What do you mean when you say God "exists"?

[dlamberth]

You didn't answer my question.

When one's brain dies, does the consciousness in which was in that brain continue?

I don't know.

 

[cvanwey]

I don't know.

That is a great answer.

It seems as though that question would need to be resolved prior to moving on to yours. Maybe find out the answer to that question first? If some consciousness exists outside human minds, then the other questions may be explored, like the one's you have asked. But until then, such questions would be like pondering any other invented question, such as, "why is there always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow?"

 

[dlamberth]

That is a great answer.

Maybe find out the answer to that question. If some consciousness exists outside human minds, then the other questions may be explored, like the one's you have asked. But until then, such questions would be like pondering any other invented question, such as, "why is there always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow?"

After body death questions I'm unable to answer until that happens. The questions I asked have been explored by following Consciousnesses with answers that point towards our Consciousness as being the Universe being aware of itSelf. Or another way of answering is that Consciousness is God's way of being aware of It's Self. Out of that comes a knowing of Oneness. And that's an aspect of this Creation that has been mostly lost in the West. That's quite a different thing than a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

 

[SolomonVII]

Mystical experiences, by their very nature are outside of space and time.

The same may possibly be said about consciousness itself. Maybe it is better stated that space and time are mainly irrelevant to mystical experiences.

 

[DogmaHunter]

No, it is an argument against the hubris of believing that ignorance can be anything other than a central part of the existential state of being human.
A whole half of the brain of humans and mammals too is devoted to processing the ignorance and chaos that is a central part of the environment.

But it doesn't mean anything, is what I'm saying.

Slapping labels on the unknown, doesn't make it known. It doesn't add anything of value or meaning to the state of unknown or ignorance.

edit: posted a bit too fast. I see I already replied to this.

 

[Oncedeceived]

You didn't answer my question.

When one's brain dies, does the consciousness in which was in that brain continue?

That is the most important tenet of Christianity. The body dies but the 'soul' lives on. Part of the soul is the consciousness of the person who lived.

 

[Oncedeceived]

I would not say that God "exists" at all, since I would not view God as an entity, spiritual or otherwise, that possesses existence as one of its properties. Are you familiar with theistic concepts like divine simplicity? (I.e., the notion that God is without parts.)

One of the trickiest debates within Christian theism is between the Orthodox view of God as being "Beyond Being," and the Catholic conception of God as "Being Itself." This debate revolves around a disagreement concerning what we mean by the word being, and how fundamental it might be. The Orthodox follow Plotinus in believing that existence requires composition, and therefore that God, being in no way composed of parts, must in fact be beyond existence. For this reason, you'll find the Greek Fathers saying radical stuff like, "God does not exist," since the idea is that God could not exist in any way analogous to the way in which creatures exist.

In the Western tradition, Thomas Aquinas reconsiders what is meant by the term "existence," takes it in an Aristotelian rather than Platonic direction, and claims that God is neither beyond existence, nor something that exists--God is correctly identified with existence itself, with the "power" that makes things real and actual instead of merely abstract and potential. To exist, in a sense, is sharing in God's nature, but God is not another instance of existence.

So traditionally, the question is not about whether or not God "exists," but about what existence actually is at all.

Where then does Jesus come in in your view?

 

[DogmaHunter]

It's a mystery, I know. While the physical body is tied to time and space, that’s not the case for Consciousness. Consciousness can move about in time and space as well as outside of time and space. To understand that aspect of Consciousness is a beginning of understanding the Mystics.

There's nothing there to understand, only to religiously believe on faith.
There is zero evidence for this. In fact, all the actual evidence points to the opposite.

Just a side note: I'm treating Consciousness as a verb in this discussion.

It's just one more way that you are wrong.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Here's another question, is a person's Consciousness separate and apart from a Cosmic wide Consciousness?

All the evidence suggests that consciousness = a functioning brain. Nothing more or less.
And what is a "cosmic wide consciousness"?

Or from another perspective in asking the same question, is a person's Consciousness separate and apart from the Consciousness of God?

Which/what god?

The evidence suggests that consiousness is produced by a living functioning physical brain.

 

[DogmaHunter]

After body death questions I'm unable to answer until that happens. The questions I asked have been explored by following Consciousnesses with answers that point towards our Consciousness as being the Universe being aware of itSelf. Or another way of answering is that Consciousness is God's way of being aware of It's Self. Out of that comes a knowing of Oneness. And that's an aspect of this Creation that has been mostly lost in the West. That's quite a different thing than a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

To me, it sounds like the same thing.
Except that pots of gold at the end of rainbows actually sounds somewhat comprehensive, while your "explanation" reads like word salad.

I don't mean to be rude. It genuinely sounds like word salad. I can't make heads or tails of it. It's abstract mumbo jumbo with no grounding in reality at all.

At least I know what a rainbow and a pot of gold is....

 

[leftrightleftrightleft]

Sorry about the delayed response.

To assume the categories illusory, is a methodologic assumption though. The set-up to reduce things to broader and broader rules or categories via hypothesis, will ultimately suggest a monistic One. This is why Neoplatonism or the Eleatics did so, too. It doesn't mean they are ultimately so reducible, and our hypothesis is a deduction from a method that implies thus. We believe the 'lower' categories less real then the 'higher' ones. On what grounds? Is atomic forces and gravity more real than the falling rock? Is force not itself an illusory concept, merely the name we apply to an attribute describing observed change of position or state? This is confusing the abstractions drawn from the empiric data as more fundamental, so how is this not a sort of Scientific Idealism?

I agree that this is a methodologic assumption. The "lower" categories are not any "less real" than the "higher ones" in a subjective sense. But the more general category is more objective. The idea being that, no matter how you look at a rock, you can always see it as a collection of forces or particles. It is more general.

I also think the view that the rock is more real than the particles that make up the rock is an epistemological dead end. The entirety of scientific and technological progress is primarily driven by figuring out what stuff is "actually" made out of.

Imagine two people sitting on a hill top. They both witness lightning strike a far-off tree. The first person says, "That lightning is real for me. The experience of lightning is more real than anything else I could see. I am content." The other person says, "I want to know what that lightning actually is. What is is made of?"

The first person is at an epistemological dead-end. He can known nothing more about lightning.

The second person will go on to discover electricity, electro-magnetism, light-bulbs, radios, computers, the internet, Wifi, satellite GPS, and much more. All because they sought to better understand lightning in a more fundamental sense rather than seeing it simply as it is in a subjective way.

So I suppose neither view is "correct" per se, but one view has lead to greater understanding and technological progress whereas the other has not.

Monism hasn't been established, and if true, is both counter-intuitive and negates our ability to conclude that everything is monistic. For we are doing so by observing change, in position or state, and then describing this in terms of force or time. Zeno's Paradoxes enter here, for in like manner we are assuming by observing change, in the tortoise or arrow, that such change is false. This is inductive reasoning masquerading as deductive. Not that there is inherently something wrong with monism as concept, I don't think the argument for it stronger than not. It does negate the possibility of veridicality of our Reason though, so essentially robs itself of its own laurels.

For you, what is the alternative to monism?

Freudian slip, I assume.

Our minds create these categories by differentiation. If some category, the Self say, has to exist, then a mind makes them. So if something were to exist prior to our knowledge of it, to human ability to differentiate it from the rest, is not a mind required? Nay, a Mind? Are we recognising an actual distinction or creating it ourselves? So if I as a being exist in an intersubjective sense, an external order had to have been at play. It is either an solipsism and illusion, or Intersubjectivity and external creation of category. As I can only be aware of my own subjective qualia, any attempt at intersubjectivity or objectivity requires metaphysical input, and we only have evidence of things existing when placed in relation to an Ordering mind. To assume something can exist outside of such a relation, unperceived, is an utter a priori position counter to all data we have, of necessity. So in a theist view, God's perception creates them - almost a Berkeleyan Idealism perhaps, one could say.

Depends what you see as reality. I meant pre-existent as before we humans differentiated it as such. So do we have fundamental differentiation and thus things that exist, or do we have no such fundamental differentiation but our facile schemes placed thereon, and thus no thing really exists per se? The latter unfortunately includes ourselves as well, so as explained above, I would opt for the former as more coherent, though the latter remains possible but unsupportable without cutting off the branch we sit upon.
[
I agree they fundamentally exist, but I disagree that this is plausible outside a categorisation by a mind. We have no evidence something can exist not in relation to a mind, as everything we know to exist has of necessity undergone this. This is a complete shot in the dark, in the face of all evidence, of which this intelligibility is a fundamental attribute. You are extrapolating phenomena that has been perceived to the hypothetical unperceived, but we know that perception or observation impacts the nature of what is observed. Schrodinger's Cat is alive and dead till we take a look; light a wave and a particle; etc. Why are we assuming the fundamental rule that the observer impacts the observation, would not be radically other? How can we determine it would be similar without our application of our perception to it, beyond an unsupportable conjecture?The koan only exists because it was conceived; and any categorisation or abstraction assumed on grounds thereof, as well.

Interesting stuff. I don't really have time to comment right now, but perhaps I can get to it at a later date.

More Scholasticism and pseudo-Berkeleyan Idealism than Deism. You asked about the nature of the concept of 'exist', not specific proselytism. God exists because inherently things need to be differentiated to do so, implying a Mind, which implies a Person. From there it is just a hop, skip and a jump to the Christian God as purposeful entity, in my opinion.

Is not mind (or Mind) also just another category? Is not God just another category invented by us?

Seems like turtles all the way down to me.

 

[devolved]

That is a great answer.

It seems as though that question would need to be resolved prior to moving on to yours. Maybe find out the answer to that question first? If some consciousness exists outside human minds, then the other questions may be explored, like the one's you have asked. But until then, such questions would be like pondering any other invented question, such as, "why is there always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow?"

Well, that's the thing. We don't even know what we are labeling when we label conscious experience, and that's the issue with semantics when it comes to tracing these meta-references to some causal root. There seems to be none. It's cyclical, and it's circular.

So, we could say that consciousness doesn't really exist, and all that exists is merely an "appearance of consciousness", but then what's the difference?

Similarly, you could say that USA doesn't exist in reality. All we have is an appearance of a country. Someone has to explain to you as a model and you have to act out as though that concept exists. But when all of us begin doing that, then oddly-enough the non-existence of the USA is a lot more bizzare claim than the existence which we accept as normal, because people behave as though it exists.

We could say the same exact thing in context of God. We behave as though God exists, and God, the way we perceive the concept, is contextualized in some "sacred values" that we act out. We act as though these values exist, which is rather strange that we do. It's not an "obvious and rational" behavior. It's only obvious and rational due to the framework we have, which was developed using religious context.

So, you can't walk into a Louvre, and claim that all of the ancient art is meaningless because you now have a phone camera and can take more accurate pictures that should now replace those less than accurate artworks. Yet, the paradox is that there are millions of people who do pilgrimages to Louvre and they stand and stare at these artworks and admire these as some transcendent "things" that we value in billions of dollars. What the heck is that? Is that a form of rational behavior, or is it irrational?

The larger point is that you can't define consciousness, humanity, country, or God in some reductionist framework. It simply doesn't work that way. And reductionism is how you choose to look at this subject, yet you are behaving in contextually holistic manner which is guided by a set of overarching values.

So, is you approach complex abstractions like Louvre the same way you approach leprechauns, then Lourve is the same concept of extreme value focused in a rather mundane existence. Unless you understand these concepts as transcendent values, you won't understand what God is in context of transcendent values.

 

[Silmarien]

Where then does Jesus come in in your view?

Theologically or me personally?

Traditionally, you need divine simplicity to keep Trinitarianism from collapsing into polytheism: three hypostases in one ousia. Three persons in one being. God has no parts, so what we have is a source of reality, so to speak, that is simultaneously a unity and a multiplicity. It's paradoxical, but makes a certain amount of sense, given that this is the same paradox that plays out throughout the whole natural world. The age old problem of the One and the Many.

I know less about Incarnational theology, but a lot of this stuff comes up in trying to conceptualize how Jesus could be simultaneously fully God and fully man. I'm not very familiar with the answers out there, but I think a coherent one is going to have to involve careful consideration of what existence really is. Once you get into High Scholasticism and move from Aquinas to Duns Scotus, individuation becomes incredibly important, so I think an approach which views his act of existence or principle of individuation as somehow equivalent to the second person of the Trinity might have some promise.

Personally, it's really complicated. I'm a skeptic, so revelation offends my sensibilities. I think that's basically just a cultural bias, though, since there's no way to rule out revelation without ruling out theism, and I would frankly not be willing to bet against theism at this point. You guys have got what's hands down the most interesting revelation, and I don't think much of the modern Western worldview is coherent without it, so... I am troubled, I supposed.

 

[devolved]

I also think the view that the rock is more real than the particles that make up the rock is an epistemological dead end. The entirety of scientific and technological progress is primarily driven by figuring out what stuff is "actually" made out of.

I think you really have to think about how that "figuring out" works, before you make that assumption.

Technological progress is driven by figuring out ratios of consistent occurrences in reality. You mix half of this, you add a third of that and you have some consistent result that we can use.

Technology is about "cooking with ratios of reality", and science is about writing out these recipes. It doesn't really care to know what these things are beyond labeling some functional pieces of model that properties are assigned to. But, if science made you believe that's what reality is, then it's largely a problem with our educational and media structure reifying concepts that you believe are "nominal reality" as though it's actually and directly observed like you would observe a rock. But that's not what's actually observed. We observe "instrumental feedback". And that feedback is devised using circular assumptions that structure that feedback to "magnify" the microscopic events to our macroscopic world. Yes, ratios are fine, but ratios of what exactly? Ratios of imaginary concepts. And what instruments help to do is reify these imaginary constructs into some actual effects in reality.

It doesn't mean that science is useless. It helps develop technology, which helps us do things faster. But it's not what you seem to think it is in terms of explaining reality.

 

[dlamberth]

There's nothing there to understand, only to religiously believe on faith.

There's a whole lot more than Faith going on. There's also the Divine Mystery to explore.

There is zero evidence for this. In fact, all the actual evidence points to the opposite.

Take your argument up with the Mystics.

It's just one more way that you are wrong.

How is consciousness not a verb?

 

[dlamberth]

To me, it sounds like the same thing.
Except that pots of gold at the end of rainbows actually sounds somewhat comprehensive, while your "explanation" reads like word salad.

I don't mean to be rude. It genuinely sounds like word salad. I can't make heads or tails of it. It's abstract mumbo jumbo with no grounding in reality at all.

At least I know what a rainbow and a pot of gold is....

I understand. When ones structure is doctrine, ritual, dogma and organization it becomes a lot harder to express the Divine Mystery.

 

[dlamberth]

All the evidence suggests that consciousness = a functioning brain. Nothing more or less.

What evidence?

And what is a "cosmic wide consciousness"?

I don't think it's so much as "what" as much as it is "doing".

Which/what god?

There's only One Divine source.

The evidence suggests that consiousness is produced by a living functioning physical brain.

Trees have consciousness as do all plants.

 

[devolved]

Imagine two people sitting on a hill top. They both witness lightning strike a far-off tree. The first person says, "That lightning is real for me. The experience of lightning is more real than anything else I could see. I am content." The other person says, "I want to know what that lightning actually is. What is is made of?"

The first person is at an epistemological dead-end. He can known nothing more about lightning.

The second person will go on to discover electricity, electro-magnetism, light-bulbs, radios, computers, the internet, Wifi, satellite GPS, and much more. All because they sought to better understand lightning in a more fundamental sense rather than seeing it simply as it is in a subjective way.

So I suppose neither view is "correct" per se, but one view has lead to greater understanding and technological progress whereas the other has not.

The former view doesn't necessitate scientific stagnation. Technology is merely a label for "structuring reality to our advantage", and that's something that we have unique ability to do as humans more than other species, but it doesn't mean that excessive use of that ability benefits us.

So, in computing science we have these:

Lecture 16: Introduction to Asymptotic Analysis

But it applies to any technological and scientific applications that are contextualized in some limits of reality. At in certain point of "accelerated input" the benefit can turn upside down, thus you have to look at this issue from broader perspective than looking at survivors and ignoring the dead ones.

So, for example, we have this absolutely absurd phenomenon:

We are killing the environment one hamburger at a time

We have all sorts of technology that services and accelerates that phenomenon, but I wouldn't qualify that as "progress". We basically offset the cost to the environment, and we spend a whole lot of time building tech goes around in circles to produce these paradoxical inefficiencies. So, we are building 120m/h cars, but if someone actually drives that fast we forbid them to drive. So, we end up living in a virtual reality of these absurd paradoxes that we end up calling "progress" and "better", but that's a highly subjective context after some basic needs are met.

And that's really where we come to clash with our runaway absurdity as we actually have built-in inefficiency and obsolescence to accelerate this "progress", when in reality it's just a form of "gluttony", and a trick to offset control from actual reality where things are real and demonstrable and keep

So, the goal of religion and philosophy is to contextualize that "progress", and actually slow it down where necessary, and to question whether we need it to begin with. A lot of the things and concepts that you see as necessary... are just contingent reality of some chain reaction of events like "buying a house". Because you can't just buy a house. You need to furnish it. And then you decorate it. And then you have to outfit it with electronics, etc.

And eventually, what we end up with is a societies of zombies that are alone in the crowd of their likes, who are staring at their phones... unless they are whipped by their bosses to meet arbitrary deadlines that have no real-world context at all, and all contingent on assumptions of "necessity" which is non-existent in the real world of "the lightning" you are talking about.

So, the purpose and the immediate benefit of the religious tradition is some continuum of contextual values which wouldn't allow for rapid runaway "progress" simply because someone has an idea to do something faster. And when everything is faster and more busy people may simply stop asking these value questions all together, because context for value is shifted into "new iphone" or some new tech that can produce something 10x more and faster than older one.

 

[dlamberth]

Imagine two people sitting on a hill top. They both witness lightning strike a far-off tree. The first person says, "That lightning is real for me. The experience of lightning is more real than anything else I could see. I am content." The other person says, "I want to know what that lightning actually is. What is is made of?"

The first person is at an epistemological dead-end. He can known nothing more about lightning.

The second person will go on to discover electricity, electro-magnetism, light-bulbs, radios, computers, the internet, Wifi, satellite GPS, and much more. All because they sought to better understand lightning in a more fundamental sense rather than seeing it simply as it is in a subjective way.

So I suppose neither view is "correct" per se, but one view has lead to greater understanding and technological progress whereas the other has not.

Both have their place in the Human experience. The first experiences a Wowness, a sense of wonder, maybe even a unity of Oneness. That's the mystical aspect of being a Human Being. The second experiences curiosity which turns into the art of harnessing the electricity.

 

[John 1720]

Rather than asking whether or not God exists, I instead want to focus on the epistemological criteria that we use to determine whether things in general exist and how that applies to God when someone says God "exists".

My personal view is that the criteria should be consistent. If A exists, then we should be able to use the same criteria to determine whether B exists. If B fails the criteria, then B does not exist.

I also think that the criteria should avoid the "Everything Exists" scenario. The criteria should avoid absurd conclusions such as the idea that mermaids, trolls, and snorglezonkers exist.

There are various ways we can define how something "exists".

Category #1: The most common definition would be a "physical existence" in the sense that it is composed of atoms, molecules, and/or energy. It can be seen, touched, tasted, felt, or heard unambiguously by any observer. This includes things like dogs, houses, mailmen, bacteria, the Sun, etc. This is scientific materialism.

Category #2: There is another class of things which are mental objects of the human imagination such as mermaids, trolls, your billionaire self, etc. Everyone can immediately recognize a drawing of a mermaid and identify it as such. These things "exist" in some sense of the word since they are things which we imagine. However, in general, we say that these things do not exist even though they have some sort of subjective existence within the human mind. We do this because otherwise we end up with an "Everything Exists" scenario. If mental objects of the human imagination are included in the category of "existing things", then the whole concept of existence goes out the window.

Category #3: Ideas or abstractions which manifest themselves in actions. This includes things like love, justice, hate, peace. Many people might say that these things "exist" while recognizing that their "existence" is fundamentally different than "physical existence". Love and justice may or may not exist but regardless of where your beliefs stand on this, I think we are all in agreement that love and justice are not the same as dogs and houses. I would argue that these abstractions do not exist in an essential way but are rather contingent upon interactions between things that physically exist. These abstractions manifest themselves in verbs and actions. For example, suppose you were shown three photos: 1) a picture of an empty room; 2) a picture of a room with two people standing in it and 3) a picture of a room with two smiling people holding hands and/or hugging. You are then asked to identify the room with love in it. Everyone picks Room #3 because it shows physical things (i.e. humans) interacting in a way which we have ascribed the word "love" to.


If someone can think of a fourth class of things, please let me know and I will add it here.

My question is: Which category does God belong to?

People say God "exists" but what criteria are they using to define this?

Most theists say that God is not physical, so he is not Category 1.
Most theists say that God is not purely imaginary, so he is not Category 2.
Most theists would probably say that God is not only an idea or abstraction manifested in actions, so he is not Category 3. (Although perhaps some deists or philosophers would be comfortable putting God in Category 3?....)

So then, how exactly does God exist? What category of existence does he fall into?

Many theists argue that God exists because they feel that he does. This is often veiled in Christian-ese metaphorical language such as, "God came into my heart" or some other such thing. This may be compelling subjective evidence, however it fails the criteria because it leads to an "Everything Exists" scenario. If "feelings" are the primary criteria, then if someone "feels" like Cthulu exists, then their claim has the exact same legitimacy as yours. It is well-documented that the mind can lead to illusory subjective feelings.

Some posters might say, "He belongs in none of the categories because he is his own category." This also fails the "Everything Exists" criteria because someone could use the exact same argument to claim that anything exists including mermaids or Cthulu.

Some posters might say something along the lines of, "The Bible says so". They may communicate this via posting various verses or other such things. This unfortunately does not answer the question unless the Bible happens to state clearly that God belongs in one of the three categories above.

Some posters might say, "There is a fourth category of things which exist spiritually." If so, I would like to hear more about how this class of things "exists" in some sense and what other entities exist in this other category. And, more importantly, how we can distinguish this class of existence from Category #2. Is there any method for sorting things which spiritually exist out from the things which exist only as mental constructs of the imagination?

Looking forward to the responses.