Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Michael McMahon]

It just doesn't make much sense to have a concept of "god" if it is synonymous with "nature". Moreover, the word "god" has connotations that may complicate effective communication.

If we equate God with nature then it can be logically consistent to love some of God and not all of God. We can love the virtuous acts within our world while disliking people engaged in evil if such immoral individuals were also included in our conception of unity. For example I know a few people who believe that Jesus was a prophet without necessarily describing Him as God. In a Christian context this might be equivalent to saying they prefer the Son of God over God the Father. In other words they appreciate the benevolence of Jesus as a moral teacher and martyr without necessarily wanting a relationship with Him as a creator of the universe. The problem of evil, natural evil and poverty are all private misgivings someone could have about a creator God who could have intervened. However the idea of a prophet and servant of God as distinct from the Creator God Himself might not necessarily bring up the same personal problems.

[Sy Borg]

It just doesn't make much sense to have a concept of "god" if it is synonymous with "nature". Moreover, the word "god" has connotations that may complicate effective communication.

If we equate God with nature then it can be logically consistent to love some of God and not all of God. We can love the virtuous acts within our world while disliking people engaged in evil if such immoral individuals were also included in our conception of unity. For example I know a few people who believe that Jesus was a prophet without necessarily describing Him as God. In a Christian context this might be equivalent to saying they prefer the Son of God over God the Father.

There is an interesting schism between the way Christians and secularists think. Speaking very broadly, Christians see belief as a choice while secularists see belief as the result of accumulated evidence. That is, if some believe that Jesus was just a human teacher, that's not a preference for "the Son of God over God the Father". Rather it is interpreting the Bible as it was probably meant to be understood by the writers rather than taken literally with modern-minded interpretations, which is always a massive error.

For instance, I don't believe in God, nor do I disbelieve. I lack the evidence to form a strong opinion, either way. It would be better if God did exist because eternal life would be real and all of those whom I loved would not really be gone. However, I don't believe in God because a 2,000 year-old book of legends does not convince me. It's not a choice. I don't believe in vampires either, and that is also not a choice.

One either believes or one does not. Many feign belief in the hope that "the mask becomes the face", but that is not true belief, it is self-programming.

I see no reason to elevate 2,000 year-old Middle eastern mythology over the myths of other cultures. After all, if Constantine hadn't been wracked with lead poisoning and seeing visions, we in the west may well have ended up as a polytheistic society, based on the old Roman Gods, of which Yahweh would have been just one.

[Belindi]

I and most other people have faith that nature ,as opposed to chaos, exists. Faith in an ordered patterned system and existential need to understand that system is the reason people try to discover facts about it. Personifications of natural forces were invented so that this quest may be energetically pursued.

[Sy Borg]

I and most other people have faith that nature ,as opposed to chaos, exists. Faith in an ordered patterned system and existential need to understand that system is the reason people try to discover facts about it. Personifications of natural forces were invented so that this quest may be energetically pursued.

Belinda, did you word the phrase I bolded above as you wished? After all, what is nature without chaos? I'll tell you what - it would be a crystal. Simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Completely inert. Dead as a dodo.

It's the odd lunacy of chemistry and fluid dynamics that makes life. However, like you, I have faith in nature, that the troubles of yore and today are the teething troubles of life, and that more a more moral, sane, settled and generally happy future awaits future beings.

Looking at the broad sweep of life on Earth, it builds on a broad base of simplicity, with each layer being both smaller and more complex than the last - geology→organic chemistry→single-celled organisms→multicellular organisms→intelligent organisms→technological intelligent organisms. Not sure what comes next, but we can expect it to be more complex and less plentiful than humans.

[Belindi]

I and most other people have faith that nature ,as opposed to chaos, exists. Faith in an ordered patterned system and existential need to understand that system is the reason people try to discover facts about it. Personifications of natural forces were invented so that this quest may be energetically pursued.

Belinda, did you word the phrase I bolded above as you wished? After all, what is nature without chaos? I'll tell you what - it would be a crystal. Simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Completely inert. Dead as a dodo.

It's the odd lunacy of chemistry and fluid dynamics that makes life. However, like you, I have faith in nature, that the troubles of yore and today are the teething troubles of life, and that more a more moral, sane, settled and generally happy future awaits future beings.

Looking at the broad sweep of life on Earth, it builds on a broad base of simplicity, with each layer being both smaller and more complex than the last - geology→organic chemistry→single-celled organisms→multicellular organisms→intelligent organisms→technological intelligent organisms. Not sure what comes next, but we can expect it to be more complex and less plentiful than humans.

Maybe we understand 'chaotic' differently. I think of chaotic as descriptive of what we don't or can't know. I think your description of lack of chaos

After all, what is nature without chaos? I'll tell you what - it would be a crystal. Simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Completely inert. Dead as a dodo.

applies to strong determinism as it affects us and other animals; strong causal determinism does not imply prediction, so we who can't predict see events as chaotic.

[Sy Borg]

Maybe we understand 'chaotic' differently. I think of chaotic as descriptive of what we don't or can't know.

I think of it as that which is not ordered.

Dictionary says:

- Physics: the property of a complex system whose behaviour is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.
- the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.
- Greek Mythology: the first created being, from which came the primeval deities Gaia, Tartarus, Erebus, and Nyx.

In a sense it is true that we cannot know chaos because it is extremely complex, although chaos theory allows for approximations, orderly disorder, so to speak.

After all, what is nature without chaos? I'll tell you what - it would be a crystal. Simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Completely inert. Dead as a dodo.

I think your description of lack of chaos applies to strong determinism as it affects us and other animals; strong causal determinism does not imply prediction, so we who can't predict see events as chaotic.

I don't really think in terms of determinism. The determinism/free will nexus - one of the great mysteries of existence - has never captured my imagination. I am happy to assume that we are not in control due to the deterministic factors driving us, but this is tempered by the quantum domain's apparent randomness, which will inject some degree of chaos into pretty well any system.

If pantheism is true, then the universe is very young, with another 1,000 billion years of star formation ahead - and so far we are just 13.8b years old. Expecting such a "baby universe" to not be chaotic is like expecting a one year-old to keep their room clean and dust-free.

[Belindi]

Maybe we understand 'chaotic' differently. I think of chaotic as descriptive of what we don't or can't know.

I think of it as that which is not ordered.

Dictionary says:

- Physics: the property of a complex system whose behaviour is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.
- the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.
- Greek Mythology: the first created being, from which came the primeval deities Gaia, Tartarus, Erebus, and Nyx.

In a sense it is true that we cannot know chaos because it is extremely complex, although chaos theory allows for approximations, orderly disorder, so to speak.

After all, what is nature without chaos? I'll tell you what - it would be a crystal. Simple. Beautiful. Perfect. Completely inert. Dead as a dodo.

I think your description of lack of chaos applies to strong determinism as it affects us and other animals; strong causal determinism does not imply prediction, so we who can't predict see events as chaotic.

I don't really think in terms of determinism. The determinism/free will nexus - one of the great mysteries of existence - has never captured my imagination. I am happy to assume that we are not in control due to the deterministic factors driving us, but this is tempered by the quantum domain's apparent randomness, which will inject some degree of chaos into pretty well any system.

If pantheism is true, then the universe is very young, with another 1,000 billion years of star formation ahead - and so far we are just 13.8b years old. Expecting such a "baby universe" to not be chaotic is like expecting a one year-old to keep their room clean and dust-free.

I do believe in determinism and this belief means I view apparent chaos as necessary events in an evolving universe. Since none of us has a Godlike perspective each of us should try to sort out the apparent chaos, but only when a course of action is not unkind to man or beast.

[Sy Borg]

I do believe in determinism and this belief means I view apparent chaos as necessary events in an evolving universe. Since none of us has a Godlike perspective each of us should try to sort out the apparent chaos, but only when a course of action is not unkind to man or beast.

I certainly see my life as largely deterministic, dominated by factors that I could not control, only adapt to. My personality seems no less sculpted by my environment than sandstone cliffs have been sculpted by the sea. There's wiggle room in there for freedom because the quantum domain is so flighty and odd. Ultimately, I only care about freedom in civics; the ontology seems not to be a problem either way. If we are controlled or free, there is no option but to continue as though one is free.

Our very existence is sorting out chaos within your sphere and increasing chaos outside of it. We resist entropy by inflicting it on others, by acquiring their energy. Humans have not found a way to sustainably order a society that is kind to its people and other animals. Social democracy seemed promising to me at one stage but it's shown vulnerability to bad actors, who can use misinformation to distort policy decisions. Authoritarianism strikes me as akin to a whole society trying to hold their stomach in for a photo, for years and years. In the end, that tension has to release and the flab will flow back out as nature intended :)

If pantheism is real, consider that in context with all the cruelty inflicted on other species in the belief that they felt nothing.

[Michael McMahon]

Rather it is interpreting the Bible as it was probably meant to be understood by the writers rather than taken literally with modern-minded interpretations, which is always a massive error.

People don't mind being subordinate to the nation state because they've a vote in it and they recognise the validity of democracy. The mindset is different for choosing an Abrahamic religion because people are asked to be a servant of a personal God. This is acceptable and don't get me wrong but it requires a lot of trust in the benevolence of a single being. One potential advantage of panentheism in attracting followers is that it's less possessive seeing as the definition of God is expanded into a collective world. Although panentheism, more so than pantheism, still requires a lot of deference to certain group faith because God in this context is interpreted to extend beyond the human sphere and outside of our universe as well as being inside it.

I and most other people have faith that nature ,as opposed to chaos, exists. Faith in an ordered patterned system and existential need to understand that system is the reason people try to discover facts about it. Personifications of natural forces were invented so that this quest may be energetically pursued.

The interface between physical nature and human or animal life would be flora. I don't think a single tree is conscious but what if we were to assign even an infinitesimal amount of being to a photon or a plant cell? Then the tiny bits and pieces of blankness might add up when there's an infinite amount of trees. Could the Amazon Rainforest be said to have a tranquil soul in a collective rather than an individual sense?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oavSum61gA&t=4s
Listen with your heart , you will understand - Pocahontas tree - Grandmother Willow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbV2Hr0qRdo
Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers Treebeard

[Sy Borg]

Rather it is interpreting the Bible as it was probably meant to be understood by the writers rather than taken literally with modern-minded interpretations, which is always a massive error.

People don't mind being subordinate to the nation state because they've a vote in it and they recognise the validity of democracy. The mindset is different for choosing an Abrahamic religion because people are asked to be a servant of a personal God. This is acceptable and don't get me wrong but it requires a lot of trust in the benevolence of a single being. One potential advantage of panentheism in attracting followers is that it's less possessive seeing as the definition of God is expanded into a collective world. Although panentheism, more so than pantheism, still requires a lot of deference to certain group faith because God in this context is interpreted to extend beyond the human sphere and outside of our universe as well as being inside it.

It especially requires trust in the judgement and intentions of people writing about events long afterwards, especially when they make numerous fantastical claims, many of which have been refuted.

A personal god makes no sense - given that gods are clearly not people, with different morphology(?), concerns and so forth. Still, if there is a general God, it could be interpreted as personal by each individual, with God ultimately being "our better selves".

Panentheism, I suppose, is a way of maintaining the security of a personal god, while acknowledging just how godlike the universe reveals itself to be in terms of its scope, power and creativity. Pantheism does not help with the sense that everything in the universe (and many things on Earth) are inherently hostile to human life.

It makes little sense to petition an entirely cold, violent and uncaring god that cares nothing for us. It does, however, make sense to worship it anyway, simply because the edifices of space and nature are indeed worthy of awe and wonder. The benefits of aimless secular worship/awe would be psychological, and perhaps such contemplations would also promote generally more harmonious relations with one's environment.

[Lone Wolf]

I find myself thinking I am a pantheist and a monotheist at the same time. Through an emotional experience I felt that there was someone or some thing that loved me in spite of all my self loathing. I felt that I had always been loved and would always be loved no matter what I said, thought, or did. Because of that experience, I quit the Christian religion and found that there was no other religion within which I could be comfortable. Hence my feeling that there is one supreme being. But then logic entered the picture and from reading a lot of different sources, I came to the conclusion that all things that exist or don't exist are manifestations of that one supreme being and therefore I accept pantheism as a strong possibility. After reading Einstein's response to the question, "Is there a god?", I find that I very much agree with his thoughts on the subject. Then I read his letter to his daughter where he described the most powerful force in the world as being love and substituted love in place of mass in his most famous formula. I am currently considering his theory that mass does not exist since everything has a vibration and when that vibration is raised to the highest level, it becomes :energy, love, God? My biggest problem is that the more I learn, the less I know. I think I know that I AM and that IT loves me. ( IT is my name for that something that loves me.) Perhaps it is like Jack Nicholson said in a movie, "You can't handle the truth."

[Sy Borg]

Perhaps it is like Jack Nicholson said in a movie, "You can't handle the truth."

As a matter of interest, that iconic line happened because he couldn't remember the written line.

Meanwhile, Atla (and no doubt others) feel that our perspective is skewed. That has been my intuition. Life does not evolve to discern reality as it is, only a version of reality that aids survival and reproduction. So we cannot see magnetic fields, most gases, microbes and so forth without visual aids because our ancestors did not need to. We cannot hear petals open in the morning or the Sun's rays hissing through the atmosphere, and so forth.

It's quite possible that actual reality cannot be coped with by biology, no matter what it is. If God is true then its power will be greater than trillions of supermassive black holes and the galaxies they anchor. Not quite our weight class :) The universe might also be nothing more than a cold, dead place, with small patches of anomalous warmth here and there, soon to be snuffed out.

I personally lean more towards panvitalism than panpsychism. I don't see the universe as dead any more than I think of the water and chemicals in me as dead, even though they are not defined as living things. I wonder if collective humanity, or the biosphere, has an overall informational synergy that we can't detect that would seem panpsychic in nature to us? The scale would be planetary rather than universal, not that we would be able to tell the difference ...

[Michael McMahon]

I personally lean more towards panvitalism than panpsychism. I don't see the universe as dead any more than I think of the water and chemicals in me as dead, even though they are not defined as living things. I wonder if collective humanity, or the biosphere, has an overall informational synergy that we can't detect that would seem panpsychic in nature to us? The scale would be planetary rather than universal, not that we would be able to tell the difference ...

New terminologies are often a rediscovery rather than a discovery because most of the possible combinations have already been exhausted in the vastness of human history. Ancient tribes may not always have had very technical or logically coherent religions but they might still contain partial similarities to current concepts. For example some of their beliefs may have been so incomprehensibly intricate that they might resemble agnosticism or mysticism. Other times the overlapping of heavenly realities may have produced an effect similar to transcendence. There were so many Native American tribes that there would have been innumerable variations in the immanence of their spiritual beliefs. Sometimes religion was viewed as a mere colonial tool like the polytheistic society of Ancient Rome. Here the emperor was rather conveniently one of the gods which helped secure national loyalty. Also, new gods similar to other religions were created to appease recently conquered colonies. However bizarre their faith system might have been there were probably still a lot of people that took it literally. I was always intrigued by the uniqueness of the Ancient Egyptian Gods but when I watched a documentary on their origin stories I was left bemused by their random and incestuous mythological beginnings.


"These early creatures had nowhere to live, however, and so Shu and Tefnut mated and gave birth to Geb (the earth) and Nut (the sky). Geb and Nut, though brother and sister, fell deeply in love and were inseparable. Atum found their behavior unacceptable and pushed Nut away from Geb, high up into the heavens. The two lovers were forever able to see each other but were no longer able to touch. Nut was already pregnant by Geb, however, and eventually gave birth to Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, and Horus – the five Egyptian gods most often recognized as the earliest or, at least, the most familiar representations of older god-figures. Osiris showed himself a thoughtful and judicious god and was given rule of the world by Atum who then went off to attend to his own affairs."
https://www.worldhistory.org/Egyptian_Mythology/

1D853493-0350-48DA-B502-67476330FF97.jpeg (235.48 KiB) Viewed 2505 times

I often played historical sci-fi games when I was younger in addition to the war games. Video games can immerse you in a fictional environment by requiring you to win to get to the next level whereas movies are more optional in terms of our attention span. Some ancient beliefs in the afterlife were so exotic that a materialised version of them would resemble postmodern sci-fi relative to our perception of the world.

[Sy Borg]

I personally lean more towards panvitalism than panpsychism. I don't see the universe as dead any more than I think of the water and chemicals in me as dead, even though they are not defined as living things. I wonder if collective humanity, or the biosphere, has an overall informational synergy that we can't detect that would seem panpsychic in nature to us? The scale would be planetary rather than universal, not that we would be able to tell the difference ...

New terminologies are often a rediscovery rather than a discovery because most of the possible combinations have already been exhausted in the vastness of human history. Ancient tribes may not always have had very technical or logically coherent religions but they might still contain partial similarities to current concepts. For example some of their beliefs may have been so incomprehensibly intricate that they might resemble agnosticism or mysticism. Other times the overlapping of heavenly realities may have produced an effect similar to transcendence. There were so many Native American tribes that there would have been innumerable variations in the immanence of their spiritual beliefs. Sometimes religion was viewed as a mere colonial tool like the polytheistic society of Ancient Rome. Here the emperor was rather conveniently one of the gods which helped secure national loyalty. Also, new gods similar to other religions were created to appease recently conquered colonies. However bizarre their faith system might have been there were probably still a lot of people that took it literally. I was always intrigued by the uniqueness of the Ancient Egyptian Gods but when I watched a documentary on their origin stories I was left bemused by their random and incestuous mythological beginnings.

I wonder if the incestuous beginning is based on logic? For instance, since the universe is expanding, we assume that everything started from just a point, or at least something much smaller. Not understanding evolution, they might have figured that generations of people logically must track back to one incestuous couple, a line from which everyone else stemmed.

Some ancient beliefs in the afterlife were so exotic that a materialised version of them would resemble postmodern sci-fi relative to our perception of the world.

The other day I stumbled upon this video representation of what the angels of the top tier of heaven would look like as per the Bible's descriptions - in order - the Cherubim (not a chubby baby with wings!), Thrones/Wheels and Seraphim. They are almost Lovecraftian! Note the human in there used for scale.

The many-headed Cherubim were the guards of Eden, keeping Adam and Eve and their descendants out (I don't know why they are erroneously depicted as the Roman deity, Cupid). The Thrones are "wheels within wheels" and they apparently administer justice. The Seraphim spend all their time praising God and they apparently have the power to make people realise how sinful they are, rather like the Total Perspective Vortex from Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which made people realise just how tiny they were in context with the universe.

[Michael McMahon]

I wonder if the incestuous beginning is based on logic? For instance...

That's an interesting viewpoint. It was lucky you elaborated on the first sentence. I probably would of put the explanation first and left that sentence until the end in order to make a better first impression!