God is the Mind that Thinks the Universe

Ultimately I'm a Platonist, but I've been influenced by Berkeley. I think he was one of the most brilliant minds to ever exist on this planet. He argued that to be is to be perceived. God is the universal perceiver that makes it all possible.

I argue that God is mind, reality is mental and is manufactured by mind. Mind is spirit. Spirit is the center of consciousness that makes existence possible. When one speaks of "Spirit" in the bible one is really speaking of the center of consciousness. Spirit is breath or wind. In both Hebrew and Greek the words for spirit are also the words for breath or wind. So when Jesus said "the wind blows wher it will" he was making a sort of pun. But in the ancient world intellect and consciousness were not the brain they were located in the breath int he chest, in the living and breathing organs.

My Platonic assumptions leads me to understand that the reality that seems so solid to us in the physical world is not solid at all. That is born out by science; it's 90% nothing, it's made up of tiny electrical charges that are made up of fruther tiney elements we don't even understand.

This view is apt to be mistaken for Pantheism. I am not saying we are God or that we are part of God. In a technical sense everything is part of God if realty is an idea in the mind of God. But that doesn't make us deity. There is a distinction between the recognition of deity in God and the basic stuff of the universe.

The upshot of all this is many fold. there are several arguments for the existence of God that I spin off of this outlook, and it solves the problems of temporal begining and of ideas about God thinking.


The view that I mentioned in the ther thread on "God is the mind that thinks the universe" is compatible wth process theology. Process theology says that God is dipolor. One pole is concerecent, that is the pole in which God changes with the universe and participates in crete existence at the most basic level. The other is the "potential" pole in which God is universal and unchaning, but that's in potentiality.

This is compatible with the "Berkeleian view" that I've hatched out, because it is the potenial pole in which the framework of Mind forms the basis of reality; in the concrete pole God is actively engaged in thought about the universe and its nature, and through perceiving his own thoughts about it interacts with the process of becoming in the universe.

The real difference is that in my view God is not really changing, the concrete pole is just a thought in god's mind about himself and his relation to the world, which is also a thought in his mind.