Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

[Exian]

I think things are sinking in- don't spook him.

[Tonus]

"Goddidit" is equivalent to the meaningless "Blargdidit."

I agree.

[Angrboda]

And for what it's worth, in the Hindu pantheon, the Shakti or divine feminine is the active principle. Like much else here you've simply coughed up your pre-existing beliefs as self-evident assertions. They aren't.

Well then, the Hindus made a mistake and got it wrong, didn't they?

Why? Because you say so?

Let's examine your reasons.

What makes you think "God" is a he?

The male / female duality is everywhere in our world.

Not true. It applies to sexually dimorphic life forms only. Amoeba have no male / female duality, nor does a rock. (And there's a lot more non-life matter in the universe than living matter.)

The masculine aspect tends to be interpreted as one with power to act, actuality; whereas the feminine aspect, as passive, one that is acted on, potency, potentiality.

That it tends to be interpreted as among certain cultures and for certain species does not support your generalization. There are species for whom it is true and species for whom the opposite is the case, and species that are neither. It's not a general rule of the world.

Nature is a "she";

Arbitrary assertion. Besides being purely arbitrary, since nature isn't a biological life form it has no sex.

... the female archetype is both receptive and destructive in its various guises: e.g., if you do not take the opportunity to plant your crops in the summer when nature is pliable, the same nature will starve and kill you in the winter.

The what? What do cultural archetypes have to do with nature?

But Nature's God is pure act with no admixture of potency in it. Hence is it appropriate to refer to God as "he."

How do you know this? This is simply another unfounded assertion.

On top of everything else, you keep arguing as if we can reason backward from the way the world is to the way the divine must be, as if some law of consistency between the two applied. It makes just as much sense to argue the reverse is true of the divine realm, that it is wholly other, than that it is the same. The only precedent for arguing such a law of consistency is based on the consistency of the natural world and assuming the divine must resemble it, but that is begging the question.

You have no more valid reason for positing the divine as the masculine of a sexual duality than you do for positing the feminine.

Remember, "He" is beyond all that exists in this world, including sexual dimorphism.

[The Valkyrie]

Good god, I gave heywood a kudos. Is this the apocalypse?

And LO, the riders did appear upon the Earth. And there were four of them.

And their names were Incredulity, Ignorance, Superstition, and Bob.

[Heywood]

Good god, I gave heywood a kudos. Is this the apocalypse?

His position is an interesting one for a Catholic theist. Suppose God creates angels....one angel after another. Further suppose God has been engaged in creating angels for eternity. How many angels would exist? The number would be uncountable.

Now in Catholic theology an angel isn't a physical thing....but it is real. I don't know of any necessary truth which limits the number of physical things which can exist.

[datc]

The masculine aspect tends to be interpreted as one with power to act, actuality; whereas the feminine aspect, as passive, one that is acted on, potency, potentiality.

That it tends to be interpreted as among certain cultures and for certain species does not support your generalization. There are species for whom it is true and species for whom the opposite is the case, and species that are neither. It's not a general rule of the world.

Dude, wtf do you want from me? I was asked to provide my own personal reasons for why I consider God to be a "he." Those reasons included a number of different observations, including the allegedly impermissible "cultural archetypes," human experience, and all that.

For example, man manipulates matter; he is a shaper of nature; he bends nature to his will. Nature is passive putty in human hands; potency; it can take many different forms. Human intelligence and labor are active; act; humans command and possess nature, put it on the rack and steal its secrets. So far so uncontroversial, right? Well, men possess women, as well, in a manner of speaking (e.g., not as property) in sex and marital communion. Hence, humans:nature::men:women. Hence, nature is a "she."

This is not a knockdown "argument"; it's an analogy, a fitting way to arrange your own personal world.

Don't like it? Then don't refer to God as a he, or don't refer to God at all. It's up to you.

[The Valkyrie]

And I thought it was because only a man could create something so spectacular and complex as the human body with so many basic flaws in it. . .

[Cyberman]

Actually, I was going for a much more prosaic explanation (in both senses of the word). Isn't there some book or other that both uses the masculine pronoun and expresses the word 'god' as a proper noun?

[datc]

As you can see, I am responding to practically everyone; so, if I have not responded to your point, then either I am still thinking about it, or your point is nonsense.

In this particular case, it's the latter.

If it's nonsense, then please tell me how a choice from one million possibilities vs an infinite number of possibilities affects the how the choice was picked.

The choice between the forms (essences) of the universe to be created was either random or intelligent. If it was determined, the problem is simply pushed back one step. In fact, randomness is the intelligence of matter or merely material objects.

Suppose random. I asked myself at lunch to pick a random number. My answer: 75 or 1/4 or pi. Clearly, these numbers are those that are in use in daily life or at best, science. I certainly did not consider x = googol^(googol^(...^googol)) 75 times. By how much greater than x is actual infinity!

Therefore, an honest and fair Random World Generator (RWG) considers every possible world to be equiprobable. But for an infinitude of worlds, the probability of any to be picked is again, exactly (not "effectively") 0.

Moreover, every world would have to be considered and either rejected or picked. It's like you stick your hand in an urn with balls, check out every ball, and pick a hopefully "lucky" one. But no non-rational RWG can fairly consider for selection every member of an infinite set.

There is another consideration. The RWG can solve the problem of choosing a world by picking an arbitrary world and using that as the solution. But each possible world is for an unintelligent chooser no better and no worse than any other one. How does an impartial RWG pick even an arbitrary world?

Now remember that all abstracta are convertible to each other. Thus, we may imagine a world, 1E, with just a single thing in it: an elementary particle. This sort of converts a world into a number. The RWG can then say: "I'll pick the world with the fewest number of particles in it." This immediately narrows down the choice to 1E. But this is already an intelligent choice. The RWG would have to be programmed by an intelligent agent in order to be so clever.

The result is that the chooser is intelligent and chooses according to an end sought.

[FatAndFaithless]

Its the same argument with more fancy sounding terms. You don't get to say "this seems unlikely to me therefore X is true".