Because in the end, reality and God are by definition exactly the same, so anyone who believes in reality is technically a theist.
How can anyone contend it? Reality is omnipresent, the source of all power, the source of all consciousness, self limited and eternal. It is a pan/monotheistic God.
We also all believe in miracles. Why? because consciousness arising from non consciousness is a miracle. Anyone who claims we arise from a universe devoid of any kind of consciousness is directly defying basic math.
Elementary particles must be made of pieces/aspects of consciousness for our brain to produce consciousness, otherwise you are claiming 0 consciousness + 0 consciousness = 1 consciousness. Logically impossible.
The title should be "We are all agnostic" because no one can have a sure knowledge that God does not exist unless that person becomes omniscient...which is an absurdity because by becoming omniscient and then knowing for a certainty that God does not exist, that person becomes God thus defeating the claim. I love it.
So any time I hear an atheist say, "I know for a fact God doesn't exist." I gasp and said, "Lord! Have mercy! I did not know! Please, I have questions!"
Reality (and by this I mean the state of being if you're slightly mislead by the reality I'm talking about) is omnipresent in the sense that it is everywhere that exists.
It may seem like semantics, but there is a ground of reality on which things are based, otherwise the human brain would not function.
It may look different for each person, but it is there nonetheless.
Gender: Male Location: Southern Oregon,
Looking at you.
Re: Re: Re: We're All Theists
But the cosmos doesn’t know that it exists. In order for omnipresent to have meaning, there must be an observer, and the only observer in the universe is us living beings (be they alien or human), and we are not omnipresent. Therefore, omnipresent must refer to something outside the universe, and that would be God in the classical sense.
I’m thinking more like cloak.
I absolutely agree! However, I firmly believe that a personification is an abstraction to represent something we cannot understand. And something that cannot be understood cannot be written down.
Gender: Male Location: Southern Oregon,
Looking at you.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: We're All Theists
I realize that you are joking, but the Tax Code can be understood. Sure you will loose your mind, but it can be done.
An example of something that cannot be understood or known is the precise location and velocity of an electron. The more you know about the location, the less you know about its velocity, and visa-versa. Therefore the precise location and velocity of an electron at any moment of time cannot be known, and therefore cannot be written down.
God is the same way, the more you know about God, the less real God seems to be. Therefore, if you knew everything about God, then God would not exist.
I'm pretty sure this completes the circle. I'm 100% sure we have a "We're All Atheists" thread, and relatively sure there's an agnostic equivalent as well.
We're all everything, you guys. We can close down the forum now.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Well if it is a machine it's a machine that possesses aspects of consciousness (because our consciousness can't come from nowhere) that once upon a time (before the "big bang") were condensed in form more complex than all the people on earth's brains combined.
If consciousness is created by specific particles touching each other in a complex fashion, then before the big bang the universe was more conscious than all of us.
True, consciousness is in many ways a mystery, but shouldn't be exempt from the laws of reason.
What kind of citation do you want? I'd try and find all the biblical references to Gods attributes but I'm not sure how long that would take.
I had explained it in the original post. Whatever the totality of existence is, is the source of everything, and defines what everything is.
It's completely self limited, because nothing else exists to limit it besides itself, which is the most robust definition of "free will" you can get.
It is everywhere, the source of all power, the source of all consciousness, eternal and self sustaining etc etc.
Last edited by BananaKing on Apr 15th, 2014 at 07:18 PM
Among other flaws, you're mistaking size with coherence. Was the universe conscious simply because more particles were present? So does the sun have consciousness? A building? Interstellar gas clouds? They all have an incalculable number of particles touching in a complex fashion.
This is probably your central problem. You're treading over the well-worn path of equating God with the universe. That's great and all, but if everything is God, nothing is. It becomes a worthless term. It doesn't make you a theist if you believe the universe exists. It just means you've watered down the concept of God so much that it has no practical meaning.
This definition of God is also incongruent with 99% of the definitions of God used by, well, anyone. If God is the universe, and nothing else, then yes, we're all theists. But so what? That's not what anyone's religion actually is. That's not what anyone's God is. And anyone who doesn't believe in God is going to tell you they wouldn't call the universe God, they'd just call it the universe. So...how is it at all constructive to posit this?
AFAIK, consciousness is regarded as an emergent phenomenon, but emergent from what? Is it a synergistic result produced from complex organization of matter (ie, living things), or, emergent through complex matter, but ultimately from a transcendent source (ie, a source preceding and beyond the material world)?
Put another way: would you consider yourself a pantheist or a panentheist? (Kindly google for definition of terms).
__________________
Shinier than a speeding bullet.
I don't know how consciousness works, I only know that you can't get something from nothing.
I'd say everything has aspects of consciousness at the very least, just not as finely tuned as us and in many ways they are seemingly more disorganised (even though they are actually more predictable than us).
The reason I said this is that we do all believe in miracles, the unexplainable. But some of us just find some miracles easier to believe than others.
Many monotheists would say they believe that God is all powerful, omnipresent, eternal and the source of all consciousness, and reality does have these qualities. According to the people I've asked the only reason they don't is because they are afraid it would make God look "impersonal".
However, they would be wrong, if God is reality he constitutes 100% of our personal lives, and it explains a lot of morality if he is everything and everyone.
To be honest, I'm often asking myself the same question.
I think I'm somewhere between the two. Ultimately I don't know how it emerges, how can we? I just know that you can't get something from nothing, and if you can, it is arguably not nothing any more.
KMC Community Forums
Apr 6th, 2014 04:05 PM
