Tell me all your thoughts on God [The Stars and the Cookie Jar]

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Watch out! She's waxing theological!

I postulate, because this is my journal and I can, that if God exists, then God's continued existence is dependent on the perceptions of the people in the world at any given moment, and their perception that God does in fact exist. Somewhere. Doing something. Those last two things can vary, I'm pretty sure.

Discuss.

And be very afraid, because this semi-deep thought was spawned from another legitimately deep thought that was scarier.

I think the deep thought will be a locked post.

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There are 17 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Well, it depends on how you define God, but my understanding of the nature of God is completely incompatible with that postulation.

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That's why it's a difficult, puzzling thought, you see, and why I'm farming out the option of response to other, smarter people. Because if your belief grew and flowered from a Judeo-Christian bent, the postulation doesn't work, but it does sort of make a weird postmodern sense.

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I am as interested as you in the responses, and why I'm not sending the Theologian over here to be all Aquinas-y or whatnot.

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Hmmm...
Nope.
I mean, that's all very well for Terry Prachett, and I think I might go along with the contention that the degree of power, or at least involvement with the world, of a specific divine entity has something to do with human belief or worship, maybe. But gods exist and act in accordance with their nature and that of the universe. As do we, of course, but then there's Free Will and it's wacky.

Scary deep thoughts want to be free!

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If a God falls in the forest and there's no one there to believe in him, ~~does he make a sound~~ is he still omnipotent?

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Dokery aside, at least for the moment:

I've wandered away from the loose interpretation of Roman Catholocism, and have taken to likening god to pattern as well as chaos. Unsolveable mathmatical formulae that we are hopeless to resist.

To bring it down to dorky terms -- because let's face it, I'm a slave to dorky terms -- The Matrix if you only had the green weaving patterny bits, and took out Keanu Reeves.

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With the heavy disclaimer that my thoughts on God are, I think, subject to change and most certainly should not be considered definitive when I am on codeine for a sight-blurring level of headaches—

I'm not an appropriate audience for this question. I don't think I believe in God. This doesn't mean that I don't believe in God. I define myself as agnostic; I am not interested in proving or disproving the existence of deities.* But I am amazed by the complexity and the weirdness of the universe, and somehow I think it cheapens stars and planets and slime mold to claim that some god expressly fashioned them for our benefit. (I'd be horrified to find out that our species was that important.) So my ideas on the divine are mostly aesthetic and intellectual, not spiritual.

I like, but am not sure I believe, the theory expressed in Babylon 5** that sentience is the universe's way of trying to figure itself out. I like, with the same caveat, the Epicurean model of the gods, who do exist: but aren't mixed up in human affairs and, in fact, probably don't care that much. And last and most relevantly, I have always liked the idea—I found it first in P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk, although it's since turned up in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and I'm not convinced that, if I poke around a little, I won't find it's originally some kind of medieval heresy—that gods do not create humans, humans create gods; that mortal belief is what sustains and shapes the divine. There's the potential for a nice kind of symbiosis implicit in that system. But I don't believe this concept. I find it symmetrical. And it slants the worldview once again toward us, and I'm not sure that's reasonable. I don't have a problem with being a random fragment of consciousness adrift in an entirely uncaring universe. There are supernovas over there. There's a spider web over here. I don't need the universe to take a personal interest in me in order to feel that it's a neat place to live.

All of this said, I realize that I do have a concept of the divine: because, for example, I believe that sex*** is holy. So can you have divinity without deities? Can you have godhead without gods? I don't have an answer and I should not attempt to theorize one now. But I think that's more or less where I stand—right now—on God. You may want to check back in the morning.

I want to read your deep thought now.

*There are things in the world that I can't explain. I am not sure that there are gods behind them. But I can't prove there aren't, and I suspect that I might be distressed if I could. In this one arena, I like inexplicability.

**By Delenn, of all people. This is possibly the only time I've ever liked anything that character said.

***Let's skip all the potential arguments and assume it's done right: whatever that means for you or me.

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I don't think people have a clue. About God, I mean. It would be like ants believing in humans, or not. I have no way of knowing, nor do I think anyone else does: visions can take the form of God, or of giant mushrooms, or pleasure domes in Xanadu. Who's to say? I majored in philosophy, got a B.A. in it, and before that was brought up by zealous but philosophically opposing grandparents (Communist/Southern Baptist.)

I don't think anything's existence, certainly not an omnipotent being's, could depend on another being's perception of it. This would mean that, before we discovered microbes, diseases were really caused by sinfulness or evil spirits....

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It would be like ants believing in humans

If I ever manage to lay my hands on an English translation of the Weber novels about ants, I'll send them to you. (They're about a weird professor who invents a machine to communicate with ants, and this child who teaches a group of ants to believe in "fingers", because the fingers are Gods. I think you'd be interested. *g*)

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A problem would be how the world's existence related to a created God. Or did God exist without need for humans to continue Her existence until humans came into being? (I've been learning R. Saadya Gaon lately, and any time I read lots of medieval-ish theology, I end up with Way too much concern about creation.)

On the other hand, it remind me very much of a quote from a Bruce Cockburn song from his album Sunwheel Dance (one of my all-time favorite English language albums, probably because I've been hearing it all my life- my tape comes from a record, and on one song you can hear the crackle and pops.), "We are children of the river we have named existance, busy dreaming ourself, and eachother into being"

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I think it's just the reverse, in fact.

Of course, if it were both, that would be really interesting, wouldn't it.

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I fail to wax theological, really.

And I know that you mean this seriously, but really... I haven't had breakfast yet, and likewise on coffee, so I'm half-asleep and all I get is this (http://machall.com/index.php?strip_id=189).

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... and as an afterthought, the failing-to-wax-theological feels really weird whenever I consider that my default icon is currently a rosary.

Um.

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I will use two abbreviations as follows:

(MP) God is more powerful than people could be.
(NBNE) If people stopped believing in god, that god would cease to exist.

1) If NBNE is true, then people could become aware of this fact.
2) If people became aware of this fact, then people could blackmail god.
3) If people could blackmail god, people are more powerful than god.
4) MP is true.
5) Therefore, NBNE is false.

(1) seems plainly true, as evidenced by this post.

(2) seems true if god would not want to be destroyed. Since for god to want to be destroyed various very strange things would need to be true. (Examples: God is suicidal. God does not care for itself. God is emo.)

(3) seems true becuase we generally take it to be the case that if someone can force you to do something you don't want to do that they are more powerful than you.

(4) I simply take as a premise about god. I think if we found beings that were around and influencing historical culture by calling themselves gods but we could harness each and every power they had, we would not think they are actually gods. For a concrete example of this, see Stargate, SG-1.

(5) This follows by multiple modus tollens.

(Note: from MP it does not follow that god is omniscient, omnipresent or omnibenevolent. Merely better than we can get. Further, I do not intend for this to be a sufficient condition on an entity qualifying as god, merely a necessary one.)

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That has the hidden postulate that the thoughts of people can create physical things. It carries with it the implicit belief that the validity of a god, and the powers thereto, are dependent on both the idea of the believers, and the number of same. Which means Allah is a more real/bigger god than Vishnu, or Jesus. The combined image of the monothestic god of the various stripes of jews, muslims and christians becomes either a muddy mess (how does one reconcile the various damnations and punishments the varied streams of overlapping belief mete out).

Taking this to a logical extreme, the soul, if it exists, exists only because people believe in it, and so prior to such belief, people had no souls. Also, extending that, animals might have souls, if enough people believe in them, if and when such souls are no longer believed in, then they go away.

Which, in a sideways sort of way, says I percieve things, only because I believe in them, and perhaps only because someone believe I can. That's a reductio ad absurdam, but it's where that line of thinking goes.

If God is all-powerful (or even of limited, but supernaturally, powered) GOd mush exist outside the parameters of people, otherwise the ideation of people would be enough to cancel out the laws of nature, in which case the whole construct falls apart.

TK

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You presume god must be physical. One could believe in non-physical entities that can have causal powers. Non-physical entities alone are easy to believe in (for example, I believe the number two exists). Giving them power to interact with the real world is tricky but not impossible.

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No, I don't presume that. I should have said, "actual things" or perhaps acting things.

I do presume that to be a "god" it must have the abilty to affect things. If that exists, all the rest of my argument still stands.

I apologise for being less than completely clear.

TK

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The Stars and the Cookie Jar

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