Jkrebs
Posts: 590
Joined: Sep. 2004
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StephenB at UD is one of he people that I've discussed issues with. I always like it when people such as Stephen post things that reveal a background glimpse of where they are really coming from. Here's a post from Stephen, in its entirety, for posterity:
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Good grief, where is Bill Maher’s imagination? For an omnipotent God, handling a billion daily prayers is child’s play. What about the really big problems that require not only heavy quantitative lifting but also infinitely precise qualitative formulations and value judgments that cannot tolerate even the smallest margin of error.
Imagine the challenge of doing prophecy or deciding whether a given soul is to be saved or damned. Unless God understands and factors in all of our thoughts, words, deeds, and intentions in conjunction with everyone else’s thoughts, words, deeds, and intentions; unless he considers all mitigating factors, including biological, psychodynamic, environmental, and habitual influences; unless he can calculate the individual’s impact on the world and the world’s impact on the individual at every sociological level; and unless can tie it all together with a full awareness of all possible combinations and permutations, he could neither predict the future nor pass final judgment on even one soul. If God can miscalculate the severity of even one temptation or slightly overestimate an individual’s capacity to overcome it, he is liable to send some poor slob to hell by mistake.
As it turns out, God has already passed a test that is of a similar texture. The Old Testament offers some 459 prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah, all of which were fulfilled in time/space/history. All were independent events, including, among other things, forecasts about his place of birth, specific events in his life, and the conditions under which he would die. That requires a great deal more intellectual firepower that simply absorbing a few billion prayers. Bill Maher needs to raise the bar much higher. |
Does God really do all that when he decides who is to be saved? Does the Bible really contain 459 fulfilled prophecies. Does anyone really believe this? (Obviously StephenB does.)
It is no wonder that arguing about the nature of science, or about theological positions that accept science, is a lost cause with such people: at the heart of their belief system is this conscious, calculating God whose main concern is this personal interactive relationship with mankind and ultimately this final judgment of eternal salavalion or damnation. The rationality of science and the possibility of spiritual beliefs that are compatible with science are antithetical to the God that Stephen believes in.
Quite revealing.
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