A Higher Power
 

The existance of whether there is a higher power or not frequently crosses my mind. I'm currently agnostic, there's theories for and against higher powers and I can't decide which to believe.

The omnipotence theory is the primary reason why I don't believe in a higher power. If there is something that can do everything, it will be able to look into it's own future. Doing so, it can see the choices it makes in the future; hence, it's future is predetermined. This results in it not having a free will, for it cannot make any choices being that everything it does is predetermined. A common retort to this is "God can always change his mind". On the contrary, if God can do anything, when he forsees his future he would have already seen the changes that he made. There's no way that there can be something that knows everything.

Our entire existence is what pushes me to believe in a higher power. I believe in the big bang theory, but what exactly created the big bang? Scientists say it was a gathering of particles that created an explosion, but where would the particles come from if there was nothing before the big bang? You can't make something out of nothing. It's like eating out of an empty bowl, somebody has to put something in it in order for you to eat off it.

This brings me to why I think science is wrong. If the big bang created the universe, and before the universe there was nothing, how much time did it take before the big bang happened? There would have to be infinite years, because there is no start of time. If there was nothing, then would there even be a value of time? Time is fictional and manmade used as a form of measurment. It's like math. We use rulers to measure things, but it is impossible to get any exact number, because they are infinitive. You can always cut a number in half. How can I trust science when two of the most commonly used elements (Time & Math) are only man made illusions?

Thanks for reading this. I'd like to hear some input!

higher power

if you take an120V appliance and run in on 240V you'll fry it

that's my take on the higher power

oh i gotta go. have some work to catch up with...

Who says there was nothing before the big bang? The most likely explanation is that there's always been matter, expanding and contracting.

how do we know the big bang actually happened?

Omnipotence...Don't you mean "omniscience?" Omniscience means "knowing all." I think you are confusing this with "having all power," which is omnipotence..

We have the illusion of free will. We can choose to obey God, or we can go against his will or choose to believe there is no order. When I say "God," I don't mean an entity or being such as we are. That is a popular notion called "supernatural theism," which is the thing which most atheists think all Christians believe. In fact, very few real Christians believe that God is a "man in the sky" who crafted the universe as in a workshop, and stands apart from it, observing his work.

God is that thing which you refer to, which existed in eternity before the big bang. God is outside the universe (transcendence) and yet at the same time everything in the universe exists within him.... No one thing in the universe is God, but God's spark is in all things (immanence). This idea is called "panentheism," which is distinguished from "pantheism." Pantheism is the idea that everything IS God. Panentheism is the idea that everything is IN God.

Kenosis is a theory which holds that that God emptied a part of his divinity in order for us to exist. Within this paradigm, evil and suffering are allowed to exist because God is a loving parent who doesn't want to intercede, but would rather that we grow by making our own choices as individuals. Thus, eventually, we learn to abide by the correct spiritual principles instead of aligning ourselves with inert matter, blind mechanism, and animal instinct.

As God emptied himself for man to exist, so man empties himself of his own personal will in order to become like God.

Hope that helped.

this board is definetly not the place to look to for help on this matter

my point proven right there ^

raah

now before i forget, inhuman, please know this:

SCIENCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE EXISTENCE/INEXISTENCE OF GOD:
IT IS NOT CONCERNED WITH SUCH MATTERS AS THE SUPERNATURAL.
ONLY PEOPLE WHO SMOKE CRACK THINK THAT SCIENCE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THINGS "BEYOND" NATURE.

ok. now remember to get an electrical adapter when you travel.

Well one way or another, there has to have always been something. Whether there's God or matter or "thoughts" or whatever you like, like you said there can't be something from nothing. Something has to always have been there, and we'll never understand it.

As for a higher power knowing the future, I don't think it's all that difficult to imagine an omnipotent being choosing to loosen control for creation, and then looking to see what happened. You can have all the power and control in the world to play everything imaginable on guitar, but that doesn't mean you can no longer play random noise. You'll be in control, but choosing not to fully use it.

However, I think stuff like that is bad for basing worldviews on. If you say "I don't like the idea of having no choice," it's kind of counter-productive. It doesn't really matter if we like something with this kind of stuff. It's not art. We're already here. Our job is to discover whether there's a God or not, whether we have free will or not, etc. - not to decide which we would prefer.

"You can have all the power and control in the world to play everything imaginable on guitar, but that doesn't mean you can no longer play random noise. You'll be in control, but choosing not to fully use it."

That supports what I was saying--when we create something we let go of a part of ourselves, just as God did when he created the universe. The act of creation is renunciation and self-emptying, not control of environment and tightening the reins.

wanker

Thanks! Sorry about the confusion between omniscience and omnipotence, I often get the two mixed up. That definately helped my understanding Assuming that God is a spiritual representation of perfection clears a lot of that up; the entire omniscience part. Thanks!

Concerning the big bang, if matter always existed, then we would have to presume that it wasn't created. It fits in with the entire time portion, because if it was never created, then could only exist from time repeating itself in a circle (no beginning/end). I don't see how something could exist without ever being created ;)

Haha, I was fully aware about getting off topic responses Laila, you really can't go through a thread without them now!

I believe in God. But there are other higher powers, like aliens:

"I wrote a science fiction film which I'll tell you about. It's ten after four in the afternoon, and everybody in the world mysteriously falls asleep. Just like that, they are driving cars, whatever they are doing, bang!, they got to sleep, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, and the whole world sleeps for exactly one hour, till ten after five, and they wake up at ten after five, and mysteriously upon awakening everybody in the world find themselves in the pants business. Stay with us, 'cause it's brilliant.
Everybody is making cuffs and flies and cutting velvet, y'know, And a spaceship lands from another planet, and men get out with jackets and shirts and black socks - no trousers at all. They say: "Are the pants ready?" We say: "No. Could you come back thursday?". They say they must have them, 'cause they are going to a wedding, and we work dillingently and make pants constantly and they come to get them, and when they come to pick them up, they leave us with socks, hankerchiefs, pillowcases and soiled linnen, and they say: "Do it!", and the president of the United States goes on television and says that an alien superpower from outer space with superior intelligence is bringing us their laundry, and they are foiled, 'cause they travelled a hundred and seventeen million lightyears to pick it up, and they forget their ticket."



-Woody Allen

You are!

I believe in a higher power but not in god, as an image of man. I prefer to think we came to be from the big bang created by some sort of catastophic event, which I consider a GOD. Either way if there is a god or not we're eventually fucked on this planet, so why waste yr time worshiping something that won't help you in yr current life? Most religions nowadays don't even believe in hell, so whats it matter?

haha, i think diesel's posts are the most meaningful ones in this thread.

diesel is the higher power himself. especially when as thoroughly plastered as he is now. (i do fear for his liver though. which proves that even a higher power can get ill.)

i love this stuff, so i'll give a real reply.

i think there's an even more damning problem with omnipotence than what you mention, inhuman, which is that if god is truly omnipotent he can suspend the laws of logic, which are, of course, inviolable. even if you grant that god created physical laws, god could not have created the laws of logic, for they hold in every possible world. there could be worlds in which acceleration due to gravity is 2 m/s^2, or in which i am a starving african kid with aids, but there can't be a world full of married bachelors or in which the proposition "if it's raining, it's cloudy" is true but "if it's not cloudy, it's not raining" isn't. so god can't be omnipotent in the full sense of the term. (some philosophers of religion retort that god is omnipotent only within the bounds of logic, but i maintain that this is a cop-out.)

referring to your big bang problem, there are quite a few scientists who assert that the notion of "before the big bang" is incoherent, because time, being a measure of motion, began with the beginning of motion -- i.e., the big bang. (as a side note, this observation, if true, would have disastrous consequences for aristotle's argument for the existence of god, in which he derives the unmoved mover from the eternality of time and motion.) the only artificial aspect of time is the way we measure it; we could easily have measured it in "plashungas" and "qawurks" instead of minutes and seconds. however, the existence of time as a measure of motion is not affected by this; time is a measure of real physical phenomena. it's the same with math. we use the concepts of number and the operations we perform thereon as tools of understanding of real phenomena (e.g., what happens when you put more apples into a basket containing a certain quantity of apples). math is a series of concepts we use, just like any other concepts, to integrate like things and differentiate distinct things; we use the concept "two," for instance, to isolate those instances of objects or ideas that occur in pairs from other objects and ideas. the "two" isn't out there in a museum or anything -- that is, it's not metaphysically real, but it is still epistemologically real (i had an abstract algebra book that lamented the designation of the number i as "imaginary" for this very reason).

you're going to laugh, but you may want to pick up a copy of rand's introduction to objectivist epistemology. it's this whole theory of concept formation and how to apply it to problems more or less like the ones you're asking. it's a bit dry at times (at least by ayn's somewhat, er, colorful standards), but it has a lot to say about the ontological status of things like time and math.

Worshipping God (giving thanks for life) is not a means to an end--it is a reward in itself...it is our true purpose to do this, because when we are thankful in this way we glorify God and exalt nature, and we ourselves are elevated into a sense of who we are.

You don't have to do this in church. Like for instance, if you smoke a joint or eat mushrooms by a river and you are transported by the play of the sunlight on the water into a feeling of unity and completeness, then you have just had a sacramental experience and worshipped God.

To think of God in terms of logic is to anthropomorphize him, which is fallacious thinking. The intellect cannot grasp God.

if the intellect cannot grasp god let's just follow wittgenstein and stop talking about it, huh?

and let's stop shitting on science for all the wrong reasons

now where did diesel go...

I shit on science once because my toilet was broken and I didn't want to shit on m^a(t)h.

i was going to respond to that but i thought i had gone on long enough.

ok, there are two possiblities: either god (assuming he exists, for the sake of argument alone) can suspend the laws of logic or he can't. if he can't (as i argue), he's not really omnipotent. now let's explore the possiblity that he can. if he can, then what happens to our knowledge? the foundation upon which all our knowledge is based is the laws of logic. if these, of all things, are merely contingent facts subject to reversal by arbitrary divine whim, all our knowledge would be on shaky grounds; we would, in essence, have to append every proposition with "assuming god doesn't get a bug up his ass and decide to change logic."

but i think there's an even stronger rebuttal to your claim, which is that statements like that are not so much defenses of god as dismissals of rational inquiry. if you take god out of the field of reason by asserting that he is impervious to it, the only other way to "prove" his existence is through your own arbitrary feelings -- which are in fact not proofs at all, because emotions are not tools of cognition.

Diesel...Have you been eating McDonald's?

Hah I'm just making fun of everyone asking if you're drinking.

I'll answer the stronger rebuttal first. Knowledge of God is of a different order. It requires a belief in the "substance of things which are not seen," or "faith." By faith, I don't mean "believing what the priest tells you anyway, in spite of the fact that your intellect tells you something else is true." This is a lazy attitude. I'm not talking about dogma, I'm talking about the willingness to have an experience.

This kind of knowledge, which is called "gnosis," can only be achieved by interior means, and not through epistemological, "subject/object" inquiry. Science and reason describe the attributes of the physical world, but do not penetrate its essence. The conundrum for the materialists is that they never experience God because they are asking the wrong questions and using the wrong methods.

The question of whether or not he can suspend logic is irrelevant, because if he could, how would we know whether or not he could?

Did you know Wagner was an antisemite? It really saddened me to hear that such a visonary guy who basically brought opera to the people was an antisemite =\

Yeah, I knew that. A lot of intellectuals were anti-Semites before the holocaust.

Here's something I just read:

"Science has as its object the study and the theoretical reconstruction of the order of the world--the order of the world in relation to the mental, psychic, and bodily structures of man. Contrary to the naive illusions of certain scholars, neither the use of telescopes and microscopes, nor the employment of most unusual algebraical formulae, nor even a contempt for the principle of noncontradiction will allow it to get beyond the limits of this structure. Moreover it is not desirable that it should. The object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe, Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through matter which constitutes the world."

--Simone Weil

right, but those "interior means" are necessarily subjective. you can either look outward with the light of reason (an objective method) or look inward to your own feelings (a subjective method). whether you call it gnosis, faith, revelation, or whatever, it all refers to the same thing: the reliance on your own feelings to "prove" things, which can't be done. that kind of epistemological method is tantamount to saying "i feel that god exists, so he must," which is a totally invalid way of demonstrating anything, let alone the metaphysical basis of ultimate reality.

You are making the assumption that if something is not capable of being proved by logic, that it is therefore relegated to the vagueness of "feelings." Mystical experience is not a vague feeling or a sentiment, nor is it subject to logic--it is the apprehension of the Real. Logic and science do not apprehend Reality, they describe our experience of the shared dream of the physical in relation to those elements of being which compose our personalities.

You are also supposing that the confines of human logic are sufficient to hold the infinitude of God, which is fallacious. You place logic above God, using it to demonstrate his non-existence. However, the limitations of the human intellect make it impossible for the intellect (or the feelings) to apprehend the divine in the first place, which is why your whole argument seems silly to me...

On the contrary, everything I am saying seems silly to you because of your individualism and materialist bias.

you have to examine exactly what logic is, logic is a set of patterns and properties that happen consistently in our humanly lives. these patterns where formed naturaly through the development of the universe. if god did indeed provoke the big bang i'd strongly suggest that he let it develop further on its own course, resulting in a butterfly like effect. the logic we perseve is arbitrary, set by the natural course of the universe which i assume had the intervention of god to a degree.

in the spiritual realm there is no mathimatical logic, common sense or anything of the like because those are purely products of the material world. id say in the hypothetical sense god does in fact have the power to change it, but why in the fuck would he?

people put way to much superstition into god, alot of people call science the enemy of religion when really its a supplement. here we are able to see the physical evidence of what god has done.

i have more to say, but im being called for dinner

Nice! Enjoy dinner.

"god is an object by which we measure our pain" - john lennon

lol diesel

edit:
rep ++

So if you've always been capable of intelligent posting, why were you posting such utter shite for so long?

I'm leaving the vagaries of the well-worn argument to one side here.

I'm with !@#$%! on this: I think that since there's no way for the intellect to define what god (perhaps Brahman would be a better word), so why bother trying to have an intellectual conversation about such things? I suppose that when you "strip down" the word into what it really means, or perhaps what it could mean in terms of science, logic, etc. than nobody can really argue with you that some force exists that started turning the wheel of creation, and therefore can be seen as the sum of all forces that exist inside creation (if the singularity that existed before the big bang was still, then motion was the creator, no?). Now... what this "god"--again I hate to use the term because it gets tangled up with deities and all that, and those are whole 'nother story entirely--let me start over. What does "god" have to do with our day to day lives? It is obviously there because its everywhere, but its role in our lives is nonexistant. We may recognize that it created the potential energy that eventually put the right particles in the right place at the right time to forge single celled organisms from the furnace of the Earth which would eventually evolve into the massive collections of cells that is a hungover writer-wannabe typing some long spiel about God on an internet message board, but why all of this happened, how it happened, whodunnit, whatever, isn't worth worrying about. I think the only thing one needs to worry about, spiritually thinking, is one's own humanity. We're all a part of creation, but we can distinguish ourselves from the rest because we have reached a level of cognition where our free will is capable of trumping every one of our instinctive urges. This means that, with practice, we can eliminate those of our instincts (I'm speaking mostly about emotions here, which is the primary area of human thought that is still considered to be 100% instinctual, an idea that I disagree with stongly) which, although they were necessary for survival at one point in time (think fear, agression, greed, etc), are capable of creating negative consequences for other sentient beings and unhapiness or dissatisfaction for ourselves. So instead of thinking about a higher power which is there and it isn't there and carrying on with that trip until the end of eternity, I'm content to do my best to elminate unnecessary suffering from my life and the lives of others. Anyway...........

If people give me utter shite, I give it back.

Funny thread!
Keep on going!

I'm not entirely convinced of a 'higher power' in the sense of something that created and controls us, but I accept that there are forces/phenomena that we do not understand - it may be that they all become logically comprehended as scientific phenomena, it may be that some of them can only be comprehended within the framework tof a new philosophical or scientific paradigm, or it may be that some of them, when understood, are indeed found to be a 'higher power' of some sort. I consider the second option to be the most likely, but that said, considering something to be the most likely is no indication of faith or a sense of inner truth.

I certainly do not feel an absolute truth or divine working in the way that persons such as Juliana of Norwich, Oliver Cromwell or Aleister Crowley have.

I refuse the Christian idea of God because if He is good, perfect and omnipotent then it must be the case that everything that happens is good, for He is good and perfect and omnipotent and by His omnipotence and divine power He has allowed it to happen. I've met a few 'Christian fundamentalists' (my term, not intended in a derogatory manner) who believe this, absolutely; I find it abhorrent but logical if one is to believe as a Christian is required to. I admit freely to being predisposed to a refusal of the Christian god, so it is unsurprising that I find a way to justify my personal spiritual instincts.