How does God exist?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Mind Over Matter, Jan 3, 2012.

  1. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

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    Since we cannot prove nor disprove the existence of God, philosophically we are free to assume either premise. My thread begins with the positive premise: God exists! Later on I will present argument/s that will address the question: How does God exist?
     
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  3. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Excuse me? That's the wrong way around.

    IMO, it should be something like this:
    - There might or might not be a god;
    - How might a god exist?
    - Explore possibilities;
    - Conclude whether or not a god exists, or conclude that there is insufficient evidence either way.
     
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  5. ughaibu Registered Senior Member

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    Where did you get that idea?
    For an entity to be a relevant god, that entity must have the following properties:
    1) a relevant god is, in some sense, in charge of but distinct from, one or more natural phenomena
    2) a relevant god has psychological states that allow for it to make decisions based on preferences
    3) a relevant god can be controlled or influenced by, at least, some human beings on some occasions.

    The problem is condition 3. If gods are not exploitable resources, then they're irrelevant, but if their exploitability is capricious, then we have no way of controlling that exploitation. In short, a relevant god must be reliably exploitable through a clearly defined and repeatable procedure, but that allows all the entities in the exploitation to take unique names and be subsumed into nature. In a word, a relevant god would not be a god, therefore there are no relevant gods.
     
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  7. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

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    By God I mean the triune God of Christianity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons in one essence that is: eternal, infinite, immutable, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

    By existence I mean: in addition to objective reality, the realm of matter and sensations, that is manifested as our body, to which science restricts its knowledge, I also recognize: subjective, rational, and transcendental reality. Subjective reality is how each of us views the world and is in rapport with others holding the same view, and is manifested as the heart. Rational reality is the shared knowledge of humanity, which is still evolving toward the truth, which is manifested as the mind. Transcendental reality is the appeal of the spirit to the mind in the form of Beauty, Justice, and Truth, and is manifested as the soul. This I will explain later.
     
  8. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    So?

    And: :wallbang:
     
  9. ughaibu Registered Senior Member

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    A fictional character, in fact. Realism about fictional characters is too silly a position to spend time arguing about, in my opinion. So, I withdraw from this thread.
     
  10. darksidZz Valued Senior Member

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    There is no god ok proof is implle i havent gotten laid yet and i prray all fuking nite
     
  11. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Literal proof typically isn't available to us outside mathematics and formal logic. What we do often have access to are arguments that may or may not make particular propositions seem more or less likely.

    I think that those kind of arguments can be generated regarding various kinds of theistic conceptions and about the likelihood of the gods featured in various religions.

    We can even assume the truth of demonstrably false propositions if we want to, for purposes of discussion. We might want to explore the implications of some counter-factual state of affairs being true.

    Ok, we can easily imagine that for purposes of discussion.

    I'm curious to see what you write.
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Assuming that seems to be begging an awful lot of questions. We can probably accept that assumption for sake of argument. The problem is that assuming too many items of doctrine as initial presuppositions threatens to render the whole discussion circular and turn it into an expression of personal faith.

    What's more, it isn't entirely clear what those phrases even mean. "Triune God"? "Three persons in one essence"? Somebody would have to propound a whole trinitarian theology if they hoped to make those kind of ideas intelligible. I'm not sure if that's ever been accomplished successfully, without throwing up hands at some point and calling it a 'divine mystery'.
     
  13. wlminex Banned Banned

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    1,587
    . . . . IMO (opinion only . . . no proof!) . . . God (prime-cause) may physically exist in dark energy [= SQR --> EEMU Hypothesis (Sciforum Thread)], but since dark energy is not (yet) detectible, neither is God directly observable . . . only in manifest effects of the 'cause'.
     
  14. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    About the third condition; If 1) and 2) are correct and 3) is correct (God subsumed into nature) then it wouldn't be nature but God, since it has psychological states and are in charge of but distinct from natural phenomena. The key word is "relevant" though, relevant for what?

    I agree with whoever said that we can't know, but we can have arguments on either side, they won't give evidence, but they can suggest why it could be plausible or not.
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed, how can such a God exist? If he already knows everything, there is no reason to think. Being everywhere, there is nowhere to go. Why would he need to do anything if he was infinite and omniscient? The universe as he made it lays out before him like an open book, there is nothing to change and nothing to do. If he offers a son for redemption, he is the one that made the redemption necessary, so he is just fulfilling his own rules and premises. It makes no sense.
     
  16. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    To heck with "My thread begins..." and delaying the title of the topic ("How does God exist?"). I don't need to watch one more of a hundred wranglings over somebody asserting his belief in the existence of God. Let's consider from the start what way God could exist, which may feedback into the other.

    Take the situation without God: Where the world conforms to regularities or reliable patterns as it develops over time. These "rules" could be said to "exist" via just that: The world conforming to such order is the being or existence of that order. That is, even if they were claimed to be abstract objects of some sort existing in some other "place", this other realm of nomological things where the order of nature originates just seems to repeat a circumstance we already find: Entities or shapes occupying a space, following a "scheme" but also enforcing that "scheme" (somehow) upon another lower realm of entities or "stuff".

    Similarly, a God substituted as the regulatory source for nature, and existing as some anthropomorphic figure residing in another redundant level and repeat of space and time (so as to be such an extended form resembling a human), acquires the same excess. Making "rules" or "order" into a "thing" or "things" or a "personhood" occupying another "place" generates another world that itself invites a need for explanation (especially if retaining governing conceptions like "time" and "causation" there).

    Which is to arrive at this and get it out of the way: Don't bother with the bearded, wise-looking figure in a robe sitting on a throne in a higher reality that for some strange reason resembles this concrete one, in as far as containing some similar spatiotemporal things, whether composed of some differing ethereal substance or not. Once this personhood object is out of the way, toss whatever is left into the arena and let's investigate if there's still any reason for exclusively calling it a tradition or term like "God"....
     
  17. pink:noise Banned Banned

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    Yes, I like that freedom.

    I like to muse over the concept of a god, the god, God, like when sipping on a good wine while being in an exceptionally good mood—there's a bouquet that stimulates a strange feedback to the senses, engrossing one's moment of good will in the cosmos, aggrandizing one's point in space and time, shedding one's bloody mortal skin.
     
  18. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    I got my foot print all over your mind I see. Maybe not my foot in reality ?
    Might God ? Does anyone find that funny besides Me?
    The meat don't start until you get to the 3rd example of :

    Explore possibilities

    Answer : We build a God like a house . By hand Me downs from the past to the present . Layer on Layer . It is easier to create a god with your mind than it is to build a house from nothing

    O.K. I am a God so God exists . Why am I a god ? I do Godly things . Some of them I can't do to you , but I do them to others and they like it . I make them scwheel like a pig. They like that
     
  19. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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  20. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

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    In the meantime, I'd like to share a number of relevant quotations by persons of greater stature than me. Let's start exploring these ideas.

    1. If physical space has at all a real existence it is not necessary for it to be continuous; many of its properties would remain the same even if it were discontinuous. And if we knew for certain that physical space was discontinuous there would be nothing to prevent us, in case we were so desired, from filling up its gaps, in thought, and thus making it continuous; this filling up would consist in a creation of new point-individuals and would have to be effected in accordance with the above principle. (of continuity) (Richard Dedekind - World of Mathematics, pg 530)

    2. Nevertheless, there are some intriguing hints that this particular universe may in fact be a discrete digital universe, not a continuous analog universe the way most people would expect.
    In fact these ideas actually go back to Democritus, who argues that matter must be discrete, and to Zeno, who even had the audacity to suggest that continuous space and time were self-contradictory impossibilities.
    Through the years I’ve noticed many times, as an armchair physicist, places where physical calculations diverge to infinity at extremely small distances. Physicists are adept at not asking the wrong question, one that gives an infinite answer. But, I’m a mathematician, and each time I ' wonder if Nature wasn’t really trying to tell us something, that the real numbers and continuity are a sham, and that infinitesimal small distances do not exist! – (Gregor Chaitin - Meta Math, The Quest For Omega – pg. 91)

    3. Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670)

    4. We are a part of Nature as a whole whose order we follow. (Spinoza - Ethics, 1673)

    5. …man's general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted as independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. (David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)

    6. “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just appearances.” (Erwin Schroedinger - Life and Thought,1989)

    7. “ But if the ultimate model for the universe is to be as simple as possible, then it seems much more plausible that both space and its contents should somehow be made of the same stuff—so that in a sense space becomes the only thing in the universe.” ( Stephen Wolfram - A new Kind of Science, pg. 474)

    8.“The world of explicate structures and sequential processes in time, which has been studied by science over the last centuries, now turns out to be a manifestation of a deeper, enfolded order that constantly sustains them.” (David Peat - Synchronicity, pg. 185)
     
  21. steampunk Registered Senior Member

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    God is an idea based on things that do have existence, but the compilation of those real things form the idea god . Althought the components are real, the order is imaginary, thereforre no empirical proof. This idea can be proven to have evolved this way. That is the true God and most general accurate representation.

    People have been conditioned to think of the God idea with the property of truth and existence. There they begin to look for confirmation and do find it easily because the parts of the idea all exist in the world. They do not experince god, they experience the components of the imaginary concept.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2012
  22. Big Chiller Registered Senior Member

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    Completely agreed about that.

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    I only don't agree or comment on this bit:

    ...if there's still any reason for exclusively calling it a tradition or term like "God"....
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2012
  23. river

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    17,307
    the problem is that god is from Ancient History

    thats where this god reverence comes from

    which is true

    again Ancient History B.C.E

    how could they think otherwise , really ?

    these people were a simple people , in the bible

    they experienced god

    not an OMNI god but a technology god
     

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