If God gives humanity free will, he must allow us to suffer, no? But a loving God would give humanity a way to live past suffering through grace; which he sacrificed for the well being of humanity. And free-will in accepting him will set us free. WE can make the decision to doom ourselves or be free from destruction. Really quite simple if you look outside the box.
I'm agnostic about universal origins/finiteness. I was just pointing out there are many possible alternatives to god - non of which go to greater lengths than conjecturing god. in fact God by definition is the most unnecessarily complex, complicated explanation possible. as noted I was referring to Vilenkin talking about his own paper here. scientists don't rule out god. but as the universe appears to operate entirely via natural cause and effect, and all claims of supernatural cause have been replaced with natural explanations whenever testing has become possible, you can't blame them for assuming naturalism as a default starting point for explaining anything (until there is reason to do otherwise).
And God also lets poor people be born into poor things? God favors the rich? God favors those that happen to be born in America and not in a disease filled country?
I sat and watched the entire Zeigest bullshit and that was way longer. I watch "The universe" and read about evolution all the time. I don't agree with most of what they say.
If you believe that riches brings people happiness, then I can see where you are coming from. Personally I think humility, grace and forgiveness to be worth well more than what you just mentioned.
You're right. They don't rule out God, only atheists. And from the research in another thread; there are just a small % of the smart people.
Wait so if you don't believe the universe is infinite, then that would mean there was a start and there was a cause.
I'm not talking about agreeing with what it says, I am saying it is claiming to know what I (me) think and I know that's not right. That's a big difference than watching something that you disagree with but does not claim to know what YOU think.
OReily?!?! Show me one thing observed in science that came to being without a cause? And don't use something that hasn't been fully discovered either. Something that we actually know and can fully observe.
Nope. It just means it's not infinite. We don't have any information about what laws dictate stuff outside (once again, that's not a physical designation) of our universe. I am not making the assumptions you think I am making. As I have repeated in every post in this thread, I DON'T KNOW.
I thought that using the microwave background we had basically calculated how far the reaches would be? That's not a map or anything, but it is calculations of the size so that we would know it's total extent. Perhaps I misread an article, but I think I read that fairly recently. Then again, I am still just starting to try and understand this subject, it's very new to me so I could have screwed up and misinterpreted something.
Glad you agree that the universe is not finite. First step in understand that there was a beginning. Now with that, we know that we haven't observed that anything "finite" hasn't come into existence without a cause. And since that's true with what we know now, it's not unreasonable to believe this cause was made by something conscious.
