when did we become god's creatures: when he intelligently designed us before the big bang along with all the exact calculations of the constants of nature needed to produce us and the world, or after billions of years when he was inventorying the Milky Way and just happened to notice these mildly amusing milk suckers which had evolved on the 3rd rock from Sun?

Generally, Christians tend to believe that God is eternal, right? If God is not just immortal but beyond and outside of and not bound by time, then to us He designed us before the universe existed; to Him, all times in the universe exist simultaneously so talking about what happened first and what happened second is not really coherent from His point of view.

You make an excellent point that’s too often glossed over, in my opinion. What gets most people so worked up about the theories of evolution and common descent isn’t so much the idea that they contradict a literal reading of Genesis or that they “take G*d out of the picture.” No, I reckon what makes most folks queasy is that those theories powerfully undermine the idea that any individual is special and was from the very beginning of time specifically intended by G*d to exist. After all, evolution suggests that the merest hint of a breath on the cosmic dice could have eliminated either your existence or mine.

The odds of me being conceived instead of one of my half million or so potential siblings are astronomical. As if that’s not enough, one slight gravitational nudge at just the right moment might possibly have rerouted that asteroid and saved the dinosaurs. Who wants to think about the implications of that? To recognize the reality of evolution is to accept a universe in which you or I might very easily never have existed. Even more, it implies a universe in which our entire species might very easily never have evolved. And how special could any universe be without us? How fulfilled could any supreme being be by a universe that doesn’t produce me?

Th Paine:

Nanotech:

Looks like a plant to me.

What kind of a plant does it look like?

A pumpkin.

From a philosophical point of view, there are two types of beings in this world, necessary beings and contingent beings. A contingent being’s existence is like the name says, contingent on another being, for its existence. On the other hand, a necessary being has as its very nature, existence, it does not rely on anything else for its existence. This is something we could say about only one being and that being is God.

Now contingent beings, which include the universe and all the beings that it contains, need a cause for their existence at every moment of their existence. When I think about the question you asked of what role God has to play, I think of the forces in the universe which allow for, and sustain the existence of all the various beings in the universe. Something must be holding those intangible forces in existence and keeping them steady. That is, something must be holding the strong and weak nuclear force, electro-magnetism and gravitational forces in existence. I think this could be the role of God that you are looking for. You might also say that God sustains all the energy that is in the world from which all mater comes from, also.

G

Gthestranger:

You might also say that God sustains all the energy that is in the world from which all mater comes from, also.

G

Given the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics....he's slowly tiring out then, isn't "He"?

How so given the law of conservation of energy?

How fulfilled could any supreme being be by a universe that doesn’t produce me?

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"And so you take joy in me

And so you come down to me

For without me, O Lord of All Universes,

Your love would be in vain."

(Rough translation of one of Tagore's more cryptic songs. The old fella never explained what he was trying to say with it either :) Your sentence kind of reminded me of it........).

I like that. Is there any of Tagore's works in English that you might recommend? I would like to read more of him.

The concept of God being outside of time is very interesting, but I will have to discuss it later in a separate thread.

What's interesting about the argument from design on the basis of the fine tuning of physical constants or the privileged planet argument of Guillermo Gonzalez is that it just assumes that life, and specifically intelligent life like you and I, is so obviously important that it could be the purpose for the entire universe.

That was my translation, I'll have to try more one of these days :)

There are lots of 'official' translations, unfortunately most of them mediocre. I'm not very fond of Tagore's own translations, his English was terribly stiff-Victorian-school-boy, Nobel Prize notwithstanding, and IMO they're sorry imitations of the originals written in Indian language. But anyway, since ou probably dont have time to actually learn the Bengali language, here are samples:

<link>

(That first poem on that page is one that every schoolkid in India still learns).

Or this one: <link>

And here's an excerpt of tagore's own re-writing of the birth of Christ. (I haven't found the whole poem on google yet, which is a pity). <link>

Another option is William Radice's translations of Tagore's poetry ,

<link>

...I'm a poet and I don't even know it?

Nah, probably not...

I kind of like that cryptic song though.

Thanks.

...but belief and religious and spiritual faith clearly comfort many, provide an underpinning to their lives and their societies, serve as moral guidance, and other functions as well. It's not necessary to have a literal Creator God for that to work, surely.

And of course there are other explanations of a role for God such as the origin of the life-force, the one who got the ball rolling and allowed natural laws to take it from there.