I would not say that the void is God. I would say that one took the concept of God and called it the pregnant void. God as a being is an ontological concept to explain the unknown. God is not a form. To call God a being is narrowing down God to our level of understanding.
I would say that God is a personification of the pregnant void. Christianity has this idea of the Holy Trinity, i.e. God as three persons. However we should remember that the term "person" is derived from an ancient word for "mask". Early Christians would have been much more mindful of this than most present-day Christians.
Is God-as-being an explanation of the unknown, or a psychological device for approaching the unknown depths of reality, or a means of explaining away the unknown? For mystic and gnostic types I would say option 2, but for mainstream Christianity I would say option3.
God does not have any of those characteristics unless God wishes to reveal God to humans. I am not sure why the cosmos would have intelligence, nor to a form, God either. Intelligence is basically how one uses what they know, and relates to humans. The void just replaces God and the need for a designer to have more knowledge than his creation. The void does this by negating anything with knowledge.
Reality as we experience it is a complex interplay between subject and object. What I am suggesting is that when God 'chooses' to reveal God to humans, what's actually going on is that those humans are just passing through another stage of their psychological/spiritual evolution - the 'revelation' of God is just another step in developing a fuller understanding of reality. The revelation of God can also be useful at more practical and biological level: for example, the development of the ancient Jewish conception of God as a tribal deity (and the Jews as the "Chosen" people) was conducive to the survival of the Jewish race in the physical world.
Yes, the concept of the void just means that scientist have outsmarted themselves out of knowledge, since the end is just void. Because God is not always present, does not mean he is "gapped". Science nor the void are able to replace God, although the void sounds like a great idea, since God is an unknown. It seems to me that we have gone from nothing to something and then back to nothing. I am sure that even in a technologically advanced world, that is how most people feel all the time.
I wouldn’t count the scientists out just yet. Science has a nifty habit of evolving – both in terms of technical apparatus and paradigms – to answer questions previously considered unanswerable. The problem re God of the Gaps is not that science has shown that God is not always present; the problem is that the advance of scientific understanding has progressively removed areas where a personal divine agent could directly influence reality. Whether it’s the motion of the stars and planets, the origin and development of life, or the factors affecting human behaviour, science has a strong track record of showing that impersonal factors are responsible for phenomena that believers originally claimed were due to personal Divine agency.
The pregnant void is a continuation of this theme of impersonal reality. I suspect that as more is discovered about the void, the more it will become apparent that it contains no room for anything like what we might consider personality. What I propose is that perceived personality and other signs of “God” are actually due to the perception and interpretation of the observer.
I don’t agree that we’ve gone from nothing to something to nothing again; rather, we’ve moved toward more refined conceptions of something and nothing, and we’ve come to realize that the difference between the two is ultimately as illusory as the difference between matter and energy. Keep in mind that I am talking about a pregnant void here, i.e. a void brimming with possibilities and a tendency toward manifesting those possibilities. It is not a dark, nihilistic, sterile void. If it had a motto, that motto would be “Why not?”
If the broader a thing is, the less useful it is, why settle for a void? That seems to have less purpose and meaning than God allowing humans to go it on their own. You are right in that many hold to religion and the church, because God is an alien concept to them. In the beginning God did bring order to the void. Even if that void was God, we are back to God looking within himself and bringing order to nothingness. That God allows humans to look into themselves and create their own meaning would make sense.
A void is not really that broad of a concept. I have already described some of the features this void does (or rather, doesn’t) have. “Void” is a subtle concept as concepts go, because it is meant to describe a non-thing. The concept of “God” on the other hand is not supposed to describe a non-thing; it has a very particular set of implications, not to mention a huge amount of cultural and historical baggage. I should have been clearer on this point in my previous post: what I was trying to say is that if you take a term (like “God” or “family”
with an established range of meaning and then try to stretch the term beyond the bounds of that range, then the more you stretch the less meaningful and useful the term becomes.
I am not worried about questions of purpose and meaning (in the Big Question sense), because such concepts are clearly products of limited anthropocentric perception. We can therefore choose to have whatever purpose and meaning we want - the void literally couldn’t care less. If that meaning and purpose involves communion with divine entities (thought-forms?) in order to establish a sense of inner peace and security, then so be it.
I don’t see it so much as bringing order to nothingness, but more as manifestation spontaneously upwelling from the un-manifest. As I mentioned in my previous post, we are in one particular cosmos/manifestation event, but that does not mean that there aren’t other cosmii/manifestation events which lack what we might call “order”.
Laws are anything but personal. They are brick walls that confine personality. Laws do not have to be set a priori. They normally are the definition of how things work. They are called laws, because they seem to "govern" and never change.
I didn’t say that the “laws” of nature are personal. What I was saying is that the term “law” connotes personality (i.e. as if they were laid down by a King). The apparent permanency and authority of these “laws” might actually be an illusion produced by our limited perception. Keep in mind that human perception is limited by a number of things including our physical senses, intellectual frameworks, brain processing power, cultural values, personal experiences, and time horizons.
I have no problem spreading God too thin. Perhaps life can be too thin also?
You can spread God as thin as you like, but don’t expect any thinking person to buy into it. Imperfect as they may be, conceptual frameworks are one of the best tools available for understanding reality. When you start playing fast and loose with conceptual frameworks and definitions, you forego the ability to have intelligible conversation.
Imo the question about what constitutes life is a whole other topic.
Everything would be natural for God. "Supernatural" and "undiscovered natural means" seem synonymous to me.
I agree with what you say re supernatural vs. natural means. The idea of everything being natural for God is a bit more problematic. One on hand, you’ve solved a key problem with theism, which is how/why an Almighty God would violate natural laws which He Himself set down in order to perform miracles. On the other hand, it begs the question: if the means of the miracle is natural, then why wouldn’t the source of the means be natural as well? Why do we need a supernatural God to be responsible, when the same act could be accomplished by a sufficiently knowledgeable natural being (e.g. a human) or by a fortuitous combination of impersonal natural factors? You might respond that God doesn’t have to be supernatural, but if He is not supernatural then what is it about Him that makes Him God? And if you say that God is all things at all times then you’ve effectively made it impossible to say or discern anything meaningful about God, because we don’t have any not-God to compare with.
It is very ambitious if one does not even define reality outside of one's own self. God is the responsible party, it has nothing to do with me. It is science and logic that are boxed in by Ockham's Razor.
When you make a scientifically testable theory about anything you are, by that very fact, subjecting yourself to Ockham’s Razor and all the other impositions of scientific enquiry. If you refuse to accept these impositions, then you are not practicing science. And if you cannot make your ideas into an independently testable hypothesis, then you have not moved beyond speculation and belief.
I apologize for not braking this down into parts. The mind is separate from matter. If I just took that the physical was a subset of the spiritual, it still goes back to God is all. But it is not any human's view of the spiritual that manufactures what is seen in the physical. I am pretty sure that everything that exist in the physical exist in the "mind" of God. However when one rejects God, all they are left with is the pregnant void.
“Physical”, “spiritual” these are just conceptual tools, not absolute realities. The mind *appears* separate from matter because of our limited perception and cultural conditioning, but the closer you look at reality the less apparent the distinction becomes. The salient commonality of the physical/material and the immaterial is that they are all made up of information.
It seems like the term “void” elicits a negative emotional reaction in you: whereas “God” feels warm and cosy, “void” feels cold and prickly. Certainly Western culture has long encouraged –and still encourages – such perceptions, but that doesn’t mean they’re true. Again the void is not dark, chaotic, sterile or nihilistic. It is before those things and all other things, and it is always brimming with possibility and freedom. I’m not saying that people do or should reject God in favour of the void; I’m saying that people tend to adopt increasingly refined and subtle conceptions of God until they realize that all conceptions of God are personas or “masks” of the primal void.
I would just say that God created the physical, and gave humans the means to have a mind separate from matter, so they can think and reason things out and manipulate the matter around them.
Having a personal relationship with the unknown is already more plausible to me than starting and ending one's life in the void.
See my previous response. Did God also give animals and plants minds so that they could manipulate matter? Or did He only give minds to certain organisms? And why would He give minds to certain organisms and not others?
It is impossible to have a personal relationship with the unknown, because a personal relationship by definition requires 1) personality and 2) knowing. Even Christianity says that people cannot have direct relationships with the unknown, e.g. Jesus Christ declares “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
I am a melancholic depression prone person. Are we supposed to trust in our feelings or in what we know?
Are you saying that you rely on a personal relationship with God to cope with your susceptibility to melancholic depression? Is it possible that your susceptibility to depression is underpinned by some of your most deeply held assumptions? What we feel and what we know can have a big effect on each other. We should probe our feelings to find out why we feel what we feel before we decide whether or not to trust those feelings.
