Cethin

Who started or what started the spark something cannot come from nothing…

No, they happen in relation to other things happening, but nothing creates them, especially not a someone. They just pop into existence. Why is that so hard to believe? Is it any less believable than needing some supernatural force to cause it? What created them? That wouldn’t answer any questions anyway, so why would that be more believable.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production

If things in the beginning were static, no movement, no input or output…

Things weren’t static. They just weren’t in general. Before the universe started and space-time came into existence, there was no space or time. There is no before, and there’s no where to be static. At some point it just existed, not at any time, since time didn’t exist. It’s hard, or rather impossible, to really hold the concept in your mind because we can’t imagine a timelessness, but that seems to be the case.

It’s not really a guessing game, it’s a there’s his gospel, we follow his gospel and we’re rewarded, which he will ensure everyone has an opportunity to, or they can choose otherwise and receive the level of reward they so desire. No one’s going to force somebody to live in a specific way; That’s against the point.

It’s my understanding that if we know of it in this world and deny it then that’s the choice we make, correct? If so, and if all other religions claim the same veracity with the same level of proof/evidence, what makes it different than a guessing game?

And God is good because he gives us a choice. Choice means we can become our own individuals, make our own mistakes, learn, and grow. Which to us is the fundamental answer to the purpose of this life. (Buddhism “Life is Suffering”) Otherwise, what’s the point of it all? We’d be hollow machines, always living in a good but un-understanding state of being with no opportunities to grow and move forward.

I’m currently having a discussion with someone else in this thread about this basically. Yes we’re given freedom to choose, but God created the world exactly how he wanted, with the knowledge of everything that would result, with the power to make literally anything happen, right? If he wanted to he could have created a world where we all freely choose the right thing, even when given the ability to choose the wrong thing. Not machines programmed to choose the right thing, just an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent designer who sets things up to fall into place perfectly.

The example I just used in that other comment is like setting up dominos. You don’t decide the physics of how they’ll fall, you just intelligently set them up so they fall the way you want. If you’re omnipotent and omniscient then this is trivial for you, and you must be able to do this for people’s choices such that they just always choose the right thing. If you’re benevolent then this is what you want. You still make just as many choices, but they just all happen to be good.

Therefore yes, God could have created a world where Adam and Eve never fell—but that would not be a world of genuinely free persons. It would be a world of perfectly programmed beings, and Orthodoxy insists that freedom is essential to personhood. Without it, love isn’t possible.

I think you misunderstand. He could create a world where they freely choose to not fall. It’s not predetermination, like you say. It’s premeditation. He must have wanted them to fall, because that’s what he knew would happen and he set it up so they would choose that. If I set up a tripline that activated a trap then tell someone to go where it’ll be tripped, that’s something I did, even if they chose to follow it.

He’s all powerful, so he must necessarily be able to create a world with free will and free choices, but also one such that we always genuinely choose the right thing. It doesn’t require us to be programmed beings. Rather it requires foreknowledge, planning, and capability of the designer, and a desire for this to be the case. It doesn’t matter if we can’t imagine that world. He’s omnipotent. He can create it, but chose not to.

From our human perspective, it may seem this way. But God did not create evil or suffering—He permitted it as the cost of freedom, because only through freedom can there be love, growth, and communion. What matters is not just that suffering exists, but how God responds to it.

Again, he designed it knowing the results, with the ability to create absolutely anything, even things we can’t imagine. The problem with the human perspective is we assume this is the way things must be, but with omnipotence it allows literally anything to be possible, including total freedom, but also where every choice made is good. That is necessarily true, if he is omnipotent.

He can create a world where every person gets into heaven, by choice, even if they have the ability to make choices where they wouldn’t, since he’s omniscient. It’s like setting up domino’s. You don’t program how they fall. You just set things up so they fall as planned, but you’re omniscient and omnipotent, so you never make a mistake. All dominos fall perfectly into place exactly as you want, because you know the outcome of everything you place.

While it may not mean much to you I would be remiss not to defend Orthodoxy here. Faith isn’t blind belief or wishful thinking; it’s trust grounded in revelation, history, and experience. The resurrection of Christ, the lives of the saints, the enduring wisdom of the Church—these are not “proofs” in a modern empirical sense, but they are reasons for belief.

They’re proofs that every religions claims equally, yet (for most) only one can be correct. That’s the big issue.

Furthermore I don’t know what your standards for evidence are but I encourage you to look at arguments like the Transcendental Argument for God. It argues that universals like logic, reason, and math are only justified if God exists. (e.g. X (God) is necessary for Y (logic, math etc). Y therefore X.)

If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify. Furthermore without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally?

First, I don’t deny any gods existence. We both lack the brief on most gods. I just don’t believe in one more than you. I don’t claim to have knowledge on any of their existences, except insofar as them not being internally consistent. I’m an agnostic (not knowing) atheist (lack of belief). I don’t actively believe anything about any gods.

The reliability of logic and mathematics are as reliable as the axioms they are founded on. No further and no less. There isn’t a thing universal about them. They are not a part of reality that we wandered across. They’re made up by humans to be useful tools. This seems obvious because both have come into existence in different forms in different places and times. If they were universal they would always appear in the same form.

If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify.

All of those are based on axioms. They’re true if the axioms are true, but not otherwise. They are useful, but not self-evident. The axioms seem to hold though.

Only if you can justify the validity of logic in your worldview. But without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally? You’re using a tool (logic) without explaining why it ought to work or why it’s trustworthy in a purely materialistic or skeptical framework.

Why do we need a transcendent source of rationality? We only need to build upon foundations of solid axioms.

Okay well this is just an opinion then. My main point here is that you can’t propose any “oughts” without a justification.

Do I need to spell out why someone who values truth should seek it? It’s not really an opinion, but a statement. I guess it isn’t a complete statement. I guess a more complete statement would be “someone who values truth, and wants to find what they value, should seek truth.” Is that better? I don’t think that middle portion is required to spell out, but whatever.

With that all being said. The biggest misconception and frankly appalling misunderstanding anyone makes in this, is that one person is valued less than another.

Aren’t they though, by definition?

Value: An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return.

So if some people get more in return (what they get in the afterlife for accepting The Lord), they’re valued higher. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you mean is you don’t think some people are, in essence, better. Just the degrees of glory mean some are valued more though, and that’s not going into the husband/wife aspect.

Kingdom’s of Glory then becomes a choice we can make to get to. Like in my other comment. Some people will prefer pepperoni, some supreme, some pineapple.

Yes, it’s a choice, but some people get nicer outcomes based on their choice, and that choice is not made any more obviously correct than the choice of any other religion.

If God is good, why would he make us make this choice and make it just a guessing game? I know the answer you’re likely to give is that it isn’t, and if we pray the answer will be made clear, but people believe with extreme faith (often more than most in the LDS have) that they’re the ones who believe the truth, and they’re certain that they’ve felt the presence of God(s) and they told them to follow this or that faith.

I understand. I’m more commenting on how it’s usually framed as a gotcha as if Christians have never thought of this before.

I think the questioning of it originally comes from Christians, so obviously that isn’t the case, nor is it what I’m saying.

The real answer to what is essentially the Epicurean “Problem of Evil” lies in Freedom and Love. God created human beings with genuine freedom, because only freely chosen love is real love. This means that the possibility of rejecting the good (e.g. evil) is not a flaw in creation but a necessary precondition for freedom.

The flaw here is he’s all powerful. If you believe the Adam and Eve story (and even if not it makes a good small case argument) he created the garden, created the tree and fruit, created the serpent, knew they’d eat the fruit, knew he’d damn them for it and they’d suffer for it, and chose to do this anyway. He trivially could also have created a world where they chose not to. Even when given the freedom of choice, he knows what choice will be made (since time is not relevant to him) and can set things up to create any outcome.

God knew the risk of creation, yet chose to create and then chose to redeem through suffering love. That’s not negligence—that’s the Cross.

It’s not a risk. He knew what would happen. He created something where this specific thing is what would come to be with fill awareness and decided that’s what he wanted, if it’s true. It’s not negligence, it’s indifference to suffering. There is no other option for it than that, since he could choose to have made something where it didn’t exist. Maybe we can’t imagine what that would be, but that’s what it means to be omnipotent.

But what does make sense in experience is the way the Church helps us encounter God through prayer, sacraments, and love.

Yeah, that’s fine if it helps you. However, every religion has this claim, so it isn’t evidence that it’s correct. That’s fine. Faith is by definition belief without evidence.

I have never seen something come from nothing. I don’t think anyone has ever or this question wouldn’t have been asked or even be in our consciousness.

Well, particle and anti-particle pairs come into existence from nothing all the time actually. They typically annihilate though.

We have facts up to big bang. It (as usual with these things) gives us just more questions than actual answers to how the universe came to exist. I argue that it always did and always will.

I think this is faulty logic. How the universe came to exist is fine, and we don’t know, but that the universe “always existed” is a bit odd. You can’t have anything before space-time exists. In a sense that means yes, it “always” existed, because that’s the start of time, but in another sense it did not exist too, just time didn’t exist, if that makes sense. It obviously doesn’t really make sense because we’re unable to hold that concept in our mind, but time did come into existence.

There is no way to know the truth

Is this true? Because if so it is a contradiction.

Knowledge and truth are two different things, although I should have written it better. There’s no way to know the truth on this particular subject. (Well, there is a way to know theoretically, if a god exists. There isn’t a way to know if one doesn’t exist though. You can’t prove that something that doesn’t exist doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something exists.)

This is just another way of making a truth claim even though you can’t know the truth.

No, you can use logic to prove certain things can’t exist. If there’s a contradiction, it can’t be correct, for example.

Who says seeking truth is something we ought to do? Particularly if knowing the truth is an impossibility. These are all assertions as to what we should do without any justification as to why we should do them.

I’m not making a universal statement. I’m making the statement that someone who values truth should seek truth. That seems self-evident.

It’s not really “we think we’re lucky or better than anyone else” hell we actually believe that God is a God of fairness that doesn’t value one person over another. Ie. “We are all his children and he loves us equally” is a core belief we hold. And as apart of that belief, we firmly hold it true that God will ensure that all his children who lived or died without hearing his gospel will have the opportunity too.

I’m going to question this a bit if you don’t mind. Doesn’t the LDS church teach that there are different “degrees of glory” and only the followers of the church’s faith can reach the celestial kingdom? Yes, there’s exception for those who haven’t heard, but those who have and didn’t follow the teachings are left out, even though there doesn’t seem to be anything different about proofs of faith provided by followers of the LDS or any other religion. They seem to be the same veracity as followers of any other religion.

And I also tend to lean towards a lot of Buddhist tenants myself btw. The concept of a state of being called Nirvana, that life is suffering (Though I know that’s not exactly what he said) and a few other ideas they hold I agree with.

Yeah, I think it’s great to learn about other religions so we can take pieces of them that help us. Even if I don’t believe any are any more likely to be true than the others, there’s “truths” in all of them that apply whether you follow the faith or not.

I don’t think you’re correct with your argument. Why would someone choose any particular religion? That’s the argument. There is no logical argument for that. There are arguments for choose one in general, although logically very flawed. Still, there’s no logical argument I’m aware of to choose a specific one.

This is a meme in Christian apologetic circles because non-Christians always think it’s a big own when it is really just a demonstration of a lack of understanding of what Christianity is actually about – Redemption.

It being a meme doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for the argument. Redemption from what? Whatever it is, God had control over it happening. Why did it happen? He is trivially capable of creating a universe where there is no need to be redeemed. Why is one where redemption required the one he chose to create? Dismissing something as just being a meme does not actually answer the question.

God does not play by your rules. The struggles we face on Earth (often of our own creation) are for our salvation. This is what the bible and church tradition teaches.

The point is, God knew we would create the struggles. Is he omniscient? He knew it would happen. Is he omnipotent? He could have created a situation where it doesn’t happen. Is he benevolent? He wouldn’t want it to happen.

Yes, this is what the church teaches. I’m well aware. Does it make sense?

If you throw a handful of sand, there will be almost no pattern to it, but if you look closely there WI be some points with more sand and some with less. You could find interesting looking things in this. When you look at the whole thing though it obviously doesn’t have a pattern to it, except what our brain may find because it tries to find patterns, even when there aren’t any.

I wouldn’t call something that’s just noise complex. I guess it sort of is by definition, but not in a way that’s interesting. Normally when I think of “complex” it’s something that has a purpose to it, but we can’t identify easily, not something that’s easy to identify but has no purpose. It’s just a random distribution of matter with the rules of physics applied. It doesn’t create anything that seems to have any purpose.

Which is precisely what we see.

Yes, that’s what I said. Pure randomness expects points of higher and lower density, not pure uniformity, as we see, which implies it’s pure randomness.

every scientific and mathematical field is based on the universe having consistent, ordered rules of operation.

This has nothing to do with being random noise or not. In fact, random noise requires consistent ordered rules. If that isn’t the case then you get something non-random where the rules change to achieve desired results, which isn’t what we observe.

I have always wanted to ask someone who has this opinion how they confront the knowledge that people from every religion have felt the same thing? Some people have felt this way multiple times about mutually exclusive faiths.

That’s one of the largest things that led me to be an agnostic atheist (meaning I don’t claim to have knowledge, and I hold no belief in a god; I don’t disbelieve, it’s the ascence of belief). I was raised non-denomination Christian, but I had a good Buddhist friend in high school. It made me curious about other faiths, and they’re almost all mutually exclusive, yet every one has people certain they’re correct. What are the odds I was born to a family that believed the correct one?

I’m not self-centered enough to believe I’m special and all the other people are just unlucky, so the result is that it’s most likely I wasn’t born lucky, and neither was anyone else. So many religions have faded out of existence, so the odds are if any are correct they don’t exist anymore. Why would I think I happen to find the right one?

I know this is unlikely, but I’d be interested to hear an actual opinion about how that feels, not hearing about what you’re supposed to believe (which I’ve heard before). I think it’s interesting to know if it makes others feel the same way I once did or not.

If you zoom out on the universe it’s almost pure noise. Does that resemble what you’d expect from a designer? I guess it could be designed, but there’s also no reason to indicate that if pure randomness is also expect to create the same things.

It does not say anything about time starting, ending, or anything. It is just a set of rules that approximately reproduce results we observe. It is not the rules of the universe. The rules we use in physics actually do not have a direction for time. It works the same in both directions, though clearly time does have a direction. It does not make predictions on if time started or if it will end, only what is the case for what we can observe right here right now.

If you’re serious, there are so many. Here’s one of the first results I found in a search, but you can find so much writing on it if you want to, which if you actually believe you’re following the “truth” you should look into.

One of the most common fundamental contradiction arguments is the Judeo-Christian god is defined as omniscient and omnipotent, all knowing and all powerful, as well as benevolent. If this is true, why is there evil in the world? He’s omnipotent so must have the power to make a world in which it doesn’t exist, and he must be aware of whatever will happen in the world he creates, since he’s omniscient, and must not want evil to exist since he’s benevolent.

These cannot all be true. If they were then he’d create a world that satisfies his goals that does not have evil, which he must be capable of doing if he’s omnipotent. If evil must exist to accomplish his goals then he isn’t omnipotent. If he can’t detect evil will exist then he isn’t omniscient. If he wants evil to exist then he isn’t benevolent.

It forms structures, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from a random process. We expect some points of higher and lower density, not pure uniformity, in randomness. The structures we see are just the results of random processes. If you zoom out far enough it looks just like noise, as you’d expect from randomness.

If it’s emergent, it seems less presumptuous to assume that the most complex interconnected system of all, the universe itself, would develop consciousness.

Is the universe the most complex interconnected system? Complexity implies not random. It seems to be nearly perfectly random. Not understanding something is not the same thing as it being complex.