@BillRM,
BillRM wrote:
livinglava wrote:
There is no difference between a natural event and an act of God. They are one and the same.
God is the author of nature. Things that happen naturally are attributed to divine authorship. That is what theology is.
Let me get this straight it is god will when ever there is a flood or any weather event of any kind as he is directly response for the running of the universe down to the smallest details an it is control at his whim? In fact there is no real natural laws at all only the appears of such laws due to him rarely changing his mind at how the universe should work.
Think of it like the CEO of a corporation making rules that cannot be broken, defied, or otherwise. The law of gravity, for example, has no possibility of defiance. You cannot petition for exemption from it or contest a ruling, ask for judicial review, or appeal it.
With a storm/flood, no one can argue against the mechanical forces of nature that cause the flood. What humans can do is learn about what causes evaporation and condensation and interact with causal mechanics at that level. So, for example, if you know more heat rises off a desert than a forest, and you know that heat causes evaporation; and you understand that evaporated water is going to fall back down and potentially cause flooding, then you have a choice about whether to allow forests to flourish and spread or whether to decimate them and cause them to dry up.
But to answer your question about God choosing how to run the universe, no I don't think it works that way. I think the way it works is that God doesn't have to intervene in physical laws to do anything. E.g. if you are not looking where you are going and you trip and fall, you might fall in a way that causes you serious injury or just a little pain and no lasting injury. Either way, nothing changed about the laws of physics. It's just that there is so much complexity in all the interacting factors of nature that many subtleties combine to produce a wide variety of possible outcomes within the spectrum of a single moment of determinism.
So, for example, you could look where you're going and avoid tripping, or you could trip and fall and break your leg because of the geometry of your fall, or you could fall in another way where the impact of your fall gets spread out over your body and you get hurt but without a scratch. No physical laws/forces need to change for all those different outcomes to be possible and thus result in a miracle or tragedy, depending on how you look at it.
Nothing that happens occurs independently of natural forces/mechanics, so God's will is never absent. Human actions, however, do feed into the system and, as a result, we have the ability to influence the spectrum of possible outcomes in various ways, over different time-spans, etc.
Quote:The weather bureau should throw away their computers and computers models and then hired priests that are in good with god to find out if it going to rain tomorrow.
You're assuming that the weather bureau isn't a sort of modern church. You are assuming distinctions between religion and other culture that are made up. There are many subtle differences throughout different forms of culture, but there is nothing preventing humans from worshiping things like science, atheism, modernism, etc. with the same fervor that they worshiped religion a few generations back. Humans do not change that much from generation to generation, even though they inflate superficial differences in their minds for the sake of feeling like they have achieved transcendence of things they want to escape, e.g. religion/ignorance/emotionalism/superstition/etc.
Quote:Interesting and breath taking concept as most people was assuming that he just step in from time to times and overrule some nature law or other not that there is no such thing as a natural law.
There is natural law but it's false logic to imagine God as separate from it.
Hawking was fond of asking whether God could create a rock too heavy for God to move. He was playing with the logical impossibility of omnipotence. It was just an experiment in human imagination, though. In reality, omnipotence/omniscience is what allows humans to ask whether God can create a rock too heavy for Him to move and simultaneously understand that it's a paradox.
Quote:Let see the only reason the earth is rotating is due to god whim an therefore there was no problem for him to stop that rotation as it stated happen in the bible.
What makes you think God would have 'whims?'
Earth rotates due to momentum. Momentum can change, but it changes due to interaction with conflicting momentum, e.g. friction. So could the Earth encounter some counter-rotational momentum or friction that causes it to stop rotating? Sure, the sun is supposed to expand into a red giant at some point and envelop the Earth, at which time it will stop rotating, at least in the sense we understand it to rotate. Of course the momentum of all its moving parts will continue in some form, i.e. because momentum is conserved.
Why would God need to alter physical laws and/or suspend them to accomplish things? Every miracle or other event we experience as divine intervention is scripted into the deterministic timeline of the universe. It may appear to us to deviate from natural causation, but upon closer inspection, does it ever?
