Musika:
It is not a direct issue with the thread op, but a detail that you insist on repeatedly bringing forth.I leave it to you to decide whether you want to maintain the detour.
What detail do you have in mind?
Regardless of your understandings of the brain, you don't "intervene" or become "actively active" to keep the show on the road ... like, maybe make sure you have 15 minutes spare in the morning to check your brain is turned on before you start the day (since it would be terrible to go through the whole day and realize you forgot to turn it on).
Are you saying that God does not need actively to
will the trees to grow for them to do what they do? That he can set it and forget it, so to speak? If so, then I come back to my original question: what is he doing
now? If he set everything in motion back at the big bang, what has he been doing with his time since then? And what is he doing
now, if anything?
As I said, others beg to differ. They however, like you, fall in to exactly the same problems when they attempt to move beyond "suggestions".
IOW one can talk of observations of this world suggesting God does or doesn't exist. Try to move beyond that, and you face difficulties.
I'm not trying to prove that God doesn't exist, here. I'm just asking,
if he exists, what he is actually doing.
I take your point that he might be tweaking invisible knobs undetectably, and I admit that I have no way to disprove that hypothesis. But I thought theists might have better reasons for believing in him than mere faith that something is tweaking those knobs behind the scenes.
Just to be perfectly clear since you might have missed it: I don't think you (or anyone) can reliably call upon observations of this world, with its seemingly harmonious balance on a seemingly chaotic fringe, to negatively or positively establish God's existence.
You're saying that people just have to have
faith in God, right?
Also, I have my doubts about that "harmonious balance on a chaotic fringe" stuff you mention. What are you thinking of, specifically, in terms of the harmonious balance? Is this a version of the argument from design?
So you suggest that your exhaustive (although obviously severely limited) analysis of a tree does not reveal a God.
Yes.
Someone else, drawing on your same limited observations, perceives the harmony in biological mechanisms and arrangement as an indication of the intelligence of God. The moment either of you try to take this suggestion beyond the realm of being a mere suggestion, what problems ensue?
I'd say the harmony in biological mechanisms is a result of evolution, which doesn't appear to require God. Which brings us back to your point about suggestions, I guess.
I will attempt to cut to the car chase, and ask the same question in a more direct manner: What is the problem with tracing necessary cause and effect of action to a person (regardless whether its God or your regular Joe or Jane)?
I still don't know what you mean when you say "necessary", in reference to a cause. Is a necessary cause different in some way to a plain vanilla cause?
Suppose I find a freshly-baked cake. I infer that it was made by a person - that a person was its likely cause. That's because I'm not aware of anything else that makes cakes, other than persons. Moreover, I can't come up with any "natural" mechanism that would tend to cause cakes to appear of their own accord.
There seems to me to be no analogous problem that requires us to deduce the existence of God, although admittedly we don't know what started the universe yet. With the cake it's a little different, because there is ample evidence that people cause cakes, whereas there's no evidence that gods cause universes.
What do you see as the problem in tracing "necessary cause" to a person?