Our current laws of physics are both incomplete and almost certainly wrong somewhere, maybe everywhere lol
Heck, the assumption that energy cannot be made or destroyed must be wrong or else the big bang should just not have happened and nothing should exist
2spook8me
Unless the natural state of the universe is stuff existing. Still, I read somewhere that after the heat-death of the universe, that after around 10^10^45 years, then natural fluctuations in space (like the constantly popping in and out of existence stuff) might happen big enough and just off-of-balanced-enough to make another one. It made me feel better.
Gonna have to call you out on that one. That's a straw man argument. He was talking about whether god qualifies as omnibenevolent and you subtly changed it to whether god qualifies as benevolent at all while still trying to construe it as the same question.
Personally I don't think a being could harm, or call for the harm, of any being for any reason (except if it was the only possible way to prevent an even greater evil; an exception which is categorically inapplicable to beings that are also omnipotent) and still qualify as omnibenevolent.
That says more about how you define omnibenevolent than it does about a being which is purported to be such. I also happen to disagree with you about how omnipotence could function.
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: The basic principle on how one should behave has stayed the same. What's changing is the covenant God is operating within. In the Old Testament, we have the Covenant of Works, which is God saying "do what I say or I'll smite you, also racial purity and blood sacrifice". Often expressed by attempted genocide of neighbouring people, mountains of foreskins, and similarly brutal things.
The (slightly) newer Covenant of Faith (i.e. what Christ established) changes the basis of how God works from a very Earth-centric view to a Heaven-centric view. God no longer requires the brutal OT stuff from his followers. Basically, it's a different religion.
Don't ask me why it's that way, though. I might actually try to answer >.>
That's pretty interesting, actually. I hope that if God is real he'll finish the Trifecta and establish the final Covenant, the Covenant of Knowledge. And then we learn Plato was right all along, with dark matter being the platonic ideal of matter.
I read it as "Divine judges do good by punishing evil". Which I think is a bad moral code - In my personal opinion, punishment is only good as far as it rehabilitates someone. Eternal punishment is the worst example of course, but also it's not right to cut off someone's hand for stealing, if they can be taught not to steal some other way. Punishment for its own sake is wrong.
But that's just, like, my opinion. In Christian morality, sin does require punishment independent of actually fixing anything.
Eternal punishment serves as determent. Game theory allows, even requires, punishing defectors. If you don't, they have no reason
not to defect. Rehabilitation is useful for situations where someone was forced into it or could get past it with some help. For people who consciously decide to do evil, punishment serves as a hard con for them, to try and outweigh the pros of committing said selfish/evil/defecting act.
Oh, and as something actually useful? Putnam, I've found myself drawn to be religious a couple of times, and I'm fairly sure that if I'd been raised differently, I would have made a very good apologetic and/or preacher. The simple reason is that it's easy. Religion provides an explanation for the unknowable. It provides comfort when things are bad ('even though you're being shit on right now, in heaven you'll have so much nice stuff and all you have to do is not be a dick to people and go to church once a week!'), it provides convenient explanations so long as you don't pry too hard (sorta like science, actually, just need more poking to find the flaws in science). It provides community, a band of people united by their knowledge of the One True God/Gods/All Gods/Flying Spaghetti Buddha. It provides a narrative, which our conscious brains are practically built from, for the universe. One in which you have a place, and matter. It prevents existential crises (usually).
Science is
hard. Avoiding bias is difficult, and being certain you have impossible(in my experience). Researchers using exactly the same procedure for experiments, and reviewing each other's data, who are in the same field and level of experience, but have different viewpoints on whether the subject is true or not, can/will find opposite results, despite utmost rigor. It allows an easy way to say 'this is moral, that is immoral'. It provides answers. Those answers do not always correspond to what we can find exists in reality when we look hard enough. They do not always actually contain meaningful information. But they sate that part of your monkey brain that fears the dark, that fears the unknown, that dreads that which it cannot find out. The part that gets scared when it thinks about the utter nothingness at the end of time. The conscious mind is, from what I know, a product of evolution looking for better ways to lie. In signalling games, after all, the ability to give and detect false signals is paramount. But it's easier to lie if you believe the lie. That's why we're so good at finding patterns, rationalizing, finding justifications, especially after the fact. The brain wants a way to present itself as the good guy. If it's organism was the bad guy, it might get kicked out of the tribe. And that means getting mauled by lions, or at least not getting to have kids. My explanation is itself a rationalization which could very well be 'proven wrong' in fifteen years time (and proven right again, and wrong again, in another thirty). Monkeys are better at simple games than we are, like Prisoner's Dilemma. They are more rational than we are. If everyone was perfectly rational, we wouldn't be people, we'd be little more than computers. And say what you like, at least for the moment there's a hefty and important difference between people and utility-maximizing algorithms.
Religion provides, in a word, hope.
Oh and everything you and I do is mostly community cults, social signalling, and half-decent, half-bad self-justifications.
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