thought, high level cognition, and complex language skills. No other creatures in the 3.5 billion years of life on earth has had these capacities. You can call that gaining a soul, if you want.

PairTheBoard has been doing that for a long time i think he is grandfathered in.

God couldn't or didn't want to build gaining a soul into the natural universe so he had or wanted to intervene?

I ask because the alien thing again. It would mean if there is other intelligent life out there with abstract thought and all that good stuff and the soul is responsible for that, it means God needed to intervene with all them too.

Seems like a lot work, and quite a bit more depending on souls and salvation views. I know there isn't any real work for God but it does look like an unnecessary step if he could of built it in. And if he cant then i need to put that on my list.

13.6 billion years doesn't seem like all that long a time. It went by pretty quick for me. On the other hand, the little sliver of time that has made up my life, while going by much too fast to suit me, seems rather enormous.

Maybe this has already been mentioned, but it seems to me the strongest example of something puzzling in the vastness of the universe. That being all the stuff that's beyond our light cone. i.e. Galaxies so distant and accelerating away from us so fast that we will never see them and could never reach them even if we could travel at the speed of light.

Yet there are a lot of people for whom contemplating the vastness of the universe brings on a kind of mystic experience, sometimes even inspiring a belief in god.


PairTheBoard

If God is a fourth grade student in another dimension doing a science project it all makes sense.

So God created two **** Sapiens (Adam and Eve) and then killed the remainder of the man-like but soulless others. If every human has a soul now and they are all descended from Adam and Eve, then all of the soulless forms of man must have been killed off at some point.... although there is absolutely no evidence for that. Also, if that happened 70,000 years ago, then based on the timeline of the Bible, the events of Abraham and Noah would have happened 67,000-68,000 years ago, long before humans had the capabilities that are shown in the Bible. So the events in the Bible must have happened 6,000 years ago (or so, give or take a few thousand) which is 60,000 plus years after they gained a soul by your calculations.

Which part is not true? The Bible or your version of evolution? You can't just apply science to the Bible when the two of them have absolutely nothing that matches.

You could ask the people who wrote the Bible how old the Universe is, but they wouldn't even understand the question. You would have to ask how old the Earth is and even then (I can't guarantee, but I'm going to guess) they would all say less than 10,000 years. The primitive mind of that time couldn't even comprehend the scope and complexity of the Universe that we live.

We, as a semi-intelligent race are just newborns, barely able to look up out of our crib. Even though we are miles ahead of our ancestors from a few thousand years ago, we are still just starting to understand our tiny little corner of the Universe.

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

Albert Einstein



Q. “Are only the important events in a man’s life,
such as his main occupation or profession, predetermined,
or are trifling acts also, such as taking a cup of water or
moving from one part of the room to another?”
A. “Everything is predetermined.”
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

If you're quoting this because it is in line to what PairTheBoard said above, then I'm not sure that you understand what Einstein was actually talking about in the quote.

Yes, but most fourth grade students don't run their experiment for an entire year and only take any data readings for the 6-7 seconds before the science fair starts.

PTB is talking about free will and a determined universe a bit indirectly which is what Einstein is talking about directly.

I believe Einstein didn't want to go along with Quantum Theory, objecting to quantum indeterminacy. His "god does not play dice with the universe" quip was a clever way of expressing that objection. The trouble with appealing to Einstein to support predestination is that he pretty much lost his debate with the Quantum Theory people.

I admit my idea of a creation with complete timeline carries with it some theological difficulties. I happen to like the idea of libertarian free will. I'm not sure the two are incompatible though. I'm not even sure such a creation necessarily implies predestination the way we think of it. I suspect a lot of theological problems are due to the weakness of human concepts. Maybe we need to accept dual theological theories for some things, like dual wave/particle theories.

PairTheBoard

Have you considered that God was simply allowing his universe to achieve the elemental complexity necessary for our brand of life? Would have been rather difficult to build iphones with only Hydrogen and Helium... Even around the 7 billion year mark the heavier elements were scarce relative to our experience.

I also think OP's post begs the question, who says God has to do anything once the universe is set in motion? i.e. clockmaker argument. As for me, I see God's hand in my life every day so the clockmaker argument is unappealing.

I am interested, how do you see gods hand in your life every day? some examples?

Are you a happy person?
I literally am at a loss as to how to even begin answering that. My life is blessed from the moment I get up to the moment I close them at the end of the day, and all the time in between. If I had to give you my best example of God shaping my world, I would point to my wife. I was going down a very dark road after my first tour in Afghanistan and there she was. I thought I dreamed her. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that God led me to her. She saved me. Whether or not you believe everything in life is chaos and coincidence is inconsequential to me unless, through further discussion, you could perhaps be convinced that the world around you is only as dark and godless as you make it.

But this brings up the question of why didn't God just snap his fingers so that things would start at the point of life or human life. Why just create subatomic particles and the quantum theory that would randomly lead to life? One obvious answer is that he didn't know how to do that. Like my fourth grader.

Clearly many religious people think that this is a real problem. Otherwise why refuse to accept an old universe in the face of insurmountable evidence.

The heavy elements in our solar system come from prior supernova explosions in our cosmic neighborhood. These heavy elements have not been developed inside of our solar system through age. They may have entered our solar system and contributed to the mix, but they were not created out of the inner solar system (except for H to He, but that isn't heavy).

If we are talking about elemental complexity, our basic subatomic elements haven't really changed. "We are all made of star stuff" That is one of the most far-reaching statements ever made based on its simplicity and extremely complex connotations.

If an artist could "snap their fingers" and produce acceptable work, would they? If we remove the idea of payment for their work from this hypothetical, I would argue they would most certainly not. Perhaps the universe is a manifestation of the old adage that's in not the destination, but the journey.

Also, if we retain the idea of "Faith," believing in something we cannot prove in absolutes, as absolutely central to God's plans, I would argue this(our universe) is the only option. To head off the obvious retort to this, even in the multiverse theories you still have to answer to first cause. I think the multiverse theories are, in fact, freaking glorious. I've asked myself since childhood why God would limit himself to one universe. Why not one with completely different laws, where gravity and and the strong force are a little weaker, a place populated by giant clouds of consciousness? Why not?

...I'm not sure where you got confused, but your post is essentially a more detailed explanation of the things I said. My post had nothing to do with our particular solar system... and as much as I love Sagan(his religious views notwithstanding) I prefer "star dust" to "star stuff."

So you have no actual evidence, it just that you think it must be gods hand, therefore it is?

I could then claim that every single thing in your life was due to gods hand, and no one could refute it.