Vicomte13
Well-Known Member
- Jan 6, 2016
- 3,655
- 1,816
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
I hope so. If I manage to keep a few more philosophers employed it's all worth it!
Good. Agreeing on definitions is always a useful starting point. Although I feel we can simplify things for the sake of this particular discussion.
Lets just accept existence as an axiom, no need for definition. More specifically lets start with the axiom of God exists. Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity lets consider God alone prior to any act of creation. Lets assume God exists alone - we are just looking at God and his attributes in isolation, apart from any created thing.
Following from the above we'll limit ourselves to only considering God's thoughts. Since God is immaterial then so are his thoughts. His thoughts exist as much as he exists.
Just ignore the nature of creation all together, I don't feel it contributes anything to the point. Let's just focus on God's own nature. The only thing relevant here is the concept of nothing. I'm thinking nothing and something are mutually exclusive. So 'nothing' is only a hypothetical alternative to 'God exists'.
God is immaterial and so is his nature. If we are to discuss the nature of God a better approach would be to talk about the attributes and characteristics that define him, specifically those that he himself cannot change.
Is God's nature governed by laws?
I'm happy just to define God as the highest being upon which all other things in existence are contingent.
That's an interesting question, but lets stick to theism.
I'm sticking to God as timeless, time being a property of the created universe.
I see all of your stipulations and can work within them, but I think that if we are seeking truth, the question of whether or not God has a mind - whether the universe is pantheist- meaning that God is the natural law that causes everything to be as it is, or is theist - meaning God has a mind and wills the universe into being - is the first great division on the answer to your question.
The Pan-theos IS nature - it IS law, but it has no specific consciousness. So through the evolutionary process Pan-theos literally is self-creating, but without an intentional will. Einstein's and Spinoza's God really is God, but really isn't something you can talk to. Gravity, electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, time, entropy, space - these things ARE, and they are omnipresent, omnipotent and eternal (back to the Big Bang, when they may have autonomously sprung into being as a probability bubble in the quantum foam). They ARE God, but they are not a God that it does you any good to pray to, because it cannot hear and does not know anything. The intelligence of humans (and, if there is extraterrestrial life, that life also) may be God evolving TOWARDS intelligence such that EVENTUALLY there will be a Theos out of the Pan-Theos, but the only deity that can be presently seen by the eyes of a Spinoza or an Einstein was the immutable behavior of physical objects. That behavior is driven by a law, and that law is the pantheist's God. And It probably doesn't have a mind (other than ours, so we're the first beginnings of that future aspect of God as we evolve, driven by the Natural Law). This actually does answer your question, but with a different God from the one you speak of.
Now, Einstein and Spinoza never witnessed, experienced (or believed in) a supernatural, law-breaking miracle, so they dd not have that in their fact set. Their God was immutable principle. Those who HAVE experienced miracles, or contact with the divine, know that there is more to the universe than just mindless laws - that those laws are subject to a conscious mind that can interact with people. THAT is the God you want to talk about. If I were an Einstein or a Spinoza, I would say that at this point we are spinning off into the speculative, unproven and unprovable - that there is no evidence of that God, so we may as well speak of unicorns.
But I am fortunate enough to have experienced some miracles myself, so I have a bigger data set than Einstein or Spinoza had to work with. Therefore, I am pleased to go on talking about the Theist God, as you have asked, since He is real, and therefore is worth accepting the limitation on the use of the word.
I would say truthfully that Pan-Theos is an ASPECT of Theos that gets disregarded in Western theological and philosophical discussion, because of a rather indefensible belief among Westerners that mind is superior to and of another nature from matter (and therefore Nature and material have nothing to say about it). I would observe that the Natural Law really IS God - an omnipotent aspect of God, but the most visible and immutable demonstration of what and who God is. The alpha aspect of God, if you will.
I say this because the mind of God loves, but that love does not cause God to override his natural will. The mudslide still drowns the kids in the orphanage. Gods kindness comes primarily in the world of spirit after the inevitable death, and it is God - through his nature (Natural Law IS God's nature) - who kills us all each individually: the way we die, MUST die from this and that, is the direct working of his stubborn will when it comes to the material. Miracles are when he reaches in and changes an otherwise inevitable result, because it pleased him to do so, for his own reasons that we cannot usually fathom. Normally, he lets the kids drown, the volcanic ash bury the school, the hurricane drown the fishermen. And it isn't just that he LETS nature do that - Nature IS his nature, his law, and he can override it but doesn't - so in truth, God directly kills everybody. The agony that Jesus experienced on the cross and the giving out of his body, that too was God's direct work: he didn't waive his will (which is the Natural Law) and he didn't spare Jesus anything - he provided no miracle, and his inevitable will worked its inevitable, slow process of death.
This is why I can agree to leave Pan-theos out of a further discussion, but why I think by doing so I am departing from the real true answer to your question, or part of it. The Laws of Nature ARE God, and they ARE God's Nature - the most important part of it, in fact, for they give us existence and administer death upon us. To separate out the thinking, loving part of God - the Theos - from the Pan-Theos is, I think, like separating the man from his brain and economic power.
I won't be able to do that completely, to be honest, because if we leave the Pan-Theos, the Natural Law out, we are leaving the primary manifestion of God - the VISIBLE daily manifestation of God in the universe, out of the equation and talking about things on the margins.
But I don't have to dwell on that either. I can pack all of that down into the atomic substructure of the discussion. To discuss God's nature, I have to refer back to the Four Fundamental Forces, Entropy, Space and Time, because that is how and why we know God exists at all: we're quite brutally subject to an irresistible and overwhelming force that both gives us existence and takes it away (unless there is a spirit that goes on).
There is a spirit that goes on, and that is where Theos comes into our discussion. It's important. But even the most die-hard Greek matter/mind dualists (with mind much superior), if they are Christians, will insist that what you do during physical life is what matters, that after you're dead you cannot repent. There's no logical reason WHY you can't repent after death, if you're still a mind and moving along experiencing and reasoning, but the physical existence - life - is so impressive a thing to the mind/body , spirit/body dualists that they nevertheless have whole theologies that supremely privilege only what one does in life - when the spirit is enmeshed in the physical. That state is primary, the spirit alone can do nothing more, they say.
But I'm not trying to fight a rearguard action here for Pan-Theism. I'm merely explaining that physical Nature - the physics - is our primary source for knowing the nature of Theos, because he has a mind, and THAT is specifically what his mind has created and enforces - brutally - on all. When we speak of the mercy of God, we are effectively asking God to spare us the full brunt of he being himself.
Gravity and lightning are God's nature. So is thinking and loving. But the love in never enough to stop God's primary laws from tearing our bodies to pieces. Even those blessed by a saving miracle by Theos are eventually killed by Pan-Theos in another time place and manner. And Pan-Theos and Theos are the same person. The promise of the love comes after the matter has been scattered. Even Jesus died from oxygen deprivation to the brain.
Leaving off the Natural Law means that we can't understand God's nature. So I can't do that. But I don't have to speak of it speculatively. When I speak of God - Theos - I will limit myself to the thinking God, that God you want to talk about. But I will speak of him as he is, and the overwhelming power of the Laws of Nature are the primary manifestation of what he is. The universe, visible and invisible, exists because Theos is ALSO Pan-Theos - Pan-Theos - Nature - IS God's nature, it's not simply an external thing like a toy. The universe is the physical manifestation of the nature of God - God's body as he wills it to be. And it's a deadly place for our physical bodies to come into being, because entropy - the tendency towards disorder - is one of the fundamental aspects of the will of God. God created Satan too, after all. Satan is the expression, in the world of spirit and mind, of entropy in the world of material and energy.
Nature is the primary place in which we directly see God's nature. So it's tough for me to just leave that off. It's a bit like talking about a cow by cutting off all of the cow except for a horn, and then talking about the cow as the horn.
But Thales could build up a whole universal thesis from a drop of water, so we can do this too. Still, I wanted to at least groan at length about being confined to the procrustean bed of Western mind-matter duality in this discussion, because I think that if we leave out matter as the primary expression of the mind of God, we leave off the physical proof of the postulates, and our discussion of God becomes unrooted from reality.
I'll stop doing it verbally, but it is axiomatic to me that the Nature Law IS God, and that Nature is the expression of God's nature. They are not different things. God is the MIND of Nature, so the only place you can learn about God, really, is by looking at nature. Sure, you can look at miracles and much more clearly see the mind of God. But you may just be seeing the mind of men, who lie. I know that miracles exist, because I have experienced them. But Einstein and Spinoza never did, so they never could admit them as proof of anything more than Pan-Theos as really existing. Theos is, but Theos and Pan-Theos are the same God.
With those stipulations, I'll accept your axioms and proceed as best as I can.
Upvote
0