Brent: >That depends on what you mean by "God". As I've pointed out at length, >language is defined by usage and usage says that "God" means an immortal >person with supernatural power who wants, and deserves, to be >worshipped. You want to hijack the word and justify it by referring to >a handful of philosophers who also wanted to hijack the word to gain >popular credence for their ideas which actually had nothing in common >with the meaning of "God" except that it was fundamental in some sense.
BTW, Freeman Dyson writes: 'My favorite version of the multiverse is a story told by the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, who died in 1950. He taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool. In 1937 he published a novel, Star Maker, describing his vision of the multiverse. The book was marketed as science fiction, but it has more to do with theology than with science. The narrator has a vision in which he travels through space visiting alien civilizations from the past and the future, his mind merging telepathically with some of their inhabitants who join him on his journey. Finally, this “cosmical mind” encounters the Star Maker, an “eternal and absolute spirit” who has created all of these worlds in a succession of experiments. Each experiment is a universe, and as each experiment fails he learns how to design the next experiment a little better. His first experiment is a simple piece of music, a rhythmic drumbeat exploring the texture of time. After that come many more works of art, exploring the possibilities of space and time with gradually increasing complexity.' http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/11/08/what-can-you-really-know/ -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
