A Thought in The Mind of God part 2

In this post I will deal mainly with two questions: (1) Is it possible that transcendent God could be "personal?" (2) How can God be Immanent and transcendent? (subtext: is this just trying to have it both ways?).I will not concern myself with proving God exists. I believe in God so I will assume God and then concern myself with understanding what I believe. There is no way to have certain knowledge in terms of the transcendent so we have to content ourselves with metaphor, everything points to meaning that we never really have.

What do I mean by "personal?" I use the phrase "concision" because because persona implies different things (see my last post on Monday). I do not necessarily mean ratiocination. Go does not need to think about things in the conventional sense yet can have personal awareness; will, volition,and understanding. I think of God as being the basis of consciousness  the source of the conscious. I don't say God has a mind I said God is mind. As such God's awareness is on a higher plane than our own. We can't understand the level of conscious  awareness at which God dwells.

There are many reasons to believe that God is "personal." I have three or four major arguments, I will name them I wont bother to discuss them at length just enough to make clear my idea:

(1) The origin of the universe requires decision making ability including indeterminacy (exhibited in fine tuning)

In other words the ability of the "creator" or whatever originating agent is responsible for reality to alter that reality as the need arises, even if that  agency is quantum interminably or is responsible or the indeterminacy.

(2) consciousness not reducible to brain chemistry.

The irreconcilability of consciousness is not proof of a transcendent consciousness it's a good reason to think there might be one.

(3) sense of the numenous--mystical experience.

The most important:
(4) Argument from temporal beginning.

This argumemt assumes that infinite causal regress is illogical [1]For this reason we must assume without God as eternal reality we start from a position of absolute nothing, not vacuum flux but real nothing since even vacuum flux must be explained, so we start with a real lack of anything. But since nothing is beyond time  there is no time, thus there could be no change, There could be no becoming since that would require something from nothing. This is a problem for atheists as well because they cannot explain how anything could come to be.[2]

In the quantum world...the world that the universe inhabited when it was less than a second old...many things work very differently. One of these is that time itself does not mean quite the same thing as it does to us in the world- at-large. Although we have no complete theory of the relevant physics, there are many indications from the mathematics that yield sound experimental results, that time itself may have ceased to have much meaning near the Big Bang event. This means that there was no 'time' as we know this concept 'before' the Big Bang. That being the case, the question of what happened before the Big Bang is now a question without any possible physical answer. The evolution of the universe has always been a process of transformation from one state to the next as the universe has expanded. At some point in this process, looking back at the Big Bang, we enter a state so removed from any that we now know, than even the laws that govern it become totally obscure to science itself. In the quantum world, we see things 'appearing' out of nothing all the time. The universe may have done the same thing. What this means to us may never be fully understood.[3]

Hawking tells us, "As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. ... he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe."[4]

The most reasonable answer is that universal mind can alter the rules at will. That is the only answer that makes sense given the rules we know and the assumptions we must make. Since I have argued that God is being itself, we can understand that if God is mind then mind and not energy/matter is the
basis of reality, This is what physicistAmit Goswami (U, Oregan) argues:

Amit Goswami: The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm. [5]

The assumption is nothing can happen in a timeless void but that assumes physics, If we assume the core of reality is ran not by laws of physics but by a mind  that thinks up laws of physics then it is the imagination of mind not physics that runs things.

As to the swede question how could God possibly be in both worlds. We assume God creates time then obviously God is beyond time, But why assume that God can't stick his finger into the temporal setting? I also want to point out as Hawking documented this stuff goes back to St Augustine, I did not make it up.

It is not a matter of having it both ways it;s a matter of realizing what it would mean for God to be being itself, for mind to be the basis of reality. There are a couple of caveats: (1) Pantheism, (2)  determinism. Evangelicals are paranoid of pantheism. Any suggestion of God being in physical things is abhorrent to them. I don't know how they keep from  panic over of Eph, 4:10 "He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe,'" This is is not a pantheism. It's merely the realization that if God is the page upon which the line of time is drawn he is bigger than time and fills all physical reality in a couple of ways. That does not mean there's nay confusion between creature and creator. One thing it could mean is that Go is the strong force holding all reality together, that would not mean a blurred diction between creature and creator.

The deterministic question assumes that God as mind would have to be thinking about every move we make and thus predetermining what we do,that is not my concept. There are several alternatives to that idea within the range of God as mind that produces the universe out of thought, without assuming God must plan out all our thoughts or actions,  For one thing God could imagine the concept of autonomous world ran by automatic laws and humanity that evolves out of these laws then allow it to happen without having to  imagine it all. It's a matter of God thinking of the concept of autonomy. Since God doesn't need to think in terns of a series of steps or to contemplate a mental dialectic within himself.

 The bottom line on all of this is God;s transcendence, It's all beyond our understanding and all we say about is metaphor, but all we say is metaphor anyway.




Sources

[1] Joseph Hinman, "Against Inanimate Casual Regression," The Religious a priori, stationary website Christian apologetic, no date given
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2010/08/against-infinite-causal-regress.html
(accessed 3/7/18)

[2] Joseph Hinman, "Argument from Temporal Beginning" Doxa:Christia Thoughtin The 21st Century, List of God Arguments. Stationary website, no date given, no page number given,
http://www.doxa.ws/meta_crock/Berkeley.html#temp
(accessed 3/7/18)

[3] Sten Odenwald quoted in Hinman, Ibid. original Sten Odewald, "Before The Big Bang," The Astronomy Cafe, stationary website by Odenwald, (July 2017).
http://sten.astronomycafe.net/beforebigbang/
(accessed 3/7/18)

An even stronger quote by Odenwald speakimgof theeworld beyond the Big bang:

There were, presumably, no particles of matter or even photons of light then, because these particles were born from the vacuum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime that attended the creation of the universe. In such a world, nothing happens because all 'happenings' take place within the reference frame of time and space. The presence of a single particle in this nothingness would have instantaneously broken the perfect symmetry of this era because there would then have been a favored point in space different from all others; the point occupied by the particle. This nothingness didn't evolve either, because evolution is a time-ordered process. The introduction of time as a favored coordinate would have broken the symmetry too. It would seem that the 'Trans-Creation' state is beyond conventional description because any words we may choose to describe it are inherently laced with the conceptual baggage of time and space. Heinz Pagels reflects on this 'earliest' stage by saying, "The nothingness 'before' the creation of the universe is the most complete void we can imagine. No space, time or matter existed. It is a world without place, without duration or eternity..."

[4]Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988,8.

[5] Amit Goswami, "An Interview With Amit Goswami." TWM from Craig Hamilton What is Enlightenment.
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/goswam1.htm
(accessed 3/7/18)

notice that Goswami probably is pantheistic I am not endorsing his views,I think his initial setting up idea the basis of reality is mind as the basis is valid and I embrace that,I don't draw the same concussions from it he does.