Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
User Journal

Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: The limitations of a perfect God 16

Journal by Ethelred Unraed
El Smooch started talking about the subject, and this JE began as a post in that journal...but it started to develop into something in its own right, so here 'tis.

...

I've mentioned it elsewhere, but I'll say it here again. We human beings have a hard time accepting that we can't understand things fully. Science and technology have spoiled us into thinking all is ultimately understandable and all must be internally consistent from our point of view.

Try to see human society, for example, from the perspective of a dog. Or a cow. Or a worm. With each "lower" level of sentience, the ability to even remotely understand a human being diminishes. Since God is by definition the "highest" being possible, His decisions and methods will hardly be completely understandable to us.

Furthermore, the writers of the Bible and other such texts were (in my version of Christian belief) divinely inspired, possibly even "directed by the hand of God" as it were. But they were still human beings, only capable of understanding things with their limited abilities, and God was "telling" them things they struggled to explain in their works.

As to the notion that "a perfect God would create a perfect Universe, the Universe is not perfect, therefore God is imperfect or nonexistent", it's always struck me as odd.

First, what's "perfect"? Could things really be better than they are? By what standard, especially one outside of our frame of reference?

Second, consider that God is by definition a being outside of Time itself -- eternal. We humans have a highly limited frame of reference of time: maybe 80 years or so, more if we're lucky. For us, billions of years seem mind-bendingly incomprehensible, but for an eternal God, it's a blink of an eye. We're still right smack in the middle of Creation, in other words -- a process that is ongoing. Thus evolution itself would be just another tool of God to complete His will. In this view, we are on our way to perfection, though we probably won't experience it in our lifetimes. Maybe "the Kingdom of Heaven" is that ultimate perfection that awaits us at the end of that process. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.

Think of a small hungry child impatiently waiting for Daddy to finish making that perfect milkshake. We're the child, and Daddy's God. All we see are the ingredients, but don't get that the milkshake is still on its way, nor do we know the recipe. All we know is we're hungry and want a milkshake.

Lastly, regarding evolution and other seemingly random aspects of nature, to a "lower" being a complex pattern would seem random. So what's random may not be random at all. Maybe there's a rational, simple explanation for a number like pi -- one that God understands, but one we humans can't (at least not until we reach a higher state of being, perhaps through later stages of evolution). Seemingly random phenomena such as those discussed in quantum mechanics could thus be God's very handwriting -- possibly His tool for acting in our Universe.

All of this is conjecture, of course. But I think it explains a lot of what you're talking about, and is also much of the reason I remain a Christian (while acknowledging that other religions may well be other "faces of God" -- think of the parable of the blind men and the elephant).

And I believe it also shows how science, far from being religion's or Christianity's enemy, can be its willing partner in the ongoing search for truth.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The limitations of a perfect God More

The limitations of a perfect God

Comments Filter:
  • No text here.
  • Oh, wait. I'm TEH MEKKZ0RXZ. I guess you know what that means.

    Sorry.
  • we already know that given n digits we can predict a certain number of digits out. all the modern 'pi' calculating algorythms take this into consideration to make calculating pi vastly faster...

    It's true, the digits are never a 'repeating pattern', but they are still a predictable non-repeating pattern.

    so pi doesn't prove randomness or chaos theory. sorry ^^;
    • we already know that given n digits we can predict a certain number of digits out. all the modern 'pi' calculating algorythms take this into consideration to make calculating pi vastly faster...

      It's true, the digits are never a 'repeating pattern', but they are still a predictable non-repeating pattern.

      Something to think about: since PI is often approximated at 22/7, what would PI's representation be in base 7 instead of base 10? Would it still be non-terminating and non-repeating? Is PI in base 10 actu

      • we have quite a few digits calculated..

        at least http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/98912_pi07. shtml [nwsource.com] 1.2411 trillion digits... and that was only 400 hours of time on a super computer.. imagine if we let it run for 3000 hours and had a nice big fat hard drive to store the result so! i mean the previous record took 1 terrabyte uncompressed... i'm sure someone could rig up a good compressed file system (perhaps a NAS solution) that could store a few hundred terrabytes of pi! or course obviously, the best
  • ...shit like this is why I'm a fan. Couldn't agree more. Rock the fuck on.
  • congrats on the little princess

  • for such a lucid and honest monologue on the subject. If I may quote "that book":

    "we see as through a glass, darkly"
      - New Whiz-Bang Version

    One of my favorite quotes. You have said the same very eloquently. Bringing a new child into the world makes you wax philosophical, doesn't it?

  • ...without doing exegesis first. "Perfect", in Theology always had the original Latin sense of "completed" (perfectus is the past participle (or perfect participle) of "perficio", or to complete, literally to do through). Thus, a "perfect" god is, a posteriori, a transcendental god, and what's important in Christian Theology is transcendence, which is the reason for the Theological insistence on the Divine Attributes (which are sufficient, but have to be postulated a priori to derive transcendence as Schola

  • Congratulations Daddy mk 2. :) You two make some BIG kids dontcha? I hope BoE is doing well and recovering nicely from the birth. She is one strong woman.

    Thanks for writing your views. I have a whole lot of disagreements with them, but it's good to get a perspective from someone who has thought it through beyond just saying "Ooh, it's just faith." You actually put some meat behind your faith.

    I really, though, do have a problem with having to come up with all of these mental exercises to explain what is
    • Congratulations Daddy mk 2. :) You two make some BIG kids dontcha? I hope BoE is doing well and recovering nicely from the birth. She is one strong woman.

      She has to be to put up with me. ;-)

      Basically, you're explaining away everything that is inconclusive or inconsistent as humans being too dopey to understand. Right?

      It's just an observation. Maybe even a tautology. Humans are not infinitely capable of understanding things, much as we'd like to be. Our capacity to understand will always be limited b

    • some points follow:

      Any god that would grant us enough intelligence to figure out more and more of the nature of life over time and to grow, but witholds a better explanation of his nature than what is in the Bible is not a god I want anything to do with.

      if God handed it all to us without making us work to understand it, it wouldn't be far removed from God asking everyone to be a fundamentalists who blindly accept what they're told. this is likely why it is often the fundamentalists claiming everything is c
      • if God handed it all to us without making us work to understand it, it wouldn't be far removed from God asking everyone to be a fundamentalists who blindly accept what they're told. this is likely why it is often the fundamentalists claiming everything is cut and dry and is explained in a literal sense in the bible. without having to work to understand it, we wouldn't really own it. we wouldn't appreciate the depth or import of its meaning.

        Excellent point. If you accept the existence of God and His role a

  • I often consider the lowly ant, and how we are mostly beyond the comprehension of the ant. An ant knows when I come stomping by, but aside from being some great unknown threat, the ant doesn't know much about me. If I save an ant from wandering into an antlion den, all the ant knows is some big thing came along and threatened it. I have to wonder how often things happen that seem horrible to me, but may have a positive outcome that I may not even be aware of. Plus I have also come to realize that I have waa

Slashdot Top Deals

Promising costs nothing, it's the delivering that kills you.

Close