God - real or imagined?

[hrsweet]

Folks,

All of our objective knowledge has come from, or is based on, what has been produced by other people and is therefore subject to scrutiny. Throughout human history, many have claimed to have been in communications with higher sources or at least been inspired by them but this has never been demonstrated. In a court it would be called ‘hearsay’. Therefore we have full license to examine any claims of God, gods and all of the rest of the unseen powers that have been claimed to exist.

There are several ways that this can be approached. These are logical, psychological, mythological, and historical. I will present a logical argument here.

As best as we now know, the universe, or creation, is composed of matter, energy, space, and time. There may also be black energy and black matter but these may just be place holders for what we have yet to learn about matter and energy.

Therefore, the source of the creation must be other than what we see within the creation. It can not be matter, energy, space or time or any combination of these elements. In can have no attributes. Otherwise, it would have to have created itself and that is illogical.

So where did we go wrong? The problem lies within the human intellect. Intellect developed for the purpose of navigating the individual within the creation. The individual’s survival itself is dependent on his ability to understand his surroundings.

The problem is that intellect, having evolved to discriminate matter, energy, space and time has zero ability to grasp anything other than that. Just try to think of something that is none of these. So when we attempt to conceptualize the source of creation, we find it necessary to bring that down to what the intellect can grasp.

This has resulted in the concretization of what is indescribable to the describable form of deity. Therefore, being a persona, it is possible to have relations just as with any other persona. The logic, of course, is fallacious.

 

[Ultimatum]

Imagined.
There is no proof.
There is no evidence.

I have made up my mind, certainly!

 

[jeager106]

Faith is that which can not be proved or disproved.
Is this post your way of expressing why you have no faith in a power
greater than man?

 

[Vinayaka]

Sky ... real or imagined? It's actually just air, and then lots of space. So there is no such thing as 'sky'. It might appear to be something, but is it?

 

[The Sum of Awe]

So where do we go from here? It is impossible for human mind to comprehend God for he is spaceless, timeless, matterless, and not made of energy?

In my opinion, God is spacetime and matter energy.

 

[bobhikes]

Yes all we know is based on human intellect and we know from science human intellect is suspect.

 

[Eihwaz]

Folks,

All of our objective knowledge has come from, or is based on, what has been produced by other people and is therefore subject to scrutiny. Throughout human history, many have claimed to have been in communications with higher sources or at least been inspired by them but this has never been demonstrated. In a court it would be called ‘hearsay’. Therefore we have full license to examine any claims of God, gods and all of the rest of the unseen powers that have been claimed to exist.

There are several ways that this can be approached. These are logical, psychological, mythological, and historical. I will present a logical argument here.

As best as we now know, the universe, or creation, is composed of matter, energy, space, and time. There may also be black energy and black matter but these may just be place holders for what we have yet to learn about matter and energy.

Therefore, the source of the creation must be other than what we see within the creation. It can not be matter, energy, space or time or any combination of these elements. In can have no attributes. Otherwise, it would have to have created itself and that is illogical.

So where did we go wrong? The problem lies within the human intellect. Intellect developed for the purpose of navigating the individual within the creation. The individual’s survival itself is dependent on his ability to understand his surroundings.

The problem is that intellect, having evolved to discriminate matter, energy, space and time has zero ability to grasp anything other than that. Just try to think of something that is none of these. So when we attempt to conceptualize the source of creation, we find it necessary to bring that down to what the intellect can grasp.

This has resulted in the concretization of what is indescribable to the describable form of deity. Therefore, being a persona, it is possible to have relations just as with any other persona. The logic, of course, is fallacious.

A thing which can be perceived in the mind is thereby real whether outright imagination, a dream, or whatever else (?).

By the very act of perceiving something you thus become its creator/co-creator (?).

Frodo Baggins exists because we know who he is, what he did, and where we can find him - there are books written about him - movies made about him. This gives him an immense amount of reality and credibility. In fact we have more reason to believe Frodo Baggins existed than Socrates (?). After all Lord of the Rings is just a reinterpretation of German/Norse legends/myths/histories with a few fantastic alterations therefore we can't entirely discard Frodo Baggins anymore than we can God (?)

Does the universe exist without psyche (psyche is the entirely of mind both conscious and unconscious) therefore without mind would the universe become unintelligible, mutable, and/or non-existent? Whom was the first observer? Is Schrodinger's cat alive or dead or both at the same time? Is God a Schrodinger's cat or is the universe a Schrodinger's cat?

When I die you can't say: "Blake/Eihwaz is dead and he's lying down in his grave." No, because I'm not in my grave and I'm not in my body. I can't be dead because I'm simply not around to be dead . . . I've moved on far beyond the 'body' concept. (?)

If the universe begins so simply and is without complexity - if complex things only develop in the universe in its later stages (such as intelligent life) and therefore God is too complex to have been at the beginning of the universe then isn't God capable of being evolved by the universe in later or even end stages of that very universe. (?) Could one say that God didn't exist at the beginning of the universe but with each day that passes he'll exist more and more or one day he will indeed begin to exist. (?) Say God arrived at the end of the universe and not at its beginning. (?) If something as complex as God is at the end of the universe then how might such a complex 'God' be able to have an effect on the beginning of the universe from the position of its end (?). What would the full relation of time have been in the sense of beginning and time? What would the relation of the universe and time be at the end of the universe? How do these two (time at the beginning and time at the end) relate to each other? Does the relation of time and universe change at the end and become different than it is now? Can it become tangent? Linear? Nonlinear? Cyclical? Etcetera etcetera.

Could God be the Bruce Lee approach of quantum mechanics and entropy? Is he simply the Hegelian 'totality'? That is: he isn't true because the universe isn't 'total' yet but when the universe finally reaches its 'totality' then we will have arrived at God as a 'totality'? Is he a Prime Mover which can appear only at the end of his Creation (at its moment of death) and is no where to be found at its birth (indeed God shall sleep in dream until that which is dead becomes alive? To put it poetically?).

Quote:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. - H. P. Lovecraft

Most Truly Yours,
Eihwaz/Blake/Mua'Dib of the Spice Melange & Arrakis/He Who Sees Too Many Futures

 

[hrsweet]

There are some interesting responses here introducing topics that do need to be discussed. What is belief? Is faith useful? What is the ultimate reality? What is God? Is reality a matter of perception? These are all related but we do need to stay focused. My post was narrowed to the concept of deity and concludes that it is to be dismissed based on logic.

To elaborate on that, the concept of an anthropomorphic creator deity is a statement that the source of creation of the entire universe, a universe that is billions of years old and has billions of galaxies, is an individual who resembles us and has our sensibilities and intelligence. This means that the creator of the 13 billion year old universe resembles one of its creatures that resides on one small planet and has been scientifically shown to have originated only within the past few million years!

 

[Rick O'Shez]

This has resulted in the concretization of what is indescribable to the describable form of deity. Therefore, being a persona, it is possible to have relations just as with any other persona. The logic, of course, is fallacious.

It looks very much like just projecting human characteristics onto an imaginary being.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

This means that the creator of the 13 billion year old universe resembles one of its creatures that resides on one small planet and has been scientifically shown to have originated only within the past few million years!

Yes, very peculiar! "Man made God" seems to make a lot more sense than "God made man".

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Faith is that which can not be proved or disproved.

What use is it then?

 

[Rick O'Shez]

By the very act of perceiving something you thus become its creator/co-creator

There is some truth in that. It's also true that belief colours perception, and perpetuates delusion.

What is a self-reinforcing delusion? - Quora

 

[wizanda]

The problem lies within the human intellect.

Just because humans are stupid and make stuff up; doesn't mean God is. We clearly find a quantifiable mathematical reality.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Just because humans are stupid and make stuff up; doesn't mean God is.

And how about the idea that God is part of the stuff that us stupid humans make up?

 

[YmirGF]

In my opinion, God is spacetime and matter energy.

Which makes the whole notion of god meaningless.

 

[YmirGF]

And how about the idea that God is part of the stuff that us stupid humans make up?

Given that Wizzy freely acknowledges that we are a stupid species, I'm not sure why he would think our ideas of god would have an iota of merit. Perhaps his logic is too subtle for this old gaffer, methinks.

 

[wizanda]

And how about the idea that God is part of the stuff that us stupid humans make up?

In one sense agreed, the concepts about God are personalized by people, to represent themselves.

Therefore this is why I'd rather equate God as a CPU; as it remove the illogical humanistic concepts applied to it, and relates it as mathematical, with defined logical parameters to work within.

The concept of there being no creator, does little to define the mathematical precision of everything down to the smallest, mathematical periodic table, up to multiple dimensional quantum physics.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

The concept of there being no creator, does little to define the mathematical precision of everything down to the smallest, mathematical periodic table, up to multiple dimensional quantum physics.

But all that stuff has been discovered by science independent of ideas about "God". And the gaps are getting progressively smaller for the "God of the gaps", particularly for the monotheistic Abrahamic version.

 

[wizanda]

But all that stuff has been discovered by science independent of ideas about "God".

Science and maths discovered the things that already existed; please don't make them into religions, and claim we invented gravity and maths. We're not even scratching the surface on dimensional quantum physics yet; so the gap is still huge.

particularly for the monotheistic Abrahamic version.

The concepts mankind has made up in many places; doesn't mean they weren't based on facts in some places.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Science and maths discovered the things that already existed; please don't make them into religions, and claim we invented gravity and maths. We're not even scratching the surface on dimensional quantum physics yet; so the gap is still huge.

I didn't suggest that we did, or that there is a lot we still don't know. I simply observed that "God" is unnecesary and redundant in these terms.
Our ancestors would have experienced a hurricane and put it down to a weather god being angry. Now we know that the weather is a natural system and we can track hurricanes. One day cosmologists will understand how the universe came into existence, and I suspect they will find a much stranger and more impressive answer than our crude, limited notions of "God".