Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?"
God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" --- Exodus 3:13-14
i just gotta love this...
While engaging in a lively discussion on creationism and evolutionism, the person i was replying to posted this which in turn talked about the xkcd comic/cartoon frame below:
Quite timely. My comment is found below. (By the way, this seems to be my one effort to name-drop so much. But flashing credentials seems helpful in this situation :D)
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Hi Archie, it's me again :)
One of our teachers in Complex Systems Summer School (sponsored by Santa Fe Institute and the Institute of Theoretical Physics in China) promoted xkcd. i saw that exact strip last month. Profound huh? :)
Can we integrate love? Get its square root?
Can we integrate God? Get His square root?
We were discussing over on my blog about "nothing to disprove the existence of" God and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Does that mean, though, that God isn't real?
This comic says it all: "My normal approach is useless here."
And (sorry for quoting you endlessly before commenting) you follow up with: "Under the influence of love, the average man becomes inarticulate and cannot understand what is happening. Poets may become verbose yet they too, under the influence of love, lose their understanding."
Yes sir, i'm in love :) But it's like being in love with the school geek: i'm starting to understand him, but the more i know him the more i find out that i don't know that much. good thing he teaches me every now and then.
i can claim that i hear God and that He directs my life, but can i prove it scientifically? Maybe not utterly, completely convincingly so. (And this is exactly why i did not mention it in my comment before even if i hold it as absolute truth. We hold two different "absolute truths" which might leave us with just an "is not! is too!" endless argument, so i looked instead for common ground for discussion.)
But there are a lot of things in our daily life where the scientific method, quantification, or measurement do not apply: music and literature, emotions and relationships, public opinion and culture. (These are by the way what makes a lot of systems "complex": they can't be defined by one equation, but we want and hope to understand them nonetheless.)
Maybe in the future there will be more defined ways of proving or disproving God's existence. (As a Christian scientist, i would say, bring it on! But I'm sure both creationists and evolutionists want to settle this once and for all.)
If i think of friend A, and tell you that i'm friends with A, who is someone you have never met before (maybe you've heard of A here and there but haven't actually talked), then i would completely understand if you don't completely believe me. Especially if i don't have photographs, voice recordings, and other paraphernalia with me.
As a Christian, i have encountered God in much the same way that my other friendships were formed (sans divine powers and so on). But as a scientist, my "usual approach" to proof might be as useless as in xkcd.
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