[dark_crystal]

Most of this is pasted from stuff i have written elsewhere, but here is my take:

Natural laws, like gravity, like natural selection, like entropy, acceleration, fibonacci sequences, etc., are visibly reified all around us. They are constant and predictable, yet not cannot be brought entirely under our control. We can manipulate them with great expertise, but only within the framework of their inherent qualities. We cannot exceed those limitations.

If natural laws exist, but cannot be brought under our control, they must be under other control, or their own– and the evidence of their existence is incontrovertible, so the evidence of non-human control is incontrovertible.

There is only one thing we can say for sure that every force of nature we can observe wants: progress. Every force of nature we can observe has an agenda that moves from left to right along a spectrum from evolution to disintegration.

Here’s the real story of Genesis: God was sitting at His laptop and he called up the evolution program and He said: “hear me out- you know how there’s all these living things down there and they’re all going to die but they don’t know yet? Let’s make one that knows and see what happens.”

And then the evolution program pushed some monkeys down out of the trees and made it so there weren’t enough bananas, so they had to start killing a lot so they could start eating enough meat to get brains big enough to fully appreciate their eventual annihilation.

Like, fully appreciate it.

And those monkeys were Adam and Eve, and all of those animals they killed to get their brains (the knowledge of good and evil) to that point were “the apple.”

Human individuals are nothing more than equations set to answer that “what if they know they are worm food?” question.

Evolution is the program God wrote to run the “existence” experiment for him.

In fact, God is the program. Right now that program is compiling data on a sub-experiment in consciousness. Humanity is the experimental group and apes are the control.

The problem is not in proving God’s existence, but in proving His concern.

Horrible things really do happen to people who we know don’t deserve them, who we know are just as innocent (probably more, if we’re honest) as we are.

We try to believe we can stave off the horrible with good behavior or perfect devotion, but deep down we know we’re not any more accomplished at those things than the victim sitting next to us. We try to earn our safety, but our experience tells us that only works about half the time. That is a powerless feeling, and makes us feel abandoned.

Horrible things happen because God is perfect. When we’re accused of letting personal feelings inform our decisions, we say “I’m only human!” Being “only human” is most often claimed as an excuse for behaving irrationally.

God is not human, so He does not behave irrationally. He does not intervene in the working of the law because to do so is not rational. God is a program– programs can always be counted on to operate strictly within the parameters that define them. Any result that seems outside the parameters is a result of undiscovered potentials within the parameters, not from the program’s intervention.

The operation is always “If A, then B,” and never “if A, then B, unless A is really awesome: if A is really awesome, then C.”

Whatever it is that is going to kill you is the culmination of all of the factors under which you were born. The program is not going to run back and reset these just because it’s gotten attached to how you turned out.

Although i profess a Christian faith, this is a deist cosmology. How can you be a deist and also believe in Christ?

Because the teachngs of Christ priorize humility above any other virtue, and humility is the only thing that "saves" you under a deist model. Having enough humility to not care that God doesn't care about you-- and to arrive at the end of your life without having let this cognitive dissonance madden and embitter you-- is salvation. Arriving at the end pissed off and bitter is damnation.

Insisting that reward and punishment happen in the afterlife is to insist upon an afterlife existing, which comes from a lack of gratitude for the life that you know to exist.

This shows a lack of humility, a belief that you deserve better than the life you were given. Trying to live without sin to gain access to a better world is, itself, a sin, by virtue of its challenge to humility. So the Christian cosmology is incompatible with Christ.