From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 20:28:06 EDT
Hi Howard,
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Howard J. Van Till [mailto:hvantill@chartermi.net]
>Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 10:17 AM
>Independent of the outcome of such tests, I'm intrigued by your list of
>possible implications and your questioning the willingness of Christians to
>deal with them. Take the first question, for instance.
>
>> 1. IF MWH, then hell is full of an infinity of unsaved vs the 1 saved
>> individual. It means that God saves everybody with a plan to condemn the
>> vast, vast majority to hell.
>
>Or does it mean that the Judeo-Christian portrait of a God who
>would send to
>hell all of those persons who believe (perhaps on the basis of the best
>thinking of which they were humanly capable) something different from X
>(some set of acceptable propositions) is a portrait of the Sacred (God if
>you prefer) that is radically inadequate or incorrect? Are you (as a
>representative Christian) willing to reexamine that portrait of God?
Yes, I am willing to re-examine the portrait of God. In some sense my entire
change from YEC to evolutionist was such a change. I went from belieiving
that God wouldn't cause pain and suffering to believing (Isaiah 45:7) that
he does. Indeed the ultimate suffering may have been inflicted upon his son.
But, one must wonder if God uses such a method to save the 'elect' or
'predestined'.
Where I limit my willingness probably says a bunch about me. I am unwilling
to make up a set of beliefs willy-nilly out of thin air with no reference to
scripture. To do that is no different than the ad I heard for the Unitarian
Universalist church tonight where they tell people to trust your own
judgement when it comes to determining your religious beliefs. I question
the value of such self-deception.
Two other items need cleaning up. I got the Deutsch article I ordered
today but it isn't the one I wanted. In that paper he references D. Deutch
Int. J. Theor. Physics 24(1985) p. 1
Secondly, the growth of the idea of many worlds hypotheis can be seen in
Joseph Silk's book, The Big Bang. I owned the 1980 edition. In it he has no
discussion of such a state of affairs. In his 2001 edition, he says:
"Parallel universes become inevitable, because quantum fluctuations
constantly spawn new universes. Almost all of them are destined to failure,
in regard to growing into our observed universe. What Andrei Linde showed
was that, in the rare but inevitable case of an infinitesimal patch being
sufficiently smooth, a bubble would grow exponentially. This bubble becomes
exponentially large by virtue of the inflation theory and can account for
many of the properties of our universe, including its size and its
flatness." Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.,
2001), p. 389
I suspect the discussion is included because the concept is more respectable
today than in 1980. so regardless of whether it is testable (which it is) or
whether we can practically build such a machine (which I believe we will),
the fact remains that the philosophical position seems to be attracting more
and more adherents or at least those willing to discuss the concept in
scientific books. We will have to deal with the concept and we can't hide
our heads in the sand from that. Hiding heads in the sand is what YECs do
best.
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