Boro Nut

Is God nothing more than a concept? I believe so. Many people confuse concepts with reality. Take beauty for instance. This is a concept, but its obviously hard wired into our brain, otherwise we would just register shapes. We’re clearly not the only animals who have this ability either, as other species clearly recognise visual signals from potential mates.

Music is a similar concept. We have the ability to detect noise, but under certain circumstances we recognise those noise patterns as music. I exclude Chinese and Japanese of course, who are more inclined to break into dance at the sound of a blacksmith mending a frying pan.

Boro Nut

When I say dance I don’t mean in the western sense either, more like pretending you’re trying to carry a spoon across a tightrope using only the cheeks of your arse, and if you’re really adept, simultaneously dodging blows to the head and rolling snot balls with your fingers.

Now that was when office parties WERE office parties!

seebs

After years of trying to come up with good explanations, I have settled on "all that and a bag of chips".

geoff

Originally posted by Boro Nut:
Is God nothing more than a concept? I believe so. Many people confuse concepts with reality. Take beauty for instance. This is a concept, but its obviously hard wired into our brain, otherwise we would just register shapes.

Why some of us (including you, Boro Nut) believe a priori that existence entails corporeality is beyond me. What gives you the right to assume that? How can you justify that assertion? (These aren't rhetorical questions. They're sincere.) Why does everything that is have to have a body (and all the properties entailed)? Traditional theism affirms that God is, at least, incorporeal and extradimensional (to put a "New Physics" spin on it) and also a being with intelligence and volition (see Richard Swineburne's rebuttal of Kai Neilson's charge that a being with such properties cannot at the same time be said to act, in his "The Coherence of Theism").

All I've laid out is what theism affirms about who God is because that's what you asked for in your OP. I haven't tried to defend the notion. If you try to defeat it, then we have moved to the arena of theistic proofs. If you want to move there, fine. But that's your call.

[ May 24, 2002: Message edited by: geoff ]</p>

Abacus

No kidding! You should come over and see my pet sometime. He's an invisible, incorporeal dragon, and he lives in my garage. I named him Buddy.

Philosoft

There are material things that exist, which are made of matter, affect other material things and are observable; and there are abstract/conceptual things, which exist only as collections of electromechanical impulses and have no direct effects on the material world. All nouns fall into one of these two categories. What you are asking for is a category that is specially designed to allow the "existence" of a non-material thing (from category 2) that has effects on the material world (from category 1). Furthermore, you wish for the sole member of this category to be God. Anything else you'd like to plead for, special prosecutor Geoff?

<strong> They don't. You can have an existing concept or idea all you like.

<strong> Far be it from traditional theism to actually affirm something that makes sense.

Abacus

Here's a question that popped into my head:

If God is supposedly indectectable by any means, wouldn't that imply that God also cannot interact with the universe?

sighhswolf

I guess this question has been debated since the dawn of man, or at least from the first time mankind saw something he did not understand.

I listened to a theologian once who stated that instead of looking for a definition of god or a tangible form of existence, he as a liberal theologian thought of god as an invisible energy source, the underlying unity that keeps the thread woven in the universe.
A commonality that binds all things and permeates the fabric of the universe.
I prefer to think of god as the power that pops up the next tissue in the box of kleanex.
Wolf

seebs

That depends. If, as some people hypothesize, God is "the entity that makes the physics keep running", then of course, He's under the radar so to speak; you can't *detect* that physics is being kept running, except in that you observe it.

I have met people who report experiences that they feel are "detection" of God; I can't disprove these experiences, so I remain agnostic about the reality of their experience. I tend to assume they could easily be right, since I'm a believer, but I don't see the evidence thing as a big deal.