God can write straight with crooked lines.

[MG 2.0]

Here we go again. Learning at the feet of those with formal training in heap theory. Just don't repeat yourselves.

How does one LOL stand up against three if the one LOL is from a believer and the three LOL's are coming from a non-believer. This may get really deep, really fast.

Gotta' factor in the dude with the shades too.

Regards,
MG

No formal training required. Just basic probability and an interest in ancient treasure stories.

OK then. Carry on.

Regards,
MG

[Limnor]

No formal training required. Just basic probability and an interest in ancient treasure stories.

OK then. Carry on.

Regards,
MG

I’ll give you a “clever” point for that one. Three LOLs and one shade is mildly funny in the Sorites scale.

[Gadianton]

But He hasn't, right? So what is one to do in that instance? Are you only going to be satisfied if and when God literally comes through your front door carrying a sign that says, "I've got a plan!"

Without even knocking and asking permission?

I'm curious as to what you really mean when you say, "If God wants to come down from heaven and prove to me..."

What do you imagine that would look like?

part 1) Even if God is an important topic, and God is there, and if I longed to commune, nobody has a clue about "him"

I think my biggest issue with your framing is that it assumes I either have, or should have, a desperate need to get to know God. Even if I were to, it's pretty obvious to me that other people who claim to know God, don't know God. Nothing I've read or heard I find convincing in the least. I can respect a person's spirituality to an extent, because I see it as an extension of a person's struggles to come to terms with life. I don't just laugh at all of it. However, I don't consider the results of such struggles, even if they are actually heartfelt, humble, and thoughtful, to be convincing in the least that God is there or that anyone knows anything about "him".

part 2) God is not an important topic.

The closest my interest and beliefs get to something that approximates an interest in God is my interest in UFOs and aliens, even though I give the odds of humans possessing actual knowledge about such things to be very low. I still find myself intrigued, and I consider that intrigue to approximate the impulse to believe in God. I can't criticize people entirely for having their God impulse when I do have something similar. I do think that belief in aliens is becoming a cultural replacement for a belief in God by modern people. To the extent that aliens substitute for God in a person's quest for connection to the universe or longing for answers, it's pretty clear that actual real contact will be more bad than good, and will be a letdown once it actually happens. The longing for the unknown will persist. Likewise, heaven, even if real, will be a letdown -- a cage of sorts that we'll long to escape.

While God is part of intellectual history, I don't find "God" to be the foundational question. God comes up in interesting topics, but not central to those topics.

part 3) I don't desire to commune with God

Once it's understood that impulses to understand the unknown can persist in a fascination with aliens, sci-fi, or perhaps other endeavors, and then once a person comes to accept their mortality, why is it that a person should seek God? The subtext of MG's post says that I must spend every waking moment desperately trying a new angle to make sure I "invited" God to answer me -- this, considering there is little reason to believe he's ever answered anybody. The thing is, I just don't have an interest in getting to know God. Even if he's really there, great, just let me live on my little plot of land and enjoy the things I like to do, I'd rather have an extend companionship with my dog. We won't have that much in common. He could answer hard questions, but there's always another question, and a good mystery keeps the blood moving. I'm not wired to enjoy being around God. We're products of evolution. The kinds of things we like are programmed by billions of years of background processes that set a stage for our lives to persist even a few short years. Getting behind reality may be a consistent curiosity, living there is of no interest to me. You need all that stuff out there to stay out there, in order to have the stable little niche where you can throw a ball to a dog over and over again and watch him never get bored with it.

[MG 2.0]

But He hasn't, right? So what is one to do in that instance? Are you only going to be satisfied if and when God literally comes through your front door carrying a sign that says, "I've got a plan!"

Without even knocking and asking permission?

I'm curious as to what you really mean when you say, "If God wants to come down from heaven and prove to me..."

What do you imagine that would look like?

part 1) Even if God is an important topic, and God is there, and if I longed to commune, nobody has a clue about "him"

I think my biggest issue with your framing is that it assumes I either have, or should have, a desperate need to get to know God. Even if I were to, it's pretty obvious to me that other people who claim to know God, don't know God. Nothing I've read or heard I find convincing in the least. I can respect a person's spirituality to an extent, because I see it as an extension of a person's struggles to come to terms with life. I don't just laugh at all of it. However, I don't consider the results of such struggles, even if they are actually heartfelt, humble, and thoughtful, to be convincing in the least that God is there or that anyone knows anything about "him".

part 2) God is not an important topic.

The closest my interest and beliefs get to something that approximates an interest in God is my interest in UFOs and aliens, even though I give the odds of humans possessing actual knowledge about such things to be very low. I still find myself intrigued, and I consider that intrigue to approximate the impulse to believe in God. I can't criticize people entirely for having their God impulse when I do have something similar. I do think that belief in aliens is becoming a cultural replacement for a belief in God by modern people. To the extent that aliens substitute for God in a person's quest for connection to the universe or longing for answers, it's pretty clear that actual real contact will be more bad than good, and will be a letdown once it actually happens. The longing for the unknown will persist. Likewise, heaven, even if real, will be a letdown -- a cage of sorts that we'll long to escape.

While God is part of intellectual history, I don't find "God" to be the foundational question. God comes up in interesting topics, but not central to those topics.

part 3) I don't desire to commune with God

Once it's understood that impulses to understand the unknown can persist in a fascination with aliens, sci-fi, or perhaps other endeavors, and then once a person comes to accept their mortality, why is it that a person should seek God? The subtext of MG's post says that I must spend every waking moment desperately trying a new angle to make sure I "invited" God to answer me -- this, considering there is little reason to believe he's ever answered anybody. The thing is, I just don't have an interest in getting to know God. Even if he's really there, great, just let me live on my little plot of land and enjoy the things I like to do, I'd rather have an extend companionship with my dog. We won't have that much in common. He could answer hard questions, but there's always another question, and a good mystery keeps the blood moving. I'm not wired to enjoy being around God. We're products of evolution. The kinds of things we like are programmed by billions of years of background processes that set a stage for our lives to persist even a few short years. Getting behind reality may be a consistent curiosity, living there is of no interest to me. You need all that stuff out there to stay out there, in order to have the stable little niche where you can throw a ball to a dog over and over again and watch him never get bored with it.

Thank you for your response, gadianton.

I don't know if I've asked you, in particular, this question before...and I'll keep it short:

Are you a multiverse kind of guy? Are you one of those folks that in response to the Fine Tuning Argument essentially says, "It is what it is, I got lucky"?

Or is your main concern your relationship with your dog and let's not sweat the small stuff.

Regards,
MG

[Gadianton]

The "multiverse" can mean a lot of things, I tend not to believe it. I occasionally read about cosmology but I'm not well-versed. I have issues with the anthropic principle. I don't think fine-tuning is that interesting. I don't see a whole lot of life around, seems like an uphill battle. If the constants were slightly more different perhaps the universe would be filled with life instead of nearly empty. We could be in a false vacuum and suddenly "boom" no more life, so much for the constants, then. It's the same as irreducible complexity. Behe's example of blood clotting is a good example, because for any organism with blood, one minor change would be death. But, blood clotting systems vary among species. Fine tuning arguments say external factors must be exactly what they are for biology to be exactly what it is, but biology could have been different with different factors. And the examples are endless as to how biology adapts to different factors. With FT, you're going way, way out there with a lever and instead of considering the difference a volcano would have made 10,000 years ago, or the onset of flowering plants 140 million years ago, which made complex brains possible, you're considering the very most sensitive things that give rise to the world we know. We just don't have the ability to study other possibilities to say one way or another.

[yellowstone123]

It might be easier to ask if the LDS church can write straight with crooked lines, and one might replace the image of a person playing hopscotch with a person using an Etch A Sketch.

I appears as though what you are doing is pointing out the tension between how believers describe God’s activity in history and how the institutional Church often appears in practice.

I'm comfortable letting things stand as I originally crafted the OP. The question I raised was intentionally about a "creator God', not primarily about the church. In this way believers and non believers were/are able to engage the idea at a more basic level before immediately collapsing everything into the familiar 'LDS truth claims debate'.

The hop scotch image was an invitation to explore whether we can get to "square one" in thinking about God's action in a messy world.

I think things went according to plan, on the whole.

Admittedly, on a board such as this one, things will eventually become boxed into one's own views regarding the restoration narrative and the resulting outgrowth of CofJCofLDS.

Regards,
MG

thank you for your response MG 2.0. I admit I don't get it. How do humans get square one given our evolutionary history: seeing things along a certain spectrum: sensitive to certain wave lengths of radiation, not to others. Sensitive to certain types of vibrations, other are not heard; chaos in the immediate environment, etc. And of course with me I want to know does your God writing straight lines end with a judgement - is it spelled out.

[MG 2.0]

I don't think fine-tuning is that interesting.

I think that those that see fine tuning as an important 'evidence' for God are not on shaky ground. Francis Collins and others of his caliber.

I think that this particular topic ought/should be of great interest to any thinker.

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

I want to know does your God writing straight lines end with a judgement...

I think there is something in 'the plan' (unless you think it's a free for all) that allows for gradients of purpose/existence/progress in the afterlife. Exactly what that might look like is open to question. I think Jesus as Judge is found in there as part of the process. Otherwise things would get a bit 'willy-nilly' and chaotic, don't you think?

Somewhere I've heard that God's house is a house of order. How could it be any other way? Any ideas from your end?

Regards,
MG

[Gadianton]

I think that those that see fine tuning as an important 'evidence' for God are not on shaky ground. Francis Collins and others of his caliber.

I think that this particular topic ought/should be of great interest to any thinker.

Well, Francis Collins is free to join this board and get his ass handed to him on this one. It's a specious argument. Those who see fine tuning as important evidence for God are, in fact, on shaky ground. They deserve all the laughter we folks standing on top of the great and spacious building can muster.

In any causal chain, the events at the end of the chain are guaranteed to be highly sensitive to the events in the beginning. If the universe were totally devoid of life, whatever the state of that universe is, it would be just as dependent on its initial events as any other universe. It's a banal point. It's like saying the conditions within the Powerball tumbler were designed to produce the winning sequence because the person who won feels special. I's ridiculous.

[Marcus]

I think that those that see fine tuning as an important 'evidence' for God are not on shaky ground. Francis Collins and others of his caliber.

I think that this particular topic ought/should be of great interest to any thinker.

Well, Francis Collins is free to join this board and get his ass handed to him on this one.

It's a specious argument. Those who see fine tuning as important evidence for God are, in fact, on shaky ground. They deserve all the laughter we folks standing on top of the great and spacious building can muster.

In any causal chain, the events at the end of the chain are guaranteed to be highly sensitive to the events in the beginning. If the universe were totally devoid of life, whatever the state of that universe is, it would be just as dependent on its initial events as any other universe. It's a banal point. It's like saying the conditions within the Powerball tumbler were designed to produce the winning sequence because the person who won feels special. I's ridiculous.

Very, very well said, especially the bolded. If I recall correctly, Bednar used the same logic to point out that those whose prayers are not answered (faith to not be healed) are in exactly the same position as those whose prayers are answered.

On a more personal note, it broke my heart to read a family member's testimony/justification re why their spouse died of a disease when a colleague of his gave a talk stating that, because of his faith, the Mormon god cured his spouse of the same disease. The mental pretzeling was physically painful to read. But, they remain a faithful tithe payer, so, the LDS god is real, as I am sure all mentalgymnasts would agree.