"God" is a name we assign to the force behind the original, unexplained creation. Presently that would be the force behind the origin of this amazing universe, light, space. Maybe we push that envelope further in the future, but the boundary always exists. In our understanding there always is a 'first'. We have only the vaguest idea in a cosmic sense how that first came to be.
It's pretty neutral and sensible to call "everything" the creator, as Spinoza apparently did, cuz "nothing" sure didn't make the universe. And as a matter of definition, that would be God. What's so fascinating is where this thought exercise may lead. We are talking about everything, acting by law unknown, generating an impossible, unexplainable result. What then don't we know of everything and what possibilities does that raise, relative to its consciousness and intelligence on unimaginable scales of time and of space. I mean, are we gnats on God's ... I'd say eyeball but everything clearly is not human so ... presence?
I'm not sure how a serious person who considered the question openly could avoid these conclusions.
Interestingly, this line of thought seems compatible with the description of God in the bible to me. If you put aside all your preconceived notions of some dude in the sky and simply read the bible for what it is, you'll find things like "I am what I am", "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end", etc. The Cristian God is called the Father. And what is a father but a source? The first link in a causality chain that leads to new life?
Sometimes I really wonder if our current understanding of Christianity is just completely different from what it meant originally.
I generally don't like discussing religion on HN, so apologies if I decline to respond to a reply, but the description of God in the Bible doesn't really fit with Spinoza's God for the mere fact that evil is wholly set apart. It exists within demons and humans but it does not exist within God. The logic of an entity with infinite attributes being God is true, but just as the natural numbers are infinite but do not contain negative integers so does the existence of an infinite Divine not contain all attributes.
Besides, some attributes cannot be co-existent anyway, at least not without breaking logic and mathematics. A man cannot turn 20 years old and 120 years old at the same time, for example.
That said, I'm not fully sure because there are some escape valves. Matthew 19:26 or Romans 8:28, for example.
But one of the reasons I don't like talking about religion on HN is that I've found a computer science centric way of thinking about some sub branches of philosophy and theology is a dead end. We're used to dealing with such pedantry and strict logic that I find we over use them in places where they're not nearly as useful as they seem.
> But one of the reasons I don't like talking about religion on HN is that I've found a computer science centric way of thinking about some sub branches of philosophy and theology is a dead end. We're used to dealing with such pedantry and strict logic that I find we over use them in places where they're not nearly as useful as they seem.
Fair enough. I like discussing religion in circles like this one, because I'm convinced there is a lot of value to be found in religious traditions, but I find it hard to connect to the typical religious crowd.
> A man cannot turn 20 years old and 120 years old at the same time
Interesting example, because he could get in a spaceship at age 19, travel out and back at very high speeds, and arrive back at Earth 101 years later having aged just one year. He turned 20 and 120 at the same time.
I realize I've turned myself into a prime example of the pedantry you mentioned, but what I mean to say is that strict logic can be misleading if we don't have the whole picture, which we probably don't.
> But one of the reasons I don't like talking about religion on HN is that I've found a computer science centric way of thinking about some sub branches of philosophy and theology is a dead end. We're used to dealing with such pedantry and strict logic that I find we over use them in places where they're not nearly as useful as they seem.
And not just that. I feel that many of the habits of thinking that lead to success in software engineering actually have pretty limited applicability, but too many software engineer internet commenters parochially assume those habits are superior and universally applicable. It's hard for me to articulate though, because I have those same habits and it's hard to see outside one's limitations.
> natural numbers are infinite but do not contain negative integers
While Z is not a subset of N, N maps 1-1, onto to Z (i.e., they have the same cardinality). That means every element of one set has a corresponding element in the other and vice versa.
Similarly, ismorphisms, homeomorphisms, diffeomorphisms are formalizations of the idea of "different but equivalent in the relevant structures".
I do not have a deeper point to make, but I think your intro argument is not as solid as you might imagine. Plus, things get weird when you go beyond discrete infinities and into the continuum and beyond.
I am not religious however I find religion fascinating because it clearly has had a massive impact on the history and evolution of humankind. Understanding why that is the case (independently of whether you believe in a God or not) makes it something worth discussing I think. Unless of course the discussion diverges into a “here is proof that what I believe is true” argument which is a waste of time.
Whose understanding of Christianity? Modern day American tech workers? Because that is the traditional understanding. It sure was
how Christianity was understood by st. Augustine, st. Thomas Aquinas and st. Anzelm. And how Christian philosophers still understand it today.
I don't understand the down voting. I also believe that the idea of the Christian god that most (non-Christian) people have is quite naive and distinct to the idea of God in the great Christian thinkers, such those mentioned by the comment.
>people have is quite naive and distinct to the idea of God in the great Christian thinkers, such those mentioned by the comment.
But that would mean people would need to drop their condescending sense of superiority over others... come on, don't take that away from people for in their eyes it's an easy win.
In defence, that is not the idea of God many people would grow up with.
I'm a Pole, even during "religion" classes or in church during preparation to baptism, the idea of God they would try to show us WAS the "man in the clouds" one, not philosophical one.
You're baptized while you're a child, and the use of tales and short stories is pretty common for plenty of subjects when ever you want to teach children.
The main idea is to pass down moral values.
I can't speak for others but I find it very hard for people to hold on to the literal content of the bible with today's education. Some might believe in the man in the sky, others might stand by just doing what they think is the right thing to do in the framework that was passed on to them, others turn to it in very difficult times because there's nothing else to hold on to and that gives them hope/peace/comfort.
I say this as someone who had catholic upbringing, took those classes for baptism and first communion. Yet I don't consider myself a catholic, still it was part of the context where I grew up.
I am not sure that is true. You can absolutely pass down moral values without involving a God. That is what happened to me. It seems to me that the goal of a lot of religious teaching is to use a bogeyman (God) to scare little children into doing what you want instead of teaching the children why it makes sense to do the right thing.
I'd agree with you if somewhere down the line the, let's call it, character of Jesus was introduced as the personification of God's ideals in a human being.
Suddenly we could move away from the "fear based framework" to the "strive to be closer to the idea of God" framework since we had someone to emulate.
In fact we can arguably say that God gave us complete freedom, and full responsibility since he died on a cross (and in that process He even doubted himself) left us with a role model.
>why it makes sense to do the right thing.
This seems like a trivial task but it's not. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn't make any sense at all.
Let's say it isn't the idea of religion I got growing up. There was no one around who could make a convincing case for Christianity, so I and everyone I knew thought religious people were completely delusional.
As I (very) slowly try to reduce my ignorance around the topic, I find that uncovering a more traditional understanding of it reveals something much more rich than I was led to believe. That's precisely my point :)
Father, Mother and Son are occult terms with standard meaning: father means spirit, the immutable and unreal principle behind reality; mother means undifferentiated matter in its most prototypical form; son is the mix of the two, i.e. the spirit causes that proto-matter to assume meaningful forms, all those atoms, etc. Also, the "Word" is a particular way that process is initiated. The bible has lots of mysterious gems that are difficult to decipher even if you know the terminology, but that's certainly not one of those.
It’s really interesting how many assumptions get baked into beliefs like this. Existence had a beginning, it was formed by something, that thing didn’t need to be formed by anything, it’s existence doesn’t count as having existed before existence, that thing had the capacity to act, that things actions resulted in the reality we see today etc.
Having convinced yourself of all of these things it then feels natural to think of that first mover as somehow complex for creating the universe rather than some infinitesimal speck that started a cascade. To then think in terms of mystical power rather than say energy. It doesn’t feel like you’re less likely to be correct with every assumption which is kind of silly in one way but also seductive.
I don’t think anyone is attributing any properties to God. God could just be a fundamental force like gravity. What parent comment is saying is whatever was the beginning, is God. Maybe there was no beginning, maybe time extends forever in both directions or loops on itself, or maybe some imbalance caused all this, but we just like to give things names that mean something.
I don’t see how you can think this without applying some properties to that first mover. Even when talking bout this you say “is God” or even gravity you’re assuming that it’s still around and wasn’t say destroyed in the process of creating the universe.
Which is kind of my point. Even just the word “is” is quite a large assumption that is easy to overlook. I think it’s an outgrowth of saying some thing created existence rather than saying some event created existence.
Edit: Even thinking in terms of assumptions it’s hard to list them all. We think of time as a linear progression which naturally suggests a first action. But set that aside and really strange possibilities show up. What if the universe was created at the end by something that’s yet to exist and time flowed backwards from that event? Now it’s last action that created existence. Or even in the middle with a positive time universe moving forward and a negative time universe moving backwards. Or…
This. There's a reason the number 0 was only invented a couple of times. Human minds don't do well with the idea of nothing. It's not that there was nothing here - it's that there was no here.
What presupposes the question is if there is a reason for the creation? As Aristotle mentions in his physics a beginning presupposes an end. In that, there is a principled order towards attaining an end. What principles things? Minds do. So a blind cosmic event does not due the the creation of the cosmos justice. In that, it was a marvelous idea.
>Existence had a beginning, it was formed by something, that thing didn’t need to be formed by anything
Energy can not be created out of nothing so something had to exist before "existence". My assumption is that every universe collapses and then new universe emerges through something like Big Bang.
Reminds me: For a while now, I've been thinking about apophatic theology, also known as negative theology[1]. Particularly in the sermons by Meister Eckhart, the German theologian and Christian neoplatonist[2].
I wonder about the connection of apophaticism, found in Christian neoplatonism, and nondualism, found in Advaita Vedanta.
"It's pretty neutral and sensible to call "everything" the creator, as Spinoza apparently did, cuz "nothing" sure didn't make the universe. And as a matter of definition, that would be God."
There are only two choices, either something always existed or something came from nothing. Either way, reality cannot have been created. Perhaps there was an external cause of the universe as we currently know it, but that would have to be shown, not just asserted. While that would be useful to know, it would not solve the problem of first cause, but simply push it back one level. Further, calling this unestablished cause a "creator" and/or a "God" is smuggling in a lot of baggage about intentionality that dovetails into all kinds of other religious beliefs. This is confounding at best, and disingenuous at worst.
> There are only two choices, either something always existed or something came from nothing.
Another possibility is that time is a property of our universe, but not a property of the larger reality from which it originated. That reality may have properties utterly unfathomable to human minds, and no amount of speculation will ever move us one iota closer to a hint of what it is. In that case it's neither "always existed" nor "something came from nothing". Such statements don't apply. "Always", "something", "nothing"... these might be just parochial terms that are deep and important here, but have no context in that larger reality.
To my reading you throw in intelligence and consciousness where such things are neither needed nor implied.
Also as pointed out elsewhere, this assumes that there was a 'first' in any comprehensible way and that that first itself had no prior origin or cause.
I think, that English language has a linguistical problem with name of "God", as it has no etymological understanding what is it behind this word and the only meaning to it is coming now only from Christianity. Other languages have different meaning for word God and even etymological meaning behind it.
If you translate Greek ancient pantheon... well, Big Bang would fit in it, just like all the gods, that described nature and things that were ruling over people, along with other gods that were describing human behavior.
Quite many of etymological meanings to most of names in other languages for God is Giver. It is not much different from Luck - the main difference between those are only in gender, but not in function. So, if someone thinks, that Gods function was to be responsible for Big Bang, they should be very disappointed or very disillusional, as the only function for God for any society was to bring prosperity to the believers(and wrath to enemies).
There are many different beliefs what is God, what is soul and so on. There are belieffs, that animals were gods - even today there is a belief in Tibet, that gods incarnate in people - young girls. Gnostics even believed, that humans are Gods and that was a big issue with Christianity...
As for something that there was something before - that is Christian construct for most of Europe. Ancient Greeks knew, that first there was a Chaos(a gods name)... for many others there was only a sea from which God emerged as a bird. So, there is not uniform belief, that there was something before, or that gofds themselves appeared into this world before creation of this world - sometimes Gods appeared even much later than Christianity is depicting them and for some American natives Gods appeared only as animals, who created humans.
If the discussion is about still unexplainable mechanisms on how this world works, especially about RND and calling it a God... well, there is a problem with English word of God, because it does not have that meaning in etymology and claiming that it is something that we can assing is not really working. Also, none of other God names means any of those things, so it would be better to establish new term for these mechanisms, how the Universe works, as God has nothing to do with that - not to mention, that extension of Christian God is not possible because of clash of meanings.
>>>I mean, are we gnats on God's
There is always possibility to accept that there is no God(who has eyes? - what about God for worms or trees without eyes, like it is for most of Life?). Rivers run without God, Wind blows without God. Life exists without God and need for it. Humans and not God are responsible for attrocities they are doing for each other and other beings.
It's generally called pantheism, although there has been dispute [1] that Spinoza's account was truly pantheism. Similar ideas exist in Hindu philosophy, and some argue the analogy is deep [2].
There is a philosophical point I enjoyed, which doesn't generalize at all but is still interesting, about the idea that the past is a good guide to the future. (For example, "How do you know the sun will come up tomorrow? Well, it always has in the past.")
Someone pointed out that the relevance of the past to the future is a pure assumption. Even the usual argument that an otherwise unmotivated heuristic is valid -- "it's always worked in the past" -- can't legitimately be used for this point, since it assumes the truth of the question under consideration.
This is actually an interesting point. Because ‘space time’ is something.
We have no idea what it even means to be outside of our expanding spacetime into that ‘nothingness’ because time doesn’t even exist there, so we couldn’t compute a thought if we travelled there anyway to attempt to grok what the hell was going on.
I think the most arrogant thing one can say is that he can somehow find out the Truth about the Universe just by lying down in his couch.
One can easily conceive mathematical solutions for all of those. People also thought that something had to keep the planets moving until Newton, that something had to keep them from collapsing due to perturbation until Lagrange (I think), most philosophers wouldn't even consider time travel until Einstein came about...
What if the total energy of the whole universe amounts to zero? If - what we call „everything“ - and that what we call „nothing“ is essentially the same? Structurally they clearly are: Both are „unbounded“ - „borderless“. What if a „void“ isn’t the only form „nothing“ is allowed to take?
This is simply a God of the gaps argument [0]. Just because we don't (yet) know how the universe was created does not mean that we must attribute it to some deity.
GotG arguments rely on gaps in scientific knowledge as evidence of the existence of the numinous.
This argument isn't about gaps in scientific knowledge. It's about gaps in scientific knowability. The argument is Godelian in nature.
The set of natural laws is a logical axiomatic system. It cannot be both consistent and complete. Therefore, either the scientific method is fundamentally unreliable for determining the truth, or there are true propositions about reality that cannot be proven within the axiomatic system of the natural laws. In short, unless the natural sciences are inherently bunk, it's a logical necessity that there exists something outside their scope, literally super-natural.
It's an imperfect analogy but I always come back to the idea of CPU privilege rings. We run up against a hard limit of what is observable/provable - a privilege boundary, if you will. That suggests we are in Ring > 0, and therefore there is something in Ring 0.
What's in Ring 0? Nobody knows. Whatever it is, we call it God.
Godel has nothing to do with it. Godel’s Incompleteness is just the math version of the Halting Problem, which is just a fancy version of the classic paradox “This statement is false”. Godel showed that even if you outlaw self referential definitions e.g. “This statement is false”, math is rich enough in complexity to simulate itself and thus end up with self referential paradoxes anyway.
It’s not this mystical thing that people make it out to be online.
Very cool! Thanks for the link! Got a lot of reading to do.
However I do wonder if it’ll turn out that these higher dimensional geometric problems turn out to have the same structure as Godel’s proof. That the higher dimensional geometric structure is complex enough to represent their own foundation.
Although now I’m committing the same fallacy I was arguing against i.e. an equivalence between unknowns
Which is a mathematical model and doesn’t necessarily reflect the physical universe, similar to how a perfect sphere doesn’t necessarily reflect the shape of the Earth.
Edit: upon reflection, I think maybe you and I are interpreting "The set of natural laws" in the GGP differently. I think maybe maybe you're interpreting this as a statement about how the universe actually works, instead of a statement about the set of laws enumerated by modern science (or any logic-based successor of modern science). The GGP mentioning the axioms of the laws however, makes it clear they're talking about the set of laws discovered and discoverable via the scientific method.
In other words, there are two ways to talk about the laws of nature: (1) some set of Platonic ideal laws existing outside of human experience, that actually govern the universe and (2) the set of approximations of these ideal laws that could possibly be discovered by a logic-based science. The GGP's mentioning of axioms means they're clearly talking about (2), but your statement makes much more sense if meant about (1).
Everything below is based on my original understanding of what you wrote, which I believe is a misunderstanding on my part.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with regard to Godel's incompleteness theorem not applying to modern science.
Are you arguing that Godel's incompleteness theorem doesn't apply to the mathematical logic model(s) at the heart of the modern scientific method, because a scientific model is an approximation of reality? The match between the models and reality has no bearing on the limits of the structure of the models themselves.
The original statement was about the limits of the logical structure of the models underlying modern science, having nothing to do with how well they actually fit reality.
Are you perhaps saying something along the lines that because scientific models don't precisely match reality, it's okay to introduce axioms that make them complete (able to prove all true statements in their domain) but inconsistent (and therefore able to construct proofs that false statements are true)?
I dispute that knowledge obtained through scientific enquiry is rigorously based on mathematics, and therefore I do not believe that results about mathematical provability necessarily imply anything about the limits of scientific knowledge.
Gödel's work was concerned with formally defined abstract systems, and his results demonstrate the limits of mathematical proof within such systems.
But science never proves anything. Science often uses the language of mathematics to express and to quantify ideas, but the core of science is observation, hypothesis-forming, and experimentation. Scientists apply logic to rule out theories, but it's an informal application of logic, not a formal one, because you can never precisely define a theory the way you can precisely define a mathematical object.
Science may appear to be a rigorous discipline, but it is at best diligent, not rigorous - not in the sense that a proof of a mathematical theorem is rigorous. A proven theorem must necessarily be true - that's what the proof demonstrates. Meanwhile, a scientific theory is only conditionally true, inferred from the evidence and hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms of the universe. All scientific truth is subject to revision if contradictory evidence arises.
Science is a system of best guesses based on what we have observed. Some of those guesses have proven very useful, and very reliable at predicting the future. But none of those guesses are fundamentally based on, or necessarily limited by, formal axiomatic systems of logic.
For all we know, there is a low upper bound on the complexity of the universe, and it might be completely explainable and understandable through the lens of science, without getting anywhere near the towering near-infinities of abstract mathematical thought.
Alternatively, if the universe was a formal system about which there were unprovable truths, one could simply add that unprovable truth as an axiom, to form a larger formal system, which itself would have unprovable truths, but as long as the universe was entirely contained within that larger system, you could prove every truth relevant to it, without being limited by Gödel.
If someone is seeking unknowables in the real world, something like the uncertainty principle could be a closer match.
You're not actually refuting the main point based on this story. Yes, mathematics is not necessarily a reflection of the physical universe. It can be, in cases like addition, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Which was the parent's point.
> mathematics is not necessarily a reflection of the physical universe
Nobody knows if it is or not. It could also be that the physical universe is a reflection of mathematical truth.
> It can be, in cases like addition, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Which was the parent's point.
Again, nobody knows if it what you claim is true or not. What we do know is that all scientific models are based on math, and if there is something wrong at the foundations of math, then all science is pseudoscience. Gödel's theorems are at the foundations of math. You can't just decide that you are skeptical about that part of math being applicable to physical models but addition is fine.
The real problem with Gödel is that it says something that a lot of people don't like to be true.
You are misunderstanding my point. Mathematics is not related to the natural world at all. 1 plus 1 will equal 2 regardless of whether there is a universe to experience it. It turns out certain types of math are useful to us, it doesn't mean that all types are. For example, infinite numbers exist, but the natural world cannot have an infinite or infinitessimal amount of things, there are upper and lower limits. Does that mean infinities don't exist? Of course not.
> Mathematics is not related to the natural world at all.
This is your personal belief, unless you can justify it. I won't hold my breath, because this discussion has been raging for centuries with no end in sight.
> For example, infinite numbers exist, but the natural world cannot have an infinite or infinitessimal amount of things, there are upper and lower limits.
Nobody knows if the natural world is finite or not. Consider for example the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. We just don't know enough to assert such as thing.
We don’t know if things happen the same way everywhere. We also don’t even know what “everywhere” is. However we have mental models/laws that seems to approximate what our senses tell us in certain limited contexts. That makes the models useful.
true, but also for some math isnt a model but a discoverable part of nature. depends on who is doing the philosophical arguing there. we dont know for sure, ironically because of godel? therefore its a true part of nature?
As with many such philosophical arguments, I think it's useful to split the word into two definitions, and the philosophical argument vanishes into a semantic argument. There are two definitions for mathematics. One definition is the rules that have existed as long as time itself, and the other definition is the subset of these rules that humans have discovered.
Godel is important, but his argument's extension to natural laws is a bit of a stretch, also that set of laws isnt really a logical axiomatic set. its more of a hodgepodge, an ever shifting discursive formation by which we are epistemological bound to in as much as we exist by it
Im not so sure your right that its a god of the gaps argument. What faith do you have in gravity. Obviously you trust that physics is the law of our universe. Deifying those laws isnt claiming that god is in the gaps of scientific knowledge, infact its suggesting that "god" is the laws illuminated by scientific processes themselves.
No. He's reclaiming the term 'god'. Spinoza equated god with being or reality - all off it - not just gaps. He did not believe in a personal or interventionist god.
He thinks that our confused conversations about god, free will, freedom, causality, etc mostly stem from poor definitions of these terms. So to have a useful conversation and valid deductions, it's critical to have 'correct' definitions of these terms - including freedom, power, etc. He starts every section of Ethics with a list of definitions. He's not only making metaphysical claims, he's also trying to set humanity up for have better conversations and understandings about god, society, and ethical behavior (hence the title of the book "Ethics").
Here's a good quote, wherein he's criticizing people's conception of God as the 'first cause' -
"So they will not cease to ask for the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the asylum of ignorance."
The quote makes pretty clear that he is explicitly rejecting the "God of the gaps".
Then again, it's really not insane to make the inference leap that given every single created thing on Earth has a human creator, the Earth (and universe itself) might also have one. Such a leap doesn't really affect the doing of science whatsoever, and might even in fact drive the enjoyment of discovering the work of said Creator.
The Universe has always existed. It does not have a beginning, and it won't have an end. I'm not talking about the 13.4B old Universe we live in. I'm talking about the Universe that came before it. The Universe is cyclical.
Its a nice idea. There'd be no ending or beginning to worry about. Everything would be self-contained.
But I don't believe that our universe is neither unique, neverending, or cyclical.
I believe that our universe is just one of many, that exists on a super-dimensional plane (or substrate - not sure what word to use), where 'universes' continously appear and disappear, like bubbles in boiling water.
Every one of these universes will have different sets of laws, or rather, the laws will be tweaked differently, depending on the exact conditions of how they form.
Most will not be valid. They will 'pop' or implode near instantaneously. Some will not have the right values for constants like gravity and speed of light.
But every once in a while, there will be a universe where the laws are just perfect for what we see in our universe. A place where stars and planets can form. Where the right elements appear, and life as we know it is possible.
OK, now where did this superdimensional plane come from, how was it formed? Or was it always there and always will be? That's what OP was saying I believe.
I like the thought experiment of exploring the entire universe with advanced space travel and finding no other life (statistically a zero chance if the universe isn’t anthropocentric).
But of course it’s unfortunately impossible to know due to space time limits.
I am 110% in support of those community principles when it comes to criticism of people. We must always assume mutual respect, practice kindness and argue in good faith. It's never not the right thing to do, whether you're motivated by persuasion or simple humanity.
But can we at least recognise that there's an enormous distinction between criticism of people and criticism of ideas? In my estimation, when someone is calling for an idea to be protected from unkindness, or name-calling, or sneering, it's probably deserving of it.
Ideas shouldn't be beyond criticism, sure. But if you can't criticize an idea without being unkind, resorting to name calling, and misrepresenting someones view -- at best you aren't haven't a dialog, at worst you don't have any valid criticism to contribute.
How do you suppose that being unkind to an idea is not “dialog” and not “valid”? You are casting ethical judgements upon rhetorical devices. That is nonsense.
Thank you for the great example. You've made your point in two sentences. Adding "That is nonsense" contributes nothing to your argument.
However, by labelling the idea as nonsense, by extension I must be someone whose ideas are nonsense.
This lowers the level of discourse. To what end? What did labelling my idea as nonsense accomplish? Did it help your argument? Or was it to make me feel bad, or to make you feel good?
Ignoring your last sentence, I do find the idea of ethics on rhetorical devices peculiar. Like - if I were to use a straw man device, would that be unethical? In a sense - maybe. I'd be misleading which is a form of lying.
I certainly wouldn't say labelling an idea as "dumb" would be unethical, though. It's just not productive to having a conversation: name calling begets more name calling. It puts people on the defensive where they are not receptive to new ideas.
Straw man arguments are a fallacy, not a "rhetorical device". It's an error we're all prone to doing at some point, unintentionally. I would argue that it's only unethical if it's done intentionally—and while you can guess at someone's intention, knowing is usually impossible. So unless you can literally read minds, only the author can truly know if they were being unethical or not.
Words don't exist only to "contribute to the argument" but also to summarise, to express emotions, as rhetorical flourishes, or simply to amuse. In this case, the last sentence is the conclusion of my argument. If you disagree, well, you disagree with my argument.
And with that you've just demonstrated my point. By focusing on an aesthetic component of my rhetoric rather than the substantive, you have chosen to steer this entire discussion away from the underlying topic.
> by extension I must be someone whose ideas are nonsense
That is nonsense. It does not follow.
> What did labelling my idea as nonsense accomplish?
It's my opinion. And while you're welcome to call that idea yours, I only consider it an idea. You shouldn't be so quick to tie your ideas to your identity. Everyone has lots of opinions and a good number of them are certain to be wrong.
Your argument is ill conceived, pedantic, and seeks desperately to justify previous positions.
But you are not someone who makes ill conceived, pedantic, or desperate arguments to save face. That would be nonsense. It does not follow. Don't be so quick to tie your identity to the pedantic arguments you've made.
here is a quote: "from the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways-that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect"
>For one thing, it manages to create a profound metaphysical intimacy with God without denying His transcendence.
this kind of thinking which I often see when people express pantheistic views is exactly what turns me away from it. It's just as much of an anthropomorphization as the article accuses traditional conceptions of God of.
I guess you can think that the universe is in some vague sense conscious, although I don't think the arguments for that are great either, but to jump from this to thinking one can experience 'intimacy' with it (and explicitly not "him") is I think already making mistakes. One can experience intimacy while being in nature but not 'with nature', Intimacy is a human emotion, 'nature' does not empathize back.
To me pantheism just seems like a misapplied psychological need. People have a (understandable) revulsion against seeing the universe as mechanic, or random, or 'cold' or what have you, and pantheism not unlike Gaia type theories are comforting.
> To me pantheism just seems like a misapplied psychological need. People have a (understandable) revulsion against seeing the universe as mechanic, or random, or 'cold' or what have you, and pantheism not unlike Gaia type theories are comforting.
Pantheism is nothing more than seeing the universe, or nature, as god. What you’re reading is one particular flavor of pantheism. A pantheist can also view god, or universe, or nature, as cold and mechanical as well.
If god is the same as the (scientific) universe, calling it "god" doesn’t add anything. To make calling it "god" meaningful, something has to be added. The GP (I believe) opposes whatever is being added.
I don't think "comforting" is an apt description of pantheism; in fact, it postulating a cold mechanical universe (as opposed to the idea that a God must necessarily be omnibenevolent) is often cited as a criticism of pantheist frameworks.
I find that panentheist flavors tend to dabble more with metaphysical supernatural stuff, but that pantheism is characterized by its rejection of blind belief. Talks about intimacy and experience feel strongly panentheistic to me, whereas a pantheist might instead summarize their position with something along the lines of "the laws of physics are omnipresent and omnipotent, and that's the hard scientific evidence of the conceptual thing you call God"
I agree that "I believe X because it makes me feel Y" isn't a good argument. But it's also not a good argument to say "you believe X because it makes you feel Y." We could apply that, fallaciously, in any direction.
For example, I could say "you believe in pantheism because you find it comforting," or "you believe in materialism because it makes you feel like a strong, tough-minded person who does need that fuzzy comforting stuff."
Pantheism is a compromise between the existence of an Abrahamic monotheistic god and lack thereof. It's a belief system without submission nor worship which are the cornerstones of judeo-christian religions including islam by extension. You might argue that the psychological need for a superhuman all-powerful deity is in our genes and it may well be the case, but canalizing the need it onto nature/universe while cutting down submission sometimes is not enough because submission (intimacy, feeling vulnerable in the company of a powerful being) is as much a powerful need as believing in something.
There's a tiny part of your brain called the Ego that thinks it is human and special. The rest of your brain knows you are just part of the universe. Inextricably so, from before birth to after death. One and the same, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. What could be more intimate than that?
To follow this line of thinking, are you suggesting I can have an intimate relationship with a rock? If you're not speaking to the point about intimacy, what point are you speaking to, because your post isn't very clear what point, if any, you were trying to make.
Do you have intimate relationships with rocks? and if so can you describe what that relationship is like? Does your conscious self acknowledge this relationship or are you just speaking in some metaphysical sense that is completely intangible?
Well, the universe is full of rocks. “Intimate” may not be a great word (too anthropic and intangible), but writing off all these rocks as boring and banal is probably narrow sighted. Birds, sun and vegetation may feel intimate, but try to feel that without a rock right under your feet. They have a point, imo. We tend to ignore “default” things, but it doesn’t make them irrelevant, they are an important part of the setup. The next thing to feel intimate relationships with is gas (the universe is full of gas that produced you after all, isn’t that as close to “intimate” as it can get).
Intimate was the centerpiece of my curiosity. Sure I can have feelings about the universe and the rocks that exist within this universe, but there is no intimacy.
> isn’t that as close to “intimate” as it can get
No, intimacy isn't a feeling that just happens to you or a circumstance you happen to be in, it's an active relationship where both parties involved do something to foster or maintain the intimacy.
Can someone feel as though rocks were actively fostering or maintaining intimacy with them? I mean, I guess? I'm not sure what that would look or feel like to believe that inanimate objects were actively working to deepen their relationship with you.
Rather it feels like this metaphysical spiritual jargon I read here is just co-opting a word to give more significance to a different kind of relationship someone might feel towards inanimate objects. It's harmless I'm sure, but at the root of it, it feels very selfish and condescending to take a word that has clear meaning and suggest to someone they just aren't using all of their brain if they can't understand intimacy with inanimate objects.
Now, understand I really don't mind misuse of words if it's towards a greater goal of communication, but here it feels like it's towards a lesser goal of demeaning people who use the word only for effective communication.
I see why you're offended now. It was not my intention.
I don't think I can describe it in words. Like I said, our egos stop us from taking the idea too seriously, perhaps out of a survival instinct. There are some drugs that will cause "ego death". The part of your brain that distinguishes between the self and the other literally ceases to function. It sounds metaphysical and silly, but when it happens, you understand how insignificant your ego truly is in comparison with the world, and yet it tells you that it contains every perception that tells you what the world is, and it's only when that ego stops that you can see that the world, including you, can go on without your ego.
So, just like intimate moments with a lover, or a musical instrument, or blessed peaceful moment, you are allowed to forget about yourself. That is my understanding of intimacy.
I've tried basically every ego-death drug that exists (or that I'm aware of) and I've still not felt the need to assert to people that they have a non-functioning part of their brain they aren't using to understand "intimacy" with inanimate objects.
I've had intimacy with a lover because the lover is participating in the intimacy. I've never had it with an instrument, I have felt it with a musician. Again, intimacy requires two participating entities. An instrument is dull and lifeless and only a tool used by the musician to facilitate in intimacy. Without the musician the instrument is effectively a curiously shaped rock.
I've also had intimate moments, where again there was an entity participating in the intimacy. The very roots of the word mean to impress or make familiar, which requires two participants. A rock can't be impressed it cannot feel familiar. Likewise a rock cannot impress itself upon you even if you feel impressed by the rock, it also cannot make itself familiar to you even if you feel familiar with it.
Again though, it's not about the incorrect usage of the word, which people do all the time to _improve_ communication. It's about the assertion that I, or anyone else who feels like me, is wrong and just isn't using part of their brain. Has it occurred to you that maybe you're wrong? Maybe you're misusing a part of your brain to imagine something that has never existed.
I'm fully aware that I may be wrong and there may be something beyond my natural senses that would allow this intimacy on a spiritual level that maybe can be revealed only by taking drugs that unveil a part of our psyche that sees this more clearly. Are you aware that you may be entirely wrong? I suspect not since you've asserted your position comes from a greater understanding, although I suspect you've had no experience that was vastly different from my own, you've just chosen to believe that experience imparted a superior understanding to you than I might have.
I did no ego-death drugs, but I definitely can feel how the complexity of things I interact with reacts to my changes and approaches. It is animate, and intimate to my understanding of that word (I can’t even describe it to the others). One may say thay it’s all in my head, and in a sense would be right, but it’s all in your head as well. Were you a rock, you couldn’t feel it. Were your lovers p-zombies, you couldn’t tell it. But on the other hand, despite having relationships in my life, I can’t tell that they were more intimate than that, so that I could somehow choose one over another if asked to. Maybe I cannot feel intimacy it at all? Another possibility is that neither of us are wrong, stumbling on a definition of a rock. Any phenomenon is complex enough when you dig deeper, and the complexity is never inanimate, it interacts back.
Also, I too didn’t want to sound condescending or superior, and more importantly do not feel that way, but I understand the initial comment you replied to. One issue with this subthread is it never defined rocks or intimacy, which I tried to explore but then left.
it's an active relationship where both parties involved do something to foster or maintain the intimacy
Both yes and no. At wake up in the morning level, it is correct, but when you get into something deep/high enough, lines start to blur. Is a human the most complex being? Is he really what we think it is? Are we objects and not parts of something more sophisticated as a whole? Being non-religious non-esoteric I’m not speaking sprirituals here, these are physical questions you have to ask yourself anyway. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28870858
Edit: and if you feel that these comments are quite delusional, it’s fine, because problems of consciousness (which intimacy fully bases on) live exactly on that level. The more you think about it, the less ground you feel.
Oh, I totally believe I might be wrong. I'm just sharing from my experience, as you are. I'm sorry you are taking it as implying some kind of deficiency because I'm truly not trying to.
I play piano for myself sometimes. I used to play because I was supposed to, but now I play because I can make such beautiful sounds, which sounds like bragging but I don't mean it that way. It's me and the piano together, for a moment, making something incredible.
It's ok if you haven't felt that with an inanimate object. It doesn't make you bad or lacking. And in fact, I do agree that this intimacy is a hallucination, borne of a perception that exists only in my own mind, meaningless to anyone else. That doesn't make it any less real to me. It still IMHO is as real and meaningful as a relationship with another human being.
Have you seen midnight mass? The protaganist from that movie in the final scene, says something along those lines... as she herself is dying. She was asked earlier in the movie: "What happens when we die"... and iirc she gave a more christian-themed notion as she herself was very religious, but you can see her shift from the dogma of catholicism to one more pantheistic.
When the memory of Riley asks her what happens when we die she responds:
“Speaking for myself? Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word: self. That’s not the word, that’s not right, that isn’t — that isn’t. How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside, and I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in this moment. Remembering. Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body, is mostly just empty space after all, and solid matter?
It’s just energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain.
And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy fighting the neurons. And I’m returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. It’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it’s always been a part. All things, a part. All of us, a part. You, me, and my little girl, and my mother, and my father, everyone who’s ever been. Every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach.
That’s what we’re talking about when we say God. The one. The cosmos, and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.”
This monologue gave (continues to give me goosebumps)... I'm exmormon/agnostic, but still inspired and have some spirituality...I believe there's something bigger and better and our 'energy' continues on in some respect, or we're at least in a simulation and maybe will respawn and get another chance to get life 'right'.. either way, I think death isn't the end, and this was just a very beautiful way to think of it...
I agree that pantheism is a misapplied psychological need, but no more so than any relgion or beleif system.
I've decided that to fill this need, it is useful to choose a fundamental belief system of some sort. I have choosen Taoism and parts of other Philosophical systems, like Stoicism, where I feel there are gaps.
not very much, that is to say I'm skeptical of metaphysics altogether. I'm partial to Wittgenstein's attitude, that is to say I think projects like pantheism deflate if you scrutinize them and inquire to what degree they say anything meaningful or well-defined about the world, or if they're really expressions of psychology or linguistics or desire.
I do agree with you that all kinds of belief systems may fulfill legitimate needs, but I think they're just that, personal, subjective and private expressions of the individual's attitude towards the world, not meaningful claims about the world as such.
I think concepts like Spinoza's or Deism or people who declare themselves "not religious but spiritual" are just having trouble parting with the comfort of religion even though they know there's nothing there.
Spinoza was writing at a time when it was easy to become exiled or dead for publishing material that doesn’t align with the mainstream religious position. So some degree of the religious comfort aspect of his work can arguably be more of a practical necessity to get his ideas published in the first place.
I don't think I would conflate things like Deism with spiritualism. You can apathetically believe there is a God of sorts and not be in the least spiritual.
I don't mean that they're equivalent, I mean that they're ways to avoid labelling yourself as an atheist when you're irreligious. They're like diet atheism. Something you can say to not feel completely alienated from religious culture.
I've often said that being "agnostic" isn't a position on whether or not one believes in God. You can be agnostic theist, or agnostic atheist. But I no longer think that's accurate.
One reason people opt for it, which I find understandable, is owing to the popular connotations that atheism carries, not unlike theism. You can avoid having to explain "I'm not saying I know that God doesn't exist". But the qualifier is explicit. One needn't necessarily be certain whether they believe in a God or not and I don't think that's well represented by the term "atheist". By the same token I don't think Deism is anywhere near atheism-lite. It is explicit belief in a God with the caveat that it's irreligious.
I like the term "apatheism" because it also captures the way I feel about the question of whether God exists.
Nature in South America's jungles, the Arctic, or Australia doesn't give a shit if you live or not. You have better chances of dyeing fast than being alive. You know, still nature. Harsh, but nature.
Stack plagues, bacteria-ridden water, parasites, funghi, predators and so on, and I'd say "nature" doesn't like you at all.
That isn’t an answer to the question and doesn’t in anyway nullify the broader concept of nature as indifferent - animals are merely part of nature and my experience from truly being in raw primal nature is that, of course things react to you, as you are also in nature, but in those circumstances the forces of survival outweigh any anthropomorphism that humans would normally attribute to the interactions we more normally encounter in our garden environment
That’s not the point you’re making, in fact you’ve really failed to make any point except a poor attempt to anthropomorphise nature and not provide any examples of how nature ‘caring’ is a universal phenomenon
I haven’t assumed you’ve made it, I’ve asked you what it is. That you can’t detect that from my plain language is concerning as to your capacity to parse my sentences.
But if that is what you’ve concluded, why don’t you make your point then, as opposed to jumping around it as though you’ve stated it (which you haven’t) or assuming it’s blindingly obvious (which it isn’t?) it’s a red flag when someone has the arrogance to assume that their view is so universally understood that their dismissive curt replies will suffice for what should ostensibly be an exchange of ideas
I think it is more complex than that. People can 100% care about the person in the street while still choosing not to help. They might believe that the person is insane and can’t be helped, they might believe that helping encourages the person to not self-help, or they simply prefer to spend their time/energy on people they love instead of strangers.
> It's just as much of an anthropomorphization as the article accuses traditional conceptions of God of.
For the record (just to clarify the overall context), the traditional conception of God, in the Catholic view, is not anthropomorphic. From metaphysical analysis, God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the Subsistent Act of Existing Itself[0]. You see this declared in the Torah in Exodus 3:14[0]. Faith only enters into the picture with the identification of the God of Scripture with the God of philosophy, but it is not much of a leap given the agreement between the two.
That God is personal does not imply anthropomorphism. That the Logos became incarnate does not imply anthropomorphism.
Also, w.r.t. "God without denying His transcendence", the traditional Christian view of God is one who is both transcendent and immanent.
> For the record (just to clarify the overall context), the traditional conception of God, in the Catholic view, is not anthropomorphic. From metaphysical analysis, God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the Subsistent Act of Existing Itself[0].
You may say that God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens but if you then say that Ipsum Esse Subsistens is jealous, merciful, leader of heavenly armies... which is the traditional conception of God in the Catholic view then we most certainly are talking about an anthropomorphic conception of God.
> The belief that one's deity chose to assume the physical form of a man: isn't that about as anthropomorphic as you can get?
In my opinion, no.
Anthropomorphism (as commonly understood) means to ascribe human characteristics to things not human; we don't talk about anthropomorphizing your grandma, but we do talk about anthropomorphizing a constellation.
Now if you believe, like the Rawlsians suggest, that there are pre-incarnate spirits floating around and these then decide to inhabit specific bodies according to a lottery, then this is also not an anthropomorphism, but is rather a creation account of how humans come to exist.
You may not believe it's accurate, but it's still a creation account. It is no more an anthropomorphism than saying that man was molded into being from a piece of clay into which God blew his breath. That is not an attempt to anthropomorphize clay.
Finally if you believe that God literally became a man, then this is yet another origin account of a specific man. It's only if you don't believe that he became a literal man that you can speak of anthropomorphizing. Suppose he was an angel that only looked like a man, but wasn't really a man. Then anthropomorphism would be correct. But if he really was a man, and not just like a man, then it's not anthropomorphizing.
So the miracle of incarnation describes a creation account of one specific man, much like the creation of Adam from dust is a creation account of another man. If you are extending the label of "anthropomorphizing" to one, then you should also extend it to the other, at which point you've left the commonly understood meaning.
Catolicism belief is without further discussions in Trinity - Holy Father, Holy Son and Holy Spirit(which had earlier representation of anthropomorphic Jewish God).
Since no one really has read a Bible, I can remind the source:
>>Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
>>"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
According to Bible - God created humans in his image - this is very problematic passage for Christianity, if there is an alien life out there, because apparently they would not be createad by a God.
Any deviations from anthropomorphic nature of a God in Christianity does look like a herecy. Because any other deviations from Christian religious dogmas basically brings to the result, where Aztec god that requires sacrifices and Sol Invictus, not to mention Allah and Yahweh are the same immanent transcendences of a God.
I don't really follow your train of thought. When we say someone is brave as a lion, does that mean we lionmorphize the person? I invite you to read about the many different schools of thoughts in the scholastic-tradition (catholic/eastern/Anglican etc) rich variants of Christianity. Some were seen as heretical and became doctors of the church... etc
Edit: The bearded guy in the sky notion of God is the least popular in my circles (Catholic/Muslim/Hindu mostly)
In math there is the concept of having a first element of a series and no one questions what was the element before the first element because if you can find an element before the first element then by definition that element you thought was first is not the first.
In light of this when people try to disprove God by saying then who created God. God is the first element so if you find out that who you think your God is is created then by definition he fails to fulfill the conditions required to be God. You have to look elsewhere.
Ok in english the term God is not precise enough, I'll turn to arabic to try to explain my point because this is what I'm the most familiar with.
Ilah is the arabic word for divinity. Wahid means 1. Ahad means the only one. Allah means The God (The only God).
I don't find it absurd to think that there is The God (Allah):
- A being who transcends time because he created time.
- A being who transcends logic because he created it and all its rules.
- A being who transcends the physical world because he created it.
> I don't find it absurd to think that there is The God (Allah) ...
I do, I see no reason to think such a being exists, absent extraordinary evidence, and inventing one seems absurd to me.
Why must god be the first element? Why must there even be a first element?
People don't try to disprove god by askingwhat created god, they are trying to invalidate a particular argument that is used by those who do believe - that the universe must have been created by some original force because it is so huge/amazing/complex, and we'll call that force god. But there is no reason it must have been, and if we imagine there is such a thing, there is no particular reason to stop there other than that semantically you have decided to call it the first. Because if the universe was created by a huge/amazing/complex god, then by the rules of your own argument we ought to look for a deeper cause.
So yeah ... it's not a 'disproof' of god, so much as pointing out that that specific argument relies on some dodgy assumptions and is not any sort of proof of god, nor justifies belief in one in any way.
The problem you describe works in both directions though. If God is introduced to explain, say, the existence of the Universe, and you’re not allowed to ask what created God or why God exists, then why not just say you’re not allowed to ask what created the Universe or why the Universe exists?
> In math there is the concept of having a first element...
There is also the mathematical concept of not having a first element of a sequence, where each element has an infinite number of elements indexed before it.
You seem to be arguing that the existence of a mathematical concept implies that the universe must follow it. In this case, you have one concept that implies a first element and another that implies no first element. They can’t both be true.
I agree that there might be a god, but why would such a god that can transcends time and logic.. care about humans? Humans are just a type of animal, an advanced organism, in biological terms we are not too different from bacteria, trees and sheep.
That there is a first element seems natural, however why should this first element to care about the 100010847238384392938474934th element?
In terms of the Islamic tradition, Allah [lit. The God] is both transcendent and immanent.
Quran 50:16 states that Allah is closer to man than his jugular vein and Quran 2:115 states that wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah.
Now to answer why He cares, the Quran states that He specifically created mankind to know Him.
And indeed, the recurring injunction in the Quran is to remember Allah, because you already know Him—Quran 7:172 states that we testified to His Lordship in a pre-birth state.
I would not agree with that because it's pantheism.
One meaning for His Face being everywhere is that everything is turned towards Him whether they know it or not, since He is the giver of being. It does not mean a literal encapsulation or identification of the Infinite with the finite.
Rather, closer to your sentiment from an Islamic theological perspective is to say that what we experience in the universe is an interplay of His attributes since He is the causer.
This is a tangent, but I don't have many opportunities to speak to people knowledgeable of Islam. Is there a concept of original sin in Islam? Do we need to seek forgiveness or salvation?
Islam does not have a concept of original sin attached to the descending of mankind to earth. Adam and his wife disobeying the command to eat from the forbidden tree is described as a "slip" in the Quran, not a monstrosity of a rebellion as seen in Christianity. Indeed, the Quran also says that before even creating Adam, Allah announced [to the angels] the purpose of Adam and his offspring is to be put on the earth as a vicegerent (Quran 2:30).
I define salvation as: 'being preserved in Heaven', and in Islam this is sought through forgiveness.
Quran 39:53 Say, “O servants of Mine who have transgressed against their own selves, do not despair of Allah’s Mercy. Surely, Allah will forgive all sins. Surely, He is the One who is the Most Forgiving, the Ever Merciful."
Nope. The Islamic approach is to optimize to our maxima. Essentially our core purpose is to strive to "find/discover/understand" God through manifesting different values (the 99 names of Allah). The various prophets (Jesus) are those among us who came closest so that understanding and manifestation.
Look at your kitchen sink. On that metal lives a billion bacteria cells. Maybe some of them are even sentient. Do you even care to find out? Not really - its far beneath you. Humans are infinitely inferior to a god. We are no different to a moving rock.
We are the only creature we know of that's capable of reasoning about our own existence and understanding our potential creation. That is a scientific fact of which there is no counterevidence.
To deny that in an effort to refute the potential existence of God is to cut off your nose to spite your face.
This statement can also be taken as one as a limitation of our understanding of the internal lives of other creatures. And there's nothing scientific about it.
The entire universe we know could be but a single neuron firing in a huge brain of something much much bigger... and they don't even realize we exist...so size is very... relative/immaterial to sentience...we could be the sentient bacteria.
I think God just cares about self reproduction, not of a specific species but in general. But I would rather consider this a natural force like a locally reversed entropy instead of a sentient agent who acts on the world.
There are a million hobbies in this world. Why did you choose the hobby you chose? Because it pleases you.
Why did you pick up that one shell at the beach while there are thousands of them? Because your eye fell on it.
I am not sure if I understand your argument. If there is a God who is the first and last element, who created everything, why wouldn't his eye fall in love with one element? And why not with all elements?
> In math there is the concept of having a first element of a series and no one questions what was the element before the first element because if you can find an element before the first element then by definition that element you thought was first is not the first.
Bad example. What's the first real number after zero?
I was raised in the evangelical Christian tradition and have since had my views broken down and rebuilt numerous times. I am still seeking. I am ignorant about Islam, other than the way it is represented in popular media and from some basic readings.
Your descriptions of God are interesting. Are these concepts that come from reading the Koran?
> Your descriptions of God are interesting. Are these concepts that come from reading the Koran?
These descriptions are in fact sourced from the Qur'an. Allah gives us his description throughout the Qur'an. He has 99 names/attributes which you can look up. Below are example verses where he gives us part of the 99 names. It's a recurring theme in the Qur'an where He emphasizes His attributes. If you would like to read a Qur'an I would recommend "The Clear Quran, a thematic translation".
""He is Allah—there is no god ˹worthy of worship˺ except Him: Knower of the seen and unseen. He is the Most Compassionate, Most Merciful. He is Allah—there is no god except Him: the King, the Most Holy, the All-Perfect, the Source of Serenity, the Watcher ˹of all˺, the Almighty, the Supreme in Might, the Majestic. Glorified is Allah far above what they associate with Him ˹in worship˺! He is Allah: the Creator, the Inventor, the Shaper. He ˹alone˺ has the Most Beautiful Names. Whatever is in the heavens and the earth ˹constantly˺ glorifies Him. And He is the Almighty, All-Wise."" Qur'an (59:22-24)
But logic doesn't need to be created. The problem here is the idea of existence. There doesn't actually need to be a universe for the laws of logic still to be what they are. It's like how algorithms have the complexity they have regardless of whether computers exist, or whether they're made with silicon or buckets of water.
There is truly no physical evidence pointing to the existence of God, otherwise it won't be a matter of belief. I also don't see any evidence that contradicts the existence of God.
For me, the existence of God makes more sense in my philosophical model than his non-existance.
It seems like a statement like this cannot be made without first giving a definition of God. Clearly, people have different ideas of what God is.
So either you are saying there is no evidence for one particular definition of God, but you are not giving us the definition or you are saying there is no evidence for any of the different definitions of God that might exist. The latter is a difficult argument to make in my estimation, because any one person is probably ignorant about a sizeable portion of definitions.
He isn't bound by space or time, ah he created them. Following that, he has no material form otherwise he would be bound by space.
He created us humans for the sole purpose of worshipping him. He is complete, in the sense he lacks nothing. All human feelings that stem from lack don't apply to him (hunger, loneliness, jealousy, etc...)
It's impossible to prove such a supreme being exists. However, I elected trust the words of people who claimed to be his prophets, as I have found no logical contradiction that proves God can't exist.
>So either you are saying there is no evidence for one particular definition of God, but you are not giving us the definition or you are saying there is no evidence for any of the different definitions of God that might exist
I don't think this is an example of Russel's teapot. In Russel's teapot, you are giving a solid explanation of what you are claiming, it just happens to be unfalsifiable.
In the example I was criticizing, the word "God" was used without any further explanation of its meaning (in a thread which hosts discussions on different definitions of the word "God" no less).
Of course, if you are a priori assuming that any definition of God is going to be unfalsifiable, you can draw the connection to Russel's teapot, but again, I don't think you can convincingly do this without knowing all the definitions.
where is time created IN? and where is logic created IN? and how can logic even be created? Is the pysical world that Allay somehow transencds contained in something or not? If not, where can Allah transcend to?
Is your Allah living completely alone in eternal loneliness or are there other beings that they can converse with?
I don't know. Just because you do some word trickery and somehow relate it to maths, the essential questions are still not being answered at all...
thus, the evidence is still overwhelmingly in favour of no Allah, no god, no jehova, etc
Loneliness isn't something that can be attributed to God. Loneliness stems from the lack and desire for contact with others, but God is complete. He doesn't lack and doesn't need.
God isn't constrained by space nor time because he created both.
As for your first two questions, I can't comprehend them enough to think about them.
Because I'm used to referring to God with male pronouns. Someone could refer to him with female pronouns, doesn't matter as the human gender construct doesn't apply to God.
I would like to hear your opinion about just why you think that first doesn't make any sense. To me, it's logical you wouldn't ascribe hunger, thirst, lust loneliness, etc... To God.
Also, that second part of your comment makes ot sound like you aren't arguing in good faith.
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
The tension is that many people are actually better off with a notion of god in their inner life for their psychological wellbeing, but to avoid cognitive dissonance they also want everyone else to subscribe to the same notion, a conflict which makes society/culture worse off. I don’t think this can be fully resolved.
> many people are actually better off with a notion of god in their inner life for their psychological wellbeing
Much in the sense that lonely children are better off with an imaginary friend, but they're expected to outgrow that as they mature and become well adapted to their environment.
Keeping the imaginary friend trades one psychological issue for another.
> the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it. And it's learning about itself.
Yes, thank you for stating what some might consider a tautology or frivolous fact, but is actually, utterly profound.
Generally, people have no trouble believing that they, themselves are conscious. But what part of them is conscious? All of it? Their toes and fingers? Clearly not...they are mechanical, I/O devices with just nerves, no brains. Same for most of you: your organs, muscles, tissues, blood. Not conscious. But what about your brain? Is it all conscious? Is the tiny part of your brain devoted to audio processing conscious, with a little person who speaks English inside? Clearly not. There are lots of mechanical parts. Is there then some "special" part of your brain that is the consciousness, and the rest is not conscious? Or is just the sum of the brain's parts conscious? Either way, it doesn't matter, it's the same principle; we ascribe a property of a part of a person, consciousness, part of the brain, to the whole person--we regard a person's hand or face with the reverance we regard for their brain, their face thinks and their hands feel with the full power of their consciousness.
So, too, the universe thinks with parts of itself, human and animal brains...
Every time I ponder this I arrive at Gaia. How can we deny that nature is conscious when it is so full of conscious things! Look at all the wondrous brains around! In animals, in insects, and now we see plants sense and respond to stimuli. All these pieces are conscious, and we must conclude that the sum of the biosphere is a conscious thing. It is truly a superorganism, a pan-organism.
Two thoughts. First, consciousness may exist by itself, e.g. is a book that describes itself in a complex enough way conscious? It wouldn’t even require the flow of time or a reader, but once you read it, it’s clearly self-aware. That’s a hard notion of consciousness.
Second, the easy, down to earth answer to “what is conscious” (iow, where do “beings” end) is where a structured perception ends. Your hand is a part of you because of a broadband link to it. It ends at the skin and hair. Lack of signal and control separates you from everything else. Organized groups have much less bandwidth and while still “pan-“, that’s much lower level of consciousness. Sometimes they synchronize well enough, but that’s just a correlation.
This is a very interesting line of reasoning, particularly the "high bandwidth connection" kind of criteria. Our native five senses can be augmented with high-capacity links to all kinds of sensors and actuators. Where is the boundary when we can plug things into our brains with as much bandwidth and precision of control as our native limbs? Cyborgs...
The lit I've come across on the subject of consciousness broadly likens it to something illusory (much like identity), not a thing in itself. I don't imagine a machine is capable of experiencing what could be described as being "thrown into the world". The high self-awareness bringing up the question, "why am I in this body, rather than some place else? How is this special unique experience of now-ness selected for what it is, could it have been otherwise?". Watts nitpicks this idea and says we are "born of the world", not thrown into it.
The most fluffy unscientific notion I could entertain is that consciousness is tapped into, like a well. But I lean toward it being a complete illusion.
Every time someone brings up consciousness I like to bring up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8. Split brains imply some very interesting ideas around of consciousness.
> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it
This seems like quite a leap. Parts of the earth are conscious, so is the earth conscious? Parts of the universe are alive, so is the universe alive? Every member of my family is conscious*, but I wouldn't say that "my family" is conscious.
The natural problem is drawing the line between which parts of you are conscious and which parts of you are merely the portion that surrounds the consciousness. Is merely your brain¹ conscious? The whole body? The brain+(not-brain body) system is conscious but the distinction isn't all that different from the brain+(not-brain body)+(not-you Earth) system being conscious.
I have to say I started with thinking that clearly containment vs. identity are separate but now for this question, I find myself confused. I bet someone has thought up this notion of what a being is already. If anyone has the keywords that will let me quickly search up the appropriate concepts in a dense fashion (i.e. without lots of unrelated stuff) I would be appreciative.
¹ Or whatever nervous system subset you find suitable, m.m.
If you spend a lot of time paying very close attention to all of the minute sub/unconscious actions of your body as you go throughout the day, you have these weird epiphanies that your consciousness is just a passenger barking orders to a meat machine with a mind if it’s own.
Do this long enough and you’ll experience episodes on non-verbal communication with whatever is at the helm. For me it occurs when I get stuck in thought and my body sort of involuntarily feints an act to remind me what I was doing before my mind wandered. It’s only happened to her three times in my life, probably many times before I realized it the first time. It’s subtle, but really weird. And probably just a product of my imagination, but that’s been my experience.
I've never heard this before but I think it's reasonable. Imagine if you were simulating the universe in a computer and a creature within your simulation achieved consciousness. I think it would be fair to say your simulation had achieved consciousness, even if 99.999...% of the processing power was spent simulating the rest of the universe "unrelated" to the conscious part.
The interesting thing is everything is required as it happened for the universe to become conscious in the form of humans. E.g. supernova that generated the right heavy metals to stabilize the protein complexes that let our brain function.
Would love it if we could test other universes with different alpha constants to observe their conscious creatures. Maybe they would be human’ and human’’ etc :)
The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has, even if parts of it don't share it. A human has a hand, the hand is part of the human, but the rest of the human is not necessarily a hand.
> The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has
I don't know how you can substantiate this. I am left-handed. My wife is right-handed. These are attributes of us as individuals. What is the handedness of the city we live in? I would reject the question outright since I don't think that traits attributed to parts of a system necessarily can be attributed to the system itself.
Syllogistic errors 101. Your ruthless logic tells us a (normal) human has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious. Ergo, the universe has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious.
your family might not be on our human plane of conciousness
but, a family might make decisions to prolong it's lifespan and reproduce itself. like the parts of our bodies, stomach, brain, eyes work to achieve these goals for ourselves, the family members likewise engage in similar decision making in it's own self-interest.
it can engage and interact with society as a unit, though it is comprised of distinct actors.
I don't believe in any particular god but I do think that the universe and our experience is ultimately unexplainable. So science can never have these answers therefore I am open to theistic arguments but ultimately even these arguments are unsatisfying because it just moves the level of unexplainability up one more level... who created god?
That is why whatever that "thing" is, that's full-stop. That's why we refer to it as god.
It requires no explanation, it must be. It's sort of like asking "why do we have something instead of nothing?".
Because apparently that's the way it must be.
That sounds crazy to scientifically-minded people, myself included, because we want answers to everything. But the turtles will go all the way down until you just decide that there is a "god", whatever that is, and it is necessary.
Is is clear in the Bible that God does not exist in physical form. In the heavens, according to the Bible, he does not even exist in the same form as angels. At one time, Jesus was described in his human form, as "a little lesser than angels". Just a little? I guess it doesn't make sense for Angels to be in God's same plane of existence, then.
I think that 'time' is a part of this universe and that God is an observer that exists outside of it all. This makes sense, because of his ability to accurately tell the future in specific detail. But in the Bible, we see that Angels are restricted and bound by time. God is not. Probably God created time. Therefore to ask 'Who made God?' in his plane of existence, would require us to understand what existence is like without time.
I can imagine a block universe with time as just an axis. Then our universe can be just an object sitting on god’s table. But ultimately this still does not provide any answers.
To get more answers (not necessarily 'any' though - I think you may have overgeneralized there), we would need to understand this mode of existence. I am thinking like this: what does existence look like without time? For example, a table is of no use to someone who has no timescale to do anything at that table. The word "created", is even more curious, as it has no meaning. Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.
Perhaps this is why God would make a universe with time.
> Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.
Correct, that's my initial comment said things are this way because it "has to be".
Our minds can not grasp the concept of what being "outside time" even means.
Again it fundamentally boils down to "why something rather than nothing". Clearly, it is because it "has to be". Because we have something, and that by definition can't come from nothing.
Pondering about these thoughts of the whole concept of "has to be" admittedly has kept me up some nights.
That's why I say it is unsatisfying and the universe is ultimately unexplainable because either there is this final "god" and we are incapable of understanding it or there is not and there is infinite levels and we are incapable of understanding it also.
Bullshit, please. Prove it or GFTO with that nonsense. Science is found on evidence, not on "what if...s" .
If you told me that an ARM Cortex A9 is faster than a current i7, and then you put the excuse of "God made it" argument over the table you would look like a lunatic.
With the Universe origins is the same. Replace "God" with "Santa" and the argument gets equally ridiculous.
I went through this same phase, at one point I declared myself an atheist, mostly because it was an easy way to give the middle finger to my Catholic childhood indoctrination.
But then I decided to dig a little deeper, and there is more to it than thinking "god" is the same as "the Easter bunny".
Good luck trying to figure out why something exists and not nothing (and we're not talking about quantum particles popping into existence in a vacuum, those are "things" ... that's not nothing).
Assuming God is created would be to assume that God is bound by some kind of time. If God exists outside of time, his 'creation' is an irrelevant question.
> the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it
Getting some GEB vibes here (Is the anthill conscious?) but I do think that characterization is a bit off.
I tend to think of it from a different angle, considering philosophies about identity; namely, the laws of physics that make the universe tick outside of us are the same laws of physics that govern how we behave individually. There's undoubtedly some fuzzy boundary between what we consider "me" vs "not me", so it's not necessarily wrong to say that consciousness is a product of the universal laws and governed by them, while also simultaneously being something that isn't an inherent property of the entire universe.
In other words, it seems weird to say the universe is conscious (similar to how it might seem like a stretch of imagination to be talking to an anthill), but it seems perfectly reasonable to say that the mechanisms that make universe what it is give rise to consciousness, individuality and relative perspectives, despite all of these things being governed by fundamentally absolute laws.
Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience
that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
If you step away from the bias, there is no reason to think our consciousness is anything special. Who cares about subjective experience, it all disappears into the void when those chemical reactions stop.
> Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
This has absolutely nothing to do with humans, or even this planet. I have no "bias".
We have trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies.
I was talking about consciousness, zero to do with "societal programming". If you don't want it to be about humans than make it about planet X that is orbiting star Y in galaxy Z that has also evolved conscious beings.
You don't think existing at all as a conscious entity in a vastly enormous, complex and strangely beautiful universe is "any way special"? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one!
Subjective experience can both be something real and also not something special in some magical sense.
If subjective experience were really just an illusion, why would you care about what happens to yourself - hell, why would you even have a concept of 'yourself'?
All he’s saying is that as a subset of the universe, whatever words you want to apply to describe your subjective experience, apply equally to the universe, since you are part of the universe. Not sure what “special” has to do with it
In short, if Universe will exist forever (no matter its heat death, the Boltzmann Brain also works under those conditions), then all configurations of matter (locally) will appear over its "lifetime" infinitely many times.
Consequently, you with your subjective experience and memories could have been created a picosecond ago by "random" motions of matter, without the need for them (ie activities leading to memories) to occur, and without thoughts being previously processed.
As strange, as it sounds, the argument is actually solid, though hard to grasp in the first moment for those who haven't encountered it yet :).
PS: This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
Eh. This seems like a very "Load State" kind of way of looking at things. That doesn't preclude a kind of higher-order logic which generated this state, and from within the state, there would be no way to tell. So time isn't stored sequentially, so what? The illusion of continuous subjective experience is tantamount to it.
If I'm actually a Boltzmann Brain, all my memories are a lie and I just exist for a picosecond, then Boltzmann Brains can experience subjective experiences, so what?
>This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test?
"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.
What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.
> What a ridiculous strawman.
I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.
While I can see where this idea comes from, it seems a bit... self-defeating in a way? At least pragmatically speaking, there's an obvious difference between your point of view and that of the universe: if it's all a big illusion, then presumably there's no point in pursuing anything since it's all inconsequential anyways. And yet here we are clacking on keyboards sending electrons into a mesh of wires and circuitry for some reason. The universe may not care about you, but the implication is that you don't necessarily care about what "it" thinks either, but you definitely care about what you as an individual think.
And in a similarly clinical view of the universe, it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it in the first place, since there's no evidence that the universe has the capability or inclination of empathizing with a human. That leaves us with things that actually are anthropomorphic (other people), and I'd posit that societies are a pretty good example of a complex interaction between many things that are presumably on autorun, and yet are able to work together towards some commonly aligned purpose that has collective meaning on some level higher than just chemicals interacting in particular ways.
It means that consciousness nothing special/supernatural. There is no soul, there is nothing but chemical reactions that manage to create something that is able to claim "I think therefore I am"
The illusion is the fact that we claim that we are able to "experience", but I think that its all just layers of GOTO reactions that create something that think its special. Much like how a program isn't considered conscious, but its very likely its because we haven't dug deeply enough into the layers of shit that is required to make a self-aware computer
We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself.
We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces.
We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep.
It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet.
It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations...
For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine).
> For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
the universe could be considered to have achieved consciousness through humans (and possibly other life forms), but the only known consciousness is those lifeforms outside of those lifeforms there is no known trait of consciousness, its going to be a very transient trait of the universe as well, the universe will only have it for a blink of an eye.
My pet theory in high school was that Spinoza lived in a time when being an atheist could get you arrested and killed, so he came up with this Deus sive natura thing, which is a good cover and in practice is not too far from atheism.
It's not just your pet theory, but a dominant reading of him. Both present and in the past Certainly many of his contemporaries (including Leibniz) and many who read him later saw him as a covert atheist and hated him for it.
I'm not sure it's explicitly a cover. I'm not sure he would have actually said "there is no God"; such a phrase might have been actually very difficult for someone to compose in that era, not just because it was shocking but it would be hard to think. Especially one raised in a devout Jewish community (from which he was expelled)
(I spent many years studying Spinoza, both in school and in private.)
It seems like the main purpose of Spinoza's God is to have an unfalsifiable God.
The problem with other Gods like the Christian God is that they tend to come with requirements about the world that are easy to disprove. For example, the Christian God is not very compatible with the existence of natural evil. By removing all of those implications and other attributes, you arrive a Spinoza's God, a God so vague / powerless that it cannot be argued against.
There is no such thing as natural evil. The Inverse of love is fear. Whether something is good or evil has more to do with the social constructs of the times than any morality. That said, a morality based on Truth, Freedom, and Love is cooperative as above and below. The unfalsifiable god is the Truth god.
No, that is exactly counter to the point the person you were replying to was making. Amorphous, fluffy definitions of god can be unfalsifiable. But if you declare detailed attributes of your god, they can be in contradiction and thus the claims about that god are falsifiable.
But in practice, people are terrific at rationalizing and will overlook all those contradiction and continue to believe their god is the right one.
Every moment of our existence brings about a certain amount of suffering, and a certain amount of joy.
Depending on our choices and intentions, the amounts of joy and suffering for both us and other viewpoints varies.
I believe that Universe is continuously solving for the maximum sum amount of joy from all the viewpoints combined.
Of course, a certain amount of suffering is required to bring about the joy, whether by providing a comparison, or by carving our abilities and motivations.
When I set my intentions for maximum joy and follow through on them, the Universe "likes" and "assists" this in amazing and miraculous ways, which bring about even more joy, and so on.
We are truly fortunate to exist in a Universe which is set up this way.
You seem to be espousing tenants similar to 'The Secret'. Which if that's what you believe, more power to you; each to their own. I tend to think the opposite though, I think the universe tends towards death, and suffering. In the absence of concerted effort death and suffering is the result. Only through hard work and effort is the chance for happiness attained. Although I guess my ideas also seem to espouse 'The Secret', just focused on a different view point.
Universe solving for the maximum sum amount of joy?
Universe is setup such that many things will form, then ultimately be annihilated.
suffering is such that it can instantly end joy.
Joy has to do a lot of work to end suffering.
Entropy generally brings about suffering, joy requires a lot of energy to create situations that relieve / protect from suffering temporarily. So the universe seems more optimized for suffering. The universe itself is indifferent.
The spider thinks things are going great up until the shoe comes down and crushes him.
The universe is old and huge on a human time scale. But (and I'm making up the numbers for effect) 99.999999% of the universe is devoid of joy and should you find yourself in other than that 0.000001% of the life-friendly places, you will be snuffed out without concern. As for the time scale, it is estimated it will take 10E100 years for all the black holes to eventually evaporate, leading to the final heat death of the universe. Life will have a home anywhere in the universe for an exceedingly small fraction of that time.
I'm wondering whether there is a metaphysical law of conservation of valence - where positive qualia have to be balanced by negative ones in some way
> When I set my intentions for maximum joy and follow through on them, the Universe "likes" and "assists" this in amazing and miraculous ways, which bring about even more joy, and so on.
> I believe that Universe is continuously solving for the maximum sum amount of joy from all the viewpoints combined.
This is easy to believe when your brain is flooded with serotonin, but i don't think it's universally true
I once sketched a story in which God is frantically working to reorder the possible configurations of the universe, so that no consciousness experiences too much torture or terror in a single timeline. And (maybe) He needs the Crucifixion as some kind of torture-sink to make it feasible.
I never actually wrote it because I couldn’t get it past my bar for logical coherence. I’d be so prolific if I had a practical writer’s tolerance for plot holes.
I'm imagining The Universe™ sitting in front of a crusty old interdimensional space laptop, thumbs-upping your actions in the ol' Fatebook once in a while. Probably The Universe™ ran out of space cats and you were the next best thing. What a fortunate turn of events.
Personally, I hold the panentheistic ("all in God") view. It's very similar to pantheism; the distinction is that pantheism would say Universe=God, and panentheism would say Universe⊂God.
Please read Spinoza Ethics. There seems to be much misunderstanding of Spinoza Philosophy going on in here. Which isn't unlike how he was misunderstood during his time.
Ya, wtf. clearly this is a reply chain of intelligent people (?) but not a single post about the actual text. like tldr for spinoza, his writing is far beyond these grasping confusions which could be avoided if anyone cared to have an actual philosophical discussion
I've been thinking a lot of god and have come up with the following, please be kind:
---
The Right Way, The Trivium, The Path Towards Illumination.
TRUTH - The all knowing all seeing omnipotent natural universe which we have a special connection and natural understanding of. Nature. God. The Universe. In binary this would be 1. The Unified Field. Father.
FREEDOM - Sun. The Child Spirit To Play and Create. Son.
LOVE - Voluntary Passion, Drive, Motivation, Law of Attraction. Cooperation. Amplifier. Replicator. Wu Wei. Waters. Godly Bodily Fluids of Head and Genitals. Blood. Holy Spirit.
The only time Fear is more powerful than Love is when the Truth is hidden and individual Freedoms & essential Property including Body are subject to tyranny.
Therefore to stop tyranny in all forms we must live our lives according to natural law and the 3 pillars outlined above.
When we do this, together we live our best lives and create the best works of art and science and support each other to great heights.
---
This article only focuses on Truth God or Universal god.
I think I get what you're saying but above sentence is not correct. Evolution favored fear over love on short term gains and fear very much assisted survival skills for billions of years and love is only new (a few million years?). Not saying that love doesn't have a chance against fear but it is true that negativity (hate, fear, etc) spreads faster than positivity (love, hope, etc). No idea what the solution might be to this fundamental feature(bug?) of our existence.
Your body wouldn't function without the loving cooperative cells, all parts, all working to make you, a perfect for this current space time human! <3 cooperation or love.
Same is true about society, we will rebuild and pivot into a stronger more distributed form, if we follow Truth, Love, And Freedom in our mandates.
I sort of tried to define them above I'm sure we can iterate. The Truth God is what is discussed in the article. Einstein believed in this God because it's a paradox to live a life in this universe with a consciousness and not understand there is universal god which all things take part of.
I have a problem with this article because of the sentence, "He loathed groupthink and thought most organised religion, not least of the Judeo-Christian kind, fuelled delusion and sectarianism".
The biggest problem with using the English word "God" is it is loaded with assumptions, beliefs, and huge variability from one person to another.
Just uttering the word "God" to someone will create an entirely different mental image for that person than for you (despite similarities or differences of life experience and belief).
Thus, any discussion about God starts from the beginning with a huge gulf between the parties involved.
You can see it right here in this thread and the way people are responding to the use of the word God.
The article first tells us what Spinoza thought and said and the last paragraph is the personal interpretation of the author but one that tries to show that was wht Spinoza thought.
The military-industrial-consumer complex was created by the universe for the sole purpose of supporting the tiny contingent of otherwise non-productive consciousnesses (physicist) who are in a race to document the system in high fidelity before the edifice crumbles - the "system" being the one set of physical constants, out of the infinite number of permutations that didn't make the cut, that resulted in a semi-stable universe.
I feel that there is an often unasked question when it comes to discussions about the existence of god. So what? What if he does exist? Why does it automatically follow that we should worship him, pray to him, live our lives for him, etc? Why immediately assume he's good?
What if ants in an ant hill see the relatively god-like figure of a 6 year old come and stand over their hill? It's probably 50/50 that he's there to dump water on the hill and destroy it or he is there to simply observe, let alone give them eternal life.
I've yet to see a convincing explanation for the existence of suffering. Mostly a lot of handwaving about "mysterious ways" and "plans". We fail to hold god to the same standard we'd hold ourselves to if we could prevent childhood cancer or genocide with the snap of our fingers. You'd be a monster to withhold that power if you were a human being, but somehow god does it out of "love".
I don't know, kind of struck me as god in the machine or algorithm approach. Everything works together to create an outcome but the process is unknowable but assumed to be weighted towards kindness. I identify as an athiest and I don't hate it.
We embody God and comprehend the universe using our 5 senses (some access a 6th) which give people a connection to Truth and nature of reality.
We have FREEDOM to operate our bodies on a spectrum, free will of God. We are the universe witnessing the universe. Freedom sets off action which could be labeled "good or evil" based on the morality of the times. The strongest bonds form in LOVE.
LOVE drives voluntary cooperation from atoms to cells, to bodies to masses. Another name is the law of attraction.
so even this decent article is just a surface overview of a brilliant thinker and this reply chain continues such lack of attention towards careful reading and discussion of his text. instead we have everyone sounding off on their own conclusions about god, reality and religion. yet most of these comments are lacking. what exactly? they are lacking thorough, exacting, and critical thinking. sure, healthy opinions are couched in smart minds, but go a step further and read a book, then you can catch up beyond your clumsy, simple, internet level brains.
here is a quote:
"from the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways-that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect"
So, your argument is that methaphysics is based on belief and no logic? :)
TBF, all of those can be expressed into binary code and mathematical formulas and mathematical logic, however there does not exist proof that there exist God.
Science requires proving that something exist - not disproving that something that is made up centuries ago does not exist!
> So, your argument is that methaphysics is based on belief and no logic?
I'm really not sure where you think I said that. And I think it's a false dichotomy in any case. Logical argument has a place in metaphysics but logic requires agreed axioms and those axioms are by definition not amenable to logic.
In general you seem a little bit unclear about the difference between induction and deduction. I'm always a little uncomfortable when people repeatedly use the word "proof" around when defending or defining science. Science doesn't really "prove" anything except in the most causual and colloquial use of the word. Science is always provisional. Proof belongs in mathematics not empirical science.
Spinoza's God is interesting not because it's a competitor to the Christian God or Thor or whatever, but because it's a rarely-explored aspect of Einstein's belief system (and confusion) about the origins of, well, everything.
Questions of religion vs science plague proper scientists too, Einstein among them, and nobody really has a clear answer about how to proceed. It's the sort of inquiry that is itself perhaps a precursor to eventual discoveries -- what is now "What happened before the Big Bang? Did someone create it?" may one day, if we're lucky, be answered by something like "It depends. Which big bang are you talking about?" But there's no harm in asking the questions... just jumping to conclusions.
>>> Questions of religion vs science plague proper scientists too, Einstein among them
This is something you are making up, because in his own words Einstein clealry states opposite of your claim:
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
You can't just take one quote out of context and use it to paint Einstein as altogether disinterested in religion -- he wasn't.
To him, there was a difference between believing in Your Own Personal Jesus™, or some variation of Abraham's fickle, meddling god (as in Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, Islam), vs contemplating religion as a social/moral force and a line of philosophical inquiry about the origins of structure and organization in the universe. The whole point of him mentioning "Spinoza's God" is to underscore that difference.
Einstein wrote about religion on more than one occasion, and his views weren't as straightforward as "religion is dumb, I don't think about it." Far from it; he recognized the universe as something inherently profound and beautiful and drew from it a philosophical sense of spirituality. No one is accusing him of being a Bible thumping Jesus lover, but he was definitely interested (on the side) on questions of spirituality, purpose, etc.
My own personal take is that Einstein recognized the limits of our understanding and drew peace and inspiration from the boundless complexity yet to be understood. He found it powerfully spiritual, but he did not attribute it to a "personal" god the same way a follower of the Abrahamic religions would. Nonetheless he was interested in these questions, even if he didn't have the answers and didn't believe the Christians did.
You wrote a lot of words to argue an unrelated point. Whether someone is interested in religion is not the same as whether they find truth in religion.
> Whether someone is interested in religion is not the same as whether they find truth in religion.
OK, I agree with that assessment. But I wasn't arguing that Einstein was deeply theistic. I was saying he and other scientists were deeply interested in religion -- not to the degree of a theologian, obviously, but interested nonetheless. I believe that to still be true.
"God" is a name we assign to the force behind the original, unexplained creation. Presently that would be the force behind the origin of this amazing universe, light, space. Maybe we push that envelope further in the future, but the boundary always exists. In our understanding there always is a 'first'. We have only the vaguest idea in a cosmic sense how that first came to be.
It's pretty neutral and sensible to call "everything" the creator, as Spinoza apparently did, cuz "nothing" sure didn't make the universe. And as a matter of definition, that would be God. What's so fascinating is where this thought exercise may lead. We are talking about everything, acting by law unknown, generating an impossible, unexplainable result. What then don't we know of everything and what possibilities does that raise, relative to its consciousness and intelligence on unimaginable scales of time and of space. I mean, are we gnats on God's ... I'd say eyeball but everything clearly is not human so ... presence?
I'm not sure how a serious person who considered the question openly could avoid these conclusions.