Search results

I've never had much sympathy for the many-worlds hypothesis. Such a conflation of the possible with the actual makes little sense. And I don't think we can save what I take to be worthwhile concepts of freedom and responsibility in such a multiverse. What really does terrify me, however, is...

Akbar, I think your thread on God and Morality is a good idea, assuming we can engage in dialog without getting caught up in the differences between our backgrounds. I myself am a Unitarian Universalist, and don't believe that God gives us rules whose violation God punishes, especially with...

I too find the Gaia hypothesis of extreme spiritual interest. If God is to be found in the natural universe, most of the important questions about the relationship between God and humankind can be framed and discussed in that context. Some red herrings need to be dispensed with first: No one...

The biological process that leads to a human being goes through many stages that might be appealed to in defining a legal person with moral or legal rights: Formation of the egg in the mother's ovaries when the mother herself is in her own mother's womb. At this point it is a living individual...

I'm not sure it's worthwhile discussing the frame story that gets Walsch into the "conversation." I'd rather focus on the relationship between God and me / you / us that is described in the conversation. For example, God says, There are those who say that I have given you free will, yet these...

You can take the frame story as seriously as you want. (Ask yourself: how would God communicate with me in a form I would believe?) And certainly the characterisation of the contents as a conversation or dialog is somewhat a stretch. Nonetheless, there seems to be a an interesting and...

When you perform a deliberate action, your brain and nerves and muscles collaborate according to strict (if somewhat probabilistic) laws. Does that mean that you really didn't perform that action? That it was merely the physical result of the interactions among your cells (or the interactions...

I can only tell you how I chose my faith community after I grew out of years of naive atheism. None of the one true answers felt like more than ill-considered dogmas, but atheism itself only said what I didn't believe, not what I believed. I joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation...

If you really mean what you imply by the words "How exactly", then you don't want a sound bite or a quick answer. You want some real details in language that is neither arcane nor oversimplified. I suggest you check out In Search of Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller. Miller is both a biologist...

I just finished reading Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God, Book 1. (Putnam, 1996. ISBN 0-399-14278-9). My copy is littered with the little plastic flags that I use to mark interesting (i.e., absolutely right, absolutely wrong, doubtful, in need of extended conversation) passages. In...

Proposal: God is to the universe as you are to your body (and as I am to my body). A more local version: Gaia is to the earth as (etc....)

Maybe God listened to the old aphorism "Give a man fish, you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." Maybe God believes it is better for us to learn how to use our free will to avoid or deal with our challenges than to rescue us every day.

And you might look at In Search of Darwin's God, by Kenneth Miller to learn why evolution is essential to modern science. Miller, by the way, is both a Christian and a biologist, and works hard to demonstrate the compatibility of both. I doubt, however, that there is any point to a...