Fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe.

The realm of reality and the realm of concepts, that is a very useful distinction.

It is like the distinction between the concept of the HIV virus and the HIV virus itself.

You can talk about the concept of the HIV virus and not get infected, but if you do get the HIV virus already unfortunatly, then not to despair, because now it can be controlled the ravages that is like the cold virus with medicines.


So, to folks who are hesitant to deal with the concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe, please, it is not going to bite you.



Pachomius

Tinker Grey said:

I'm not sure I can tell a difference between your 1 & 2, ...

[...]

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Are you an atheist, or pantheist, or deist, or panentheist, or agnostic, or just a curious human after knowledge of the kind that will add to your shall we say wisdom in life?

My topic is the fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe, in the Christian faith.

And it is that God in concept fundamentally in the Christian faith, God is the maker of everything that is not God Himself.

Now, let us if I may talk about a man who is a father, like Stephen W. Hawking.

Correct me if I am wrong in the details.

He is a biological father to some children I understand, and then also he seems to have gotten involved in some kind of a sexual adventure that is akin to that plaguing Schwarzenegger.

With all acknowledgment to the genius in him in regard to astrophysics, and specially in being able to convince his admirers that God is not needed for the universe to have come into existence, all the universe needed are the laws of physics (of course he does not expatiate on where the laws of physics come from or he should just say that the laws of physicas are God, period, which I will accept no trouble at all, because the laws of physics can be God but that does not mean that God is all laws of physics).

Now, I understand that Hawking in his condition still managed to have produced what? one or two children.

So, the fundamental fact is that the man did produce babies, that is the thing that we have to attend to first and foremost, then try to figure out how he did it.

You see, I want people to first attend to the fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe, in the Christian faith.

As a concept, mind you, is that an impossible concept.

So, no need to go further into the attributes of God, just first keep to the fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe, which is that God in concept is the maker of everything that is not God Himself, or God is the maker of the universe.

I must apologize to the fans of Hawking, I have not really made a serious research on the sex life and reproductive life of Hawking, just from my stock reading, so if the admin should erase this post I can understand perfectly, but then Hawking is just any other guy as far as web forums are concerned.



Pachomius

Thank you, Beechwell.

Now, allow me, please tell me if you are an atheist, or whatever in relation to God whose fundamental concept for me and I am sure for fellow Christians like myself is the maker of everything that is not God Himself, in relation to the universe, i.e., to everything.

Can you most carefully and specifically tell me what is your problem and you express it by saying:

It is the "fundamental concept" part that people (I at least) are having trouble with.



Trouble is something that when a person meets it, it is not welcome, for example, a bad smell, or bird's droppings on one' head, or being fired from one's job during hard times.

Trouble can also be a headache, or being mugged.

Trouble can also be a moral problem like when you want very much to touch a girl but you know that will get you in trouble unless you first get her consent and make sure it is witnessed to or at least put down in writing, or you might get called on by the police for sexual harassment.

There is also trouble for you if you are of the intellectual type, as for example, with atheists: that Christians who believe God exists are a majority in your society, and they get to succeed in having their values like no adultery imposed in society.

So, dear Beechwell, what exactly is your trouble with God Whom I describe in fundamental concept as the maker of everything that is not God Himself.

Or is it the word itself 'fundamental'?

It is from my stock vocabulary an adjective word informing a reader or hearer that the thing communicated as being fundamental is because without that thing by which it is fundamental that thing is of no importance to anyone who otherwise will accept it as important to himself.

For example, enter these symbols into google and see what it returns:

" * fundamental * " [ exactly as you see the preceding text line ]

And it will return the following text materials in the first page of google's hits.



Please go through the materials above and see if you get to know what is the meaning of the adjevtive word, fundamental.

And tell me what exactly is your trouble with the phrase, fundamental concept, as applied to the concept of God for being the maker of everything that is not God Himself in relation to the universe, in the Christian faith.



Pachomius

The word is from the Latin fundamentum which means as in English foundation, as in the phrase foundation of a building.

Correct me though if I am mistaken about the etymology.


Now, suppose you want to put up a house, what do you build first?

The foundation of course, because if you don't start with the foundation you can never have any house much less a skyscraper of even two hundred or more floors.

Okay, you are correct, the parts of the house or skyscraper can be put together elsewhere and then brought to the place where you are going to have your house or skyscraper, but you do know that there must be already a foundation waiting for the house parts or skyscraper parts to be put on top of, otherwise you cannot have a house or skyscraper at all in that exactly specified location or piece of land on planet earth.

So, when we say fundamental concept of God, we mean that without that concept of God, then God is of no importance to us, i.e., as we humans are concerned, that is why I say in relation to the universe which universe includes us humans.

Anyway, if we were not around then we would not be talking about any fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe which includes us.

Okay, another example, the one I gave about Stephen W. Hawking, a victim of motor neurone disease by which a person is paralytic almost totally in regard to muscular movement of the eternal muscles like in the legs and arms and hands and also facial muscles.

What is the fundamental concept of Stephen W. Hawking in relation to his children?

It is that he is the biological origin by sexual reproduction of his children.

So that if he were not the biological sexual reproducer of his children then there is no fundamental concept relative to him in relation to children who are registered to be from him by biological reproduction -- and not by instrumentality of law i.e. adoption.


I hope you get what I am trying to say, but the word fundamental is a most common term and the concept contained therein is one term that any readers of so much as comics can and do know and understand.



Pachomius

ToddNotTodd said:

The flying spaghetti monster and the invisible pink unicorn are both having a hard time with this one...

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Honestly, I have not come to anyone who has participated here that goes truly goes into the topic of this thread, namely, the fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe.

What I have met so far are people who just want to in a way and I will displease these people who just in a way want to take pot shots at God the entity, but will not stay around to genuinely take the fundamental concept of God in relation to the universe, in the Christian faith.

It is like you are trying to strike a conversation about the weather and everyone who takes an interest in your talk keep referring to dogs and cats being rained down from the sky.

And when you ask them to just keep to the weather, they keep numb, speechless, and go away.


Anyway, allow me just in case there are people who do with utmost good faith and utmost good will, care to examine the fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe, allow me to repeat what I know to be that concept, namely, God is the:
That line of text represents a concept and it is composed of sub-concepts, thus:
Is there any one sub-concept that should not belong in the assembly of sub-concepts which go together to make up the fundamental concept of God in the universe in the Christian faith?
Pachomius

Tenka said:

The universe so far as we can tell consists of a hundred billion galaxies each of billions or trillions of star systems of all that the God of Abraham appears to be the part time patron of one tribe of one species on one planet for a very short period of that planet's existence.

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Well, we are talking now in regard to ourselves who are acquainted with what you exactly are telling readers here, that the universe consists of a hundred billion galaxies each of billions or trillions of star systems.

Now, the people who descended from Abraham and Abraham himself already in their days knew of the God conveyed in Gen. 1:1, that He God created in the beginning heaven and earth, or what today we call the universe in English.
And there were other ancient peoples contemporaneous with Abraham and his descendants, who also had the knowledge of the God Who created in the beginning heaven and earth.

Now, if I may, from my stock knowledge arrived at from stock reading, that line of Gen. 1:1 was written not later than 900 BC.

But let us not go into the timeline of the composition of Gen. 1:1.

Suffice for my purpose here is the thought that very ancient peoples including the people descendant of Abraham and also Abraham himself knew of God creator of heaven and earth at the beginning.

Which -- and this is important to our topic here -- heaven and earth means to these ancient peoples, the universe which today we know to be composed of trillions and trillions of stars etc.


May I just say that we cannot continue to belabor that very primitive peoples in the past had very limited and crude ideas of the universe, compared to what we know today of the universe, but we must keep in mind that their concepts of the universe were as good as their senses were active and working and their mind also was effective on the limited data then mastered by them of objective reality, to define the universe as everything that is made by God at the beginning when He did make everything that is not Himself.


So, now we are in the year 2011 common era, CE, which can also still be designated as AD, for call it CE or AD, they concur chronologically, except that CE or common era seems to be more ecumenically acceptable to non-Christians.

That is another story.

The fact is that though very primitive and ancient peoples had a very limited and crude idea of the universe in their times and climes, that fact is not any diminution of the concept of God from their days to our present days, when now we know the universe to be very much larger than they knew, but what they knew was as much as they knew for their mastery of the data of objective reality in their days.

It's like this, if I may illustrate with the reference to the composition of the material universe in ancient Greece, namely, fire, earth, air, water, and now today we know it is composed of sub-atomic particles and space and time and laws of physics and also dark matter and dark energy, or what have you from the latest physicist speculators.

The fact is that the material universe was as complete for the ancient folks, as our material universe is supposed to be as complete as we know it from our physicists or astrophysicists, today.


Just the same the fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe today still stands, namely:
And I am inviting readers here to find out whether that concept is an impossible concept in terms of its internal composition.



Pachomius

Well, there is no new post from people, so I will just review the thread from the start.

Tinker Grey said:

Since I do not know that God exists, I cannot know its relation to the universe.

However if a god were to exist, one might wonder whether it would merit the title if it did not create the universe. Nevertheless, many religions have existed that did not entail their god(s) creating the universe.

As for the Christian god, I wonder what makes a concept fundamental. Second, what does being the creator of something mean with respect to being "in relation to" that something?

Click to expand...

Dear Tinker Grey, thank you so much for your post, I did not have time to entertain you much earlier and accused you of obstructionism, and demanded that you should read up on the internet if you really do not know the drift of this thread.

But now I have decided to explain to you the drift of this thread, so that I can also myself get to know more clearly and very profitable to myself more systematically what my concept of God as a Christian is, in relation to the universe.

Tinker Grey said:

Since I do not know that God exists, I cannot know its relation to the universe.

Click to expand...

You must have done a lot of reading since when you started to read, so you must have some stock knowledge about God in Christianity in relation to the universe after all your years of reading, that makes up the stock knowledge of your intellectual culture.

And you must have done a lot of thinking since you started thinking about things, so you must have thought also about what is God the concept in regard to the universe also in concept, such concepts as you have read about and thought about, they make up your stock knowledge by which you have an intellectual culture.

If you really do not know that God exists, that is all right, but you must know that Christians believe that God exists.

Read on, for what "in relation to the universe" is all about.

However if a god were to exist, one might wonder whether it would merit the title if it did not create the universe. Nevertheless, many religions have existed that did not entail their god(s) creating the universe.

Click to expand...

First, I am in a Christian forum and I am talking from the standpoint of a Christian theist, and for me as a Christian theist, the fundamental concept of God for me in relation to the universe is that:
So, for your intellectual culture -- as I presume you are living in the West where it might be said it is the domain of Christendom, it pertains to your relevance in regard to your social and cultural environment, to know or to recall what is the fundamental concept of God in the Christan faith in relation to the universe.

Read on.

As for the Christian god, I wonder what makes a concept fundamental. Second, what does being the creator of something mean with respect to being "in relation to" that something?

Click to expand...

For Christians, the concept of God is fundamental in the sense that without it the concept, God is of no importance to them.

For example, you have a father or at least you know you have a mother and who she is, if you don't know the fundamental concept of mother then you would not know why mother is of any importance to you.

Fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe, what is the meaning of in relation to the universe?

It means insofar as the existence of the universe is concerned for people talking about God and universe.

And the importance is that God is the maker of everything that is not God Himself, mind you in concept -- I am not into proving the existence of God in this thread.

So I ask you what is the importance of your mother in relation to you?

You answer if you do know her importance in relation to you:

Your answer should be:
Of course you are happy about that; or are you happy about that? you rue the day your mother gave birth to you?


Fundamental means of the foundation, as for example of the foundation of a house or a building.

The foundation is very crucially important to the house or building insofar as the people who are to live and work in the house or building would be safe in it, and the house or building itself would be stable, all because the foundation is a base for it to rest on and to anchor itself by.

So, you can see that the concept of God for Christians is of the most fundamental importance to Christians, and also in relation to the universe, because their concept of God explains for them the cause of their existence as also of the cause of the universe of which they are a part.


Please tell me what other concepts in the text, fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe, and also God is the maker of everything that is not God Himself, you don't understand.



Now, perhaps you want to know what is a concept?

Here: a concept is a thought in the mind of people, which represents something in objective reality or even just also in the mind again of people, and it is represented in turn by a word, so that the concept of God, that term God is also a word, and both concept and word God represent an entity outside people's mind, in regard to Christians of a maker of everything that is not God Himself.

And concepts and words are needed for people to communicate among themselves, so it is to your intellectual culture to know concepts and words which are the means by which you can talk intelligently with other people and imbibe more intellectual culture which is good for you as a member of a civilized society possessed of an intellectual culture.


Now, I assume that you already know from stock reading as a person living and working in the West what is the Christian faith.

If you do not know what is the Christian faith, please, you owe it to yourself to obtain an acquaintance with it, by reading conveniently in the internet about the Christian faith upon which the civilization of the West is built and operating by.

Anyway, I will just recite the Apostles' Creed which is the common statement of faith among Christians, here:
Please look up that text in the internet.

I hope this help you to participate in this thread, and don't go away.

Send me another post and I will try my best to accommodate.


but I trust that you don't really need to be spoonfed by me, unless you really are not qualified to participate in a thread in a board on philosophy.


Thanks again just the same for your presence here, hope that you will be profitable to readers and also to yourself, here.


Digression:

I had been in forums where it is forbidden to act like a troll, but what is a troll?

In one forum I had been to, the owners forbid anyone to accuse any others of being trolls, if anyone believes that any other(s) is just into trolling or being a nuisance whatever, he should just report him to the authorities, and they will investigate to decide on the facts.

I hope Tinker Grey you are not possessed of the heart and mind of a troll.



Pachomius

Before anything else, let us assume that we are talking intelligently here.

But what is intelligence?

Right away, I will say that although educational psychologists are debating what is intelligence and the kinds of, nonetheless as intelligent people -- and I dare say 95% of mankind are intelligent people, we know how to act intelligently, even just to know where we had not acted intelligently for not being attentive to the important crucially safety considerations in undertaking an action whereby we are to obtain an advantage.

For example, the first time homebreaker who did not bother to first case the target house for several days, to know how to get in and get out successfully and safely, and then got himself locked inside the house and the man of the house came after him with a meat chopper.

That is forgivable for a first timer, but if he does not learn from this unhappy experience, then he is not intelligent in learning.

So, we all are experienced people and have become intelligent with having gone through many learning experiences and encounters in life.

Just the same, even though we do not have authorities agreeing on what is intelligence exactly and the kinds thereof, we do know what is not intelligent in an action of a person when we see it.


Now, coming to concepts, do they have existence outside the mind of man?

Which is intelligent in regard to the question what is the fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe, for a man to react to, namely, the question?

You can keep insisting that we still have not decided whether concepts exist independent of man's mind, and therefore you need not involve yourself in that question.

Of you can seek to answer that question notwithstanding that the unsettled debate whether concepts exist outside man's mind.

I ask you, which is the intelligent course of action, if you are keen to participate in this thread.

Of course one can be practical and just not participate here and not even bother to be curious as one ancient thinker tells us it is man's nature to be curious, so that he is saying in effect that an entity that is not curious to know or at least to question is not a man, perhaps a god or a beast of the most primitive kind.

That is also in a way an intelligent action, not to be present in this thread -- intelligent unto himself, so he should live by himself in some solitary desert island away from the rest of mankind.


Now, we are all here who do or did participate, what do you think, to continue to argue in this thread on the existence of concepts whether they have independent existence outside man's mind or not, or to proceed with the issue on the consideration that concepts are in man's mind and man and other men are around, so they we can talk about concepts.

And work with utmost good faith and utmost good will to come to what exactly the internal ingredients of a concept are that make up the concept, and by which all participants in the exchange of thoughts can talk about the concept to know from curiosity if nothing else about the world of again concepts if nothing else then but concepts, again?

And then from the concept agreed on, to go forth to look up the thing that is described in the concept mutually agreed on as regards the what it is.

Or to make up something that will correspond to that concept.


For example, the concept of a vessel that can stay in air space and move, like the birds do.

Similar to a ship only this ship the concept of that is, floats in the air space, not on the surface of water.

Or, more interestingly, a ship that sails underneath the water of a river, a lake, or a sea.


So, this thread is about the fundamental concept of God for Christians in relation to the universe, which is that:


That is the fundamental concept of God in the Christan faith in relation to the universe, as agreed upon by Christians.

So Christians can go forth in the world outside concepts and also invite non-Christians to join them to search for God as the maker of everything that is not God Himself.

Is that a possible expedition, and is it feasible?


Or shall we mankind produce God Himself as in fundamental concept in relation to the universe, according to one Christian Pachomius, maker of everything that is not God Himself?

But prescinding from whether we can or we cannot, we are already disqualified because the concept requires that we are already maker of everything that is not us ourselves.

To start with, we did not make the air we breathe in and thereby stay alive on.




Pachomius

When I started here this morning, there were no new posts, but now there are new posts, when I checked after my last post here on do concepts have independent existence outside man's mind.

How did that happen?

Perhaps and I think that is the case, my computer just returned the "cache" it has stored up when I last worked here in this forum.


Anyway, thanks a lot for your participation.

Let us all go forth if you are game into the search for God as per the fundamental concept of God among Christians in relation to the universe.


Lesson and habit to be acquired, reload, refresh, not once but twice and even thrice, in order to get to the latest postings in this forum.





Pachomius

Pachomius said:

[...]

Let us all go forth if you are game into the search for God as per the fundamental concept of God among Christians in relation to the universe.

[...]

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Is that into proving the existence of God outside the realm of concepts, when I keep saying that I am not into proving the existence of God in this thread, but just into the examination of the fundamental concept of God in the Christian faith in relation to the universe?


Yes, that should go into another thread.

But just the same we can also attempt some proving of the concept of God as defined by yours truly, namely, maker of everything that is not God Himself, even though we don't go to search for God climbing the highest mountain on earth, diving into the deepest depths of the oceans, and cruising with light-year speed to the edges of the Big Bang universe.

We can do it in our mind, by thinking.

And we can downsize the universe in our mind, by just concentrating on the nose in our face, the concept of the nose namely in our face.

Thus we can search for the concept of God in the concept of our nose, as we know the reality of our nose in our face and thus have a concept of it, and then we search the concept of the nose for the presence of the concept of God as fundamentally the cause of the thing represented by the concept of the nose in our face, in our mind, the concept that is.


So, we ask in our mind, "Does the concept of the nose include the concept of what or who made the nose, or it made itself?"

In concept, the nose could not have made itself, because the face of man in which the nose is situated has not always existed, and man himself has not always existed, thus the nose as a concept cannot include the idea that it has always existed, and therefore it has got to have a maker, who in the ultimate terms is the maker of everything that is not himself the maker, and that is the concept, the fundamental concept of God for Christians in relation to the universe, namely, maker of everything that is not God Himself.


Mind you, we are talking all the time in the realm of concepts, not in the realm of existence outside the realm of concepts, outside the mind of man.




Pachomius