Me & You, Forever ♥

Monday, May 26, 2008

God's Debris

Maple crusade is lagging my nerves out and i'm once again signing in for the n-th times.

Anyway, i got nothing much that i want to blog about. Except that i got freaking pissed by Guo Hao, Gui Liang and Han Hui. What's the meaning that they don't want to transfer the game to April. I did tried to zip it up once, but it showed me a freaking 3 hour duration!!

Then i gave up trying to zip it. So i asked Guo Hao to lend April the thumbdrive for her to play the game too. But just because Han Hui don't allow (by saying too many players make the game lag), Guo Hao seriously didn't want to give the game to April.

And he managed to psycho Gui Liang not to give too.

BOOOO!!!

I will try to transfer the files for myself. I hope those files aren't corrupted.

Anyway, i was reading God's Debris and i thought it was a pretty good book. It talks about this guy who knows about everything. And all the things that's in the book is very thought provoking. Even though this book is called 'God's Debris', but i ain't sure if the entire book is about God. For i'm only at Chapter 4, "God's Free Will".

But below is two excerpts i took out from the book. Enjoy.

OM stands for Old Man
And ME simply stands for... well... me (:

OM “If you toss a coin a thousand times, how often will it comes out heads?”

Me “About fifty percent of the time”

OM “Why?”

ME “I guess that’s because the coin weighs about the same on both sides, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will land on one side versus the other”

OM “You haven’t answered why. You simply listed some facts”

ME “What’s the answer?”

OM “The answer is that the question has no why”

ME “You could say that about anything”

OM “No, any other question has an answer to why. Probability is inexplicable.”

OM “Do you believe in God?”

ME “There has to be a God, otherwise none of us would be here.”

OM “Do you believe that God is omnipotent and that people have free will?”

ME “Yeah”

OM “If God is omnipotent, wouldn’t he know the future?”

ME “Sure,”

OM “If God knows what the future holds, then all our choices are already made, aren’t they? Freewill must be an illusion.”

ME “God let us determine our future ourselves, using our free will.”

OM “Then you believe God doesn’t know the future”

ME “I guess not, but he must prefer not knowing”

OM “So you agree that it would be impossible for God to know the future and grant humans free will?”

ME “I hadn’t thought about it before, but I guess that’s right. He must want us to find our own way, so he intentionally tries not to see the future.”
OM “For whose benefit does God withhold his power to determine the future?”

ME “Well, it must be for his own benefit, and ours, too. He wouldn’t have to settle for less.”

OM “Couldn’t God give humans the illusion of free will? We’d be just as happy as if we had actual free will, and God would retain his ability to see the future. Isn’t that a better solution for God than the one you suggested?”

ME “Why would God want to mislead us?”

OM “If God exists, his motives are certainly unfathomable. No one knows why he grants free will, or why he cares about human souls, or why pain and suffering are necessary parts of life.”

ME “The one thing I know about God’s motives is that he must love us, right?”

OM “Love? Do you mean love in the way you understand it as a human?”

ME “Well, not exactly, but basically the same thing. I mean, love is love.”

OM “A brain surgeon would tell you that a specific part of the brain controls the ability to love. If it’s damaged, people are incapable of love, incapable of caring about others.”

ME “So?”

OM “So, isn’t it arrogant to think that the love generated by our little brains is the same thing that an omnipotent being experiences? If you were omnipotent, why would you limit yourself to something that could be reproduced by a little clump of neurons?”

ME “We must feel something similar to God’s type of love, but not the same way God feels it.”

OM “What does it mean to feel something similar to the way God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun because both are round?”

ME “Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to.”

OM “So you believe God wants things. And he loves things, similar to the way humans do. Do you also believe God experiences anger and forgiveness?”

ME “That’s part of the package”

OM “So God has a personality, according to you, and it is similar to what humans experience?”

ME “I guess so.”

OM “What sort of arrogance assumes God is like people?”

ME “Okay, I can accept the idea that God doesn’t have a personality exactly like people. Maybe we just assume God has a personality because it’s easier to talk about it that way. But the important point is that something had to create reality. It’s too well-designed to be an accident.”

OM “Are you saying you believe in God because there are no other explanations?”

ME “That’s a big part of it.”

OM “If a stage magician makes a tiger disappear and you don’t know how the trick could be done without real magic, does that make it real magic?”

ME “That’s different. The magician knows how it’s done and other magicians know how it’s done. Even the magician’s assistant knows how it’s done. As long as someone knows how it’s done, I can feel confident that it isn’t real magic. I don’t personally need to know how it’s done,”

OM “If someone very wise knew how the world was designed without God’s hand, could that person convince you that God wasn’t involved?”

ME “In theory, yes. But a person with that much knowledge doesn’t exist.”

OM “To be fair, you can only be sure that you don’t know whether that person exists or not.”

It's a little long. But i had a good time trying to make think about it.

And now, time to go into Maple. (: