God and Existence
ChastMastr
Shipmate
From on the “God is not Love” thread:
Video game worlds, virtual reality, or the movie Tron might be useful (though imperfect) analogies. It’s like He’s the creator of the whole system, not someone you can point to, but there. Not “existing” in the sense of being made of pixels or code, which to those beings might be hard to imagine. Another way of putting it would be that I look at God is existing more than we do, if that makes sense. Our own existence, “existence itself” as we know it, is an image of His.
(Tron is an awesome movie, with a lot of Christian parallels… “Oh, my User!” as one of the programs says at one point…)
I do want to emphasize that these are very imperfect analogies.
I do seem to recall priest and novelist Andrew Greeley wrote a book called, I believe, God Game, years ago, in which that analogy was a major theme…
(ETA focused quote, DT Admin)
Gamma Gamaliel wrote: »
Mind you, I could complicate things by saying that in some strands of Orthodox thought, God does not 'exist' in the way we understand the term.
But that would frazzle my brain if I went too far down that route. It's not one I know much about but it seems to be connected with the apophatic emphasis that characterises much Orthodox theological talk.
I'm out of my depth on all that.
Video game worlds, virtual reality, or the movie Tron might be useful (though imperfect) analogies. It’s like He’s the creator of the whole system, not someone you can point to, but there. Not “existing” in the sense of being made of pixels or code, which to those beings might be hard to imagine. Another way of putting it would be that I look at God is existing more than we do, if that makes sense. Our own existence, “existence itself” as we know it, is an image of His.
(Tron is an awesome movie, with a lot of Christian parallels… “Oh, my User!” as one of the programs says at one point…)
I do want to emphasize that these are very imperfect analogies.
I do seem to recall priest and novelist Andrew Greeley wrote a book called, I believe, God Game, years ago, in which that analogy was a major theme…
(ETA focused quote, DT Admin)
Comments
(Also would you mind if I edited your quote to just the last three paragraphs of Gama’s post ?)
Yes, and specifically the Christian God.
arguments against the Ontological proof was that Existence is not a predicate. No, I don't know either.
It’s about what God existing means (e.g. we probably don’t think God existing means there is a 700 feet tall white bearded man sitting on a throne on a cloud - so what do we mean ?)
I'll get back when I've had time to think of an answer that doesn't involve both/ands and the over-egging of puddings.
Suffice to say for now I was party to an intriguing discussion the other day between someone who cited a video where two Orthodox priests in the US opined that God has a body of some kind - but not as we know it - and this prior to the Incarnation, and a priest who strongly disagreed with this idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towing_Jehovah
That’s generally the way I use it as well.
That's what I mean. I don't use "exist" in that restrictive sense. I suppose if asked to make a distinction I'd say "exists as part of the created order" and "exists outside the created order" but I dunno; it just feels a bit "well, obviously".
It's not I don't get the concept. I just don't quite get the narrow definition of "exist" which then requires a completely new definition for "insist" which usually means something along the lines of not being satisfied unless one gets ones own way. "Exists outside and before the created order" may be more of a mouthful but at least it's clear what it means in this context.
I like the film, but remember that the computer world includes the torture and "derezzing" of inhabitants who don't conform to the "official" position regarding belief in the existence of Users.
In the film, the inhabitants of the computer world are essentially the same as the inhabitants of the real world, but operating in a different medium. An inhabitant of the real world (Flynn) who is incarnated in the computer world acquires additional super powers in that world.
To the extent that the inhabitants of the computer world appear to act like moral agents, it seems that evil (and good) in effect entered the computer world through its creators. I'm not convinced such analogies get us very far in the direction of grasping the meaning of more or above regarding the nature of God's existence.
For comparison, suppose we ask whether numbers exist (when people aren't thinking about them). If they do, they have some weird properties. They're not things you could come across; if they exist then they couldn't not exist; they "control" what happens in the world without having any causal effect; and so on. In short, weird.
There are some similar issues going on with with God - if God exists then God's existence is weird in many of those ways.
(Really, it's an attempt to head off a lot of the kinds of misunderstandings that come from thinking that God is eg a version of Jupiter.)
If I may: one thing that helps me is to appreciate that time is a human construct. God is outside of our human time, but Jesus Christ, both human and divine, was born and died within our time. Beyond what we see in Christ, I struggle to even attempt to understand God.
Does it?
Doesn't when I use the word. It just means the thing isn't just a figment of someone's imagination.
I don't think this is true either. Our descriptions of time periods are human constructs, but time itself was happily passing for billions of years before we appeared to construct anything.
I get the point being made by saying “exists” doesn’t fit when applied to God. But it really does seem divorced from what the average person means by saying “God exists.”
Yes—by the bad guys serving the Master Control Program, who is blocking their ability to commune with their Users. It’s very much like religious persecution, with the most powerful program (like Lucifer) trying to take over both the digital world and the real world (“and I was planning on hitting the Pentagon next week… it shouldn’t be any harder than any other big company… but now this is what I get for using humans…”), and defeated by a User who becomes incarnate in the digital world. But we don’t see, at least in the first movie (I need to see the second), persecution by those who believe in and happily serve the Users.
Well, if it doesn’t help you, that’s fine. It has helped me for decades. And it is imperfect, as I said.
I see how the portrayal of an alternate form of existence might help, and I'm trying to understand how it helps with the particular aspects of more or above, as I don't see that the film incorporates any notion of transcendence.
Well, it applies to virtual reality and video game worlds in general. But if the analogy doesn’t help you, then no worries.
Doubt not, brother!
We know a song about that, don't we?
Blessings XX
What do you suppose the brains of Mongol humans told them in, say, the 5th century BCE?
"...For you are God ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever existing, yet ever the same..."
That is a problem of the translation. Saying "ever existing" seems to me to transcend the contingency that I find in "exist". The Greek is simply "αεί ων", with the second word being the same as used in "the One who is" (ὁ ὤν),