Reply to post: Define "God"

God Exists?

steelpillow Silver badge

Define "God"

"That from which I came, that in which I dwell, and that unto which I shall return". Is that a reference to some universal deity or to the physical Universe? The answer to that depends on your religious perspective.

How does my personal inner experience relate to the information patterns carried by my brain activity? According to Integrated Information Theory, "consciousness is what information feels like once it reaches a certain kind of complexity". But how does that inner experience arise? This is the "hard problem" in the philosophical theory of mind. Neither symbolic information nor experience is a material thing and therefore neither is amenable to the physical sciences or their chemical and biological derivatives. Does that mean they are independent planes of existence or are all three inseparable in the same way that the multiple dimensions of spacetime are?

Whether you call the Ultimate Reality God, the Multiverse, the M-Brane, Allah, Jehovah, the Tao, Brahmin or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is all the same to me, I care only how It and I relate to each other. Only the thoughtless attribute any anthropomorphic features to it, and that is one thing where both Islam and Judaism have stayed a step ahead of modern Christianity (which fell into the trap of idolatry around the start of the medieval era).

IMHO the question "Does God exist?" is merely a way of hiding from the fact that you have no idea what that "God" is or what "existence" might mean in that context. Only the thoughtless deny Its existence without stopping to think seriously about whose God they are denying. Most atheists fall into the trap of denying a straw God conjured by their own prejudices, fondly imagining It to be every believer's God.

Our OP appears to have done what so many of us do, escaped from the one trap only to fall into the other.

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