The Paradoxical Existence of God

[ZhangA]

If god existed,

 

we would never be able to comprehend him.

 

If we could comprehend him,

 

he would no longer be god.

 

 

God is a being that exists beyond our universe.

 

If god existed in our universe then he would have the laws of the universe applied to him,

 

he then is no longer god.

 

As a being that exists beyond our universe,

 

we would never be able to comprehend him as he is beyond the universe and everything we understand.

 

How can we comprehend something that exists beyond the universe?

 

That is like saying, how can a blind child from birth comprehend colour?

 

 

If you can comprehend him, then he is part of the universe.

 

He is then no longer god.

 

It's like explaining to a blind child what colour is,

 

once this blind child comprehends colour, he/she is no longer blind.

 

 

When I say comprehend, I also mean to "know of".

 

You can't "know" god, because everything we know is shaped by this universe.

 

God is beyond the universe so he is beyond everything we "know".

 

To explain this idea using my analogy,

 

How can a group of blind people prove that colour exists without previous knowledge of colour?

 

You can not prove that god exists,

 

because once you do, he longer is god.

 

 

To sum up the idea I am trying to put forward,

 

People will never be able to prove god's existence,

 

the more you try to say there is a god, the less godly he becomes.

 

Yes, it doesn't disprove a "god",

 

but it disproves any idea of god that humans have right now of him

 

because we are incapable of "knowing" such a being.

 

 

We are a community of blind people trying to prove to each other what colour is.

 

[John Cuthber]

"It's like explaining to a blind child what colour is,

 

once this blind child comprehends colour, he/she is no longer blind."

To be blunt, that's bollocks.

The kid would still walk into walls.

[Kturbo]

I don't understand your paradox in relation to God's existence.God can and has revealed himself to mankind through religion and science addition to the fast universe we see.The very fact that God is God means nothing can be applied to him as well as everything that is good can be applied to him.God can be in this universe without anything about the universe being applied to him because he is God.Because he is God he came and walked among us and we did not die in his presence as well as he can reveal himself as he truly is and we would die in his presence.Can we do anytthing to ever stop God being God.

[jspsfx]

I think the problem is that existence is something human beings attempt to measure and confine. Matter exists as far as humans are concerned. We spend billions of dollars and countless hours trying to describe these factions of material existence with mathematics.

 

"God", as i see it in this age, is only the culmination of thousands of years of spiritual belief that has clashed with prescription to material favor.

 

Conceptually we are prideful to imagine we can discuss Gods existence or lack there of. I happen to believe the closest association I can make to what we identify as "God" is the reality that confounds us all. Plot, graph, measure, coordinate the objects you perceive all that you want. God will never be subject to such measurement.

 

Is god real? We're relatively intelligent but if he did we would be too stupid to understand the answer.

[ZhangA]

The paradox of god's existence is that we're unable to imagine such a being beyond the universe and everything we know, so our current idea of god is nothing like the actual "god" whatever that may be. That means christians, muslims, jews are all believing a false idol. Not the true god.

[sweenith]

The paradox of god's existence is that we're unable to imagine such a being beyond the universe and everything we know, so our current idea of god is nothing like the actual "god" whatever that may be. That means christians, muslims, jews are all believing a false idol. Not the true god.

 

 

First, I think you are assuming that our notion of God is entirely a product of our own reasoning/experience/assumptions/etc. . Whereas most theists believe that their concept of God is (at least in part) informed by what God himself has revealed to human beings (via divinely inspired Scripture, for instance). Now, if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then he would have no trouble informing human beings of his existence and his nature, if he willed that. And it's not unlikely that an omnibenevolent being like God would be gracious enough to assist us if we were unable to form an acceptable conception of him via our own limited epistemic resources. So, I don't think it necessarily follows from the fact that God is beyond the universe and our experience that our idea of God must be false. If God wanted us to have a correct idea of him, then that's how it would be.

 

And second, it seems to me that even if you don't know everything that there is to know about X, that doesn't mean that your understanding of X is false. At most, it would only follow that your understanding is incomplete. The same is true with respect to God: I'll grant you that we can't fully comprehend God, since there are innumerable true propositions about God which we don't know, and never will know, by the nature of the case. But that doesn't mean that the things we do understand about God are falsehoods. For instance, it is indisputable that if God existed, then God would be identical to himself (as all things are).

 

What's more: in order for our term "God" to even be meaningful, minimally it has to pick out at least one property (*edit: or set thereof*) which belongs to any being which is God, and to no being which isn't God, for otherwise the term "God" would not differentiate God from anything else. Take human, for example: it differentiates humans from non-humans, in that for any object X such that X is (a) rational, and (b) an animal, X is human; and for any Y which lacks either of those properties, Y is not human (I'm using Aristotle's definition for the argument's sake only). Similarly, we at least have to state what quality or set of qualities would distinguish a God from something else, or we're really not talking about anything at all. I would suggest starting with Anselm's definition: God is that being than which none greater can be conceived (Proslogion).

Edited August 15, 2011 by sweenith

[GateOfRain]

I like paradoxes, seldomly find them though. I like especially to solve them.

 

 

Now, since the scholars have a million different definitions of god, I don't care if he is paradoxical. If someone told me I was fantastically supergreat all the time, I'd probably go against the flow. Probably that's why the world isn't a deoderante

 

 

[MoralScience]

When we talk of god we need to think of the evolution of the concept of god.

We need to examine the world's religions redefining norms and rethinking the attributes of god/gods.

If we study the history of religion we see the evolution of the notion of god from many to one, from women to men, from concrete concepts to abstract ones.

God then is a poorly defined notion but we can be scientific and accurate by admitting that the concept is evolutionary and in the evolution we may note two features: One is that religions improved in norms of kindness and the other that they improved in abstraction of the divine.

 

The Abrahamic notion of the father son covenant is an improvement over the Oedipus complex of the Greek infanticidal and patricidal gods.

So is the notion of 12 Greek Olympians becoming a single authority.

Monotheism evolved from being anthropomorphic to being the abstraction of the worship of the process, we can call it the worship of the unit order, monas.

 

 

To be truly moral we need to reach beyond the limitations of our religions and their obsolete norms, we need to evolve faith in an order or god that is completely abstract and formal.

God is real if theism can be defined by science with the formulas of the process.

 

In my recent book I crossed the last frontier of science by identifying the unconscious,

a psychological adjustment mechanism, as a universal harmonic of emotions, resolving conflicts.

My god is the projection of this inner order to an outer one, which we can all be ecstatic about.

But deep down it is our unconscious, conflict resolution adjustment mechanism.

Morality is a natural science phenomenon.

Religions gradually discovered this process, mystified it and deified it and monopolized their findings in a supremacist manner.

 

Read the validation of the Formal Theory of Behavior through the art exhibits of the Museum of the Creative Process.

There you will see how religions discovered the science of the unconscious conflict resolution process ahead of psychology.

Now though we know all religions are psychological adaptive sociological phenomena with many limitations.

They have evolved norms or conflict resolutions on how to make society into fair and just systems. But their discoveries are partial and complementary of a certain scientific mechanism.

Science now captures this mechanism and asks religions to be accountable to natural law.

 

Science like Prometheus has stolen the fire of the gods and is now seeking to heal the world.

Albert Levis

[rm32644]

No disrespect but the problem with your God defense is typical. "Beyond the universe" is total speculation and without basis and hence meaning. What you need is a solid God hypothesis. You can't starts with what God must have done or what God must control, or why we can't see and hear him. Without a reality based God hypothesis, you don't also have a God theory, since a hypothesis must precede a theory. Without a theory, it is careless science to then form a strong conclusion. There is a valid hypothesis and theory of evolution, which makes that conclusion stronger than a God conclusion, not that they are on the same level, or even in conflict.

 

You could start with a reality based statement of where God might be within this universe, since that should be the only one to concern us Then why God is invisible not only to visible light, but also does not emit, absorb, or reflect any electromagnetic waves from radio waves to microwaves. In your God hypothesis you could attempt to explain why with all of God's powers he does not chose to communicate with everyone, like on CNN, Fox News, apparently he cannot even generate an email posts. And why is the God also totally silent? You could also include how a God could be invisible yet intelligent, since from all our knowledge of how things work, there is zero evidence of anything that is intelligent being also invisible.

 

It seems to me that on a mythology scale, the currently accepted God within our culture is nothing more than a conveniently redefined statue god. Redefined as invisible and silent, to deflect obvious questions regarding its lack of presence. And not at all defined by scientists, but rather by clerics, versed in the history of "wise" men in the past, so wise that the authors of their ancient text were ignorant of germs and other microbes. We really need to move beyond religion before it destroys our species. Consider that Iran's IRGC is about to go nuclear.

[questionposter]

It's like saying God doesn't exist because we have seen him, therefore no one has faith in him and he can't be real.

[Moontanman]

Ok, I have to ask, which god? I mean seriously, there are a lot of them, I tend to like Zeus, he uses lightning to punish evil people, buildings, trees, hill tops, anything tall..... being tall is obviously evil...

Edited November 4, 2011 by Moontanman

[ponderer]

The existence of anything seems paradoxical.

 

Let us suppose that one thing exists. We ask ourselves how it came into being. This question appears to presuppose that nothing existed before the object since it is the only thing in existence, and without it nothing else exists. We suppose that the object was not made from something else that was destroyed to make it.

 

From this apparent position we must imagine something appearing suddenly out of nothing.

 

This seems paradoxical, improbable, and incomprehensible.

 

There is a solution to this apparent paradox. We may argue that something old was destroyed to make the thing we asked about but that starts an endless series of question about where the previous thing came from. At some point we argue there must have been a first thing that was made without destroying something older to do it. Where did that come from?

 

So, this approach fails to satisfy, because it does not really answer the question how you get something out of nothing. It just dodges the question.

 

Perhaps we can redefine the meaning of nothing.

 

Let us say that something has no fixed dimension and no fixed form, yet at any given instant it has form and dimension. Now let us say you have a whole lot of such things, and that their forms and dimensions intermingle destructively and constructively. Without periodic behaviour time passes but cannot be experienced. Only a series of instantaneous disconnected moments exists. Without consistent form or dimension, nothing has spacial existence. Circumstance do not evolve to new circumstances. Nothing holds form to exist and there is no experience of sequential time, and linear dimensional space.

 

So we have shifted the paradox to something else. A sort of existence without existence. This approach might be more acceptable if

we imagine some sort of governance for the transitional movement of such random geometry, for its motivational expression and responsive behaviour. The governance would have to prevent persistent form from arising and yet under very special circumstance allow persistent form to arise.

 

If we suppose that transitional geometric shapes might be partially shielded from disruption, and partially vulnerable to disruption, we might imagine a dimensionless lake of endlessly abortive form taking, where shapes step on each other to form preventing any shape from succeeding in forming. Eventually some exceedingly rare combination works to hold a persistent form of sufficiently high dimension and of such shape that it cannot be assailed from any side, and corrupted by any other surrounding geometry.

 

Here we suggest that physical existence is dependent on persistent geometry, which may form out of a paradoxical nothingness, a sea of varying and transitionally dimensioned and shaped indistinct non-persistent geometry. Persistence would depend on the expression of a rare unique stable geometric configuration.

 

What do you call something that has a paradoxical almost existence, of frustrated shape taking, where one expression steps on any other in the way?

 

I think it's called The Lake of Fire.

[Moontanman]

The existence of anything seems paradoxical.

 

Let us suppose that one thing exists. We ask ourselves how it came into being. This question appears to presuppose that nothing existed before the object since it is the only thing in existence, and without it nothing else exists. We suppose that the object was not made from something else that was destroyed to make it.

 

From this apparent position we must imagine something appearing suddenly out of nothing.

 

This seems paradoxical, improbable, and incomprehensible.

 

There is a solution to this apparent paradox. We may argue that something old was destroyed to make the thing we asked about but that starts an endless series of question about where the previous thing came from. At some point we argue there must have been a first thing that was made without destroying something older to do it. Where did that come from?

 

So, this approach fails to satisfy, because it does not really answer the question how you get something out of nothing. It just dodges the question.

 

Perhaps we can redefine the meaning of nothing.

 

Let us say that something has no fixed dimension and no fixed form, yet at any given instant it has form and dimension. Now let us say you have a whole lot of such things, and that their forms and dimensions intermingle destructively and constructively. Without periodic behaviour time passes but cannot be experienced. Only a series of instantaneous disconnected moments exists. Without consistent form or dimension, nothing has spacial existence. Circumstance do not evolve to new circumstances. Nothing holds form to exist and there is no experience of sequential time, and linear dimensional space.

 

So we have shifted the paradox to something else. A sort of existence without existence. This approach might be more acceptable if

we imagine some sort of governance for the transitional movement of such random geometry, for its motivational expression and responsive behaviour. The governance would have to prevent persistent form from arising and yet under very special circumstance allow persistent form to arise.

 

If we suppose that transitional geometric shapes might be partially shielded from disruption, and partially vulnerable to disruption, we might imagine a dimensionless lake of endlessly abortive form taking, where shapes step on each other to form preventing any shape from succeeding in forming. Eventually some exceedingly rare combination works to hold a persistent form of sufficiently high dimension and of such shape that it cannot be assailed from any side, and corrupted by any other surrounding geometry.

 

Here we suggest that physical existence is dependent on persistent geometry, which may form out of a paradoxical nothingness, a sea of varying and transitionally dimensioned and shaped indistinct non-persistent geometry. Persistence would depend on the expression of a rare unique stable geometric configuration.

 

What do you call something that has a paradoxical almost existence, of frustrated shape taking, where one expression steps on any other in the way?

 

I think it's called The Lake of Fire.

 

 

Nothing can not exist....

[Ophiolite]

The existence of anything seems paradoxical.

<snip>

This seems paradoxical, improbable, and incomprehensible.

It is much more likley a consequence of two things: our considerable ignorance and our limited intellects.

 

 

 

Here we suggest that physical existence is dependent on persistent geometry, which may form out of a paradoxical nothingness, a sea of varying and transitionally dimensioned and shaped indistinct non-persistent geometry. Persistence would depend on the expression of a rare unique stable geometric configuration.

Do you have any evidence at all for such a suite of 'entities'.

 

What do you call something that has a paradoxical almost existence, of frustrated shape taking, where one expression steps on any other in the way?

 

I think it's called The Lake of Fire.

So, in essence you are stringing together some ill defined thoughts about ill defined nothingness and tying it neatly to a religious concept just because it appeals to you. I don't think that will have many buyers.