She sells magical crucifixes and has warned of consequences from God for those who don’t stand with the president.
The president’s spiritual advisor, Florida-based televangelist scammer Paula White-Cain, said at a book-signing event this week that saying no to Donald Trump is the same thing as saying no to the Christian god.
While speaking during the event, White-Cain recounted how the president asked her to join his Evangelical advisory board before his 2016 inauguration, saying, “He’s got a strong persona, don’t get me wrong. Don’t start a fight with him.”
“Why would the evangelicals come out and vote for him?” she asked before saying that “God told me to” join his advisory board.
“Because one thing I said, ‘I’ll never do politics,'” she said. “But when it came down to it, it wasn’t about doing politics. It was about an assignment. To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God. And I won’t do that.
I can name like ten.
But you asked for one, so here you go.
The “First Cause” / “Unmoved Mover” (Classical Theism). Associated with Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas.
God here is not a being in the universe, nor an interventionist agent tinkering with physics. Simply the necessary grounding of existence or causality itself.
Science describes how events unfold within the universe. This concept addresses why there is a universe at all (or why causal chains exist).
There is no contradiction because they operate at different explanatory levels.
My point stands. The common understanding of god is narrowly scoped to the piss poor anthropic god provided by Christianity and the like. There’s a broader world out there.
There is no necessary grounding for causality. Insisting there must be one is special pleading. And the prime mover god fails in any eternal universe model because infinite regress isn’t a contradiction or impossibility. You’d also have to explain what created god; failing that, you’d have to special plead that it doesn’t need a creator.
All said, the prime mover argument is one of the five dumbest arguments for a god.
But it isn’t a proof for God, It’s a definition of God. And these definitions of God have existed for a long time, which is why I would argue this isn’t a move of the goal post. These are goal posts that have been ignored. There’s also the idea that God is the totality of the universe, and that doesn’t come with any anthropic claims. In fact, I’d argue God being the totality of the universe is closer to some of the beliefs people have in modern day — loosely in association with Astrology, or the belief in some kind of cosmic energies. They just don’t call it God, But if you can distance yourself from the anthropic claims of God, then you can see they’re quite similar.
They do look quite similar, in that they’re beliefs entirely ungrounded in observable evidence or rationality.
Yeah, nobody is arguing that these claims are grounded in observable evidence. I certainly am not. The only reason that argument has air is because people profess that it doesn’t exist in their scientific view of the world, where you “proportion belief to the evidence.” Nobody is saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying it leaves people with a pretty hollow understanding of what’s actually a much richer subject. People love to strawman the idea of god. Nobody likes to discuss the good things that came from having a common religion, regardless of how you define god. Nobody likes to consider that so many definitions of god don’t even operate on the same level of abstraction as science, and therefore you can hold both beliefs. Nobody takes seriously the argument that spirituality might be rather important for the animal which evolved for hundreds of thousands of years with spiritual beliefs and practices. Rather, we forget our neighbors and wonder why we are lonely.
Shrugging your shoulders and saying “must be god” is not addressing anything.
Which, coincidentally, is perfectly fitting to describe (make up) a god!