You like to ask difficult questions.
Let me give you a bit of history here. I've gone from Christian (not a strong one) to atheist to agnostic to Deist. My current beliefs are based on Near Death Experience. It is the best evidence, IMO, of the existence of what we think a God is.
With that I do not pretend to know what God had to do with the creation of the universe or anything that has happened on this planet since its inception. I have some guesses but no definitive answers. People who have had it explained to them say it's very simple but they can't bring it to terms in our world.
Therin lie the problem. God, the name I will give the Light, resides in a dimension different from our own. We can't understand or explain anything outside of our 4 dimensional world. The only rules we know are those of our dimension. We theorize of another dimension but we can't possibly understand it.
My feeling is we were not meant to understand. We were put here for a purpose, a purpose unique to each individual. Conflict happens as this is the way we learn. When our time here is done we all, and I mean all, go back. We will come back again.
Life is not the time we are born here on earth and die. Life is in the soul. Our soul was in existence before we came here and it will be in existence when our body dies.
I see a lot of NDE in religions. The Golden Rule is one aspect of NDE. But no religion can explain God's dimension or understand it any more than I can. Unfortunately religion is used as a tool to gain wealth, power and control over other people. They create Gods and use the power of their Gods (fear, vengeance, etc.) to control and conquer. I have very little respect for religions and the Gods they create.
Quote:a) Have you been able to rationalize that god created the universe and then abandoned it, and if so how does such a view pertain to freewill?
I don't know if God created the universe or, if at creation, god was created along with the universe. There may be an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of Gods. Did God abandoned it? I don't think he abandoned it. But I don't believe if he controls every aspect of it either. We have the will to behave as we choose. When we return we go through a life review. We see the mistakes we made. Those mistakes were not programmed into us. We were faced with certain situations and we reacted to them. Perhaps there were better ways to react to them then what we chose. If so we will be told. So, yes, we do have a free will. We make decisions without a God putting our decisions into our heads, as some Christians believe.
Quote:b) Have you been able to rationalize that the best of all possible worlds has already been created and any godlike intervention could not improve it, and if so how does such a view pertain to freewill?
What is the best possible world? The Romans thought they had the best possible world. Do you agree? The Indian nomads felt they had the best possible world. Don't we all try to make the world the best possible world with the conditions we are given? Isn't free will our quest to make the world we have the best possible world?
Quote:c) Have you been able to rationalize that god became the world and does not exist as a separate entity from it, and if so how does such a view pertain to freewill?
I do not believe God is the world or the universe. My assumption is God is the sum total of all souls. We are all a tiny bit of God. The sum total of all the souls knowledge is God's knowledge. We come here to learn, we take back what we learn. For all I know this could be happening in a billion earths.
Quote:d) Have you been able to rationalize that god intervenes only as a subtle and pervasive force in the universe, and if so how does such a view pertain to freewill?
I'm inclined to believe God does not intervene. Things take their own natural course. Did God make a meteorite crash into the earth so he could destroy the dinosaurs and create humans? I'm inclined to think not. For what purpose would he do that? What purpose was the Permian extinction? To make dinosaurs? If the end result is to make humans why didn't we appear a billion years ago?
Quote:e) Do you believe in the watchmaker analagy, and if so how does such a view pertain to freewill?
No. I think once things got started it went on its own course. My analogy is this. Remember when the atomic bomb first came out? In trying to explain how it worked they used the mousetrap demonstration. A table would have a hundred set mousetraps on it. On each mousetrap was a ping pong ball. One ball was dropped in the middle. Suddenly, spontaneous eruptions of ping pong balls. Did anyone guide each and every one of those ping pong balls? Or did nature take its course, so to say?
The Big Bang started it all. After that it was nature on its own. That's my take on it. I can't prove it. But no one can prove otherwise. There are some things we don't know and never will know until we pass on. So don't ask me what was before the BB. I don't know.
We are put on this earth with a purpose and the talents to do what we're suppose to do. How we do it and if we use that talent the best possible way is our free will. Where it all leads to is the sum total of all of our free wills. Each soul has its own thing to do, its own thing to learn. It may not be able to do it. It may have to come back and try again.
People are always asking did God do this or that. God is in a different world then ours, a world we can't possibly understand. We're not meant to know what's going on in God's world. We'll find that out when we return home. Until then we should be concerned about our world, how we behave towards one another and to our environment. We have control over that. We don't have control over anything outside our dimension.
