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@PGA2.0
How can the earth be further from the sun and still support life? Please give your evidence for this statement.
It can't. Not in the real world anyway. But if there was an omnipotent creator such as Ahura Mazda or Eiocha then it would easily be within their power, would it not?
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@disgusted
Oh do get into it.
I wrote posts 59 and 63 prior to reading the entire thread, since I was at first responding only to the OP and not the thread as a whole. Now that I have read through the thread I noticed your mention in post 41 regarding the Babylonian captivity, and as it happens that is what I was alluding to when I mentioned that the stories were put to paper for a specific purpose. A way of maintaining cultural identity and all that. I suspect based on your mentioning of it earlier that you probably already know at least as much about that aspect of it as I do. Certainly enough to understand the rest of what I said in my previous posts in context.
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@Mopac
The Ultimate Reality is God, and the fact that there is any perceived order or reality at all is all the evidence you need to believe that there is a way things truly are.
I guess if your definition of god is reality rather than referring to some form of supernatural being... well, I am not a solipsist so I believe that reality exists. Seems like a pretty useless definition though and I doubt that is actually what you mean when you use the word god.
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@Mopac
Because God could do it, that means God has to do it?
No, I do not think that. I do however think that the fact that we happen to exist in the one place that it is naturally possible to do so is something that should not be ignored considering how unlikely that is given how indescribably small the portion of the universe we are capable of inhabiting actually is.
If the universe was fine-tuned for life, we would be able to live in it. For the most part, we aren't.
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@disgusted
What makes you think that? The authors definitely wanted to be believed. I know it was fairy tales but the authors weren't after that interpretation.
What I mean is that the specific stories within were not meant to depict a literal history of the world and founding of the tribes of Israel. The stories of the Old Testament were a collection of oral traditions that the people had which were written down and recorded at one time for some specific reasons that I won't get into here.
The Hebrew authors certainly did believe that their god really does exist in the real world, but stories such as for example the story of Adam and Eve have a definite fable vibe to them which is very evident when looking at the meaning of the names Adam and Eve in the original Hebrew which the story was written in. The from which Adams name is derived translates as 'man' and Eve as 'living' or 'to give life'. These names have very clear meanings in light of the story itself. This continues for other Biblical stories as well. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, etc. Many Biblical Characters have names which very directly related to their stories within the book.
Again the people that made the stories clearly did believe that their god was real, but the stories were created to convey certain messages rather than saying that the things in the stories literally happened in history. Biblical literalism is a relatively recent phenomenon which I think gets in the way of those messages from the authors by trying to shoehorn ridiculous narratives where they clearly do not and cannot fit.
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@EtrnlVw
Life on this planet is fit for its inhabitants.
I do not understand how this should be the case in a fine-tuned universe. I once made a thread to this effect on DDO:
I think the idea I try to get across in the OP of that thread went over the head of most that read it, despite it being such a simple idea. Life as we know it cannot exist in most of the universe.
Even if every planet in the entire universe were miraculously made to be perfectly fit for life most of the universe would still be incapable of supporting life.
Even if our solar system was all there was in the entire universe and hundreds of thousands of earthlike planets were added to it the vast majority of the universe would still be incapable of supporting life.
One has to ask why our civilization just happens to exist on a planet, and not only that but a planet where the conditions for the natural development of such a civilization are physically possible. Please stop reading this for about thirty seconds and just think about that for a moment. Why is it that our civilization exists in the one place we know of that it is possible for it to naturally exist?
Surely if a creator being capable of designing the universe such as Aten, Gaia, Ymir, Vishnu, Ngai, Zamba, Atum, Pangu, Xamaba, or any of a dozen others were responsible then our civilization could exist anywhere. Earth could be, for example, several times further from the sun and still support life just fine. We would hypothetically not even notice a difference until we developed astronomy and began to better understand the physical laws of the universe. Would this not be within their power?
So why instead do we happen to be in the one tiny part of the universe where the development of life is physically possible? Some people would say that such is the case because this is the one tiny part of the universe where life is physically possible. Of course we would develop here. Others would instead choose to believe that the entire cosmos exists literally for their benefit alone.
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The Bible seems to become significantly less interesting when viewed in the light of interpreting it as literal and historical truth rather than literary metaphor such as was clearly the intent of the various authors of the Old Testament.
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