h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Blickybadger, after what happened to Adele, I have *no* intention of discussing abortion with anyone here, other than what I have already said. I don't like having people shouting spite at me - who would?

Interesting speculation, but who can presume on the motivations of a deity? Almost by definition, they are unknowable. However, it would seem to me pointless to set off a universe knowing exactly what will happen - that makes it no more than a design exercise - hardly something an omnipotent being would find interesting or necessary.

Equally pointless would be to start off something that needs continual tweaking and fiddling to keep going in the right direction - unless a deity can get bored, and needs something to occupy the time.

It it were me (yeah, right), I'd want to see what the minimal possible initial conditions would produce given umpteen billion years. You could set off a whole bunch of them, each with slightly different starting values, and leave them to brew while you dozed. Most might produce sterile universes, but some might produce life here and there, that you could watch and see how it develops. Ooh... look, intelligence has evolved... aw, they went and destroyed themselves... but wait, this one here has got past that stage... that's weird, what are they doing now?

Now that would be fascinating.

It might have something to do with what God did/does, in fact. Very interesing!

Just because you know what's going to happen doesn't nessassarily mean it's not interesting. I've watched The Fellowship of The Ring several times, and had the books memorized before that, and each time I feel amused, sad, happy, fearful... 'course, I'm a too, but you can still be interested in things that you know already.

Perhaps for the random circumstances, well, we've got how many stars around us? (Anyone know?) Who knows? Perhaps He takes a closer look at Ganymede every few hundred years.

<(((><

Higgs and others. It's an approach I've finally discovered/concocted after a good deal of doubt. Find something that is at least plausible because then, however bleak it might be (and I don't see why it should be), at least you can believe it. They you might want to debate it and tweak it to see how far you can go and still keep it plausible.

Eventually you will define a kind of 'thought space' where any acceptable 'religious' belief must fit. Then find the area of intersection with the largest possible subset of what you were brought up to believe, if that's what you find comfortable. Some ideas may have to be, perhaps reluctantly, accepted or abandoned. What is left is what you can, and perhaps even do, believe and find acceptable.

Of course, the process continues indefinitely. I don't spend much time on it, but it's fun sometimes to suggest it to others and discuss it.

There you go, Higgs! Not that difficult to make a start is it? I take the view that God has some constraints such as being perfectly good. Therefore whatever He does has to make things better than when there is only Him. You can have an evil or disinterested God if you like. On balance, I find a good one more plausible. After all, I'm here and so are you. He must be doing something right!

Hi Fnord. Yep, I can tell you why God created the universe. It is a consequence of the fact that He is perfectly good (according to my definition of God). Therefore, if there is some way in which He can make things better than they are with just Him in existence, He has to do it. A perfectly good being is bound to make things better wherever possible.

He, being omniscient too, knows that a universe with moral agents who can choose between right an wrong (us) would be a better one. So He wills such a state of affairs to come about and, as He is omnipotent, it does.

Why God created the Universe.

To know itself through experience. To hold up a 'mirror' to itself. When there was 'nothing' surrounding the 'something' there was nothing to reflect back to God what it was. The consciousness that was Something, split and created the physical. The consciousness was the 'building' brick. That is why we say that God is everything and everywhere.
The Universe is built of God's consciousness.
All matter is composed ,at the sub atomic level, of consciousness.
Including the evolved human being.
The body of the physical recyclable animal is part of the sum total of what we like to call God inhabited by that same consciousness.
These physical beings use the Universe as an experiental field. So that the experience is real, the memory of the being is 'rebooted' at birth. This also answers the question as to why God would know everything that will happen and yet still requires the happening.
To know what happens in the future is not the same as experiencing it. One does not learn from anything as well as first hand experience.
No two human beings in the history of the World have ever had the same identicle experience of life. This denotes the myriad of experiences available in many lives.
Upon death the experiental program returns to the god consciousness and then 'choses' a life to live next to obtain that particular experience that only that life will bring. This is the point at which we select our destiny. At this point without physical form, nothing is perceived as good or bad. Everything is experience. Everything is of value. We are in control of our lives in this sense, not victims of the fate will might feel is enforced upon us all, but is in fact the life we have selected to live.
Coincidences, deju vue, precognition etc are all 'signs' that the consciousness identifies as pointers to the memory of what we really are; particles of the God consciousness only seperated by the physical and the perception of a physical reality. We are not seperate things from God. We are all part of the something which fills the nothing.
God does not inhabit another realm, nor is it behind a closed door, unless that closed door is a metaphor for the temporal lobes or the partiel lobes of the brain, which gives us all our perception of time and space and self.
Remember everything we know about reality, time, space and the physical laws of the experiental field we call the Universe is perception.
To quote many religious texts, we are all one under the skin and bone.

Hi Jez .

You'll be there, really? Bl**dy brilliant. Do send me your number and we should definitely try to meet up.

I'll be with the British Druid Order crowd. Look for a middle-aged, fat chap with an ill-tamed goatee beard, wearing a Indiana-Jones style fedora and bearing an oaken staff. Probably with a tall, bored mosher/gothic daughter in tow .

Should be a good day. I love the beginning of Winter - so much energy!

Bring on the storms!
Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Jez,

He *isn't* fat!



az

Drinking it now Ta

According to *his* doctor he is obese!

6' tall and 18 stone - look at the standard charts, so there!

I am proud to be stout! It is my right as a middle-aged man to be fat, worry about my daughters, eat 12" pizzas as snacks, consider 2 bottles of red wine a cure for stress, examine my hairline every day and pull stray ones from my ears, get by on 5 hours sleep, drive a little too fast on the motorway, disagree loudly with politicians on telly, slouch, grumble, and embarrass my children by dancing to Status Quo and Spandau Ballet at weddings.

I never complain about all your shoes do I?

Pah!
Matholwch /|\.

Re God's Existance
God cannot have existed forever, cannot even exist now, if Douglas Adams himself is to be beleived To quote HHGTG "God said: I refuse to prove I exist, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing, and promptly disappeared in a puff of logic." Not entirely sure that's the exact wording but I think it makes sense within the field of this discussion.

hi Math,

All my shoes? I only own two pair.

Well, you don't look *fat* to me.

So there.

az

Yvonne-

He just took the Bible literally. That's not really what we mean in this thread... *Shrugs*

Hi there, Yvonne. I wouldn't consider believing DNA for a single yoctosecond. Why should God find faith preferable to proof? We could choose to have faith in Satan, the golden calf or the Sun. I fail to see why the Almighty should find such a situation desirable.

> There you go, Higgs! Not that difficult to make a start is it?

I have no objection to speculation or assertion of 'original causes' of any kind, as long as they only have 'effect' prior to the point at which we can start to theorise and speculate cosmologically. In other words, as long they are (and remain) outside the purview of science. I use the words 'cause', 'effect', 'prior', 'point' for want of any better to describe the pre-origins of spacetime and causality... a knotty problem!

Since we don't know how space-time came to be, and I don't think we can ever *ultimately* know how things came to be (i.e. if the universe turns out to be the ripples resulting from the collision of 2 multi-dimensional 'branes', we won't know where the 'branes' came from, etc.), it doesn't really bother me what we call it. I don't care if it's turtles all the way down, universes within universes, God, or an electric elk called Simon, it has no relevance - it is unknown and unknowable. If it makes you happy, call it God.

Now that MIT are publishing all their courses online, there are some excellent opportunities to find out what the really deep thinkers have made of the subjects we've dipped our meagre intellects into...

Check out the 'Problems of Philosophy' course at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-00Problems-of-PhilosophyFall2001/CourseHome/index.htm, in particular:

The Ontological Argument : http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/D4C79E77-93BA-4A7F-9B77-FE705E0F2095/0/fa01lec01.pdf

The Problem of Evil : http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/7A787990-31D3-4850-90FC-B34B0E7AE7A8/0/fa01lec02.pdf

Evil and Free Will : http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/F3C2D0C3-6209-4052-A398-5353C3686BC5/0/fa01lec03.pdf

and Free Will I, II and III, etc. - Solid stuff!

Toxxin:

"Why should God find faith preferable to proof?" "I fail to see why the Almighty should find such a situation desirable."

But He evidently does or His existence would be a matter of fact and not faith because He would have made His existence obvious. Why does God hide behind this shroud of 'unknowable', 'unprovable' invisibility? If He wants our adoration and worship why doesn't He provide indisputable proof of His existence? It would put an end to a lot of evil perpetuated in the name of religious disagreement.

F