But , "God" is used as a way to cut off the infinite regress of "why" questions. In that way,God is definitively mysterious, unknow_able_, not just unknown. "God" means something/one about which you cannot or may not ask "why ?". God is the "why question" terminator. "Good God, child, stop asking me 'why' ! "
Good to hear Hawking led the peace demo !
Charles
^^^^
C. G. Estabrook wrote
I think this is a good argument against the intelligent-design line.Intelligent-Design departs from the classical Christian (and Judaic andIslamic) notion of creation in favor of a mechanistic argument, which falls to this objection.
Stephen Hawking (who BTW led the anti-war demonstration in London on 2 November), Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (Newton's chair), wrote that after his theoretical labors, "You still have the question: why does the universe bother to exist? If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question." That's far closer to the classic notion than intelligent-design.
For most Abrahamic theists. "God" is the name for whatever accounts for the fact THAT there is a universe. HOW the universe is, is of course the province of science, and terrible muddles (e.g., the Galileo case) have resulted from confusing those questions. --CGE
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, John Adams wrote:
> All this is very interesting. Perhaps I'm showing my ignorance here,but
what is the argument against the idea that, if the physical world is too
complex to be explained without a creator, then the existence of a creator
capable of producing such a world is at least as inexplicable as the
creatorless existence of the world?