Your outer god statement reminds me of Gnosticism. The Demi-Urge and the bigger God beyond the demi-urge who is just and kind and reasonable. Right now, we go back to Switzerland's bad-boy, Juergen Schmiduber who postulates that everything is a program (digitalism) thus, there may have been a programmer analyst, or developer, who made our universe or brought life and intelligence to it (whether standard universe or simulation). In the beginning there may indeed be a Platonic set, somewhere beyond our detection, currently, that started all this activity. I think I was imagining a friendly person (God) who may not live up to the general characteristics that Aquinas or Anselm set forth, but an alien who doesn't control things, or even have the power to do so. Many would not like this description as God, which is the main reason deism failed. It doesn't satisfy either mine or previous generations' view of a supreme mind, it doesn't please the amgdyla part of the brain, neurobiologically speaking. To speak a common American phrase, "it sucks!." I still twiddle with one description of a Boltzmann brain as God, simply because its really smart, comes out of no where, has "false" memories.
Mitch -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 11:30 am Subject: Re: Digest for [email protected] - 4 updates in 1 topic On 15 Jan 2015, at 21:49, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: Bruno, what of a super modern theology that removes God as someone who can be reached by prayer, but an actual intelligence in the universe? I got the idea from Dawkins, actually. That would be an interesting discovery, but would not address any of the metaphysical questions, which would become, where does that actual intelligence come from?, is there an ontological physical universe?, why does that hurt?, etc. Assuming computationalism, we would been led to the same universal person---the person described by the 8 hypostases, which actually lives in all Löbian machines, and so in us, and in some other animals, and presumably in that "actual intelligence in the universe" that Dawkins suggests. That person is not God, at least not the "outer-God", which has some maximal knowledge (arithmetical, or analytical truth, say), but that person inarnatente God locally (by the []p & p; p is global, but []p is local, it might be the set of beliefs that you have when opening the box in Washington). The "[]p & p' mirrors the greek-indian "inner god". It can be seen as the outer-god, made amnesic, and looking through your eyes/bopy (locally). It is the discovery of the arithmetical truth by itself, but apparently it seems it has to relativize itself to make sense (there are a lot of open questions there). Bruno -----Original Message----- From: Ronald Held <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jan 15, 2015 1:00 pm Subject: Re: Digest for [email protected] - 4 updates in 1 topic Yes On Jan 15, 2015 12:55 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: [email protected] Google Groups Topic digest View all topics Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics? - 4 Updates Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics? Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>: Jan 15 05:40PM +0100 On 14 Jan 2015, at 20:02, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote: > Sure, why not, for you it works, but many also have their own > definitions and doctrines… and there is the rub. Everyone is talking > about god, but the word means different things to different people. Really? I know only atheists to refuse the definition given by Samiya. > If we want to rigorously define the conceptual meaning of god then I > believe it should be possible to use the language of math and logic > to make a more compelling argument for science. With Samiya definition, you can already prove that a machine cannot distinguish God from Arithmetical Truth. (Actually, a machine cannot even distinguish God, or arithmetical truth, with sufficiently big part of arithmetical truth). > seek to find a way to speak of this mystery that uses rigorous > symbolic language of math and logic. Otherwise it is just a bloody > (not so) merry go round…. And round, and round. I disagree. I think it is a good start. Then we can add assumption(s) (like computationalism, or materialism, etc) and see what could look like that God in those theories. We have less problem today, because mathematical logic shows how to talk about non nameable thing, and God, as a substantive used as a fuzzy name, is only a pointer. If we drop the word ---, tomorrow, we might go round and round on "---". Theology *is* by definition the search for a theory of everything. Today physics fails, as it cannot unify the quantum facts and the gravitational facts, and actually does not address many other problem like consciousness, afterlife, souls, etc. Bruno > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>: Jan 15 05:47PM +0100 On 14 Jan 2015, at 20:32, meekerdb wrote: > is power" or "God is a bearded dude in the clouds" They are just > instances of a simple formula: "I think X is really important and > deserving of your adulation. So God is X" Not at all. When we say "God is money" we do a metaphor. No one would defend the idea that money is the origin of the universe/consciousness. When we say God is the unknown reason of the universe/consciousness, we provide a definition. >> Do you believe in a source of reality beyond the apparent physical >> reality we find ourselves in now? > No. I don't "believe IN" anything. I entertain hypotheses. Good. But you don't always talk like that. Sometimes it looks like you do believe that our origin is physical. Bruno > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>: Jan 15 06:23PM +0100 On 14 Jan 2015, at 22:56, meekerdb wrote: >> God exists, rather than being a true atheist who would "believe IN" >> "no theistic god exists" > I don't believe any theistic God exists - and so I'm an a-theist. Usually atheists believe that there is no theistic God. If you are agnostic, then let us continue the research, and let us not decide in advance the degree of theistic-ness of god. BTW, how would you define "theistic". If it means "santa Klaus", I am atheist too, but consider that trivial and uninteresting. No serious theologian believes in Santa Klaus. And yes, many theologian are not serious, but this is due to the contingent fact that people blasphemize all the time (i.e. use God for personal power purpose (the most irreligious thing to do according to *many* theologian and normally all scientist). Theology gives power. Fake theology gives fake power. The problem is that fake power works better, in the short term, and needs much less effort, because it needs only gullibility/lack of education and training in logic, where the non fake theology asks for serious effort and work. I have a question, thinking about you being an a-theist. Is the God of Anselmus theistic? Does Gödel's formalization of Anselmus formalize a theistic God? In fact, if you are "only" an agnostic atheist, then it seems even more weird to me why you have vocabulary problems in the field of theology. I have no problem using "toy theology" for what ideally arithmetically sound finite creatures (machines, numbers) can eventually believe, and intuit, and observe, about themselves and their possibilities. It is then obviously interesting to compare this with what humans believes about themselves. Bruno > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>: Jan 15 06:38PM +0100 On 15 Jan 2015, at 00:45, meekerdb wrote: >> Having no beliefs is agnostic. > No, an agnostic not only doesn't know, but thinks it's impossible to > know, per #5 below. Those are "or", and that meaning of agnostic is technical, and put out of its context. That is because atheists want to include the agnostics. I comply and distinguish the strong atheist (non agnostic) from the weak atheism (can be agnostic). But I point that the difference between string and weak atheism is far bigger tha between string atheism and christianism (which for a mathematician is just about the same main belief in Aristotle conception of reality). By allowing agnostic to be a form of atheism leads to trivializing the term, and is very misleading on the meaning of strong atheism. Better to accept that science = agnosticism in all direction, be it matter, god, equality between matter and god, or difference between matter and god. We start from scratch using some general assumptions. The interesting question is not god exists or not. the interesting question is "is the physical universe the reality, or is it an aspect or mode of a deeper/simpler reality". Bruno > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Back to top You received this digest because you're subscribed to updates for this group. You can change your settings on the group membership page. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it send an email to [email protected]. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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