What is a gawd even?

[bennyboy]

Why is this philosophy?

Never heard of philosophy of religion?

lol I don't mean your OP question, although the "gawd" spelling makes it right away look more like an anti-theist meme party thread than a serious question.  I meant the general flow of the thread up to this point.

I'd actually like to put forward an answer of sorts: I think the God idea as a philosophical idea amounts to this: "God is whatever device, entity or quantity that allows the resolution of paradox."  In other words, it represents something that cannot be represented physically, but is crucial to the underpinnings of existence (like the square root of -1).  And we've seen theists use it often in this way: "Everything must be caused, but infinite regression cannot be true in a time-limited universe, therefore something must exist outside of time." And instead of spinning off into "Yeah, but how/why does it exist?" the train is stopped there: it just IS. . . because the inverse of a paradox is itself still unexplainable.

Of course, this gives way immediately to accusations of special pleading, but I don't think that needs to be.  In a philosophically honest application of this particular definition of God, we might discover that something about this universe is God, or that time is an illusion and that this God is therefore not needed.  We might one day discover what it is about the universe that allows it to exist despite the apparent infinite regression the existence of finite things in infinite spacetime. In other words, we might actually be able to use science to learn about God. Who knows? We might find through QM that there is something intrinsically related to sentience about the universe that is required for it to exist at all, in which case "All is one and all is God" might be found to represent scientific truth so long as the God idea has been divorced from every flavor of cultural mythology. I like the idea that mind is what makes the universe possible and vice versa, though obviously it's just hippie speculation at this point.

Now, I'm not a theist, but it seems to me a definition like this could be usable by theists and atheists alike: by the first as a description of the most essential feature of God, by the second as a definition of an otherwise unusable word that can be taken seriously in philosophical discussions-- i.e. that isn't conflated with ideas about Sky Daddy watching teens masturbate all the time.