re: #881 Salamantis

If the universe was created by a creator deity, then who created THAT creator deity, and who created HIS creator, and so on and on ad nauseum ad infinitum. Yep; we’re talking Creator Turtles all the way down a bottomless infinite regression pit.

The definition of deity would be the Prime Cause any other beings of whatever power would have to be creations and subordinate. That is why monotheism is so much more logical than the pantheistic idea of multiple powers fighting it out for supremacy. The idea of a Creator is that since the Creator is the Prime Cause and exists outside the universe that we are in, then He/She/It (the English language does not have a proper pronoun) cannot be limited by the “laws” of this universe. The universe initial start argument does not match the deity creation argument. The universe, as an artifact of time, must obey all the laws and therefore needs a starting point. If the definition of “deity” implies nothing more than a super-powerful magician which requires a “creator” then it is nothing more than another artifact of the universe just like in the mythology of primitive people or in a fantasy novel.

I always considered it to be less virtuous anyway to do good and avoid evil because one believed in and feared a smiling bully with a pie in one hand and a club in the other threatening and cajoling one to do so, than it would be if one does good and avoids evil simply because it’s the right (as opposed to the wrong) thing to do.

This is also a straw man. While the goal would be to conform to the will of the deity for the right motives, there are people who have not yet developed sufficiently to be able to do so. These people need a system of reward and punishment as a teaching tool to learn to follow the right path. Consider the difference between an infant, a toddler, a tenager, and an adult. Bringing up modern politics, consider the spoiled selfish actions of …

In any case, we need an outside source to define “right” and “wrong” because people defining those terms on their own can lead to Pol Pot’s Cambodia or the terrorists’ Islam rather than the examples of good people that you gave. Remember, Pol Pot claimed to be doing “good” and that his actions were “necessary”. Andrei Sakharov is an example of a “good atheist” but was unable to teach his children to follow in his path.

In any case, this has nothing to do with the argument over evolution in which both sides misunderstand what is going on and attempt to redefine both evolution and creation to mean what would support their personal agendas.

Creation could have taken place 5 seconds ago with this post already on your computer screen and we would have no way of proving differently. All that we can say is that according to the rules as we understand them the univers appears to be a certain age. An example would be that Adam saw the stars even though light could not yet have reached the earth from even the nearest star if it had started from the star at the moment of creation. If he had cut down a tree as soon as he woke up, he would have been able to count the rings in the trunk. A mushroom was created living on a dead tree.