(December 17, 2011 at 2:21 am)Rhythm Wrote: Again, you choose to call something god which already has a name. God explains god? Everything explains everything? This sort of word game adds nothing but confusion. God explains a unity, everything explains unity? God/everything explains wonder? I'd be willing to bet a considerable amount of money that you wont be able to elaborate upon that in the slightest. It's a platitude. What unity? The feeling you get? There's probably a better set of words to describe that, like "my feeling of unity". The italicized bit is the relevant bit. Deciding to call everything god is a hell of a stretch. Language is malleable but not so much that any word can be taken to mean anything at all. Otherwise there's no point in attempting to communicate anything.
I'll provide a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which states my position clearly:
"For the pantheist, however Unity is interpreted, the world is not simply an all-inclusive Unity in the sense that the world, understood to be everything, is the “unity” composed of everything. This would be to interpret it as asserting that everything that exists simply is everything that exists; or to put it another way, everything is (of course) all-inclusively everything. This is true but vacuous, and it trivialises pantheism at the outset.
Attributing Unity simply on the basis of all-inclusiveness is irrelevant to pantheism. Formal unity can always be attributed to the world on this basis alone. To understand the world as “everything” is to attribute a sense of unity to the world, but there is no reason to suppose this sense of all-inclusiveness is the pantheistically relevant Unity. Similarly, unity as mere numerical, class or categorical unity is irrelevant, since just about anything (and everything) can be “one” or a “unity” in these senses. Suppose “formal unity” to be “the sense in which things are one in virtue of the fact that they are members of one and the same class … the same universal” (Demos 1945–6: 538). Then clearly formal unity is not pantheistic Unity. Furthermore, formal unity neither entails or is entailed by types of unity (e.g. substantial unity) sometimes taken to be Unity. Hegel's Geist, Lao Tzu's Tao, Plotinus' “One,” and arguably Spinoza's “substance,” are independent of this kind of formal unity.
Unity is explained in various ways that are often interrelated. These connections range from mutual entailment, to different types of causal and contingent relations. Roughly, Unity is interpreted 1) ontologically; 2) naturalistically — in terms of ordering principle(s), force(s) or plans; 3) substantively — where this is distinguished from “ontologically”; and 4) genealogically — in terms of origin. Christopher Rowe (1980: 57) calls 4 a “genealogical model of explanation” of unity. “Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the Milesian monists appear to have claimed that what unifies the world is that it sprang from a single undifferentiated substance."
(December 17, 2011 at 2:21 am)Rhythm Wrote: You may be able to demonstrate the existence of a worm, that doesn't mean that the worm is god, or that the worm testifies to the existence of a god by any definition of the word which isn't constructed specifically to suit your claim.
Words are simply definitions - which change quite often as time progresses and knowledge grows. In your scenario, the worm is a part of everything in existence. That same worm testifies to the fact that things exist, and as we know, multiple things comprise everything. If I choose to associate the remarkableness of existence with the term God and I apply that term to be a synonym of everything, then I effectively choose to state that God is everything, and everything is God. More simply stated: If I choose to define God, in my own terms, then God becomes what I wish. It provides me with the warm fuzzy feelings, it provides me with thought provoking ideas, it provides me with comfort.
(December 17, 2011 at 2:21 am)Rhythm Wrote: I get fuzzy feelings all the time, all without the help of your not-god. With no assumptions of unity. I'm not going without anything, your belief isn't giving you a leg up on me in that arena. Why would you assume that it was?
I'm glad that we both get fuzzy feelings all the time. Perhaps we even get them for the same reasons. I simply associate mine with a different word. Mine carries with it a sense of humility and personal naivety which allows me to appreciate the natural beauty that I encounter - something that I never hope to lose. I can't state what your's carries, perhaps the same, perhaps different, but either way we each have our own.
Brevity is the soul of wit.