Made-Old, the Stone Washed Universe Don't miss he Shopping Carts! Scroll down for more info.
    Lets talk about the made-old explanation of natural and geological history. In this, certain people of faith who think that it is spiritually important to come to a specific conclusion about the creation of the world have posited that one way to make a seven day creation (six plus a one-day vacation, really) seem plausible in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary is to state that God made the world looking old.

    I believe that this is remotely possible, provided you start with the assumption that there is a God and He is an omnipotent being capable of anything conceivable or inconceivable. In this, it could be said that God created the Earth in-situ, in process, like a rolling start.

    In following this theory, I might then conclude that all events that apparently happened prior to the act of creation are therefore synthetic, and manufactured. God is omnipotent, however, so His manufactured history is 100% convincing in all the ways we as lowly humans can ever perceive. So the only one who could possibly tell the difference between the manufactured history and the real history is God Himself.

    As a matter of fact, this could mean that God created the universe three minutes ago, including all of our memories up to this very moment. How could we ever know? My car, contrary to the evidence provided me by Ford Motor Credit, may be brand new and my bowels may be full of food I never really ate but only think I did.

    Ah, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. Lets go back to God having created the Earth about six thousand years ago sporting a stylishly lived-in look. If true, then scientists have no choice but to use the evidence and phenomena presented by God's manufactured reality in their quest to find answers and make predictions about the world around us. They must operate within the system set up for us by God. God seems to have made the artificial history completely seamless and predictive, and therefore removed the necessity of believing in his act of creation, an act for which he carefully provided us with no evidence.

    That is, if He did such a thing so very effectively, then He effectively did no such thing at all.

    With this, I think it is possible to believe in a seven day creation, and it is possible to believe that there was no seven day creation and both are not disprovable and can be valid paths to their adherents, though I am not among them, and fail to see the spiritual necessity of holding onto either concept. Why would the salvation through the love of Jesus require that we believe in a supposed seven day creation? (Well, six plus the aforementioned one-day vacation)

    But what if you believe that all of time, past and future, may have already been about to be existing all along? What if all of time was always created because it was all created at once?

Labels: Creationism, Jeans, Religion, Underpants

  ¶ 9:58 AM 1 Comments

  Free Will, Fate, and Metaphysical Determinism     One of the key difficulties when approaching the existence/nonexistence of God is the paradox of free will in the face of an omnipotent, omniscient being.

    If God knows everything that will ever happen, including every decision we have yet to make, then there is no freedom. We are fated to do everything we will ever do and even the act of trying to avoid fate is itself a fated act.

    Free will must therefore be an illusion, as our course was set by God and anything bad that happens is actually His fault by reason of poor planning. Or is it?

    An atheist might state that this paradox which adds to the list of reasons that God can't exist. But eliminating God doesn't completely eliminate the problem of free will.

    That is, when you strip God from the question, the question still remains: do we have free will or is the future inevitable?

    We are products of our genetics, our upbringing, and our personally accumulated experiences and training. Our decisions, which are the product of the moment we make them in and the people we are when deciding, could probably be predicted should an observer just have enough information.

    Once I get to this point free will becomes a matter of definition. I define my 'will' as being the evident desires espoused by the creature that I am--the end product of my genetic inheritance, my accumulated experiences and the influence of the information I am acting upon (regardless of that information's veracity). I have free will because the creature that I am then exercises that will. Any decision at that point is an act of free will because I've properly defined 'will' to match the result. A tautology? Perhaps.

    But really, can you impose an idealized idea of what "will" or "soul" is without taking into account what is practically possible and self-evident about the creatures we are? That is, I can state that we can't be true free actors because the universe dictates and shackles my soul. But then I've defined soul and will as an unattainable ideal that simply doesn't match the available evidence. Might as well be talking about animism. 'Soul' is merely a religious construct if it seeks to define one by excluding the definable.

    So, within the confines of what it is possible to say about will and freedom, we have it. For what that's worth!

    But here's where metaphysics comes in:
    Everything will have already happened, and therefore would always have been happening.

    The 'movement' of time, hurtling from the past towards the future on the razor thin edge of present, is not an illusion per se, but is a forced perspective informed by entropy. All instants and happenstances that have happened still exist there in the past. It’s a direction we can't travel (as of yet), but it is a coordinate of orientation as sure as x, y, and z. The future is no different, and while it seems as if we haven't done that s*** yet, it will have always been done. In that, our actions aren't so much as determined as they are merely determinable.

    Metaphysical determinist, I.

    I find free will to be alive and well from a practical standpoint. There's no relief from that responsibility to be had by pointing at a metaphysical determinability of reality. Just because the decisions will always have been made doesn't mean that we weren't always in the process of having decided.

    Some would say this is like saying, "play along with the game." It is more subtle than that, I think.

    By the definition of will that I use, and with what I believe about the nature of existence, then we have freedom. It isn't that we are determined, it is that we are determinable. Our choices are revealed as they seem to pass from the future toward the past.

    It may seem paradoxical, that I am stating we have both free will and that the free will we have is an illusion. But it doesn't seem that way to me, as I can conceive of a scenario where both are true at the same time.

    And while this is no guarantor of God's veracity, it certainly eliminates the paradox of free-will from becoming a factor in my decision to believe/not-believe in Him.  ¶ 1:28 PM 1 Comments