Does God Exist? If So, What is the Nature of God? These two question keep me up at night. Let me start by saying that while I do believe in God, I have no idea what the nature of God is: A personal, yet infinite being, or an impersonal force, or a transpersonal, infinite void that spins off Universes like grains of sand.

When I look at the world as it is, I have a very hard time in accepting the idea that a loving, caring God would create a Universe that appears to us exactly as the Universe should appear if there were no God: A colossal indifference in it's very design to issues of fairness, justice, suffering, evil. The Universe just is, and cares not one whit for the human experience. "It rains on the just and unjust alike". Indeed. I have read the writings of St. Ireneus, who postulates that the Universe was created deliberately as a "vale of tears", that suffering is an essential component for the evolution of souls into mature, loving beings.

Now Ireneus is one of the few early Christians I like, and the only one that answers the Problem of Evil in a somewhat coherent fashion. For example, he was a Universalist, as was Origen, and denied the doctrine of everlasting Hell. I'm not going to go into the rational absurdities of religious doctrine, as I don't believe Truth is something issued by Decree, which we must believe in or perish everlasting. Such a notion is absurd on it's face.

There have been Western mystics who described God in terms very near to the pantheism of the East, yet there are schools within both Hinduism and Buddhism which adhere to a notion of a personal God - that is, a God with a Mind, an infinite mind, fully soveriegn over creation. Yet still, that begs the question: If God exists, then why did He design a Universe that appears exactly like we would expect the Universe to appear if there was, in fact, no God?

Ultimately, I can't give a rational explanation as to why I believe in God, generally speaking. It might be more accurate to say I believe in a spiritual foundation to reality, that, as the Dao states, the Name which can be uttered is not the Eternal Name; that if we think we grasp God, we don't. But my belief is based primarily on personal experience, on feeling, on serendipitous events and synchronicity in my own life which leads me to believe there is a larger force ultimately orchestrating things. But feelings and coincidences do not form a rational foundation for belief. I do think Intelligent Design and the Anthropic Principle can possibly give a rational basis for belief in a Creator of some kind, but can state nothing of God's Nature.

Ultimately, I simply don't know, and don't know if knowledge of the unapproachable is even possible, outside of direct Mystical experience - which begs the question again; how do we know such experiences aren't simply products of our own mind? I know I'm not the only one who struggles with these questions, especially in a place like this; indeed, this is a big reason why I am drawn to DMT - the potential for a transcendent experience of Ultimate Reality that could help me resolve my questions and world view.

If you like St. Ireneus, you may find resonance with The Law of One, if you aren't already familiar with this philosophy. It may answer some of your questions, maybe not. It may incite more questions, maybe not.

Just a bread crumb that may help you along the way...if it doesn't resonate, leave it behind and keep pondering.

Because there is no God or gods - that is the only logical assumption. Why ascribe a supernatural/spiritual connotation to something that needs neither?


Never mind defining the nature of god but try defining "god".

Why ascirbe beauty to a flower, love to a relationship, hate to an adversary? Just becasue it is not necessary, does not follow that it does not exist.

Bingo. This is the reason I believe in a spiritual foundation to existence, of a reality behind or beyond what our senses reveal to us; it is what philosophers term Qualia, the qualitative nature of experience: the beauty of a flower, the redness of red (the experience, not the physical phenomena), in short, all of the things we deem subjective, or phenomenological. I don't think such things are reducible, in fact, I think there are incredibly strong arguments against the reducibility of Qualia to materialistic explanations. Roger Penrose makes a very strong case for this, mathematically and using quantum physics, in "The Emperor's New Mind"; In "the Antipodes of the Mind", the Israeli psychologist and Phenomenologist Benny Shannon touches on his conversion from atheism to a flavor of pantheism after dosing aya some 130+ times. Hey, it worked for him, so I'm going to give it a shot!

I tend personally to oscillate between a weak agnosticism and a vague theism; not because I won't take a stand, but because I am an ex-Fundamentalist \ Catholic still making up my mind as to exactly what it is I do believe; I have a pretty strong conviction as to what I don't believe, and it isn't "either what we say is true, or there is no God" - that's a false dichotomy if there ever was one. If atheism could mount a convincing argument explaining Qualia, I'd be an atheist, but so far, I haven't read one. Ultimately, however, I think what we do matters far more than what we believe as to the ultimate nature of reality. I spend a lot of time reading Atheist writers, and while they do a wonderful job of dismantling fundamentalism of all flavors, I believe the conclusion reached: "therefore, there is nothing" is a non sequitur.

Too, the very moral indifference of the Universe compels a moral response: we, all of us, do one of three things: Light a Candle, Curse the Darkness, or Refuse to Care. Options A and B both show courage and conviction; the apathy and indifference of the third response does not. Yet all are moral responses to the Universe. The very fact that we are all, to some extent or another, responding in a moral fashion to an amoral Universe seems to point to something beyond this Universe.

God, to an ant, is that large thumb he sees just before I squish him. I don't like squishing ants, but I do, when they invade my house. I would prefer to leave them alone to be ants in their own universe, but they persist in invading mine. I think God, to a human, is probably just as distant. And, therefore, does God have a god? The universe being infinite, probably so.

As above, so below.

A God implies a single Entity, either he is the strongest of a bunch of gods or he/she/it is life itself and we are all part of it on our exploration into the inknown.

Maybe God doesnt know "everything" i like this

How else would you expect the Universe to appear?

…………………………………………………………………………

What if God = consciousness? This is a question I’ve been asking lately. If so, then the consciousness we experience is the consciousness of God – it IS God.

Our existence “allows” God to experience existence as finite material individuals, qualities that God doesn’t “naturally” have. The material universe was created so that the immaterial can experience finiteness, physicality, individuality, time, life, death, joy sorrow, pleasure, pain, faith, doubt, an apparent absence of God …

Just my latest random musings.

How many infinities can there be?

One.

Actually, there are infinitely many infinities. Infinities have something called “cardinality”.

Read more about infinity here.

and the cardinality of infinity is infinite...

Just look at the real numbers - betwixt each integer are an infinite # of steps...

Ahhh beautiful beauteous recursion.

It just keeps recurring

JBArk

and recurring
ad infinitum

It depends on one's starting point. If fundamentalism were true, and belief was a requirement to avoid the everlasting torture chamber, then an almost complete lack of evidence couple with a requirement for faith would be intrinsically unjust and logically incoherent. In this case, it would be legitimate to argue that (for example) the Universe should be designed to confer some proof that Justice exists as an objective truth, so that when people are decent to one another, life literally gets better: better weather, fewer accidents, more promotions: that as you do well to yourself and fellow humans, life gets better. Conversely, if you screw people over, rocks are more likely to fall on your head. Something like that.

The problem here is that if being just was guaranteed to make your life go well, and things like Wall Street could never, ever happen because greed resulted in falling rocks and poverty for the greedy, rather than for million of innocents, then everyone would act good just for the rewards, not doing well to others for the sake of doing well to others. It would be utilitarian and fake do-gooderish. So it seems an indifferent universe is the only possible universe that produces authentic moral responses, as opposed to utilitarian moral responses.

All the above does is help illustrate the incoherency of fundamentalist "thinking". But if God and the reason for existence are bigger than children's horror stories, then the absence of God apart from hints here and there isn't such a logical obstacle, more of a mystery to be solved. If, in the end, "all will be well, and God will be all in all", and we can learn to accept ourselves and the world as it is - imperfect - yet work on improving both, without irrational fears of an enraged psychotic in the sky, then I think we have a much better foundation for something as abstract as Hope.



I have often wondered the same thing. During one psychedelic journey, I envisioned God as being like, or having become, a series of individuated points of consciousness, all aware of the Universe, but not of their ultimate source - like a bunch of eyes perceiving our layer of reality, but mostly oblivious to the infinite mind to which they were attached. It's hard to explain.

An infinity of infinities is still one infinity. All are subsets of one.

Infinite cardinality sets:
Our intuition gained from finite sets breaks down when dealing with infinite sets. In the late nineteenth century Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, Richard Dedekind and others rejected the view of Galileo (which derived from Euclid) that the whole cannot be the same size as the part. One example of this is Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel.

Nice concept, but irrelevant now with the understanding of holography, where the most infintesimal part is the same as the whole.

I think you did a pretty good job of describing it. These are difficult concepts to get our minds around, but this description fits well with my signature.

Saldin wrote:



Good point. How about imaginary numbers?

And holography - where the parts are the sum of the whole, and the sum is the part & the whole. Can't wait to see where holography leads us - processors, memory, the key to understanding (a part of) the universe? Fascinating stuff.

Still waiting to get a hold of a copy of "the holographic universe" - my reading list is just way too long right now. Anyone read "the self aware universe", by Amit Goswami PhD? It has a lot to say that is relevant to this discussion.

cheers,

JBArk

Your signature is a great quote; I'm not familiar with Sri Aurobindo, but from a quick glance at the entry on Wikipedia, I'm intrigued. A Mystic, a Philosopher, and a Freedom Fighter. My kind of guy

Someone better versed in mathematics can correct me, but I believe that imaginary numbers were an intuitive leap sometime shortly after Galileo and Newton, used to solve a particular problem which I can't recall. What is fascinating is that the so-called imaginary numbers, and the complex numbers built from them, aren't imaginary at all; years after their discovery (not invention, but discovery), it was found they were perfect in describing features of Mandelbrot sets as well as being indispensable in quantum mechanics. In short, they actually describe features of physical reality otherwise impossible to describe, and are one more piece of evidence that mathematical objects are transcendent entities we discover, not contrivances we invent to describe things. Penrose talks a lot about them.

I also envisioned God in an altered state as a bundle of tiny fiberoptic cables, each leading to a sentient being (such as ourselves but not limited to ourselves). From this I felt both that we were all connected, and also that God would be more effective if we worked together to "make our little lights shine". ("Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine...)"

I like the reference to eyes, all looking around and not seeing each other as a whole. Nice metaphor for our current state of existence.

A number is a number whether inaginary or not. It is a symbol that represents something, whether is is 1 or i. The whols subset of numbers themselves are just a part of the whole.

Touchable Holograms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2jzB-M5yTo

I highly recommend The Holographic Universe, very intereting and thought provoking book. I have The Self Aware Univese, but haven't read it yet.