Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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kk23wong
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Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by kk23wong »

I wonder nobody ever point out that the existence of the God is actually a "Conscious Earth", a life form of a higher level.

Is it possible? It is open to discussions.

It feels like to me I am holding a globe to talk to the natives that this object is actually a Conscious being. *Laugh* :D Just a kind of feelings, no offenses.

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Papus79
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Papus79 »

I'd try that one out two different ways:

1) The term God seems to have been beaten into the absolute of all things over time, at least in the Christian tradition of YHVH, so when we use that term we're usually talking about something closer to the Ancient of Days or Brahma rather than a planetary logos of some type.

2) If you think about it human beings are hierarchical structures - ie. colonies of trillions of different types of cells and there seems to be two way communication - both upstream from bodily sensations and downstream from sense-perception and the complex reasoning that we apply to those perceptions which in turn inform our bodies through our nervous systems and endocrine systems. When you consider that all of nature is hierarchies as such it doesn't sound that far fetched that there could be much higher order compilations of faculty and personality than just human dominance pyramids or that all of this may very well, like us, add up to something more than the sum of its parts.

I guess what'll tell us a lot more about this sort of thing is when we get a much better hang of the natural creation of information, what kinds of universal laws there are about information, how information can be passed, etc. etc.. It might pan out, it might not, but I don't necessarily think there's anything strange about the concept. Especially with all the added quantum biology stuff that's jumping out now - the odds of governance moving through things in more interesting manners seems like it would have a mechanism.
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Darshan »

Earthellism, a philosophy based on astrobiology, recently reviewed the sci-fi movie "Passengers" and have a better view on the location of our God. In this movie a spaceship is travelling trillions of miles to another solar system and several passengers can chose to commit suicide (rather than die from extreme loneliness) by being ejected into outer space but none do that. Clearly ejecting into outer space where there is no oxygen and no decomposition thus no chance to have their body recycled into new life. Our earth is not a God but a water-blessed planet with amazing life. Gravity has kept all life here and no one has ever died and been lost to outer space (Apollo 13 was close). Clearly we are married to this planet in many ways and there is a strong spiritual force that keeps us here and allows our bodies to be recycled and our souls to stay close to earth. Astrobiology teaches us that our earth will be cremated and our solar system will die in 7 billions years and our God will escort our molecules to a new solar system just like the way we ended up here. God is not earth but God is near earth and there is no hell below us but heaven is above us and the proof of that is that all religions say that heaven is great white light which suggests a place above or near the clouds in a state of existence that allows us to remain close as we wait for our final cremation when our sun cremates earth.
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Fire_Monkey
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Fire_Monkey »

I believe the the religion of Kabbalah actually proposes this very notion.

That, much like the tenets set forth in panentheism, all is good and God is in all.

Mind you, this is different than pantheism. Which only posits that God can be found in nature. He is thus, limited to just being nature. Atheists can be Pantheists. I am a pantheist.

But Kabbalah and panentheism go farther....God also exists outside of and beyond nature. Think of God as you and you as a thought in your mind. That's a close approximation.
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Grotto19 »

Fire_Monkey wrote:I believe the the religion of Kabbalah actually proposes this very notion.

That, much like the tenets set forth in panentheism, all is good and God is in all.

Mind you, this is different than pantheism. Which only posits that God can be found in nature. He is thus, limited to just being nature. Atheists can be Pantheists. I am a pantheist.

But Kabbalah and panentheism go farther....God also exists outside of and beyond nature. Think of God as you and you as a thought in your mind. That's a close approximation.
Kabbalah has a very simmalar point of view to my own. Regarding the nature of God. Am I in my house or am I in America? Am I in America or am I in space? Am I in our solar system or in our galaxy? Am I in our galaxy or in our Universe? The answer to all these is question is yes. My belief is a photo of God is a photo of all that there is. When it was written by Jews I am the alpha and the omega, and I am him who is called I am, these things say to me this is exactly what God is, the sum total of all that there is.
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Papus79
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Papus79 »

I at least find the Qabalistic tarot fascinating and useful in its own ways but I'm still in a space with it where all the correspondences, sphere and path significance, etc.. are perhaps medicinal but they aren't really helping me to feel more informed about the world around me or why it works the way it does (maybe years from now more of it will line up - for right now it waxes too anthropocentric, really logocentric, for my life observations to date). If anything I'm somewhat hesitant to buy into the whole Hermetic Great Work without more evidence that we're really under some type of deliberately growth-oriented process. Evolution has a very 'throw them wherever and let happenstance sort the rest out' cannon-fodder approach to life, enough to where I really have to sympathize with why atheists and even anti-theists look at the world we live in and would come to the overwhelming impression that we're an accident of chance in a cold and utterly non-sentient universe.

What I do think might be a bit more promising for elucidating an animistic world view is neutral monism, particularly of the open system functionalist variety. If we allow for consciousness to be hierarchical and we don't worry so much about whether information is necessarily playing on neurons for a system to be sentient or even playing with our own data streams from time to time.
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Alias »

kk23wong wrote:I wonder nobody ever point out that the existence of the God is actually a "Conscious Earth", a life form of a higher level.

Is it possible?
Sure, but S/he doesn't carve rules on a stone tablet or smite people for marrying the wrong other people or lift the righteous out of harm's way -
so what use is S/he?
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Pages »

Why is GOD necessary? Why must God be a thing? Why can't it just be a concept, why is the term so important that it has to be attached to something to make sense?
The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Alias »

Pages wrote:Why is GOD necessary? Why must God be a thing? Why can't it just be a concept, why is the term so important that it has to be attached to something to make sense?
Because of the smiting.
That was the biggest part of a god's job description, right after making weather, back in the day when gods were deities of something rather than mere abstract ideas.
Nowadays, the god is supposed to take the ineffable part of humanness up into his/her/its bosom/mansion/kingdom/ after the mortal part dies in some praiseworthy manner, such fighting infidels, refusing sex with a duke, or apoplexy while attempting to make beautiful native women ashamed of their breasts.
Everything needs a context in which to make sense. For modern gods, it's the threats, contradiction and dogma.
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Pages
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Pages »

That's what I'm saying... God doesn't and will never make sense in any conventional view of it and it baffles me why we keep trying to scientifically and logically borrow the name as if it's existence (in whatever form) has to be part of our reality.

-- Updated June 13th, 2017, 4:19 pm to add the following --

Earth is earth, it doesn't have to be conscious just because we wanna fit God in there
The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?
Alias
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Alias »

And that's why I mock religion by speaking plainly about what it really is.
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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Papus79
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Papus79 »

I don't really get shocked or offended by it. Mainly just about everyone in the west - whether they were raised with or without belief - has Abrahamic monotheism of some form as their starting block for nearly anything that's not reductive materialism/physicalism. For a really long time (I think it's just starting to get better in the last five years or so) people didn't seem particularly cognizant of anything other than theism, atheism, and agnosticism. The rest was 'No one thinks that way - why bring it up' and next to nobody would have said that they were an atheist but not a reductive materialist.
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Prothero
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Prothero »

Why stop with a "conscious earth"? Why not a "conscious universe"? Or why not attribute primitive forms of "mind" to every event and interaction (a form of panpsychism)? God then becomes the sum of all of the experience and sentience of the world, of all those interactions and relationships.
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Alias »

The 'conscious universe' thing gets floated every couple of weeks on one forum or another.
Every adolescent comes up with it independently and thinks nobody else ever has.

It's harmless, but also a dead-end.
The universe is God.
OK. And then... ?
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Prothero
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Re: Can the God be a "Conscious Earth"?

Post by Prothero »

Alias wrote:The 'conscious universe' thing gets floated every couple of weeks on one forum or another.
Every adolescent comes up with it independently and thinks nobody else ever has.

It's harmless, but also a dead-end.
The universe is God.
OK. And then... ?
Well the origin and extent of "consciousness" should not be a dead end for philosophical speculation. It is probably a dead for scientific proof (which deals primarily with physical and measurable empirical aspects of reality) but we directly experience "consciousness", we attribute it to other humans, many attribute it to higher or more complex life forms, and some (panexperientialists) attribute a primitive form to the fundamental units of reality (events in spacetime). To conceive of God without conceiving of some form of divine consciousness, seems to be worship of materialistic physicalism which I would say is not religion at all.
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