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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (3183)	11/7/2000 9:09:37 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

<<So in conclusion I would say that far from being an easy and pat answer to our existence, the idea that there is in fact a designer poses many more questions than it answers>> Good morning, Greg. What you said, above, is precisely what I meant to show with the closet analogy. It was my reply to the "watchmaker" argument, which says "Well, somebody must have made it all, how do you explain a flower?" I was merely saying that as a means of clearing up mysteries, it has a fatal flaw. <<If tidy = true, then it only appears to be true when in fact it is false, but that's what we are trying to determine.>> We're in agreement again. My point was that the appearance of having provided an answer to the First Cause question is an error. You still have a postulation for which you have no answer to the First Cause question. Your house isn't tidy, in the analogy. <<For instance what is this designer like...?>> You know what I think any designer who created the world of Pinjira Begum is like, not to mention the one described in the Bible. Not a being I would worship. <<and what demands, if any, does he place on us? >> The question of how we should live is the most profound, and important, question there is, of course. We human beings have to figure it out, because there's no one else to do it. And we are born with the capacity to empathize. Well, with the capacity to be taught qualities like empathy, and others that can help us make a better, fairer world, because we want to and because it will be the safest world for our own descendents to live in, not because a jealous, cruel, punitive deity commands us to. << It is often said that people have a psychological need for God, and there is surely some truth to that, but is it not also true that there is perhaps an even stronger psychological aversion to God as well? >> My reaction to that is that if there were any evidence for the existence of a benevolent consciousness running things (and it would be easy enough for a deity to provide) I'd have no aversion whatever to believing it existed and gratefully worshipping it. My aversion is to believing something is true when it isn't just because we humans like to fall on our knees.