Is it reasonable to deduce God from order in Nature?

[marco]

Is it reasonable to look at a lamb and deduce that God set the production of sheep in motion through his wonderful love. Blake wondered why the God who made the lamb also made the tiger to kill it.

When we see the operation of flowers, the human eye, the spider's web... some of us conclude there is a God who fashioned them. How else did they come about?

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

Should we expect more definite signs of our maker?

And if we accept that some Intelligence made everything, how do we reconcile this Intelligence with the Titan of the Old Testament, hung up on sex, sin and sacrifice?

[dio9]

[Replying to post 1 by marco]

Deists did . lions eat lambs. That's the way it is. Life exists in this biosphere by consuming life. We consume and in turn will be consumed. Round and round it goes. What's wrong with us eating lambs? We give thanks for it. Even vegitarians eat life , plant life.

Job 38:4-41New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

4
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings[a] shouted for joy?

[Kenisaw]

Is it reasonable to look at a lamb and deduce that God set the production of sheep in motion through his wonderful love. Blake wondered why the God who made the lamb also made the tiger to kill it.

When we see the operation of flowers, the human eye, the spider's web... some of us conclude there is a God who fashioned them. How else did they come about?

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

Should we expect more definite signs of our maker?

And if we accept that some Intelligence made everything, how do we reconcile this Intelligence with the Titan of the Old Testament, hung up on sex, sin and sacrifice?

We have all kinds of signs from our maker. Signs that directly contradict what the maker supposedly did and does. Because the maker made everything, including evil, even though the maker is all good and all love and doesn't deceive or lie.

I guess the god in your OP isn't such a reasonable position to hold after all...

[Divine Insight]

And if we accept that some Intelligence made everything, how do we reconcile this Intelligence with the Titan of the Old Testament, hung up on sex, sin and sacrifice?

This is the bottom line for me.

I openly confess that it is extremely difficult for me to view the world we live in to be nothing more than a pure random chance occurrence. And I'm not talking about evolution here but rather the fact that our universe even can evolve in such a constructive way is the random chance occurrence I'm speaking to.

However, even if I embrace the idea that there must have been some sort of intelligent entity behind the creation of our world, when I look around at potential religious paradigms Buddhism and other possible pantheistic views appear to be far more reasonable then the Titan of the Old Testament as you have said.

This is the major problem with the argument: "There must be a God, therefore Christianity must be true". It simply doesn't follow.

Also, science has showed us that given the Big Bang and the standard laws of physics our world would indeed naturally evolve. Therefore there is no need for a baby-sitting God. The God of Buddhism is not a baby-sitting God. The God of the Old Testament most certainly is. In fact, the God of the Bible not only baby-sits, but he even intervenes, directs and commands humans to behave and do certain things.

There is no evidence of a baby-sitting God. Not only that, but if a baby-sitting God actually did exist then he would be responsible for all the evil in the world for not intervening to stop it when he obviously could. In short, he would be a very bad baby-sitter.

So the argument: "There must be a God, therefore Christianity must be true". Is a very bad argument.

[Mithrae]

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

A theistic conclusion could be a product of inference, rather than ignorance. As primitive humans, we already knew what it was that governed our own behaviour, because we experienced it every moment of every day - choice. We knew that other humans behaved according to choice also, and presumably the animals we kept as pets or hunted too. So was it not reasonable to infer that trees and rivers and clouds were governed by choice also?

Rightly or wrongly, animism simplifies into polytheism - from spirits governing every specific tree and stream, to spirits governing all trees and all streams - and polytheism into heno- and monotheism, but the underlying inference is still there. We know and experience choice as a mode of causation, but as yet cannot know or demonstrate any other. As far as modern science is concerned, the 'laws of nature' are descriptive not prescriptive: So while we have the presumption of a deterministic universe as an alternative metaphysical theory, it lacks that element of personal experience and verification which the view of a fundamentally conscious nature to reality has. The former is merely a negation of what we know and experience, while the latter extrapolates from it.

[liamconnor]

When we see the operation of flowers, the human eye, the spider's web... some of us conclude there is a God who fashioned them. How else did they come about?

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

Is the question whether this is an accurate account of the origins of religion? No. Religion's origin was not a inference from the empirical world.

And if we accept that some Intelligence made everything, how do we reconcile this Intelligence with the Titan of the Old Testament, hung up on sex, sin and sacrifice?

Hung up on sex? Is what is meant by this merely that God imposes boundaries within which sex is not only permissible but necessary?

Sin? If 'sin' is a real thing and ultimately destructive to our well-being and happiness, then I do not think there is anything to reconcile here.

Sacrifice? Unless one is a vegan, obviously the problem here is not the slaughter of animals, but the conceptual connection between that slaughter and resulting atonement. The N.T. makes it clear that the ancient sacrifices were shadows of the coming Christ. And when we study the N.t. theology, it seems that the death of Christ was not a matter of appeasing an angry deity with blood, but with the mystical union with Christ whereby our sinful nature, both the wayward will and the corruptible body, die and are, with Christ, reborn.

As for the O.T. rituals, the Bible suggests a period of time in which the knowledge of God was lost--a rather long period of time. If we consider the first several chapters of Genesis to be mythical, it could have been a very, very long period of time. Thus anthropological developments not under God's direct influence may have occurred; indeed, as 'sacrifice' was a universal practice of the ancient world, this seems to be exactly what occurred--part and parcel of man's intuitive encounter with the world was the sense that new life and death went hand in hand. Though animal sacrifice was perhaps a poor expression on the part of man to express this, nevertheless God may very well have used it because it led to a deeper a truth.

[Justin108]

When we see the operation of flowers, the human eye, the spider's web... some of us conclude there is a God who fashioned them. How else did they come about?

Thus God is the product of our ignorance. We do not know - ergo God.

Is this a reasonable position to hold?

Is the question whether this is an accurate account of the origins of religion? No. Religion's origin was not a inference from the empirical world.

How would you know?

[marco]

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?

And where were you when babies were gassed in the Holocaust?


If we were created to be reviled by the creator, to be mocked for our ignorance and to be addressed in boast, then what was the purpose? Job is an illustration of all that is mean in the God of the OT. Fortunately he is a pantomime character, not the author of the Milky Way. He is the nightmare that emerged from nomadic minds. We may be ignorant of our origins; but surely we are not fictions.

when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings[a] shouted for joy?

The atheist Shelley, whose half-eaten corpse was thrown on an Italian coast when he drowned, wrote better lyrics than the dumb morning stars. Given the brutal destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, these lines that speak of joy sound insane.

[marco]

I guess the god in your OP isn't such a reasonable position to hold after all...

It would seem not, Kenisaw, but if we damn our reason as being unreasonable and count our wisdom as folly then we can go along the path that accepts the Tyrant of the Old Testament as the maker of all that is good and fair.

[marco]

There is no evidence of a baby-sitting God. ........................


So the argument: "There must be a God, therefore Christianity must be true". Is a very bad argument.

I completely agree. The Bible has more evidence of baby-battering than baby-minding.

When we deduce an Intelligence to be the basis for creation - rightly or wrongly - we are a million miles away from the half-human thing that was invented for the ears of nomads.