Question by ? Plea for Peace!: Does anything magical and spiritual exist? And doesn’t science render god useless?
Some people have said that free will doesn’t exist because: all that we do is just a product of external forces and different impulses that we as humans have (entirely chemical and situational, not true “freedom”).
Doesn’t this suggest that nothing truely “meaningful” exists? The beautiful concepts of love, etc. are all essentially destroyed by the fact that we are animals with chemical reactions that create everything- thoughts, feelings, everything.
And again, doesn’t this mean god is useless? Ancients, before they knew of matter and perception and metaphysics, thought that god was the sun and created magical concepts for everything. Now that we know better, doesn’t that take away any practical reason for god?
Although I will say that I think life would be SO much more beautiful if we removed certain levels of science that take away from “spiritual” meaning.
Oh and if anyone’s interested in talking more about this, wants me to elaborate on my views or wants to discuss theirs with me, PLEASE don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail or IM… I’m always up to talk about these sort of things.
Best answer:
Answer by para k
science proves how powerful God is. afterall, God created science
Add your own answer in the comments!
TRUE science and spirituality are one and the same. GOD is all there is, there is nothing else, that is not possible. GOD IS the sun, but it (GOD) is also everything else that exists.
We. and all things are all made of the same “stuff” (pure energy).
“In rendering the Universe as a divided version of itself, GOD produced, from pure energy, all that now exists – both the seen and the unseen”.
You are right in that we do create everything around us, including our own reality. This is created by the energy of our thoughts, words and actions.
Quantum physics is coming closer and closer to understanding the above.
peacefromken
God can not be manipulated thus useless to them.
Some people just don’t realize that science has shown that the concepts of causality and determinism are limited to the status of probability.
If you can expeirence something then it is real that includes love, science does not take it away by explaining how it works. You can still expeirence everything reality has to offer even feelings.
Science does not “take away meaning” it reveals the reality as it is not as we want it to be.
If you do not find reality as it truly is beautiful then I am forced to conclude you have not learned much about science.
Not all ancients were superstietus just like not all people today are.
God is an idea used to explain certian things but when better more imformed ideas come along that explain them it is not rational to simply keep believing in the old ideas.
If that is how scienced worked we would never make new discoveries that show even more beauty in the universe around us.
If god does exist then god gave us our minds so that we would use them, we should cherish the gifts of intellect and reason and the beauty the help us to reveal, we should not cast them aside because they sometimes tell us things we do not want to hear.
No humans are not at the center of the universe.
No we are not much different from other animals.
No we can not say for certian that some things are right and some things are wrong no matter what.
Learning these truths was not comfortable.
But it is important.
The truth is out there, science is one of the best tools to help us find it.
Science is a tool whereby mankind attempts to organize the chaos he sees around him into an orderly fashion, but it is already orderly. We can only trace the ‘how’ back so far until we breach the threshold of faith.
The Founding Fathers could not begin to imagine how far “science” has come since their day. But science and religion went hand in hand to them, including the “human sciences” of what would become sociology, psychology, and especially of political science, which was not new and is a formal science of philosophy.
The Deism they practiced is a form of human sciences, because they fervently believed in God, but just as fervently believed that God “gave man Reason, not Religion.”
http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm
Jefferson wrote about an attempt by religious leaders in what is known as the “X.Y.Z. Affair” to make our government one of religion instead of secularity.
“[T]he dominion of the clergy, who had got a smell of union between Church and State, [ ] began to indulge reveries which can never be realised in the present state of science.”
http://christianparty.net/deism.htm
He meant that “in the present state” of the philosophical understanding of Man’s condition, an understanding which came from the Renaissance ideas of Locke and Rousseau and Hobbes and others, and ideas specifically about “common sovereignty” and “individual sovereignty,” that religion would never be able to undercut the grounds on which secularity was build into our Constitution.
As for “The beautiful concepts of love, etc. are all essentially destroyed by the fact that we are animals with chemical reactions,” I must say nothing is destroyed by that fact. The fact is, that if we were not “animals” we most certainly would not have any “beautiful concepts” or emotions of anything at all, because it is only through having the body of an animal that such chemistry in our Being can exist.
The physical feeling of emotions, including love, are exactly that–physical feelings. How dull love would be if we could not feel it! It would be an intellectual exercise in determining how much value we placed on a thing and whether or not that value was worth our love; but our love would have no emotional content, only intellectual content.
If you wish to call the things that are wonderful and beautiful and caused by nature and by nature’s god “magical,” I would not argue. It is magical. But it is also reality that such magic is necessarily an effect within our animal bodies.
Science takes away nothing. Science explains how things work, but science cannot tell you whether God made things work, or whether He did not.
Even the Big Bang can be said to be God’s work, if that is what you believe. Science can never disprove God’s existence. Theologians have said so, and that is why they say that “faith and ONLY faith” [said Occam, a Franciscan,] works to bring you closer to your God.
God is not only useless – he does not exist and never did. And how does the supernatural give anything a ‘meaningful’ existents. Science only adds to beauty. The application of much has made life not only possible but has enhanced so much. All that science research does is remove bull****.
Yes, it’s true that some people say human beings lack free will. And if we were all cogs in the Big Wheel of the Universe, nothing meaningful would exist. And while it’s impossible to prove it one way or the other, it certainly SEEMS to me that I have free will (I’m able to lift this arm now, now wriggle this toe, et cetera). So, even if I don’t have free will, it definitely seems that I do. I’m aware that this is not a rigorous philosopical argument, but, in my opinion, rigorously philosophical arguments are rarely necessary.
And, yes, if we lacked free will, God would be useless. But you’ll find no philosophers worth their weight in salt who maintain that humans don’t have free will. This being the case, if you maintain the existance of a God or Gods, It or Their existance still remains relevant.
I don’t like talking about supernatural things, since I know nothing about them. When it comes to the supernatural, there is only speculation to be had. But some of “Hamlet” comes to mind: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
-John