Is 'God' An Atheist?

[Spencer]

Or is believing in him/her/itself enough to make him/her/it a theist?

Was listening to Greydon Square and his lyrics mentioned this, so I am curious what you all think?

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

Or is believing in him/her/itself enough to make him/her/it a theist?

Was listening to Greydon Square and his lyrics mentioned this, so I am curious what you all think?

Only if god had self-esteem issues and he didn't believe in himself.
In all seriousness, since god is a god or deity and as long as he believed that he himself exists, then he qualifies as a theist.

[ssmutters]

Interesting.

I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy talks about this. Here's how the gist goes I believe:

Man says: God, for you to exist you should have faith in yourself. But if you have faith in yourself it means you do not 'know' you exist. Man tries to prove God exists and this makes unnecessary for people to have faith. And since God cannot exist without faith, God vanishes in a puff of logic.

So, if God is a theist, he believes in his existence but doesn't know he exists. If he knows he exists, as he has to, because he needs to be aware of his own existence, then he needn't have faith. And not having to have faith makes him an atheist. I don't know whether he would vanish in a puff of logic if he knows he exists though. Last I heard, logic doesn't apply to God and he can perform miracles (ironic).

[Tiberius]

I hate to see someone darken Douglas Adams' name with such an absurd argument that wasn't even in the books. People gave kudos for it as well! Tut tut! Am I the only true DNA fan here?

The argument that you completely misquoted and shredded to pieces was this:

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Now for everyone who gave kudos to the above post and consider themselves a Douglas Adams fan, I have only one word for you: Belgium.

---

To address the argument in the previous post:

Man says: God, for you to exist you should have faith in yourself. But if you have faith in yourself it means you do not 'know' you exist.

Non-sequitur. It does not follow that for God to exist he has to have faith in himself. Having faith is not a prerequisite of existence; faith is something that only beings with thinking minds can have, so your argument would effectively null the existence of anything without a mind...which is silly.

So, if God is a theist, he believes in his existence but doesn't know he exists.

Non-sequitur again. Theism is the belief in God; it says nothing of knowledge of God. However, assuming that the God we are talking about is omniscient, her therefore knows everything. So he knows he exists. God is therefore a Gnostic Theist.

If he knows he exists, as he has to, because he needs to be aware of his own existence, then he needn't have faith. And not having to have faith makes him an atheist.

Third and final non-sequitur. It does not follow that "not having faith" makes you an atheist. Not having faith *could* make you an atheist, but it could also mean you have knowledge of God's existence, and therefore have no need for faith. God would come into this category, since being omniscient (see assumption made in my previous paragraph) he knows he exists.

[ssmutters]

I hate to see someone darken Douglas Adams' name with such an absurd argument that wasn't even in the books. People gave kudos for it as well! Tut tut! Am I the only true DNA fan here?

If he knows he exists, as he has to, because he needs to be aware of his own existence, then he needn't have faith. And not having to have faith makes him an atheist.

Third and final non-sequitur. It does not follow that "not having faith" makes you an atheist. Not having faith *could* make you an atheist, but it could also mean you have knowledge of God's existence, and therefore have no need for faith. God would come into this category, since being omniscient (see assumption made in my previous paragraph) he knows he exists.

Wow, I was feeling like I won the Rory, now I feel like the runner-up for the Rory or worse still, struck by Thor's hammer. My bad, not to have realized the subtle difference between 'proving' and 'knowing'. Adrian, go easy on me, I am an avid Douglas Adams fan too and consider that I won the Rory for using the word Belgium in a most gratuitous way. - ss

[Cego_Colher]

I hate to see someone darken Douglas Adams' name with such an absurd argument that wasn't even in the books. People gave kudos for it as well! Tut tut! Am I the only true DNA fan here?

Oh, I knew the bit had to do with the fish, but I liked the comparison. I wish I had one of those fish. :-(

[Edward the Theist]

God cannot be aware of his own existence. If he were aware of his own existence then he would also be aware of that which is not him. In other words he would be able to differentiate himself from what he is not, and since it is impossible for God to be anything other than monistic in nature (Notice, I said monistic and not monotheistic; there is a big difference in meaning.), self-awareness must be a contradiction of him.

Mathematically speaking, I would compare it to trying to make a set that contains itself as a set--you can't do that. God is the set of all possible things. To be self-aware would be, for at least the consciousness of God, outside the set of all possible things and contain the set of all possible things at the same time. It's absurd.

[ABierman1986]

If God were to exist, then wouldn't it go without saying that a creator with a purpose must have some kind of cognition in order to intentionally create life, and to instill worship and faith in creations permits the assumption that God is aware of God's existence does it not? Perhaps in the same way the cells that make up the flesh of my hand don't recognize what higher purpose they serve in building a more complex creature, we as humans would not recognize the cog we functioned as in a higher organism that could be a sentient and omnipotent religious God. But this would be on such a scale, and our intelligence so primitive in comparison to God's that it makes the gap between cellular life and human life look infinitesimal. This is just food for though and of course, this presumes the need for a supernatural entity or presupposes some kind of evidence for this kind of deity, of which there is none and so the entire argument's initial assumption is inconsistent.

[Edward the Theist]

If God were to exist, then wouldn't it go without saying that a creator with a purpose must have some kind of cognition in order to intentionally create life, and to instill worship and faith in creations permits the assumption that God is aware of God's existence does it not? Perhaps in the same way the cells that make up the flesh of my hand don't recognize what higher purpose they serve in building a more complex creature, we as humans would not recognize the cog we functioned as in a higher organism that could be a sentient and omnipotent religious God. But this would be on such a scale, and our intelligence so primitive in comparison to God's that it makes the gap between cellular life and human life look infinitesimal. This is just food for though and of course, this presumes the need for a supernatural entity or presupposes some kind of evidence for this kind of deity, of which there is none and so the entire argument's initial assumption is inconsistent.

First off, I fully accept your condition at the end of your reply that you do not believe such a being exists. But for the purposes of this argument we can talk about such a being.

You said, and quite poignantly I might add, that

If God were to exist, then wouldn't it go without saying that a creator with a purpose must have some kind of cognition in order to intentionally create life, and to instill worship and faith in creations permits the assumption that God is aware of God's existence does it not?

And that statement, the problem it creates and its solution is the very crux of the cosmological idea that I am working on. I admit, I am working on the answer; I don't know the answer, but what about this:

I can argue that God cannot be self-aware, not the actual God anyway, but it leaves the problem of why this God-force, if you will, would start to create the universe and the things it has in it. It seems like there are only two solutions (of course I'm open to being schooled on more):

A. The force has desires and will and the capability to shape itself into the universe in the way it wants.

B. The universe has to be exactly as it is or it is a contradiction.

The first choice, A, has too many anthropomorphic problems associated with it. I mean, how could a primordial God have desires of any kind? How would such a personality form in a mind not associated with any universe?

The second is more like Spinoza's God, infinite attributes expressed through infinite modalities that simply have to exist. For if they didn't, it would contradict the primordial force itself.

I appreciate the ability to discuss this with you, and I appreciate the fact that you do not believe in God. I would like to continue this discussion in that I see this as part of the work I am trying to do and the #1 reason I joined this group (to find people I can have this kind of discussion with).

I'm open to any ideas anyone has, even if we all agree there is no God, and this is all a hypothetical logic thought experiment.

[ABierman1986]

Alright, I can accept the idea of a non-self aware god for the purposes of your discussion, especially given the hypothetical nature of the whole thing : )

I think in response to your cases I would say that for A, your argument of anthropomorphic problems could be solved if this force is manifest through the inner religion that so many claim. Perhaps it is an anthropomorphic perspective but that doesn't necessarily rule it out as many religious people would argue that humans are made in God's image. If this force has no self-awareness then perhaps the increasing level of complexity we see is analogous to developmental stages of human life. The development of sentience could then be a universal attempt to examine itself and the human sense of god is the true semblance coming through. Your argument of how a personality form in a mind not associated with the universe might also be asked of how we develop our personalities from synaptic transmitters, or more fundamentally, the actions of individual atoms. I sure don't know the answer to that question, but the fact that similar situations can be identified suggests that this phenomena may exist on a higher order and could be examined further.

The second also sounds similar to the Deism followed by Ben Franklin, where God may exist but is useless because nothing can be changed. This view could also be considered deterministic depending on how you want to interpret the limits of the conditions imposed on the universe. In this instance then I think an argument could be made that it is the entirety of the space-time interactions that make up "God", and that these conditions would define the circumstances in which this type of God could arise. This is highly speculative but if one considers the actions of quantum phenomena in an energy density unlike one we've ever seen then it seems plausible that the laws our universe work on may be the correct combination of random law changes that permit the conversion of energy to matter in the big bang, bringing into existence this type of deity.

I would also submit another option, that of the Gaia theory. Modern physics predicts vibrational strings/loops of energy at the foundation of matter, and we've known for decades that there is quite literally nothing differentiating humans from a common hydrogen atom except macroscopic combination. Perhaps this underlying energy that permeates the universe interacts with itself in a way we can't understand, like synapses in our brain. In a case like this a superior force or will could develop in a way that optimizes some purpose of the universe, possibly to increase entropy to a point of pure disorder and energy as it may have been before the big bang. A God of this nature may or may not be self-aware, but it is a harmonious view with many of the more Eastern belief systems.