It's true that people's ideas of gods have changed over time, but I think the dictionary reflects the current attitude of most major world religions today.

@skado Well, if they base the definition on religious beliefs, they'll never publish an accurate one.

“Everything” when regarded as a single thing is an abstraction, like for example, “public opinion” is not an entity as such, but public opinion certainly is a force to be reckoned with, so it can’t be said to not exist, just because it is an abstraction. And giving it a persona and a name is only a linguistic shortcut; a user-friendly interface if you will, like Father Time, Mother Nature, etc.

“You seem to be assuming that a creator being with self-awareness and intent is necessary.”

Why does it seem that way to you? I haven’t mentioned self-awareness or intent. That would fall under the question of God’s nature. I have addressed only God’s existence.

@skado If there is no self-awareness and no intent, it is simply mindless energy; so, why call it a god?

@Joanne
Why not? That's how it behaves. For all practical and experiential purposes, it functions as a god. It created us. It has rules we must follow or suffer consequences. It gives us sustenance, and a home that's well-suited to our needs, and it receives whatever is left of us when we die. Humans anthropomorphize abstractions and inanimate objects all the time. It's a linguistic shorthand that is expedient as well as harmless if you don't make the mistake of reifying it. Why should Homo sapiens not give its hurricanes human names? "Dorian" is a lot more user-friendly handle than something scientific and impersonal like "TH19c011P3627." Though no modern person is likely to then think Dorian has self-awareness or intent, but they're also not likely to regard it as a non-existent entity. It's real, and it's more powerful than us. It cannot be denied, no matter what we name it. We may as well name it something we can relate to.

@skado Well then, we might as well just name this energy "Fred."

Everything is just a natural consequence of energy taking different forms over vast amounts of time. And, when we use the word "God" we think of a being with consciousness (or consciousness itself) with self-awareness, will, volition, etc that is something to be loved, feared, worshiped--and is the source of morality. I simply see no reason to call this energy "God."

@Joanne
It seems that it’s human nature to assign agency to things that are, in fact, only abstractions. My point is, that it is the assumption of agency that is the error, not the fact that the abstraction exists. So, yes, we could call it Fred, but Fred doesn’t carry any suggestion of supremacy, whereas the word god does. And supremacy, in this case, just refers to an abstraction describing the largest, most all-inclusive “thing” imaginable. Just because the majority of the populace then instinctually applies an assumed layer of agency to this abstraction, doesn’t mean we are required to follow suit.

My sentiments exactly.

I feel completely free to ignore the accepted Xian concept of god. A broader reading of history and philosophy provides many other concepts to choose from. Why do you volunteer to assign such authority to popular Christian opinion?

@skado Is it your goal to demonstrate a philosophical version of god to challenge the prevailing Xian version of god as a benevolent father? If so, have at it, hoss but since god isn't a philosphical concept to those who believe in him -- and they're the ones you'd have to convince -- I fail to see what you think you've demonstrated.

I get where you're going with this; you're offering a more rational explanantion for "god" -- if it's even necessary to have any version of a "god" -- but no true believer is going to be swayed by it.

@Sgt_Spanky
Fair question. I suppose I’m not so much trying to sway fundamentalist believers as I am trying to reach what I would call fundamentalist non-believers; the people who have been able to see that the fundamentalist, or literalist, interpretation of a god is not rationally tenable, but who are still operating under the assumption that the fundamentalist’s god is the only interpretation available for acceptance or rejection.

I agree that fundamentalists aren’t likely to be swayed anytime soon by my view (although many of the people on this site were believers at one point, so something eventually caught their attention) so I’m not investing my energies at that level. I know I, myself, could not have come to where I find myself now without first having gone through the stage of total rejection of fundamentalism, so I don’t expect others to.

What I eventually came to, though, is the idea that there is a path of development that extends beyond basic rejection of fundamentalism. And it’s not a new idea. I didn’t invent it. It is the perspective that, when interpreted metaphorically instead of literally, the ancient wisdom traditions finally reveal their esoteric secrets, and, much to my continued amazement, they are all in perfect sync with well-established science.

The ancients weren’t the dummies we’ve come to think they were. They were much more persecuted than even today’s atheists, so they had to embed their wisdom in verse that could satisfy the fundamentalists, and yet still carry the encoded insights they wished to preserve.

Today, we would call their observations Psychology. But the Psychology they understood, and practiced, has yet to be fully described by our modern Psychology. But the whole business was about regulating one’s own psychology in order to bring about a permanent stage of cognitive development characterized by constant deep contentment, regardless of material circumstances.

It appears to me that the only people who could make use of these insights are those who have at least already escaped the grip of fundamentalism.

@TheMiddleWay Nice try there my friend BUT the dictionaries have words such "Chimera" in them plus a description of what a "Chimera" was/is BUT, here's the cruncher, A "Chimera" IS a creature of myth and legend, and just like god, no-one has either ever seen one nor found any evidence that it existed.
Ergo, just because something is defined in WORDS does NOT mean that it MUST exist or have existed.

@TheMiddleWay Yes, a dictionary CAN define what 'god' is just as it can also define what a 'Chimera' was thought to look like BUT those definitions merely suggest that those things were once thought to be real and, as a clear, thinking, well educated human being I have learned that simply describing something in dictionary such as a god or a Chimera does NOT make it a reality.
Do you not agree?

Thanks for that excellent quote. I am in full agreement with Sagan on this. But it was called God for a long time before it was called Universe. So the sequentially more appropriate question might be What does the word Universe add to the conversation? How does prohibiting the longer-standing, designator, only to replace it with another, add substance (as opposed to style) to the conversation? Why should the popular opinion of the masses of relatively undereducated people outrank the likes of Spinoza, Einstein, and Sagan?

@skado I think it became necessary to add in the "universe" word-descriptor when they realized that the god of Spinoza et al. was not what most people referred to as a god. This "god" was impersonal and not consciously aware of existence (or maybe just not conscious, depending on whom you ask). Gods and goddesses, up to this point, had been embodied in some fashion. They were physical and separate identities from the universe. Even the Abrahamic god was somehow separate from the universe as it could interact with various aspects of reality and not with others. I know, that omnipresent thing puts a bit of a question mark here, though it seems that wasn't always the case, according to their mythology. And why should we question such experts? They are describing a relatively new phenomenon (or at least in a relatively new way). Plus, they are experts, not omniscient gods, we should question their claims to come to a better understanding of what we call reality. We have seen where Einstein was wrong about physics, why not consider that the above listed may be wrong on other things as well. (I know, I stayed away from language theories as that is a heck of a rabbit hole, though I would likely start around Habermas or Wittgenstein.)

@PadraicM
To value the insights of the educated over the uneducated is not to assign them the status of infallible gods, but just to say there’s no reason, that I can see, to claim that the uneducated opinion should command greater respect than the educated one.

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

@skado And your quote shows where I was getting around to with the introduction of language and meaning making. If you boil the words down so far that they become effectively meaningless, what do we have? Well, you referenced the "supreme being," but we are left with words again as we could talk about the "supreme human" and the "supreme human in speed" and the "supreme human in strength," etc. At some point, you start to realize that everybody is supreme at something and thus would be the god of that something at which they are supreme. Do we then need to toss out any notion of superlatives as simply saying the "god of X" would cover that? The word "universe" then adds in an element of distinction (which may be wrong if we ever discover other universes, thus a multiverse as some hypothesize), as do any superlatives.
More to your reply to me above, that was about different readings of the same words. I read the "Why" as a potential looking for reason (those great minds might be wrong) where you seem to have meant it as more of a statement that popular opinion does not equal correctness. This is why these details matter, the social construction behind language adds meaning that positions the language as information instead of mere data that is open for interpretation. When it is reduced to data, we can have misinterpretations (when it isn't, we can still have this result). In short, the context and the details (including adding in new words ore re-understanding how words are used) that matter in language.

@PadraicM

My intention is not to use the malleability of language to make something look like something it’s not, but rather to say that the accepted definitions of those words allow various meanings, and by tracing the etymology we can catch glimpses of insight.

What defines words?

@skado I think the Illuminati.

Kidding

@TheMiddleWay
I agree wholeheartedly that dictionaries are next to useless for establishing the substance of facts, but that of course is not what I’m trying to do here. I specifically say that should be left to science. What I am addressing the accepted range of legitimate meanings of words, and for that, surely dictionaries should be allowed a seat at the table, even if other sources are allowed as well.

As to muddling, I am reminded of the inverted accusations of the purveyors of economic neoliberalism which claim Thatcheresquely that "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money” to which my response is The trouble with Capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s labor.

So who is actually doing the muddling here? There has been talk of god-as-universe as far back as the ancient Greeks, through the flowering of reason in 16th and seventeenth centuries, and up to our own lifetime by brilliant, and often very “religious,” thinkers and scholars like Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Huston Smith, Thich Nhat Hanh, Karen Armstrong, Chris Hedges, Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, Joseph Campbell, and so on.

As far as I’m concerned, these thoughtful people are doing the work of unmuddling the superstitions of the general populace, and the power-mongers who have stolen the metaphoric language of our common heritage.

Whatever labels we prefer to use, the totality of reality is, and most likely always will be, well beyond our full understanding. It truly is our source, and it will have its way with us. Those are the facts that humans of all time periods have recognized, respected, and personified as gods.

@TheMiddleWay
My point isn’t to redefine God by way of tautology, but rather to suggest that, whether they understood it or not at the time, what the ancients were responding to, and personifying as “God” was, from the very beginning, just the combined forces of the natural world. It’s not about what they or we “believe” but about what the real forces were in that relationship. And that the realization of this can precipitate real human progress, where now only tribal gridlock rules.

@skado This is the heart of the problem I have with this post, since the observation that there are real issues behind the mythologies of the gods etc. people created in the past, could not be more true. To the point however that it is banal if not almost tautological. Of course, people in the past were attempting to address problems with real things. What matters, and is interesting, however, is why the false answers people created for those problems, continue to persist, and why they persist even when completely discredited.

The main reason being, that human culture is by its very nature ultra conservative and anti-progress, since the ideas which persist in it, are by natural selection, those ideas which are good at persisting despite being challenged by true observations. Human culture is indeed by its nature especially anti truth, since its main function is to protect people against ideas they find threatening. And since threatening lies are usually easy to disprove, even within the framework of other less threatening lies they are little true threat. The truth however is much harder to dismiss and therefore stronger more complex cultural traditions have grown up to shield against it. Human progress will always be blocked until all people realize that recieved culture is not somewhere to find truth.

@Fernapple
Ok, but not sure what that has to do with this post.

@skado Sorry although it does relate to the post where you quoted. “What is God’s nature?” It was mainly triggered by your last reply to TheMiddleway.

What does the word “God” mean to you?

@skado
It refers to a higher power. One that has any view of the lives we lead and has an impact on them.

@Athena
Ok, my point here is that, by some reckoning, your definition could be seen to fit in either camp described in the Sagan quote offered by PadraicM above. And that Einstein, and Spinoza before him, and others before and after them, realized that those physical laws, the laws that science has described, were the real forces behind what people were personifying as God.

@skado
Then let's call it science!

@Athena
I’m happy to do that with you, but with my brothers and sisters who prefer to personify their abstractions, I’d rather do the work of translation than the work of war.

@skado

Then it's a personal God they're speaking about and I don't speak that language.

@Athena
We’re all free to learn new languages or not, as we please, and we’re all free to do the work of building bridges or walls, as we please.

@skado

True. I prefer to spend time with people who apply critical thinking, which happens to be a large group of people with whom I've cultivated close friendships over the years.

There are are lots of these people in Canada! It may be different where you live and you can compromise your values as you choose.

@Athena
I would describe my friend group the same way, but getting along with people who think like me is not a problem.

The fact remains that wherever one lives, there are people in the world who don’t think like me, and whose thoughts and actions do nevertheless impact the world I live in.

Now, however much of one’s time a person cares to devote to dealing with tensions in the world is purely a matter of personal preference (until it’s not) but to whatever extent one chooses to engage that problem...
there are different approaches available.

Our attitudes and actions can contribute to war or they can contribute to peace. Peace-building does not in any way compromise any of my values. What it compromises is my comfort, and until I become acclimated, it can sometimes compromise my identity.

@skado

I understand and that makes sense.

I don't have to encounter people's differences in ideology very often. It's not really discussed, mostly because Canada is fairly secular and the topic of religion doesn't come up. I won't engage with people who want to argue about belief. They can choose to believe what they wish; I just don't include them in my inner circle.

I am all for keeping peace until someone crosses a line with respect to my non belief.
For example, an acquaintance quite recently kept saying she would pray for me and my mom, who has been I'll for sometime. I let it go once, twice, three times and said thank you. At one point I reminded her that I don't believe in prayer, that I'm an atheist, and she could spend her time praying for someone for whom it would matter. She insisted her prayers were working and and kept saying "God bless you."
What I find about people's beliefs, whether it's God or "the universe", is that they feel entitled to respect, but don't offer the same. I feel offended when my good fortune is attributed to "the universe."

For me, peace is when it's a non issue.

@Athena
Right - when people just trade in the word God for the word Universe but still retain their servile attitude toward it and their attribution of agency, it’s every bit as nauseating! I’m just glad the Universe doesn’t leave religious tracts under my windshield wipers!

Correct. I don’t look to “Christians” to define my worldview.

@Bobby9
Why do you prefer Judeo-Christian starting points over all others?