Saturday, September 23, 2006

Something is Not Nothing, but Nothing is Something, or Something Like That.

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This is a comment from anonymous (that most prolific of all posters) on a blogpiece concerning my God Argument, "Argument From Cosmological Necessity.".The original argument turns on the idea that something must always have existed.



anon: While I will grant nothingness as a PSA seems to me to be an impossibility, since we would not be able to get out of the state of entropy that nothingness implies.


That's exacctly the point of the argument! That means that nothing as a "Putative state of affairs" (PSA) is impossible, thus we did not start with nothing, we had to start with some eternally existing "something."



However, to say that the spark, or counterpoint, or whatever it is that keeps the universe "real" and happening is "God" is a stretch. But what if it is God, as in a creator. To think that anything as massive as a counterbalance to the entirety of our known universal reality would even consider us important is ridiculous.



That's because you are identifying God with the big guy in the sky sort of thinking. You see the divine as an old man up in the clouds with the particular personality of some religious document. You need to learn to understand those images as metaphors.



Would something with that much force and power then create something as infintesimal as a human son to teach us a lesson? I hardly think so. Would that force even bother to notice Man in the great expanse of the universe that God created?


What do we have to base that judgement upon? Even that thought is anthropomorphic, and anthropocentric. you have nothing to base it on. You have no concept of what it would mean for God to do that much less how it seems to God or if God doesn't do such things all the time. After all, how can we measure economies of scale with infinity. The big guy in the sky is big, and everything he does is big, but if we are talking about infinity there is "big" or "small." the micro can be just as infinite as the macro.



There is so much of man in the Judeo-Christian manifestation of God that just has to be wrong. Kingdom's. God the Father. Lord.



Christianity is about us. The fundies are upset because they think God would hand down a "perfect" revelation from on high. But he's handing it to a flawed humanity. He hands it down through humans because it is for humans. So it has to be encoded and filtered through our cultural constructs because we have to understand it. The best the we can do is to understand it analogically. We can only know that our connections are metaphors but we can have the direct connection in mystical experience which is beyond words.




These are all human concepts. If God is the Father, then who is our Mother? Men can fertilize, but he cannot create.


"father" is obviously metaphor. Who is the revleation for? If it is for us shouldn't we understand it? Why would God communicate with us in ways totally incomprohensible?


I am not saying there isn't something, but I highly doubt it's anything like the men who wrote the Old Testament envision.


I think the Christian understanding has warped our persective about how the Jews actually saw God. They knew God was more than just a big guy on a throne. See the visions of Iasiaha about the throne Cheriot, these are metahors not litteral statements about how God looks! They are like the sumbols in the Book of Revelation. They are like images in modern art, they only suggest things.



Man has been wrong about the nature of his God through every epoch. We "know" that there is no Zeus on Olympus. No Odin in Valhalla. No Jupiter. No Osis. Yet it's ok to believe in a J-C God, Allah or Vishnu? We call theirs a "mythology" and ours are "beliefs"? "Ancient" man beleived just as ferverantly in the Gods as those of the faith do now.



You are literalizing the metahors. you are hung up on the litteral.



You can't have it both ways



O I already do!

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