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Do you believe in God? Why?

A vampire pleads with Jesus and now craves animal blood instead of human blood.

My view of God has evolved considerably over the years.

I have long agreed with Feuerbach's view that God is a human construction. However, more recently I have shifted to argue that God is constructed on first principles from materials available in nature, not as an arbitrary fulfillment of subjective emotional desire.

This means God is the set of natural conditions that are conducive to the flourishing of complex life on Earth. Living in accordance with the will of God therefore by definition supports the flourishing of complexity, which is the real underlying meaning of the religious concept of salvation.

The underlying ethical principle is that complexity is good. That means natural systems that have evolved over millions of years should be seen as sacred. A complex ecological system is more robust against shock, supporting the stability of the earth system. This theology is compatible with the Christian ideas that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the last will be first in the Kingdom of God.

Conventional belief in God as a supernatural entity makes no sense, as its views of God as intentional and personal lack any evidence and are better explained as psychological construction than genuine revelation. Seeing God instead in terms of the natural processes of cosmic order relates better to the available evidence.

"Seeing God instead in terms of the natural processes of cosmic order..."
That sounds like Einstein's conception of God. But why call that a God? It's just there, nothing supernatural.

"That means natural systems that have evolved over millions of years should be seen as sacred."
To me that means they are extremely important, but not worthy of worship although some do so.


(BTW, my confusing original post is a summary of a very short story found in the link in OP.)

Do you believe in God?

LanDroid wrote: ↑Fri Dec 09, 2022 12:33 pm "Seeing God instead in terms of the natural processes of cosmic order..." That sounds like Einstein's conception of God. But why call that a God? It's just there, nothing supernatural.

Hi LanDroid, my view is that theological conceptions of God can be understood as allegory for how humanity connects to the overarching natural processes of cosmic order. So we can retain Christian and other religious language, seeing it as parable for response to actual natural forces that operate largely in the unconscious.

Calling these natural processes God is a convenient way to sum how the anthropic tendency in the cosmos to promote complexity can be imagined in Dante's positive vision of the love that rules the stars. God language is a popular simplification of the deep unknown mystery supporting our cosmic existence.

Now that is a very complex statement! The underlying questions are where our God language comes from and what it refers to. The most plausible answer is that God language serves the social purpose of describing a mystery that is beyond understanding. This mystery does however have attributes that can be considered in both positive and negative ways. For example, we can positively say that our solar system provides the supportive context for life on earth to flourish, and we can look at the natural order to see the details of how our specific location in the universe, planet Earth, has more complexity than astronomy has found anywhere else. On the negative side, attributes that traditionally distinguish the nature of God include that God is not finite, mortal, knowable or visible.

My analysis of how precession of the equinox combines climate cycles and mythology seeks to describe this local order that gets called God. Calling God the supportive local order of the cosmos is a way to ground religious ethics in science.

Calling the mystery God is a way to connect to what we do not know, in faith that we live in a universe that has forces supporting us to flourish that we cannot fully see.

My view is that this whole approach to talk of God harmonises with the underlying hidden intent and meaning and purpose of the Biblical story of how humanity can connect to God. Jesus Christ was invented to personify the Sun, as a symbol of how the divine presence of eternity, infinity, omniscience and omnipotence appears in time, space, knowledge and power. The radical naturalism of this vision was impossible to convey in popular form, and was instead replaced by the supernatural imagination of church theology and worship. Digging beneath the popular distortion can excavate its coherent consistent clarity.

The key to this connection between what is seen in church history and what is unseen in the divine presence of God in the world is the harmonisation between the Bible story and natural science that emerges from analysis of how precession of the equinox provides the cosmology for the overarching Biblical vision of fall and redemption. Precession drives climate seasons, and these climate seasons, marked by the date of the perihelion, match perfectly to the Christian vision of time. In the precession cycle, Christ appeared first at the bottom of the cycle at midwinter and then again as the cycle rises toward a new summer. I explain this cosmology in my recent essay The Physics of Astrological Ages.

If "God" is Robert Tulip's metaphor then, yes, I believe in him/her/it. Otherwise, a definition would be helpful.

And then there is Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy, which has been adopted by Process Theology. God is a process. Nothing supernatural, as LanDroid would say, but since stories of the supernatural are, by and large, signifiers of things transcendent including transcendent values, the continuity of linking to ancient ideas about God has some value.

There are many reasons why people believe in God or a higher power. Some believe in God because they find comfort in the idea that there is a higher power that is responsible for the universe and everything in it. Others may believe in God because they have had personal experiences that they interpret as being signs or messages from a higher power. Still, others may believe in God because they have been taught to do so by their family, community, or culture, and they find meaning and purpose in their belief. Belief in God can also be motivated by a desire to find answers to life's big questions, such as the meaning of life, the nature of the universe, and what happens after death. Ultimately, the reasons for believing in God are complex and varied and may be different for each individual.

The laws of physics do not exist, a theoretical physicist named Sankar Das Sarma argues in a new column published by New Scientist. While we define the laws as the “ultimate laws” of our universe, Sarma says they are merely working descriptions, and that they are nothing more than mathematical equations that match with parts of nature.

...Well, according to Sarma, the laws of physics as we view them are just mathematical equations, we have created to help define certain parts of nature. After all, the reason that we call it theoretical physics, is because it’s all based on theory and equations. As we strive to prove that these laws exist, really all we’re doing is unraveling more detail about how the universe works.

https://bgr.com/science/the-laws-of-phy ... physicist/

Here is Sankar Das Sarma's original article, but subscription required. That article references this earlier one There Are No Laws of Physics. There’s Only the Landscape. by Robbert Dijkgraaf.

Einstein's God probably does not exist.

LanDroid wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 9:02 amThe laws of physics do not exist, a theoretical physicist named Sankar Das Sarma argues...

LanDroid, these weird opinions from Sarma are for me important psychological evidence of the high value of religious faith. The idea that the law of gravity does not exist is so bizarre that only someone totally separated from faith could come up with it, let alone believe it. Gravity is totally obvious once the elliptical orbits and general structure of the universe are observed. This false humility, 'perhaps we are totally wrong', is in truth a form of nihilistic despair, taking intellectual doubt to its absurd logical terminus.

Philosophically, we can ask how we know the universe exists as we observe it. The cold logic of the Sarma insanity reveals that we need axiomatic foundations of systematic logic, statements whose truth is held to be self evident. That the universe exists and that our observation of it is reliable are examples of such self evident axioms, validated by the abundant coherent inferences that rest upon them. The psychology of belief in such axioms has a similar nature to religious faith. And yet the difference is that conventional faith is readily disproved by the observation that conventional myth is better explained as psychological construction than supernatural revelation. Even so, the similarity remains that without faith we have no basis for shared understanding.