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Originally Posted by scourge99  I never said that you stated the bolded parts. I made a logical deduction of the premises that I believe you hold that COULD lead to the beliefs bolded.
Your statements have been quite vague and it appears I am still having difficulty understanding what your position actually is. I believe the next paragraph cleared things up a bit for me.
So which is your hypothesis?
A) God is literally energy.
B) God is not energy but he is able to manipulate energy because its supposedly in and of all things.
C) None of the above. |
It would be closest to A, considering the greatness of energy I do not presuppose to understand all of its traits to the point of making a negative statement as to what is possible through it (as you could say all things that happen happen through it, as all matter comes from it), but insofar as there are going to be scientifically observational aspects of nature which are significant in the Christian understanding of the world I think God is literally energy. I don't personify God with human concepts of manipulation and sentience, as the only personified aspects of God are actual people.
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(Feel free to ignore the following paragraph if you answered 'B')
Then what about the Old Testament and all that proactive interfering with human affairs that God did? I'd say thats pretty characteristic of something intelligent.
Also, the divinity of Jesus had to come from somewhere. If you believe he is more than just a mere mortal and performed the miracles recorded in the New Testament then he couldn't of been born out of mere chance. It only makes sense that God caused his birth doesn't it?
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They're stories meant to reveal truths of life intermingled with actual events in the history of the Hebrew people. I think the history is important for the context of the stories, and I think the stories provide very powerful insights to the world and the placement of man within said world.
I think the divinity of Jesus comes from what Jesus represents other than some kind of supernatural concept of divinity (as I think once you're asserting that God is supernatural you're already heading in the wrong direction). Once again, I'm not going to state negatives as to what was possible, but I think were Jesus alive today he'd be the first to tell you that it really couldn't matter less whether or not he was able to perform miracles or if the descriptions of the miracles are meant to illustrate truths in the same way Jesus himself illustrated truth through parable. On top of that, the Gospels were all written a good while after Jesus's death by people who hadn't even lived in the same time as him, let alone were old enough to witness and understand his life. As they all told roughly the same story, we can assume that these stories were well developed, more than likely primarily through oral histories, and these people, among others, wrote their own versions of the stories they heard, and I don't think it'd be unheard of that when writing of the life of such a great man who's lived through tales of his greatness that at some point superhuman abilities were applied which were a product of the reason people think George Washington shat golden truth.
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That IS reality. As I said before we only know one thing for certain, self-awareness, the rest is merely inductively derived.
Isn't logic based on inductive premises? |
Yes it is. All I attempted to demonstrate was that it was possible to have some understanding of God while recognizing that the totality of God is beyond your understanding (and thusly there is an inherent fallibility to any claim as to the nature of God or belief as to God's attributes), and this demonstrates that that's possible as we have some understanding of the world even though we recognize the totality of the world (but as a product of this there is an inherent fallibility to any claim as to the nature of the world).
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When you said this:
I am demonstrating how the reality is that in all things you can still basically "know" things without fully understanding them. This is my and anyone else's understanding of God, and my and everyone else's understanding of everything else.
Since the first sentence was ambiguous about how you attained "knowing" and because you were talking about God, which is something that is purportedly incomprehensible, I could only assume that you were somehow trying to tell me you could know somehow know something without experience.
I'm still confused on what you meant by the sentences I quoted above.
 lost me there |
The overarching system in the world is beyond your comprehension, and yet you understand parts of it (while still recognizing your fallibility as a product of your lack of comprehension of the totality of the system). It's the same way with the understanding of God. That's what I was getting at.