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Tell me, how did you arrive at the conclusion that your Primacy of Consciousness (God's consciousness initiated existence) inference is 'more certain' that your other "observation"s and "reason"-ing. I'm asking for a standard to measure your certainty against (something that would have enabled you to have made the evaluation that you are more certain of God than anything else).
Ed.
Firstly Ed, I'm a victim of this paradigm and the ethos level truths, truths that are seemingly undisputable to many people..an example of the emotional intensity of an ethos level truth would be the typical reaction people have against the idea of severe child abuse and the certainty that it's not on....so if you understand my analogy, you can consider that I believe people's reaction to the possible existence of a transcendent being a defiance of an ethos level truth, and thus it seems entirely natural to them that there CANNOT be any God{especially any God that shares details from religious texts, such a the positing of a supernatural realm}.
So I don't have gut wrentching certainty, all I have is a belief based on where my knowledge takes me, and my knowledge is limited due to the nature of what I'm considering, ie, God.
As for my standard, it's really down to believeing that it's more plausible to assume a creation event as per the evidence package that supports the big bang, eg, background cosmic radiation and so on....if it weren't for that evidence, then perhaps an eternal universe would suffice of necessity.
But should all the considerations be considered (I implicitly granted the Big Bang as evidence, remember)? I'm curious, do you have a proposed solution to the problem of evaluating considerations based on a standard?
Well, I'm confused here Ed, I don't see how a big bang and an eternal universe are compatible, so unless I'm mistaken, the acceptance of an eternal universe is the rejection of a bang.
David, define a creation event. It is imperative that we both know what we are talking about here. Your claim here seems to quickly advance to a certainty without an adequate, transparent outline of reasoning. A creation event is the emergence of matter and forces, and this is the typical view of scientific cosmologists, ie, that matter and forces emerged at the big bang{although obviously very few of them attribute it to God}.
David, have you ever witnessed (or heard of someone witnessing) the creation of matter before?
No.
What about the apparent indestructibility of matter (its persistent existence)?
Persistent after it was created.
David, you are not assigning ANY positive qualities to God, but merely negative ones, such as: 'transcends' reality or 'transcends' our understanding of it. Even nonsense is 'beyond our understanding' however ($64,000-question: Do you have a method to distinguish your view from nonsense?).
With respect Ed, you've assigned transcendence as a negative, I've determined that this concept is necessary for me to reconcile all the evidence...and this reconciliation MUST occur within my lifetime, it can't be an assumption for the distant future, as that would render any evaluation of God as worthless within my lifetime, the time I need it.....and I need it only because it seems to be true, not because I'd become an emotional basket case without it.
Unless you guys can adequately debunk the big bang theory, then it doesn't make sense for me to accept an eternal universe.
Btw, an appeal to an endless cycle of bangs and crunches won't work either as I would consider God as the initiator of the first bang.
David Mayes.
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