You're arguing against a personal god right there. Nicely done. I agree with everything you said.
It's hard to argue that there are graceful gods given all the terrible things that happen.
Define “personal god”. And then show your definition to be absolute. Please don’t skimp on your answer.
Regards,
MG
A personal god is definable in multiple ways, but in this context, it refers to a divine being which actually has grace, ie the topic of this thread. I am arguing in this thread that the idea that humans could assign any emotions to god-like beings is incoherent. Arthur C. Clarke's idea of advanced technology being equivalent to magic for the unadvanced is also true morally speaking. Bacteria cannot even begin to comprehend human actions because they are not capable of beginning to perceive even a billionth part of the activities of even a single human.
To say that a demigod or a god has "grace" would be like a paramecium making judgments about humans. It's absolutely incoherent.
It certainly could be, that a sufficiently superhuman intellect would be indistinguishable, to humans, from madness or mindlessness. Assuming that this would have to be so, though, might itself be only a failure of our limited imaginations.
Perhaps what happens, as one moves up the scale of intellect past a certain point that lies somewhere below us, is not that everything changes wildly but that unimaginable new things get added, while retaining some recognisable features from lower levels. This is certainly true for us, anyway. We do retain a lot of animal instincts, a lot of the same kinds of automatic reactions to things that animals have. We are not totally different kinds of beings from, say, dogs. We are beings like dogs, with completely un-dog-like stuff added on top of that. Some dog is still there in us; it's just not the whole of us.
How much from our level would still remain after really a lot of that kind of addition? Would only its proportion in the whole divine intellect matter? That would surely be negligible, a drop in an infinite ocean. Or would its absolute amount still matter, providing an adequate interface for us, even if a near-unity fraction of God remained incomprehensible to us?
That's still leaving aside the issue of whether God is even on a continuum with us, however far removed along it, or whether God is just a qualitatively different kind of entity from us with no extrapolation possible between us. As I like to put it, we are not to God as a character is to its author; we are not even to God as a semicolon is to the author; we are to God as a semicolon is to God. We are just patterns, while God is the maker of patterns. Even if pushing upward along a continuum retained a human-like fraction, jumping to God might not.
Some degree of continuity between us and God is nonetheless possible in principle, I think. Something with which I often struggle, professionally, is the differences between geometry in two and three dimensions, and in four or more dimensions, up to large kinds of infinity. Some things that we think of as essential aspects of geometry really change with the number of axes. The simplest example I know is rotation. Rotation exists and is important in any number of dimensions greater than one, but it is only in three dimensions that rotation can be thought of as "rotating about an axis". The general rule is that rotation is "rotating within a plane", just as in two dimensions, actually. Only in three dimensions does there happen to be a one-to-one relation between planes and axes, so that you can think about the rotation as having an axis. Rotation that isn't a turning around an axis seems bizarre and hard to imagine, for us—or for me, anyway. Yet on the other hand we can describe a rotation in any number of dimensions perfectly well, using nothing more complicated than we use for rotations in a simple plane, if we just focus on the right plane.
Geometry even in infinitely many dimensions is still a human concept, so this example may just be missing the point. It's still an analogy for the optimistic hypothesis that God is not in fact completely alien to us. Perhaps some subset of the divine feature set really has been ported down to our infinitely more limited hardware, even if the reverse engineering is completely impossible for us. This, at any rate, is the hypothesis of the theistic religions that believe that God made us. Under their hypothesis, we and God are not just randomly drawn cards from the big deck of possible beings. God made us, and made us "in God's own image".
Whatever that means, it must have been a tough job, to perform anything that could remotely be considered a faithful port, of even a radically reduced feature set, across such a difference in architectures. That's why God gets the big bucks, though, I guess, for pulling off hard jobs like that.
While that's a fun explanation, I think that you are gilding the lily of religion. Universalist, nonfundamentalist faiths could accept your ideas here, but I think the it just doesn't jive with traditional faiths. But that is definitely a subjective opinion.
Besides specks of dust being unable to contemplate divine beings' will, I think that there are severe problems with defining what a god is or how many there are.
I don't think it's logical for a theist to deny the possibility that there are multiple or even numerous creator beings that made our galaxy, solar system, and planet. How could someone prove there's only one? I don't think you can.
Additionally, it's also possible that any of our creators might be dead. Or if alive, simply not omniscient or omnipresent. That would explain a lot I think. And if we somehow were to encounter noncorporeal beings capable of superluminal travel, I have no doubt that many, if not most, humans would start worshiping them, even if they were known to be mortal.
The concept of gods in almost all present religions is severely limited and absurdly anthropomorphic, especially if we're talking about timeless beings.
But just for discussion, let's say there is an eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient god. I still don't think we could understand it, even if we were part of it.
The human body is made of about 100 trillion cells. If somehow, one of my red blood cells became self aware, it could not possibly understand what my intentions or actions were, even though it is made of my genetic material (made in my image) and is part of me. Trying to claim that we could understand the ideas of an infinite, omnipotent god is infinitely even more illogical than this scenario, in my view.
Could an omnipotent being endow humans with such knowledge? Definitely. But since so many people have wildly different opinions on these matters, the probability that an all-powerful being is revealing things to us seems extremely low.
It certainly could be, that a sufficiently superhuman intellect would be indistinguishable, to humans, from madness or mindlessness. Assuming that this would have to be so, though, might itself be only a failure of our limited imaginations.
Perhaps what happens, as one moves up the scale of intellect past a certain point that lies somewhere below us, is not that everything changes wildly but that unimaginable new things get added, while retaining some recognisable features from lower levels. This is certainly true for us, anyway. We do retain a lot of animal instincts, a lot of the same kinds of automatic reactions to things that animals have. We are not totally different kinds of beings from, say, dogs. We are beings like dogs, with completely un-dog-like stuff added on top of that. Some dog is still there in us; it's just not the whole of us.
How much from our level would still remain after really a lot of that kind of addition? Would only its proportion in the whole divine intellect matter? That would surely be negligible, a drop in an infinite ocean. Or would its absolute amount still matter, providing an adequate interface for us, even if a near-unity fraction of God remained incomprehensible to us?
That's still leaving aside the issue of whether God is even on a continuum with us, however far removed along it, or whether God is just a qualitatively different kind of entity from us with no extrapolation possible between us. As I like to put it, we are not to God as a character is to its author; we are not even to God as a semicolon is to the author; we are to God as a semicolon is to God. We are just patterns, while God is the maker of patterns. Even if pushing upward along a continuum retained a human-like fraction, jumping to God might not.
Some degree of continuity between us and God is nonetheless possible in principle, I think. Something with which I often struggle, professionally, is the differences between geometry in two and three dimensions, and in four or more dimensions, up to large kinds of infinity. Some things that we think of as essential aspects of geometry really change with the number of axes. The simplest example I know is rotation. Rotation exists and is important in any number of dimensions greater than one, but it is only in three dimensions that rotation can be thought of as "rotating about an axis". The general rule is that rotation is "rotating within a plane", just as in two dimensions, actually. Only in three dimensions does there happen to be a one-to-one relation between planes and axes, so that you can think about the rotation as having an axis. Rotation that isn't a turning around an axis seems bizarre and hard to imagine, for us—or for me, anyway. Yet on the other hand we can describe a rotation in any number of dimensions perfectly well, using nothing more complicated than we use for rotations in a simple plane, if we just focus on the right plane.
Geometry even in infinitely many dimensions is still a human concept, so this example may just be missing the point. It's still an analogy for the optimistic hypothesis that God is not in fact completely alien to us. Perhaps some subset of the divine feature set really has been ported down to our infinitely more limited hardware, even if the reverse engineering is completely impossible for us. This, at any rate, is the hypothesis of the theistic religions that believe that God made us. Under their hypothesis, we and God are not just randomly drawn cards from the big deck of possible beings. God made us, and made us "in God's own image".
Whatever that means, it must have been a tough job, to perform anything that could remotely be considered a faithful port, of even a radically reduced feature set, across such a difference in architectures. That's why God gets the big bucks, though, I guess, for pulling off hard jobs like that.
Great stuff, PG. I love your posts.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
