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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here, ready to tinker with the definition of this being whose existence we have been debating for some time now.

I must assume many PPs have had some fun tossing straw men around, while others have seriously underscored the difficulty of knowing a concept which is, by definition, beyond our comprehension.

But while God, if He exists, is a mystery by His very nature, our existence is an effect of the Cause, and some aspects of the Cause can be understood through our existence.  Physicists and mathematicians observe regularly occurring effects and ascertain knowledge of their causes without observing the causes themselves.  Now, God is not a gluon or a quark, which are parts of the physical world.  But the properties essential to our understanding of the physical world raise the questions whose answers are God.

Two of those questions are causality and information.

Atheists and theists each have their own issues with causality:  things don’t come into existence without a cause, yet there is no explanation for the first cause (who caused God?).   A materialist explanation rests on the inescapable assumption that matter and energy came from nothing.  This relies on as-yet undiscovered principles of physics. In contrast, the theist notion of causality accounts for the sophistry of an "Uncaused Cause" without violating the laws of physics.  Before the Big Bang, there was no physical universe, no space, and no[i] time[/i].  The Cause is outside of time and space.  There is no difference between[i] what[/i] it is and [i]that[/i] it is.  It exists necessarily.  This is God.

A metaphysical concept that encompasses this understanding of God's nature is a mind.  Information theory (which pops up in computer science, cosmology, genetics, evolutionary theory...) assumes a separation between an object and its representation, as well as the involvement of someone capable of understanding this relationship.  Information needs a sender and a receiver, an encoding/decoding mechanism, and a code to represent something (which is distinct from the symbols of the code itself).

Materialistic processes cannot produce coded information.  Every[i]thing[/i] in the materialist universe represents only itself.  Everything we know about information requires a Mind, because there is no known mechanism by which natural processes produce information.  That Mind is God.

From here, we can understand more of God's attributes, such as God is One, God is infinite, God is eternal, God is transcendent and immanent, omniscient and omnipotent (it is too late at night for those separate discussions now).  But the concepts of causality and information are an excellent beginning, because they demonstrate that God authored science, the material universe, physics, and life.  So our increased understanding of the physical world and the forces that govern it can only bring us closer to understanding God.  There is no conflict.

So that is why I cannot get excited about evolutionary theory in and of itself.  It could well be true.  When theories about the material universe are used to prove a negative that is outside the scope of such inquiries, that is irrational.

As a general response to the specific complaints of the day:  of course I do not hate Dawkins, and I can understand why other skeptics out there would not want to stand behind his work.  The only reason I addressed him specifically was to illustrate the problem of closed minds.  If skeptics are truly interested in pursuing the truth, wherever it may lead, they would not fall back on ad hominem attacks, or other logical fallacies.

Again, I am only too glad to admit my limitations.  I am just a mom.  Though I found the referenced scientific papers fascinating, they present no challenge to faith in God, when God is understood not as the picture in the Sistene Chapel, but the most real thing there is.

My question now is, why is it so important to not believe in God?

[/quote]

I hate to pick on this so soon, but from the science perspective:

1.  We don't know what is prior to the big bang.  There are lots of ideas, but it may not be nothingness.
2.  God as defined as that thing before the universe (if there is such a point) is hard to distinguish from the universe itself.  Assuming in classic big bang theory, there was a singularity of infinite density and energy, that exploded forth, your version of God would have to either be the force that released all that, or the thing itself.  But that doesn't necessitate a sentient being.
3.  Information theory is not what you represent.  I think you are describing metaphysics.  Information theory is an abstract mathematical concept that really isn't dependent on a sender or receiver at all.  Shannon's (inventor of information theory) insight was to study information abstracted from semantics - ie, meaning.  Therefore, in information theory, certainly within the field of cosmology, the material universe is the information.  In information theory, we don't look at the meaning (semantics), but rather the quantity and whether it is conserved, created, or destroyed. (BTW theists, you want to pull for "conserved".  Destroyed breaks causality and therefore God).
4. Therefore, if information is as described in information theory, it refutes the part about "That Mind is God".  Sorry, I really didn't mean to do that.  But there it is.  Maybe the idea survives if you revise what you are thinking about regarding information.
5.  But next, I think that even with an everyday understanding of information (semantics), we see it consumed to powerful effect without the presence of a mind.  DNA is transcribed by transcription RNA to encode messenger RNA to encode proteins that do useful things.  None of this requires a mind to operate.  A crystal builds copies of itself by simple inorganic processes.  Now you may believe that this took a creator, but you can't conclude that merely from seeing that a nonthinking process consumed information.  And if that is tough, it is clear that nature  produces information continuously.  Wind blowing across the sand encodes ripples.  Waves and the tide are the encoding of the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.  And so on and so on.

Thus, with God relegated to only causality, your essay leaves us with an image of God no better than the initial energy or force in the universe.[/quote]

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