- What a neat word! Inspires me to call myself “a Threeness Pentecostal Christian”.
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Fortunately I don’t have a lot that needs clarifying. No doctrine of any kind. I think of it as God existing first and acting on matter to shape and guide it. It is doubtful that everything we see in the living world could have come about through random mutation alone even in the deep time we think the universe has had. But if everything we associate as coming from consciousness - including awareness and intention - has always existed that can be thought of as the mind of God. I liked this post from Fred_W on May 27 of this year while I was away from these forums:
Any valid comparison between what ‘God’s Word’ tells us and what ‘God’s Creation’ tells us must put both into the same form of interpretation. We do not interpret the Creation literally, we interpret it epistemically. Words are man-made and translation is interpretation by definition. Genesis must be given an epistemic translation. Such a translation would read, “In the beginning, God created space and matter. And the matter was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was vibrating over the fluid matter.” Seems to be amazingly accurate. Ancient Hebrew had no better words in its vocabulary to say that with the syntax found in Genesis.
In particular I like this way (my bolding) of understanding Genesis, not that I think my interpretation coincide’s with this member Fred’s idea. But I find it useful from my POV. One of the questions it addresses is the mind/body problem of how matter in any form gives rise to mind and how mind has any control over a material body. It isn’t a material explanation of anything but it does suggest how mind and matter could ever have gotten together. Science alone hasn’t been able to touch that one. Brains can be studied directly by science but not the consciousness which they support. If consciousness starts out as the mind of God then the paraphrase (translation?) contained in that quote makes a lot of sense. It isn’t a purely material explanation, but who expects that regarding anything to do with God?
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I agree with his reasoning and method. It is a problem with literal interpretations when the fact is that the meaning of the words have changed simply by there being so many more words for things the people back then didn’t know about. “Dust” for example could just as easily mean matter or stuff of the earth than what the word has come to mean to us today.
I personally think the theological understanding of Genesis 1 is much more likely what was intended than this fit to modern science – saying God is not light, sun, moon, land, water, plants and animals, but the creator of all of these things. But I use a similar methodology as this in other parts of the Bible.
It is not completely clear what you are claiming provides this explanation of how matter gives rise to mind. From what follows it sounds like you are agreeing that God as a mind is what you mean – that starting with a mind would explain why a created universe is meant to give rise to consciousness and mind.
Because I think it is the other way around: either matter and consciousness are co-basic or consciousness comes first. I suspect it is the latter and matter and consciousness may be different phases of one thing. That is what Iain thinks but I don’t have an informed opinion about that one way or another so I borrow his.
Oh I see…
That is too magical of an idea of consciousness for me.
I think consciousness is part of the process of life, and like life it is highly quantitative. Thus the human level of consciousness is a vast array of smaller portions of consciousness gathered in multiple hierarchical levels with innovations to add greater awareness and greater degrees of abstraction due to more representational capabilities. I think it is all perfectly rational and subject to scientific explanation.
Perhaps my refusal of most of these ideas of divine simplicity is related to this. I see God as a being of infinite complexity not simplicity. Perhaps starting with such a being as a creator of everything else seems farfetched to you, and that I can very much comprehend. I have no argument to support the idea. But I think this idea of a magical fundamental consciousness is far more farfetched.
Well any attempt to talk about actual beginnings has got to be speculative. It was a mistake for me to describe God in overly simplistic ways even just to describe in broad strokes. But yes starting with a cosmic watchmaker or human like being behind a curtain waiting around eternally fully formed already as a catalyst for jump starting everything does strike me as far fetched. Maybe the language of genesis is preferable for avoiding becoming too specific. Every attempt to say more must flounder.
Truth is an opinion in the mind of the believer that satisfies the soul. Everyone has their own opinion (POV).
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Some opinions can be wrong and the opinionated believing what is untrue. I.e., truth is not merely an opinion in the mind.
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Well yes, I don’t buy into all such ideas either: not a watchmaker (well not with regards to living things), and not human-like either. I do believe the universe was designed to support life and that is the reason for its existence – designed in fact for a relationship with the living things inhabiting it. This makes a great deal of sense of many things I see in science which frankly don’t make a whole lot of sense to many scientists. And I don’t understand the Biblical “created in God’s image” to mean God is similar to us in ways that we would say God is human-like compared to other sentient civilized beings in the universe (assuming they exist).
Thus I would reject humanism in favor of an ethic to support and defend life in general (the purpose of the universe), remembering that I consider life to be quantitative and hierarchical so I do not consider the life of all living organisms to be equal. And since AI, I do not think intelligence to be a significant measure of greater life but do think diversity, awareness, and cooperation are significant measures of greater life (language hitting heavily on those).
Also while I don’t agree with the word “simplicity” in the doctrine of simplicity, I do agree with the understanding of the doctrine which would judge the word “formed” as not applying to God – not composite in any way. Besides since in my case, we are talking of an infinite God, I don’t see how it is possible that such a being could be formed.
While I don’t have an objective argument why such a being must exist, it is reasonable to ask what reason I might have to believe in such a thing. Though I have explained this elsewhere, it seems appropriate to do so in part here also. And first reason which came to me was in answer to a human need (applicable to all living things really) for a faith that life is worth living. A very subjective reason to be sure, which I think all such reasons for such a belief must be. I also see a need to balance out the objective, uncaring, mechanical nature of so much of the universe. It would be dishonest to deny this rather pervasive aspect of the universe and so embracing this as a human being really needs something to balance it out. So I see this highly subjective belief in an infinite (and thus all important) caring being behind the curtain (as you say) to be very helpful to our well being.
But if you still think a being who thinks like a human would need to have figured out the laws of nature and constructed atoms in such a way as to eventually give rise to cells, there is as much magic in your thinking as mine. Not that I object or that it would be my place to do so. We all make our peace with all the demands of reality as we find them on the best terms we can.
I don’t.
- thinks? yes. like a human? no. An infinite being capable of everything would logically have some ability like thinking though very likely not at all similar to what human beings do. Let us remember the Bible was written to be understood by human beings and I think it ascribes motivations only because of how they understood things (some of which no longer even work with human beings in modern times).
- I think God only needed to figure out how to design the universe to support sufficient complexity for the nonlinearity of self-organizing processes. I don’t think it needed to be planned out even as much as you seem to suggest.
- It remains an open question whether He designed nature well enough for it to make it all the way on its own, and how much interference (as allowed by the laws of nature – no magic) was required to get thing beyond hurdles which made the development of life too unlikely. Getting some measure of how common life is in the universe might give us a better sense of this.
Perhaps you can adjust what you say to fit these corrections, but I suspect it will lose a great deal of its cogency when you do.
Of course once I bring the Bible into it you have far more grounds for seeing magical elements in what I am saying. But then I have answers ready for that as well because I simply don’t subscribe to a magical understanding of any of its content.
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I watched a talk where Neil Degrasse Tyson uttered once again his statement that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us, and someone else tossed in that it is under no obligation to be safe either.
My image of how God thinks is tied to the strange (to humans) ways that some human minds work, for example my younger brother who can look at a number up to seven digits long and just tell the prime factors – he doesn’t stop to calculate, he just “sees” them. Another example would be someone I know who always knows just where the balance point is on a log no matter how strange the shape – he definitely doesn’t stop to estimate volume and density and all, he just “sees” the balance point. Then there’s a kid who when handed a Rubik’s Cube that is scrambled will look at each side and then know the shortest sequence of moves to solve the cube – he doesn’t work through them mentally, he just “sees” the steps between the disordered pattern and the ordered one.
So my concept is that for all the mundane things we have to use math and measurements to figure out, God just “sees” them, so like my younger brother can look at a number and know its prime factors, God could – working in the other direction – think of the sort of universe He wanted and just “see” what the constants needed to be.
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Roger Zelazney wrote a series of science fiction books where a main premise is that a certain family had the ability to consider a situation and then choose which possibility was going to be realized – in the story’s terms they could adjust probabilities in order to get a desired outcome. And the probabilities didn’t have to be large, either; one of my favorite scenes is where one guy is traveling and wants his sword, so he stops at a hollow tree, reaches in, and there’s his sword because regardless of how vanishingly small the probability of his sword having somehow gotten into that tree, that was the possibility he ‘selected’ for.
I sometimes think of the first cell coming about in that way, that God chose a moment when the right elements were present and just tweaked the probabilities to select the possibility He wanted. Admittedly it’s not a great model since it pretty much conceives the universe as a sort of clockwork mechanism, but I find it useful in that it puts God’s action(s) in changing things in the universe on a more subtle level than Him adding energy or physically re-arranging things.
I agree with you that truth is not merely an opinion. The issue is that truth is an abstract concept that is not obvious and has no intrinsic power. The power of ‘truth’ is only in the passion of belief that it inspires. On a personal level, it can satisfy the troubled soul but on a larger scale, it produces much conflict. The issue of truth, driven by the passion of belief, is the source of all religious and political conflict. The only truth that always ‘wins’ is death. Mankind has created many opinions to deal with this reality.
I agree with that as well. But I think there are two kinds of truth which we can, do and must negotiate. There is that which can be vouchsafed by science or by direct observation. But then there is everything in our experience which one must negotiate without the benefit of certain knowledge. In such circumstances the “truth” is that which you actually rely on. As such it is the basis of faith. Some things, especially regarding the sacred, will always remain in this category. Though of course people can associate with others who rely on the same truth so conceived and thus form a community united by the shared belief in that which resists certainty.
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The concept of truth may be merely an abstraction, but truth itself is based in reality, and that reality is not an abstraction. ‘Truth’ to a Buddhist may calm her soul dispassionately (but not truly satisfy) and likewise may New Age woo for panentheists from the 1970s and 80s. I do not disagree about the power belief can entail, but isn’t there a difference between truth believed and truth (‘true truth’) in reality? Certainly to co-heirs in Jesus.
(Now of course I have to reprise my favorite anagram, the Latin that answers Pilate’ question ; - )…
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The Amber series, starting with “The Nine Princes of Amber”.
I don’t see God altering the probabilities – those are a big part of the laws of nature. But I do see God as selecting particular outcomes and the restraint of those probability distributions in the laws of nature explain why He cannot do so all the time or systematically (given His commitment to those laws of nature as necessary for the process of life). Miracles are by definition unusual and unexpected.
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Vanishingly small probabilities is a good description of how God orchestrates his providential interventions into the lives of his children, and that’s a fun fictional illustration of the former. A true to life illustration of God’s orchestration and vanishingly small probabilities is Maggie’s factual testimony about her five ‘lottery wins’ demonstrates it wonderfully (her ‘lottery wins’… in the order she bought the tickets and her single tickets being the only tickets bought at all, so to speak). Of course denialists will deny and not be convinced even if someone rose from the dead, per the parable of Dives and Lazarus.
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