Can God make mistakes? How many 'likes' will it take for him to back down?
- Thread starter craptakular
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Soldato
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Ok, lets put the concept of god to one side for a moment. Do you guys believe, or at least entertain the idea of creatures/beings existing in the universe that have some sort of 'god-like' powers? Creatures that are just way more evolved and technologically advanced than us?
I think it's highly probable, given the size of the Universe and billions of planets within it, that there is lots of other life out there and yes some of it is likely to be more advanced, technologically, than us. I don't have faith in this belief, it's simply conjecture based on probability from things like the Drake Equation and the fact that life evolved here on our planet, so logically, it may happen elsewhere in the Universe too.
Are we heading back to cargo cults?
Whoever decided it would be invisible was a genius
Indeed. Also the guy who decided he existed in a realm beyond space and time so that we could never use our technology to detect him was a genius too.
We have some God-like powers - in that we can create 'simple' forms of life, design organisms to our own specifications (within some limits), create weapons which could simulate a natural disaster, create and give plagues (edit: Not to mention cure them!). Technology is going to make God look unimpressive at some point.
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Soldato
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Then surely you accept that these beings would exist on a spectrum of abilities/powers. If you find a being with a certain degree of powers, you can bet that there exists somewhere, another being that is even more powerful. You could keep doing this over and over again.
Then question then remains, does this spectrum converge to a limit or does it diverge to infinity?
Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by 'powers'. Can you explain ?
I think if it diverged to infinity then we would see at least one God which was all powerful with the exception that it does not have the power to hide itself from us properly. In that case, we would be aware of it and have evidence of it.
Well if he does mean supernatural then I would dismiss that as nonsense. We have no evidence of anything supernatural so that is something which he would need to demonstrate before I believed it existed.
I think this is largely because we would study the supernatural thing and thereafter consider it natural.
Soldato
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I use the term powers to encompass things that these beings are able to do, whether it be through technology or natural evolution. The more power a being has, the more impressive its feats are. I'm not talking about magic or anything supernatural, even if it may seem like it to us.
How does that even make sense ? Something is either supernatural (god, ghosts etc) or it's not. Everything we can observe study and measure is part of the natural universe. Supernatural is nothing more than a concept, it can not be observed, measured or studied. Every scientific effort to investigate ghosts and psychics and other tripe has returned a verdict of no evidence. If there was a supernatural aspect to the universe, like god for example, that interacted with the natural universe, then we should be able to detect it, but we see nothing. All we have are people claiming revelation and asserting faith.
Supernatural is merely something outside our scientific understanding, fire for example was likely considered supernatural once over (if not by name). I imagine there are many things outside our understanding out their lurking in the universe.
Ok. Well any sufficiently advance race would seem like gods to us just like we would seem like gods if we could fly a Boeing 747 back to the time of the Roman Empire. Doesn't make us gods though, it just gives the illusion of godlike powers.
Well exactly, but if we saw ghosts and had true, repeatable, documented evidence of them then there is a good chance we could start to study them, find out how they could be controlled and find out how they work. At that point we would just integrate our knowledge of them into our framework of natural science.