Do You Wonder About the Source of Meaning?

Albert,
Your definition of omnipresence does not agree with Judeo-Christian view of God. What you have described is panentheism.

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@Rick: What would it change? Life would be utterly devoid of meaning, would it not? If God came to me with all the answers, I would have no real reason to live anymore. Your question reminds me of the question that Heather poses to Michael in one of the videos. Why does God spare one 6 year old, and not another? If God spared every single child, why would he stop there? He would then have to spare every single life form in the universe that did not want to die prematurely, and then, where is the line drawn?

"I have noticed - have you? - that the more secular our universities have become over the last few decades, the larger have become the sections of bookstores devoted to witchcraft, Ouija boards, astrology, and pet rocks. Christian believers are told that such things are sinful, idol-worship, the deification of silly human fetishes."

I hardly think filling heads with one style of falsehoods makes them immune to other styles. It's at least as likely that, having accepted one set of impossibilities, a person is more disposed to accept other sets of impossibilities.

"One does not have to be a Jew or a Christian to conclude from experience that, on balance, truth is stronger than the lie, goodness is more powerful than evil, the beautiful wins out over the ugly, and life is better than (say) suicide."

I'd say one doesn't have to be a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim to hope truth and goodness are more powerful than lies and evil. But we had six recent years in which lies carried the day and there are all too many places where goodness is spotty.

"The first of the Ten Commandments of Moses teach us that Jehovah, the God of Israel (and all humanity) is the true God, and no one should dare to put false gods in his place. Certainly there are false gods. Certainly there are false religions. Down through history, many different tests have been proposed for discerning the difference. It has long been a passion among Christians and Jews to discern who are the true Christians or Jews, and who are the counterfeits."

As though there were any reason to trust the Bible, but there is not so this is meaningless. In fact to most religions the rest are false. To atheists they are all false. Atheists are closer to most religious than most religious bother to realize.

"The Catholic Church blesses and promotes many objects intended to remind humble people (and learned people) of the presence of God, and the eruptions of the holy into daily life."

It seems surprising the RCC charges people for these items which further its and its god's cause.

"Similarly, he expressed sorrow that he himself lacked an ear for religion. But he did not disrespect those who did hear its silent music."

Well I for one am glad that meme doesn't sit easily in my brain.

I don't think that all the New Age paraphenalia is all that new a phenomenon, is uniquely attractive (or even particularly attractive.. we tend to get pegged most frequently as strict materialists, not as crystal waving tarot and astrology lovers) to atheists, nor can be really seen as connected to the seculariztion of universities. Heck, is it generally the college educated (well, traditional colleges, that is) that frequent those stores most frequently?

Logic people logic!

The search for meaning itself is a representation of a biological mechanism that is genetically beneficial to the species. Whether you believe in tarot, god, or the flying spaghetti monster makes no difference at all (even though we humans love hierarchy, especially when it comes to belief!). The search for meaning and the beliefs that result from such searches create groups, create camaraderie, organization, alliances, positive social behaviors, etc., that were naturally selected and proved advantageous to the propelling and evolutionary development of the human genetic code.

To debate whose beliefs are "better" or whether or not "god" is the source of the search for meaning seems silly. Let's use science and logic in the 21st century please. When you question human behavior in terms of evolution and genetics the picture becomes a lot clearer, often to the consternation of the church no doubt and the coffers of its collection plates.

The "Argument From Reason" advanced by C.S. Lewis (see also Vic Reppert http://dangerousidea2.blogspot.com/) asserts that a deterministic Nature cannot create meaning, nor even support reasoning.

My own half-formed opinion is that this argument can succeed (only) as far as driving naturalism toward the "universe-is-a-computer" position. Among scientists who have adopted this position even without such driving are MIT's Seth Lloyd (book /Computing The Universe/) and Max Tegmark, and popular-science writer Charles Seife wrote a book (/Decoding the Universe/) explicating it. Frank Tipler converted from atheism to Catholicism while traveling this line, and while I find much fault with his book /The Physics of Christianity/, it offers fair support for what Professor Novak says above about "miracles" and God not needing to violate natural law.

This line falls in with the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics (which puts higher-order determinism behind the "blind chance" of QM) and arrives at a dilemma: do all logically-consistent finite information structures have physical existence? If the Universe/Multiverse is infinite, if the zero-point field is a computational substrate, and if all standard reductionist hypotheses hold (biology to chemistry to physics to math to information, or if as Tegmark writes, "consciousness is what information feels like as it's being processed"), then it is hard to avoid a "yes" answer.
Tegmark and Tipler and Seife answer yes, and Seife flat-out concludes (pp250-252) that there are a "kergillion" planets just like Earth except that you are currently being devoured by a giant alien wombat. To which I add, plus planets just like Earth except Richard Dawkins became Pope---with attendant difficulties for basic rationality. However, the "no" answer, as I recall from Tegmark in a quote I cannot locate, requires postulating a limiting principle apart from the laws of physics [in a way more fundamental than inserting "known" before "laws"].

If my second-hand reading of Oxford's Keith Ward is correct, he has worked the "no" answer into a reason for belief in God. Not as science, but per my reading as what I called "modeling" in response to an Internet query about defining "believing agnostic"---it's the top Google hit for that quoted phrase (http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.usage.english/2008-01/msg00661.html). To which I supplied "fideist", but defined more narrowly as excluding only (the possibility of) /reproducible/ knowledge of God. This narrowing strikes me as according with Fides-et-Ratio and (again by second-hand reading, including http://www.michaelnovak.net/Module/Article/ArticleView.aspx?id=285) Professor Novak's recent /No One Sees God/. Reading myself into what Mark Vernon summarizes here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/16/godandthemultiverse), Ward's argument takes "no" as necessitating selection and preference in the world, with the moral dimension of not letting us arbitrarily be eaten by wombats (though we have freedom to venture into their caves). It extends to asserting that human free will shares with God's will in the path taken by our reality, which relates to what commenter Albert writes above about Omnipresence.

I'd be interested to know whether someone (a friend suggested asking William Lane Craig) has made a robust argument along these lines. I got involved not from my faith but from my own professional computer-science research on "universal prior" probability distributions, which among other things IMHO answer the weird questions in this NY Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?ref=science), which in turn reflects some of my scientific references above.

Taking the Bible as a metaphor for the human experience is valid to me. Taking it as the word of God derived from the stories of an obscure desert tribe is not.

Maybe "meanings" change as new philosophies and metaphysical thinking evolves, often based on new discoveries.

Bertrand: "Think of the high school football coach who thanks god for the latest touchdown."

I always have to laugh when people thank their gods for personal things like that. Any god who spends his time affecting a football game must be an unimportant, junior-level god. Definitely the lowest face on the totem pole.