Nature is nature and gods are gods. There is nothing wrong with seeing god in all the way Gnostic Christians do but to call god nature when the definitions are as is would be wrong. God, if anything, is a part of nature, and not nature being a part of god. Regards DL
Facts show a lie or a truth. Not a belief. As you state, belief is a motivator. A motivator is not a fact. Regards DL
I bow to no one or no thang... i am but a gear in the clock-work of life... an that you believe thers no such thang as hell -- i have no reason to believe that you'r morals are not at least as good as mine... an i suspect that mine are beter than any other religous/spiritual person ive seen post here at Sciforums.!!!
Better than the religious stuck in a barbaric century I can agree with. Those do not usually follow good morals but follow their immoral gods instead. The spiritual thinkers do not usually agree with the religious on moral grounds. The religious are into Inquisitions and Jihads while the spiritual are men and women of peace who have rejected religious dogma and the intolerance that goes with following the old religions. Regards DL
If the facts prove the belief to be true, no argument. There are no true facts in talking animals or a bunch of virgins awaiting us in heaven. Regards DL
The reason why we stopped inventing gods, is actually very simple. Science in all its forms. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! When we climbed down out of the trees, and our knowledge and reasonings were scant, we invented gods in the Sun and the Moon, rivers and Mountains etc, to help explain us, the planet we inhabited, and the universe around us. Then along came a few great men, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Brahe, that began to explain the heavens around us, and some of the whys and hows.....the belief in inanimate objects as gods began to fade....Still the question/s remained...how did we get here? Where did the stars come from? etc.....As other greats such as Darwin, Pasteur, Jenner, Curie, Rutherford Bethe, and many many more continued with experiments, making relevant observations, and gaining knowledge, we were gradually able to construct a reasoanble picture as to some of those whys and hows etc. While as yet, that picture is still not complete, it has certainly pushed back into near oblivion any need for any imaginary deity.
"Regarding the OP: is there any reason to think "we" have stopped inventing Gods? " Your ignorance and incapabilities don't seem to be persuasive evidence of anything. Especially not when combined with notions such as humans - all of them? - "stagnating" in some new and vague way. I'm not sure how one would determine that some particular claimed deity, manifestation of worshipped spiritual entity, or the like, qualified as a newly invented god, but there sure seem to be a lot of possible new gods on the landscape - from Jah to John Frum, and we are only in the Js speaking English. But there are truths in the stories of them. http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/654/the-nurse-and-the-wolf/ Science would be more of an instigation for new invention of deity, than a preventer of such. The inadequacy, or better: unsuitability, of the former conceptions of deity in the face of the needs of scientifically sophisticated people and the realities of their world does not obviate those needs or banish those realities.
What you have shown is that science and knowledge have undermined some existing deities. But that does not address the matter of inventing new ones, nor does it address the needs of scientifically sophisticated people unwilling to restrict their acknowledgment of the universe to its simpler patterns and manifestations. On general principles, such as those of Darwinian evolution, removal of existing entities from a given environment opens up more possibilities for new ones to emerge - not fewer.
Explaining physical phenomena has never been the primary role of deity among human beings. Had humans ever really needed Gods for that, they would have been dead - because such explanations don't work.
Seems to me that we have replaced gods with scientific models capable of doing the same things through the mathematical function, I could make a defensible argument that the *inherent mathematical functions of the universe* seemed *intentional* to the uneducated, but we know now these *constants* are required to fill the mathematical functional evolution spacetime fabric itself, a mathematical geometry which gives an illusion of purposeful design. But it's just the mathematical function in a dynamic spacetime geometric. God cannot do more than what the mathematics allow, a confirmed concession by a spiritual institution which for some 2000 years have believed in a Magician with a Magic Wand.
Of course some people deserve punishment here on earth but not in heaven. Gnostic Christians are Universalists and. like a supernatural god, look at reality and see that evil people are not born evil, unless insane, and that they are products of all those they have interacted with. We need to protect ourselves from criminals and evil here, but that need is non-existent in any heaven I can imagin. Regards DL
I do. Fact is, they are a product of myth to the intelligent and a product of worthy religions to the less intelligent and delusional. Regards DL
