Which book made you realize a divine, creative, infinite intelligence exists?

Which book made you realize a divine, creative, infinite intelligence exists?
For me it was reading the Timaeus when I was 14.

>In the Timaeus Plato presents an elaborately wrought account of the formation of the universe. Plato is deeply impressed with the order and beauty he observes in the universe, and his project in the dialogue is to explain that order and beauty. The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a divine Craftsman, who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos).

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the Torah

Torah, as in the Pentateuch? If read in its proper Christian context it can save your soul, if read like a talmudic jew or modernist it will damn you.

Oh man for the sake of your happiness never ever read Kant

well then I guess I'm Christ-fucked

Kant also believed in the divine, creative, infinite intelligence transcending the universe. Because he wasn't a brainlet.

Kant did more than anyone up until that point to prove god

Did not say or implied he was an atheist or disproved G-d. All I am saying is that if the OP bases their belief on God based on the argument from design Kant will do a disservice

Same, OP, except I found Timaeus in my late 20s. Have you heard Dr. Sugrue's lectures on Socrates? Dude's brilliant.

design is not so much an argument for God, but a clear and beautiful footprint of God.

if a person's noetic faculty is darknened no argument will work on them, if their noetic faculty is bright no argument is needed.

When did Christian (or Jewish?) theology shift from seeing before-creation as watery "chaos" over to seeing it as total nothingness, the absence of existence?

It seems like even the early Jews, like the Mesopotamian religions, saw it as primordial chaos. And even Plato does here. It'd also be interesting to know if later Christians self-awarely TALKED about the change, like, when they were reading Plato as a pre-Christian Christian and they got to that part of the Timaeus they'd go "oh but he was wrong about that."

The Cat in a Hat.

dude don't break out the real challenging philosophy so soon

I prefer the timeless classic 'oh the places you will go'

illiad

Nathan's vision:
youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_423307315&feature=iv&src_vid=-H0MDGIXZ0o&v=q_a5v2dbdBk

>design is not so much an argument for God,
It certainly is an argument just not a very good one. Not only that its one of the more important arguments used in the modern age despite its ancient origin.


>if a person's noetic faculty is darknened no argument will work on them, if their noetic faculty is bright no argument is needed.

Its unfortunate that both these poles can resemble each other almost perfectly in practice.

change would be impossible if something unchangeable didn't exist. each moment would be totally unlike the previous, no human would be the same from one second to the next.

the very transience and fragility of this world implies an unchanging, supreme principle behind it all, sustaining it, at work weaving it all together.

My diary

Not at all, we are just at the center of an extreme concentration of order that has been becoming more orderly for billions of years thanks to a stable system (of energy from the sun) that sustains it. In due time, all of this will be gone.

checked those holy trips.

order comes from intelligence.
change requires an underlying unchanging foundation, otherwise no condition would ever be satisfied for even one moment to exist.

>it will all be gone eventually
even its unraveling follows extremely precise laws and its not unraveling into nothing, since nothing can't and won't exist, it's returning to its source. the source is absolute.

all the hairs on your head are accounted for, their life and death ordered, by the grand Architect.

>becoming more orderly

what do you mean by this? if you mean to say that chaos can create order, how does it do this? how can the disorderly order itself?

Holy shit, that is fucking interesting: what if, instead of that age old concept of order comes from intelligence, intelligence was born from the order (the harmonious order of our solar system and our position in the universe). Our existence as organic beings was only permitted because of the ridiculously rare possibilities that allowed our earth to have life, so why wouldn't it be the same with the more human abilities of reasoning and the like, on a larger scale with regard to our position in the universe at large (sorry if this sounds fucking stupid, i just learned to look at it in reverse and I've got to work it out in my head, and I should have done that before posting)

> instead of that age old concept of order comes from intelligence, intelligence was born from the order
>le Bergson's "the universe is a God generating machine" meme
no.
you're putting the cart before the horse, confusing the effect for the cause.