I asked if he meant a creator, to which he replied "I don't know."
The more I asked for specifics about this god, he would say no or I don't know to them all, yet still said he KNEW God existed.
I guess it's likely just the semantics that trip me up as everything he says makes him sound like a flavor of agnostic, yet he is steadfast about "knowing" that God exists which I can't understand without a definition of some sort.
He also has extreme trouble viewing atheism as anything but a belief system (which it is exactly not) which again leads me to believe it's a leftover from his prior religiosity.
First of all, if you can define God, you're shooting too low. If you believe, when you talk about God, you're talking about a definite construct that he must by definition exceed. Let's be scientific, and talk about what's not in dispute, the physical universe. We can describe its immense total size numerically. We can even believe that the model we hold in our minds approximates the truth of that vastness. Similarly we can talk about all the empty space in an atom, and make up metaphors about a ball bearing in Los Angeles and a basketball in Wembley stadium, or whatevah, but we can't truly grok the truth that we scientifically know -- that a block of lead is well more than 99% empty space.
How many stars are there? You can say a number - really an abstraction of the numbers you can name, that is, a number to the power of another number. You can say what you know of the classifications of stars. How do you get a star? You can talk about enough hydrogen gathering together that the gravity crushes it down raising its temperature and pressure until nuclear fusion happens.
Have you ever
seen, can you ever actually
imagine, gas in such a volume that it's exerting gravity at all, in any noticeable way?
No, but you'd notice its absence. I'm digressing, not setting up a proof or a metaphor. That's not the point.
The point is more that we have only one language to really talk about these scales, and that's mathematics. Even at that, we're only describing, we're not talking about the
thing itself, but an abstraction of the thing. There would not be enough room in your head to know the detail of every partical, not enough neural pathways to know them. We know the model. The map is not the land.
We'd get into theist/agnostic or atheist disagreement were I to posit that the sum of the Universe does not contain the sum of divinity. In fact, were I to so posit, I'm not certain I'd understand what I was saying.
However, even taking the sum of all that is as God, and imbuing it with organization, even including the law that dictates entropy, were I to say "I will now define God," I would be lying. Similarly, were I even to try the mundane task of defining the universe, I would be lying, strictly speaking. I would be describing the current state of knowledge about a
model. in fact, at the quantuum scale, one rule is you
can't know.
For him to try to convince you with a "definition" would be bullcrap. But for you to try to ridicule him for the lack of one is similarly ridiculous. For the believer, you don't define God. You don't have the processing power to do it. For the unbeliever, you can snicker for the lack of a definition, all the while accepting a simplistic model for all you
do claim to know.
I've been described hereabouts as a "heritage Jew," meaning I grew up in Judaism but I'm not observant. They're right, so far as their definition goes. However, the most central confessional formula of my faith (as pronounced) is shema yisroel, adonai Elohanu, adonai ehud. "Hear, O Israel, the lord our God, the lord is One."
My little model is this: If the lord is One, nothing's outside him but by process of purposeful separation, that is, creation. I agree with the Kabbalists though that the separation is never absolute (their metaphor is that there's a spark of the divine everywhere.) I suspect though that the entirety is too anthrocentric, and that the separation is, in fact illusion. I've fallen into a bit of a pantheistic heresy I'm afraid, with a conscious (for want of a better word) and living (for want of a better word) cosmos.
We've decided we have a universe that came into being somewhere just south of fourteen billion years ago. Then we get to a couple of those mysteries you can only get your head around if you're a math geek, to wit:
1) strictly speaking there was nothing before the big bang, because time was created by the big bang, along with space, stuff, and energy. Don't get it. Supposed to be true. Your brain's not designed to understand that time started -- time's not supposed to be an actual
thing, it's the
order of things. But that's what the Discovery Channel says.
2) Ya get something for nothing. Or to be more precise, you get everything for nothing. But it's okay, because it's balanced by a bunch of negative energy or somesuch generated simultaneously.
But then you can posit that universes, plural, pop in and out of existence all the time, which makes the "uni" part sound a bit silly.
So, I need a word for "the whole shootin' match" - a conscious, living, shootin' match that we stand in relation to as a miniscule cell to an enormous -- astronomically enormous -- body.
So I don't think about a being outside of the natural order with a consciousness approximating human consciousness. I think more of a mindful and connected universe. I have no real understanding of "the big thought," but I feel we're not its object, but parts of it.
This stuff is just the primitive model, the lie I tell because it's the closest lie to the truth, and it's challenging to me to try to explain it. I can tell you about the "moving parts" or give you if/then statements, I can tell you whatever you like. I'll get it wrong. It will be clunky and partial, and it will be words about things neither of us "get."
You can answer with other words, and you can explain that a model can be built without such a mindful universe (or multiverse if we have to put it that way, though I believe in a uniGod.)
In the end, however, you'll ask for proof, and I will be happy to say go fish. I could play that silly game, but it would come down to "I like my models built that way." The same would be true for you. You would explain to me that a scientific understanding of nature demands an objective analysis that does not posit subjective unprovable beings (or properties of known forces and particles.) But I'd ask you: how do you objectively describe the subjective?
And in the final analysis, that is all that such an understanding of God posits: that the subjective does, in fact, exist. You could disprove the subjectivity of the various individuals typing in this forum by the same means as disproving the subjective life of all that is. However, you still posit those subjective other minds.
You can list the proofs of other subjective consciousnesses, but they are pretty weak and could easily be supplied by fooling the senses (the old brain-in-a-jar thing, lately updated to the Matrix and all that.)
Similarly, you can say there's no real benefit to believing any higher orders of consciousness. The same applies. This is what's evident to me, but I cannot make it evident to you.
PFnV
