A Half-Serious Definition of God
December 14, 2021 at 10:37 pm
(This post was last modified: December 14, 2021 at 10:45 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
Just floating this out there...
God is that which could not be otherwise.
The form mocks Anslem's ontological argument and has the slightly vague "...and this everyone calls God," quality to it. Application of the idea also makes for some very strange bedfellows...hard determinists and pantheists, comes to mind. Such examples do not support any classical nothing of God. There seems to be a problem of conflating God and what is necessity.
That said,...
Now the serious part,...
For me, the definition reflects the general criteria that I use to distinguish between the sacred and the profane...between the Creator and his creation.
Anything of a created nature has an arbitrary quality.
Anything of a necessary nature gets attributed to God.
In other words, if somethings at least appears that it could have been otherwise...from physical constants, like the speed of light, to historical accidents, then that is part of the created order. In contract to this, when I think about God I think about what must be and could not be otherwise...Being-As-Being, a Totality, etc. Then there are things like the efficacy of reason and intentionality that signify to me a rational order that transcends the particularity of circumstance. On a personal level, I wonder what are the absolutes of my life experience? What did I choose and what could not have been otherwise?
God is that which could not be otherwise.
The form mocks Anslem's ontological argument and has the slightly vague "...and this everyone calls God," quality to it. Application of the idea also makes for some very strange bedfellows...hard determinists and pantheists, comes to mind. Such examples do not support any classical nothing of God. There seems to be a problem of conflating God and what is necessity.
That said,...
Now the serious part,...
For me, the definition reflects the general criteria that I use to distinguish between the sacred and the profane...between the Creator and his creation.
Anything of a created nature has an arbitrary quality.
Anything of a necessary nature gets attributed to God.
In other words, if somethings at least appears that it could have been otherwise...from physical constants, like the speed of light, to historical accidents, then that is part of the created order. In contract to this, when I think about God I think about what must be and could not be otherwise...Being-As-Being, a Totality, etc. Then there are things like the efficacy of reason and intentionality that signify to me a rational order that transcends the particularity of circumstance. On a personal level, I wonder what are the absolutes of my life experience? What did I choose and what could not have been otherwise?
<insert profound quote here>
