Is God Omnipresent?
Offline Christian theology teaches us that he is. I'm sure someone will disagree with me and tell me that the true scotsman... err... Christian doesn't actually believe that god is everywhere, but I know when I was in bible school they taught me the word "omnipresent" and made me memorize it in conjunction with "Omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent." That last one was always the one I couldn't remember...
Anyway, there's a point to all this. What is hell? Many a theist on this site has said that hell is the complete removal of god's presence. Hell is total separation from god.
How is that again? If god is everywhere, then hell can't exist... but if god is in hell, then what exactly is hell, and why would god want to hang around for eternity looking at billions of his creations suffering? Sounds like a masochist to me.
Anybody want to tell me what I'm missing, and give me some scripture to back it up?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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There are only two possiblities. Either spiritual entities have no influence over physical entities, in which case there is no way to demonstrate that they exist and no possibility that they can be responsible for any physical activity, and therefore there is no reason to believe in them or they have the ability to interact with physical entities in some ways, and therefore it should be possible to find evidence for their existence.
So which is it, StMichael? Do you have evidence, or do they not exist?
It's only the fairy tales they believe.
You are ignoring what I said. For a physical body to exist as a physical body, it MUST have a form/shape in it. This spiritual entity is part of any physical body. The matter itself does not exist apart from the form, and cannot. It's not some little spirit extrinsic to the thing, but part of any physical thing.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
Psalm 50(1):8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.
Hi, i know this is may be attacking an old post, but it ties in pretty much with everything else you say.
St Michael wrote
That much is obvious from the character of our own minds, which are not dependent on matter for their existence.
WHAT?? Wait a minute?? I study molecular biology, and am starting to work in neurology. I can tell you our minds are completely intertwined with the glands, channels, nuerons, astrocytes, dendrocytes, oligodentrocytes, synapses, electrical impusles, chemical imbalances and hormonal feedback that make up the human brain. The mind is not seperatre from the brain. There is no evidence whatsoever for any spiritual component to any of the processes of life or conciousness. It is entirely material.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
St Michael: why isn't there room for God's grace in Hell?
deleted.
I don't think this argument is tied into everything else I say, but I do think it is a critical point.
I do make arguments here (I think) and elsewhere that support this view. Our brains are organs through which we exercise thought and action, but they are not identical with the capacity for thought - the mind. We can see this for a number of reasons:
First, because the mind thinks universal concepts - we conceptulize something which is infinite in character, like dogness or the number 2. Matter itself is and can only be particular, or finite. Hence, the mind has to be immaterial to know these infinite and immaterial things.
Second, because the mind can know all possible bodies. This would not be the case if the mind were purely material, because every material organ knows only a specific type of body, for the same reason as above. Matter can only recieve matter. It cannot form a knowledge of all bodies, but only of a type of body. So, if the mind were matter, we would only be able to know one sort of bodies, and not all types. But this is patently false.
Third, because the mind knows more intensely intelligible things better. This is the contrary with sense organs and material organs that recieve impressions, where an intensely sensible object is actually in itself less sensible because it overwhelms the sense organ. The opposite is found in the mind, where the more intelligible and more immaterial the object is, the more knowable it is for us. Hence, the mind cannot merely be an organ which recieves sensible impressions.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
PS - to Hello, if you do want an answer (which you might not as your second post says, "deleted."), there is no possibility for God's grace in hell because those who are in hell have definitively rejected all God's grace and have chosen to pursue some other good. However, Purgatory, which is not hell, is a place where people do accept God's grace and are purified to enter heaven after death.
Psalm 50(1):8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.
the second post was a "doublepost" ...i'm learning the lingo.
i don't know, i just don't see how you could make the judgement that one is perpetually choosing hell. I think God would find a way to let grace into hell inasmuch as he would let his grace anywhere.
With choice, isn't there always a chance?
You are implying that intangible concepts cannot arise from a tangible force, which is not true. Essentially, what you are doing is attempting to defeat a scientific argument using armchair raciocintation, which is pretty pathetic. These questions were once spiritual. Not any more. With new advances in isotopic tracking, molecular modelling, nuclear imagery and function mapping, we are on the verge of unlocking the PHYSICAL secrets of life. The chemical imbalances and hormonal feedback that make up...us. Our conciousness (the hardest one to crack) our thoughts, our emotions. To claim this is impossible by using a priori is ridiculous. If you believe that there is a spiritual component to life, why don't you gather some data to assert this hypothesis? Until then, it must be presumed non-existent.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Hell itself has no such chance. The devils clearly have no such chance, as well. The nature of seperated spirits, both human souls seperated from bodies, entails a determination in the human will. After death, the soul is no longer able to reverse or amend its decisions, but only to choose in an absolute manner, like the spirits (angels, ect.). Purgatory, however, is the purification of the soul after death, and hence really satisfies what you want to admit into reality. But it is not those who have been damned and performed penance in hell, but those who never left the world damned, but still made a decision for God. Now, they are purified until the final judgement of God, when they will be united to Him forever in heaven.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
Psalm 50(1):8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.
That's really sad. It seems that hell is tragically unnecessary.
I see no reason to believe that physical things require non-physical things to exist, and I've never seen you present any such evidence. Your mistake is in taking abstractions that our brains create and imagining that they are inherent in reality itself.
I'm going to take the fact that you didn't offer any evidence when asked as an acknowledgement that your there's no reason to believe in spiritual entities.
It's only the fairy tales they believe.
Well, imagine a physical entity without any form at all - pure formless matter. It would lack any intelligibility at all. The atom itself is a structure that exists in the real world. Likewise, the structure of matter in a rock determines the way in which that matter exists - as atoms of iron or the like arranged in a pattern that we perceive and name a "rock." These structures actually exist in reality apart from our minds, while our minds know them through our perceptions. What would it mean to say that there isn't actually any structure to correlate the term "atom?" It would destroy natural science, as well as all possibility of knowledge, if our terms were not applicable to reality.
Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,
StMichael
Psalm 50(1):8. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.
Atoms are structures that occur naturally to organize smaller parts of matter. Until the atom forms, it does not exist, so in fact the "form", in the sense of atoms being a form, is dependent on the things that make it up, not the other way around, and the things that can make a particular atom could make any number of other atoms.
We create terms to describe classes of things that we encounter regularly. That does not mean that there is a form out there in the universe that rocks, and atoms, and people are held to. They occur only in our minds.
And aside from all that, none of this equates with a soul, which is understood to exist after the body dies. When you split an atom, the matter takes a different form, and the original is just gone. So too when a person dies.
It's only the fairy tales they believe.
Yes, this is his modus operandi. He then repeats the same already refuted argument ad nauseum.
Precisely...
You've captured his essence.
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
Well said.
Yes. Categories are an end result of our 'divide and conquer' ways of knowing the world.... a 'false' distinction that allows us to simplify the world. 'Nature' is a continuum, not a category.
Yes.
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'