Relationship with changeless God is impossible
- Bahman
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Relationship with changeless God is impossible
- LuckyR
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
Not a bad opinion, though many theists will vigorously argue with you on that one. Of course atheists will agree with you that since gods don't exist that you are correct in a way since they (as nonexistents) would never change.Bahman wrote:Relation is about cause and effect. Lets consider two persons who are chatting, first person causes, say something for example, this affects second person, hear what it was said and get affected, the second person react in the same way. God however is changeless since it cannot be affected by us hence making relationship with God is impossible.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
The Christian God is a personal god which means that you can have a relationship with Him. I am not sure about the Islamic Allah or the modern Judaic god.Bahman wrote:Relation is about cause and effect. Lets consider two persons who are chatting, first person causes, say something for example, this affects second person, hear what it was said and get affected, the second person react in the same way. God however is changeless since it cannot be affected by us hence making relationship with God is impossible.
Long long ago Biblical stories were composed of the Judaic or Israelite God walking and talking with people often upon hill tops, and surely the people then had relationships with god. There was even a covenant between God and people after Noah's Flood where God promised not to again punish people .
The idea of changeless God may be due to the Greek, Platonic,(Form of the Good:Form of the True) influence upon Judaism and subsequent Judeo Christianity.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
So be careful what he tells you.
- BardoXV
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
More like the people who tell you about God are irrational, so be careful what you believe.Grunth wrote:God is irrational.
So be careful what he tells you.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
I fail to distinguish a difference between god and reported god. Are not holy books reports?BardoXV wrote:More like the people who tell you about God are irrational, so be careful what you believe.Grunth wrote:God is irrational.
So be careful what he tells you.
- Skania
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
Bahman,Bahman wrote:Relation is about cause and effect. Lets consider two persons who are chatting, first person causes, say something for example, this affects second person, hear what it was said and get affected, the second person react in the same way. God however is changeless since it cannot be affected by us hence making relationship with God is impossible.
This is an interesting question, which goes to the 'eternal'. What would an eternal being be like? Of course we cannot know what the theistic God would be like, but we can still play with the idea.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem about God being lonely in the night and the poet wanting to take God a drink of water. Could such a being have needs? Well, the Christian God supposedly created us and gave us freewill. That does sounds like loneliness, particularly in a creation that can accept or reject the maker. If we accepted and loved God, that could be the real deal to an eternally lonely being.
We might also consider whether the act of creation is change for the creator. Artists and writers in our mortal realm do say that they experience change in the creative process, and I have some little personal experience of this. Maybe we could infer that the act of divine creation is similar? Of course any speculation of this sort is just that, but not without interest.
S.
- DuncanIdaho
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
(As a side note, you could argue that if God is perfect then there is no reason for Him to change, and the point for the relationship is for us to change to be more like Him. That argument doesn’t interest me very much or seem as likely so I won’t dive into that possibility at this moment.)
I would argue that it would be possible to have a relationship with a "changeless" God, if God is a truly eternal being. This may sound contradictory, but it makes sense if you separate how a mortal would perceive eternity and how a truly eternal being would perceive it.
So let's say God is truly eternal, He has existed and will exist for an eternity past and an eternal future. But let's say that He also perceives all of time at the same "time", meaning He is conscious and present in all moments equally without restriction on His ability to act on reality at any point along the timeline without any regard for the order of any changes. This would mean that from our point of view, an eternity would "pass" without the core being of God ever truly changing according to how we saw Him. This would also mean that any number of realities could have or will eventually come and go along His personal timeline, though because we exist within this particular reality we would never be able to interact with any of those timelines. What this means is that by creating this timeline, His interactions with us affect Him and does actually change Him, but since we can only interact with Him from our limited perspective of time we would not be able to perceive these changes since the effect of our interactions will have seemingly been in place before the causes.
For example: Say a loved one underwent a dangerous, live-saving operation a few hours ago. You don’t know at his point if they survived the procedure. You pray that they have survived and will make a full recovery. You find out a few minutes later that they did in fact survive and they will likely make a full recovery. Were they fine when you prayed? Had they actually died, and the past was changed? There is no way for you to know, because from your perspective if the past had been changed you would have no memory of the original past. From God’s perspective this would be no different from interfering with an event that has not yet happened from your perspective, since events that are not in your present have either already happened or have yet to happen, but for Him have happened, are happening and have yet to happen simultaneously.
If we accept this possibility, it would mean that God can be eternal, even “unchanging” from our point of view. Since any change He would experience would change who He is simultaneously through all of our timeline, we could not perceive any real change in who He is giving the illusion of being unchanging. Since the only reality we could know would be His “current” timeline, we can have a relationship with an “unchanging” God that has the capacity to change.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
If God occasionally intervenes as He did in your scenario of the dangerous surgical operation then He would have to make a complete new nature to correspond with a previously impossible surgical outcome. This claim is as true as causality is true.
If causality is not true then God , if He makes order from chaos, would have to employ some other ordering principle. I don't think that anyone can imagine any ordering principle other than causation. I don't refer to simplisitic linear causation. I refer to wholistic necessity.
- Newme
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
Think about what seems more alive - something that grows and changes or something that remains stilland the same?
- OntheHorizon
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
I don't think this follows at all. I am an atheist and the context wherein the statement is found about god not changing is not referencing the inability to respond, or react or move. Further more I myself am not CHANGING by walking across a room. My body is moving and reacting to the environment but that is rightly referred to as changing. It IS me that is moves around the environment and when I do what I myself innately do, that isn't me changing. When my brain sees the floor or objects and my body moves around them that is my body or my essence changing into something new, it's following preexisting patterns and methods that were in fact always a part of me. A conversation between two people does not require that those people be changing. The human brain can hold a conversation all by itself, assessing and responding are built in patterns, not evidence that the brain has become something new.Bahman wrote:Relation is about cause and effect. Lets consider two persons who are chatting, first person causes, say something for example, this affects second person, hear what it was said and get affected, the second person react in the same way. God however is changeless since it cannot be affected by us hence making relationship with God is impossible.
But the idea that god cannot change comes from religious texts that also do not provide the claim that god does not talk or listen or learn or respond, these religious texts are full of examples of him talking, listening, responding and sometimes even learning.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
I can: personality. But that would mean that Creatorship is not an attribute of God, but rather the aggregate of God's infinite, acting nature.Belindi wrote: If causality is not true then God, if He makes order from chaos, would have to employ some other ordering principle. I don't think that anyone can imagine any ordering principle other than causation.
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
In what way is personality acausal?Dark Matter wrote:I can: personality. But that would mean that Creatorship is not an attribute of God, but rather the aggregate of God's infinite, acting nature.Belindi wrote: If causality is not true then God, if He makes order from chaos, would have to employ some other ordering principle. I don't think that anyone can imagine any ordering principle other than causation.
What might God be other than
?God's infinite, acting nature
- OntheHorizon
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
Ok... sorry, correcting typos.OntheHorizon wrote:I don't think this follows at all. ......Bahman wrote:Relation is about cause and effect. Lets consider two persons who are chatting, first person causes, say something for example, this affects second person, hear what it was said and get affected, the second person react in the same way. God however is changeless since it cannot be affected by us hence making relationship with God is impossible.
I don't think this follows at all. I am an atheist and the context wherein the statement is found about god not changing is not referencing the inability to respond, or react or move. Further more I myself am not CHANGING by walking across a room. My body is moving and reacting to the environment but that is NOT rightly referred to as changing. It IS ME that is moving around the environment and when I do what I myself INNATELY DO, that isn't me changing. When my brain sees the floor or objects and my body moves around them that is NOT my body or my essence changing into something new, it's following preexisting patterns and methods that were infact always a part of me. A conversation between two people does not require that those people be changing. The human brain can hold a conversation all by itself, assessing and responding are built in patterns, not evidence that the brain has become something new.
But the idea that god cannot change comes from religious texts that also do not provide the claim that god does not talk or listen or learn or respond, these religious texts are full of examples of him talking, listening, responding and sometimes even learning.
- DuncanIdaho
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Re: Relationship with changeless God is impossible
He would still be capable of real change in spite of this. Any action on His part would change the events following whatever point in the timeline He edited. He would experience this change through all of our timeline simultaneously and have memory of the previous timeline, while we would be ignorant to any change and only have knowledge of the timeline we exist in.
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