What if God foreknew human reactions?

irrelevant to what? not the absolute truth.

I imagine it would be irrelevant to establishing god exists at all.
By absolute truth you mean what? Truth that cannot be demonstrated? Truth that is self evident? I do not understand the meaning of what absolute truth is. Can you elaborate on the implication of the phrase "absolute truth"?

ok, I agree we're not gonna establish that god exists, and whether or not he is omnipotent is irrelevant to the establishment. I meant that if god does exist then he is relevant, and not having evidence of god does not make god irrelevant, assuming he does exist. God would be an exception to this statement. When discussing the existance of god, the absolute truth is whether or not god does exist. We don't have any objective reason for believing in him, suggesting that he does not exist, but if he does exist then the absoulte truth would be that he does despite the suggestion that he doesn't.

If you met and fell in love with a beautiful woman, instantly realizing that she cared about you and that she was real..(well, more than real, really) she would in effect be a sex object. An object or an objective of your desire.The Church is said to be the Bride of Christ. To those who have felt or believed that they were "born again", they met the Holy Spirit and to them, God became very objective at that moment. The religious fanatics consider their zealous passion as proof of adoration for their Deity...an object...as it were. (many young people in Mosques and American Churches look to the Dad they never had in the Imam or Pastor..and would gladly die for them)But just as that woman becomes more than an object (or an objective) once you really love her and treat her as a part of yourself, so too do some spiritual people feel the same way with God. The problem, according to religious belief, is that our own desires as humans often conflict with Gods desires for us...and we "cheat" on Him by doing our will and not His will.The obvious question? How do you tell the difference? All I can say is that you know when your wife is angry with you even if she never says a thing. So too with God.By the way, old chap, we often go round and round on these things and all that I can really hope to convey to you is the sincerity of my beliefs...not in any way the truth or falsity of them.This message has been edited by Phatboy, 09-23-2005 02:53 PM

Catholic Scientist But is there an existence,to us as humans, that is seperate from evidence for such? Can we seriously contemplate existence of something that does not leave a trace? If so, any expalnation is just as valid as god.In fact it leaves the realm of explanation altogether.

Phatboy I do not in the least doubt the sincerity of your beliefs.My point is this is the crux of the matter in many ways.That something you believe in can both be subjectively accesed yet remain aloof of evidence is not persuading to me is all.I can only go by the rational inherent in my makeup to arrive at the conclusions I do.

God exist and does leave evidence. Everything is evidence of God.
If the Red Sea parted today and swept away an army we would call it a tsunami and charge it to nature. I stay 45 minutes from New Orleans, and personally don't think Hurricane Katrina or Rita just happened to fall back to back. God is pretty much taken from our country (school/court). No protection now.

If everything is, nothing is. When were we ever protected? There's no shortage of disasters, natural or otherwise, in American history.

b.b. A tsunami is a far cry from a standing wave b.b. If the red sea parted and held motionless this would be against the laws of physics and would indeed be evidence of unnatural forces or at the very least a huge gap in our understanding. Donna and Ethel came back to back in 1960 as did Carla and Hattie in 1961Back to back hurricanes in consecutive years and here we are almost half a century later and no end of the world yet. Hurricanes are not the vengence of god but the result of the circulation of heat and moisture in the earth's atmosphere due to solar energy input to earth. The mechanisms are surprisingly well documented.Take a trip to wikipedia and investigate for yourself. What led you to believe that you were under protection sir?This message has been edited by sidelined, Sun, 2005-09-25 11:17 PM

If I thought there was, how would I go about showing you? No, we cannot.Keep in mind that I think that god left a trace.on the side: what about transitional species that we don't have fossils for? They left no trace but we contemplate their existence...or do we consider species A and species C as the 'trace' for species B.

Catholic Scientist We know of four forces in nature. In order of strength they are{1}The strong force which binds the nucleus of atoms. It operates over extremely short distances of 10^-15 meters. By definition it is assigned the strength of 1.{2}The electromagnetic force which is essentially the entirety of your world and responsible for the colors you see, the nerve impulses in your brain that allow you to think and feel and anything you care to imagine except the force of gravity. It has a strength on the order of 1/137 that of the strong force,however it operates over infinite distance in accordance with the inverse square law.{3}This is followed by the weak force who's strength is one-millionth that of the strong but without which the nuclear fusion of the sun would not occur. The range of this force is even less than that of the strong force at 10^-18 meters.{4}And then we have gravity who's range is also infinite but who's strength is staggeringly infinitesimal at 10^-39 that of the strong force. It takes a mass the size of planet earth to have enough gravitaional force to pull an apple from a tree only after the stem is weak enough.How hard is it for you to do so?We can measure the properties of these forces quite well and the problem for you to show occurs in explaining how anything manifests itself to human experience without trace since any means that attends to the senses we possess need involve manipulation of one or more of these forces. In order to manipulate such forces it is reasonable to assume that a force of greater strength must be somehow used. Failing that you must show that there is some means by which these forces can be manipulated without leaving a trace. We can contemplate them only as a consequence of evidence that we already possess. Since the features between A and C show similarity we can reasonably infer the existence of B. The lack of a transitional can be due to the rarity of fossil formation or even due to the problems inherent in classification standards.

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But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

So you're defining 'witout trace' as not involving the manipulation of one of the four fundamental forces. And I need to show how something could manifest itself to human experience without manipulating one of the fundamental forces. The manifestation would have be subjective.If it was a force that was not one of the fundamental, i mean one that we are not aware of objectively but only subjectively, you could not use the manipulation of the fundamental forces to explain it. Now, this subjective force would be useless to science, as we know it. But, if the subjective force did manifest itself in a human's experience, you would expect the lack of manipulation of one of the fundamental forces to negate the manifestation?

No, that's just the Messiah that, according to the Tanakh, was promised to the Jews by God.
The 'perfect' messiah would be one that brought me a dragon and a Defiant-class starship; but as nobody thinks that anybody promised that, it's irrelevant. Considering the number of self-proclaimed messiahs that were running around at the time, that ain't exactly a prediction.

Catholic Scientist Without trace would be that which did not manipulate the fundemental forces since in order to do so it would need introduce a new force of greater strength which itself would be detectable. Human experience is the result of the fundemental forces and therefore only a force of greater strength introduced to manipulate them would itself be detectable. It would not be subjective but measureable as a distinct force seperate from the four we know of. If it is measureable it is of course objectively verifiable. If you are aware of it subjectively it must be measureable since your subjective reality is dependent upon the fundemental forces. It therefore follows that a manipulation of your senses are of necessity done so by a force. This force would be objectively measureable since force is by definition a measure of mass acceleration. Any change in the fundemental forces must involve a change in the mass acceleration. As I previously explained you cannot manipulate a fundemental force without objectively altering the properties of the force. {mass acceleration} If you subjectively experience something that experience is itself is a manifestation of the fundemental forces. Your very thought proceses are electromagnetic as are your dreams. Your reality is the manifestation of these forces.Now if we have an alteration of your subjective experience and it leaves no trace then the explanation follows that the experience was not real but imagined. Yet that imagined reality is a result of your brain processes which are the manifestation of the electromagnetic force.
To imagine something via the manifestation of the electromagnetic force that is not real in the sense of manipulating the fundemental forces is perfectly consistent with the subjective experience being a result of the fundemental forces. If we contend that, no ,we know it was something actual we face the conundrum of explaining how this can be so and explain as well how it could not be imagined instead.

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But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

Dependent upon? Yes
Limited to? UnknownDoes the subjective experience have to be a fundamental/measureable force? Could it be of something other than a fundamental force, that we are unaware of scientifically? But there could be more without science being able to detect it.Was it us who were talking of absolute truth earlier?Lets assume reality is what was described in The Matrix (the movie). Now the absolute truth would be that you are living in a pod being a battery but you experience tells you that you live in 'our world'.Now, science would easily explain all the phemomena of our world and if repeatable it wouldn't matter what the absolute truth was and science would be unable to detect the absolute truth.Also, someone(in the matrix) would not be able to scientifically explain the absolute truth via the laws of our world. But this doesn't mean it doesn't exist it only means that we have to assume that it doesn't for the sake of science.What if someone woke up in their pod in the real world and had the vision of living as a battery and then returned to the matrix. That would be a subjective experience outside of the fundamental forces of the matrix(our world) and it would not be able to be detected in the matrix. It'd be just another dream result of fundamental force #2, but that doesn't make it not real. It just makes it impracticle and uneccessary to the science in the matrix world.I'm not claiming to know the absolute truth, I'm just saying that things could exist that are real and undetectable by science. My subjective experience has suggested that there is more than the physical world that science has described to me. I could be crazy but I think the experiences are real. And of course it is easy to say that they are just the dream results of fundamental force #2 but that doesn't mean that they aren't/can't be real or the truth.