(July 20, 2010 at 12:33 pm)Godhead Wrote: In my view, god doesn't play any role in the sense that one would assume, ie it doesn't "do" anything, or interact with or intervene in anything, or contribute to anything. The reason for that is because in my view, god IS everything. If you want to count that as a role that's fine but I don't really consider it a role, because a role implies taking part in something, whereas I believe that god already is everything (and simultaneously beyond everything).
There is still another thing I don't understand about your view.
So far, I've gotten what exactly your idea of what god is and does and I've gotten most but not the most important thing about what led you to god. If I understand you correctly, you've arrived to god based on the feelings you have about your surroundings.
(July 20, 2010 at 12:33 pm)Godhead Wrote: The reason why I call it god is because I believe that consciousness is involved, I believe that the universe is a living, conscious thing, a manifestation. To use an illustration (lthough it's not the most accurate), god is the mind, and the universe is the body (therefore interconnected), and god (the mind) infinitely transcends the body and is selfexistent (uncreated), and god manifests and the universe is that manifestation. That's why I don't just call it nature, because consciousness is involved. I'm a panentheist.
But how is it possible for you to have arrived to that conclusion?
If you've 'felt god out' so to speak with your intuition and reasoning, exactly how did you use those tools to discover what you've just told me?
It's also necessary to mention the lack of any traces of this powerful intelligence that we can recognize. You might say that that's by design, but if that were the case, then I still have to question any human ability to detect anything of this nature, which leads me back to my previous question of how you've 'sensed' god and determined that this feeling equates to god over anything else.
(July 20, 2010 at 12:33 pm)Godhead Wrote: Given that view (and I know you don't share it), the universe itself is the "trace" of god's existence. And I fully understand that one would only regard the universe as being the trace of god's existence if one has the view that I have. This would make it very difficult for you to demonstrate that the universe involves no god, because you'd first have to convince me that panentheism is not the corert view in the first place. In other words, you'd have to challenge my initial premise. If you did that, practically everything else in my belief system would fall in an instant.
To proove to you that the universe is godless, I need to know what, to you, the universe would be without god and why the universe needs god to exist.