What is God?

[Kosher Ham]

You are a walking contradiction. If you seek to make others happy or to live justly, that certainly makes you relevant.

 

Actually, I am sitting. There is no contradiction. No more than any Bible I have ever read anyway.

 

I only need those that I care for to find me mildly relevant. Appreciate what I do for them privately...and keep it moving.

 

I do things for people without recognition intentionally. Because they need the help and I can.

 

God never told me to do that. It's what I do. I have talked about my pretend adopted children on this site several times, I spoil them rotten when I have the chances to see them, and sometimes just for important days in their lives. They deserve and appreciate all that I do for them. I don't even need a thanks for those moments ( they do thank ), but it makes me feel great as well as help those kids experience different things and strive to get to the place where they can do the same for others.

 

Again, God never made me this way. That is my own thing. I filled up 3 of my buddies cars with gasoline when I was a kid, because I could. That was many a days back.

 

Someone that can does, and should. To think God makes you relevant, or the existence of God ( or not ) is kind of scary.

 

I can do all of these things without wanting recognition or praise. The Bible does have an issue with Pride.

[twa]

Right. God is ultimately unknowable in His totality, but knowable according to what He reveals about Himself and what we experience with Him.

 

"Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you

 

It can be a rough ride though , especially for the hard headed/hearted.

but such is life as well.

[PeterMP]

I can do all of these things without wanting recognition or praise.

 

There is a big difference between doing things without recognition or without wanting praise and being irrelevant.

[Kosher Ham]

Big ? Please explain.

 

Endzone was the one that made a statement that led me to that one.

 

You do things because you can, you do things because you want to, you do things because it is the right thing to do.

 

None of that has to do with God.

 

Stoning someone ... most times that I have read... not right.

[Zguy28]

Big ? Please explain.

 

Endzone was the one that made a statement that led me to that one.

 

You do things because you can, you do things because you want to, you do things because it is the right thing to do.

 

None of that has to do with God.

 

Stoning someone ... most times that I have read... not right.

What is your objective standard for "right"?

[Kosher Ham]

Right ? As in helping someone in need, an injured animal, being respectful of others, etc.

 

Those are some of the things I do.

 

I don't try to tell people how they should live their lives...that is on them.

I am just simply an asshole, yet a nice guy at the same time.

I have to be honest with people, especially if you ask my opinion.

My true friends love my honesty. Yet, I think all of them are crazy for being friends with a guy that sometimes hurts their feelings.

 

I don't know what my wife was thinking when she decided that I was so great,

I win on that one.

 

And what is your standard ?

[s0crates]

also find it kinda shady how, now that modern science debunks most if not all miracles/large scale biblical events, many people have said that the bible isn't to be taken literally. How blasphemous is that?! The bible is absolutely meant to be taken literally.

FYI, Almost no serious theologians think this. You can go all the way back to Augustine (even earlier in Judaism), and you will scarcely find a single biblical literalist among professionals.

I allow that there is indeed a current of biblical literalism in our culture today, but I'm fairly confident that is a rarity among serious scholars. Who actually thinks "the bible is absolutely meant to be taken literally"? What serious thinker is a young earth creationist?

(If only those young earthers knew the damage they were doing to their own cause . . .)

We have long known scripture must be subject to interpretation, as we are reminded pretty much every time we find a biblical claim falsified, for example that the earth was created in 6 days, or even when we look at the variety of different sects reading the same text. Biblical literalism is obviously false, and it has been obvious for centuries, even to thinking theists.

The main debate among theists is not about whether scripture is literally true, but rather it is about how scripture should be interpreted.

As a general rule you should not set up the weakest version of an argument for refutation, instead you should consider a contrary opinion in its most plausible and persuasive form. There are smart theologians. It's bad form to assume they're idiots who believe what only an idiot would believe.

This isn't to single you out. I find a lot of atheists do this. I blame Dawkins and his ilk. They have spawned an army of straw man slayers.

[s0crates]

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are His progressive revelation. Jesus was the ultimate or climax of revelation. It all leads to Him.

I read a great book on this topic once called Reinventing Jesus. It is a positive apologetic for the reliability of the historical Jesus as revealed in the New Testament.

I'm not too big on scripture as divine revelation, but I like the progressive idea.

You could tell a sort of biblical story where God is learning. In order to understand Job's suffering, for example, God has to become a man and suffer Himself. Jesus even asks God essentially the same question Job asked Him: Why have you forsaken me?

Maybe God is making amends. Maybe He is learning mercy. Maybe our relationship to God is somewhat of a dialogue. It's an idea anyway.

Of course to tell this kind of story you'd have to deny God's omniscience and immutability, but maybe that would be for the better. Consider: Can an immutable and omniscient being really love?

This is similar to the strategy of John B. Cobb Jr., a personal favorite of mine, and an example of the type of person an intellectually honest atheist would concern himself with refuting.

Truthfully I'm not doing Cobb's view justice, but he basically says God is "creative responsive love." His general idea seems to be that God is in a co-creative process with His creation.

Anyway I'd recommend Cobb's work to anybody with an interest in philosophy, theology, ecology, education, or the relationship of science and religion (as well as any atheist that tires of refuting straw men and prefers to see the arguments of a smart theist).

[s0crates]

For example:

http://processandfaith.org/writings/article/process-theology

2. The Doctrine of God

Through the centuries there has been tension between the Biblical-religious way of thinking of God and the philosophical one. It has been widely supposed that the God of the philosophers must be conceived as the "absolute" or the "unconditioned." Pascal was one of those who insisted that this is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For one thing, theirs is a God who interacts with creatures.

Since Pascal, some theologians have distinguished the God of revelation from the God of philosophical reason and have affirmed of the former more of the Biblical attributes. It is surprising, however, how often they still feel compelled to repeat much of what has been said originally for philosophical reasons. Developing a doctrine of God from the Bible alone leaves too many questions unanswered.

Whitehead and Hartshorne have developed a third approach. They believe that the philosophical Absolute is based on an inadequate philosophy. It arises from the substantialist thinking that Christian theologians derived from the Greeks. Attributing primacy instead to events, occurrences, happenings, or processes, they arrive at different conclusions, conclusions that turn out to be more congenial to the Bible.

. . .

Whitehead did not move in this direction only for philosophical reasons. He participated in the revolutionary developments in physics in the early twentieth century. Like most physicists of that time, he sought an intelligible account of the new phenomena. But unlike most of them, he did not give up the effort when it turned out that the phenomena could not be interpreted in existing categories of thought. He believed that these categories reflected substantialist habits of mind and that the task was to develop new categories genuinely oriented to events and processes. He concluded that the cosmos is composed of momentary "actual occasions" each of which incorporates within itself aspects of all past events. Among these occasions moments of human experience are the ones we know at first hand. We can affirm the reality of the others only as we generalize features of our own experience. They are all actual occasions of experience.

It is important to understand that "experience" does not mean what many empiricists have meant, that is, conscious sense experience giving rise to thought. Whitehead is a radical empiricist who understands human experience as a unity of largely unconscious feelings of the body and its environment. Out of this unconscious physical experience, sensation and thought arise. Emotions, purposes, values, memories, and anticipations are more fundamental than sense experience and thought. Sense experience and thought and consciousness generally are precisely what cannot be generalized beyond the higher animals. What can be generalized most plausibly are unconscious bodily feelings charged with emotion and purpose.

. . .

Each occasion of experience is an instance of the many becoming one and being increased by one. Whitehead cannot understand this process apart from something like unconscious purpose, an aim to be and to be as much as is possible under the circumstances. He calls this the "subjective aim" of each occasion. In part the subjective aim of human occasions is conscious. It is an aim to constitute oneself in the moment so as to attain some immediate satisfaction but also so as to affect the future. In most occasions the future that is in view is very immediate, but in human beings it can also include the more distant one.

Whitehead can explain this aiming to be, and to be in a particular way, only by reference to the effectiveness in the world of possibilities not yet realized there. These must be ordered as "lures for feeling." These are responsible for the element of purpose that pervades the world and for such novel order and ordered novelty as emerge within it. They are also responsible among human beings for the pervasive sense of positive possibilities partly attained and partly missed that Whitehead sees as characterizing moral and religious experience.

Whitehead sees the ground or source of purpose, value, order, and novelty -- and in human beings of moral and religious feeling -- as divine. He calls it God. God's efficacy in the world, requires that God be actual, like the actual occasions. But because God relates to all actual occasions through time, God cannot be momentary as they are. Instead, God is the one actual entity who is everlasting.

To be an actual entity, God cannot only act on the world. God must also be acted on. That is, while the occasions of the world feel God, God also feels them. Whitehead's technical term is "prehension." A prehension is the way one actual entity incorporates another, or some aspect of the other, into itself. Every occasion in the world incorporates into its own life some aspect of the divine, that aspect, namely, that gives it a subjective aim. Meanwhile God incorporates all that happens in the world into God's own life.

. . .

I think Process Theoligians have one of the more promising metaphysical systems out there, certainly better than the impoverished mechanistic/materialistic picture of reality we poor moderns have been saddled with.

[Kosher Ham]

See, if it is not to be taken literally...what's all the hype about ? Makes it a book of fiction, which I have stated for decades.

[alexey]

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are His progressive revelation. Jesus was the ultimate or climax of revelation. It all leads to Him.

I read a great book on this topic once called Reinventing Jesus. It is a positive apologetic for the reliability of the historical Jesus as revealed in the New Testament.

I already know which holy book you consider to be god's revelation through our previous conversations. I was inquiring about how you decided which holy book is the correct one.

You mentioned that god is knowable through revelation. I can see how that works if we know which revelation is the actual revelation from god.

If our knowledge of god is rooted in faith that a particular revelation is true, then we are talking about god that is knowable through faith - a faithable, rather than a knowable god.

[Zguy28]

FYI, Almost no serious theologians think this. You can go all the way back to Augustine (even earlier in Judaism), and you will scarcely find a single biblical literalist among professionals.

You must only hang in liberal theological circles. There are literally (no pun) tons of "professionals" (I would define this as theologians , professors, and textual critics) who take the bible as "literally" in what it affirms as historical information. And there are a lot more Young Earth Creationists in those circles than you could imagine as well (I am not one however).

I already know which holy book you consider to be god's revelation through our previous conversations. I was inquiring about how you decided which holy book is the correct one.

You mentioned that god is knowable through revelation. I can see how that works if we know which revelation is the actual revelation from god.

If our knowledge of god is rooted in faith that a particular revelation is true, then we are talking about god that is knowable through faith - a faithable, rather than a knowable god.

"Knowable through faith" - I can agree with that statement. The bible equates faith with certainty of what is physically unseen.

[alexey]

"Knowable through faith" - I can agree with that statement. The bible equates faith with certainty of what is physically unseen.

Sounds good. Looks like it's a valid usage of the word.

Although in my view the word knowledge and the word faith stand in contradiction with each other as fundamentally different ways of justifying beliefs.

[PeterMP]

Big ? Please explain.

 

Endzone was the one that made a statement that led me to that one.

 

You do things because you can, you do things because you want to, you do things because it is the right thing to do.

 

None of that has to do with God.

 

Stoning someone ... most times that I have read... not right.

 

You seem to be mixing and matching ideas in ways that don't make sense to me.

 

Irrelevant:  beside the point, immaterial, not pertinent, not germane, off the subject,

 

Just because somebody doesn't seek attention or praise does not mean they are immaterial, off subject, beside the point, etc.

 

The definition of irrelevant has nothing to do with seeking attention/praise.

[The 12th Commandment]

Don't want to speak for KH but I think he was just saying he likes to fly under the radar for the most part.  I do too.  A nod from someone you work with when you've displayed competence is much more satisfying to me than public accolades.  Same goes for good works.  Seeing the results of those works is all the acknowledgement I ever want.  Some of my volunteer work is with the humane society and I'll take a wagging tail, a happy purr or a lick on the hand as an indication of success over public kudos everytime.  

 

Sometimes we have to accept the public recognition when other people are involved the effort and then it should be done with grace and a spirit of comradery.  If faith drives you toward these actions, more power to you, but it's not required.

[Boss_Hogg]

[Chachie]

We all get our knowledge of God or gods from religious texts, so I'll stick to the ones I'm familiar with.

 

I cannot speak for religious texts other than the Old and New Testaments, but I get a very different vibe from the God of the Old and the God of the New.

 

Old Testament God had a "name", could be jealous, unforgiving, and NOT all-knowing. Nor was he/she/it alone.

If there is someone or something pulling the strings, which I grant is a possibility, it's a form of alien life or consciousness.  From our perspective it would seem omnipotent but from it's own it might not be.  Maybe it's a collection of consciousnesses like changelings in DS9.  Could be anything really, there's so much we don't know yet. I love that. 

 

Whatever it is It would be every bit as much a product of the universe and the laws governing it as we are.  A bunch of them that we haven't figured out of course.  Stupid Prometheus movie makes me think of the big statue guys throwing the seeds of life into a stream. While I wish I didn't have that mental image of it, that's the sort of all powerful being I imagine in terms of knowledge beyond ours.

 

 

Good post, IMHO.

[Chachie]

Jesus believed Abraham was a real person. I think I'll take the word of a man who predicted his own death and resurrection and accomplished it,

 

 

Also- One can trace Abraham's bloodline. That at least lends validity to his existence.

[alexey]

This thread seems to have claims that deviate from the mainstream scholarship. If you have credible, sourced information about historicity of Abraham or Jesus, please do a public service by updating the corresponding Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham#Historicity_and_origins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus#Historical_views

[endzone_dave]

In almost every case these threads end up with Christians defending their faith so I have a question for the atheists:

 

How can you believe that nothing created this universe?  From a scientific standpoint, there is always a cause and an effect.  So how could there be an effect (out universe being created) without a cause (no God/creator).  How could something this enormous and complicated just appear out of nothing for no reason?

[alexey]

How can you believe that nothing created this universe? From a scientific standpoint, there is always a cause and an effect. So how could there be an effect (out universe being created) without a cause (no God/creator). How could something this enormous and complicated just appear out of nothing for no reason?

We do not know how the universe came about. An atheist does not have to form a belief about it. Saying "I do not know" is okay.

Cause and effect are properties of the universe. They apply to things inside of the universe. Applying cause and effect to the universe itself is like asking what happened before there was time.

Properties like size and complexity of objects do not necessarily indicate that they were created with a conscious intent.

[endzone_dave]

We do not know how the universe came about. An atheist does not have to form a belief about it. Saying "I do not know" is okay.

Cause and effect are properties of the universe. They apply to things inside of the universe. Applying cause and effect to the universe itself is like asking what happened before there was time.

Properties like size and complexity of objects do not necessarily indicate that they were created with a conscious intent.

 

I can't wrap my mind around anything not being created without a conscious intent.  It seems to me that the more we learn about the universe, the more we would realize it is too incredible to have been created without conscious intent.

[Predicto]

I can't wrap my mind around anything not being created without a conscious intent.  It seems to me that the more we learn about the universe, the more we would realize it is too incredible to have been created without conscious intent.

 

You might be right - or you might just be attempting to give meaning and coherence to things and ideas that are too large and terrifying for your mind to wrap around otherwise.   

 

I wish I knew the answer.  

[alexey]

I can't wrap my mind around anything not being created without a conscious intent. It seems to me that the more we learn about the universe, the more we would realize it is too incredible to have been created without conscious intent.

I am mostly on the same page - incredible, magnificent, marvelous. I saw a family of geese with some little ones on my way to work today. Just looking at those tiny little creatures walking around and doing their thing, so tiny yet so incredibly complex, it just filled me with awe... But it did not tell me that they were created with a concious intent because we have not detected any conscious intent behind evolution.

As I type this on my iPhone, or if I find a $15k iWatch on the beach, I can marvel at that as I reflect on the technological progress that humanity has made. I will also know that conscious intent was involved because we know that conscious intent went into making those items.

[Predicto]

In almost every case these threads end up with Christians defending their faith so I have a question for the atheists:

 

How can you believe that nothing created this universe?  From a scientific standpoint, there is always a cause and an effect.  So how could there be an effect (out universe being created) without a cause (no God/creator).  How could something this enormous and complicated just appear out of nothing for no reason?

 

 

In science there are always questions that we don't know the answer - until we finally discover the answer and move on to the next question.  When that happens, we realize that the question was not unanswerable, we just lacked the tools and the insight to answer it before.  Perhaps this is just another one of those questions that is currently beyond our ken. 

 

Or not.