Who Is God?

[Sy Borg]

On a more familiar level than via negativa, physics is largely the study of symmetries, and “pregnant with possibilities” is an old expression, a good one. I like it. But notwithing the religious-like faith some people have in chance and probabilities, science hasn’t a clue about the impetus that broke (or breaks) the symmetry of nothingness. It cannot be ignored that recent experiments looking for some imbalance between matter and anti-matter that could account for the universe came up with nothing: the universe shouldn’t exist.

Sorry, but it's silly to refer to "religious-like faith some people have in chance and probabilities" given that the consideration of probabilities requires a lack of faith. If you believe then you have decided that you want the probability to be 1:1 and that's the end of the inquiry. If you don't believe, then you can consider probabilities.

Actually, science doesn't even know if there was a "symmetry of nothingness" before the Big Bang. Learning what came before is a work in progress so science's answer is "We don't yet know", along with a range of hypotheses with some degree of valid theoretical underpinning.

The imbalance of matter and antimatter makes sense to me. Not much in nature is exactly even so why should the amounts of matter and antimatter be exactly equal? As it turns out, they are very close to equal - just one part in a billion difference, and that was enough for all of this.

Remember, science cannot be correct unless humans know everything there is to know, and that is impossible. So it's always a work in progress, and must always posit the very most conservative and unexciting models possible with the facts at hand.

Fortunately, our private lives need not be so rigorously confined and we are mentally free to roam wherever, and if they happen to be "spiritual pastures", why not? However, science must retain rigour or it will lose its predictive power.

[Fooloso4]

Greta:

Learning what came before is a work in progress so science's answer is "We don't yet know", along with a range of hypotheses with some degree of valid theoretical underpinning.

This is the difference between science and the pseudo-science some theists latch onto and put forth as “possible implications”. It is as if they read only the headlines and find it “pregnant with possibilities”, failing to realize that it is their invalid speculation, without theoretical underpinnings, that has impregnated their minds and can only give birth to a stillborn child or windeggs.

The imagination is a wonderful thing but will never match the wonders of the universe. Theoria is no match for theory. Theoria is a retreat, a closing off from the highest source of awe and wonder, that is, the universe as it is in all its mystery. “God” and the assumption that what is necessitates a ground or source that is not, represents a failure of the imagination, an arbitrary terminus. Unlike theoria, theory is never an end in itself. It is a way in to reality, rather than a way out.

[Belindi]

Thank you Belindi. So, and correct me if I'm misinterpreting you, existence is God. I mean to an extent I can comprehend that. Although it seems superfluous. For example could existence be existence? But I digress. I cant claim to comprehend existence. Not fully. So your definition of god, sadly, remains incomprehensible to me. To be honest I tend to deal with examples much better than pure thought. Let us say God is nature, now what? Your example of ethics makes no sense to me. I can be ethical without believing God is nature.

Spinoza's ethics are founded upon reason. Reason is in theory accessible to everyone and needs no mystical or worldly authorisation.

I gather that your ethics are founded upon reason and not what God or some social elite has ordered. Since many people think that 'nature' means trees and furry animals ,'existence' may be a better term. Nature , or existence if you prefer, is made of what you call examples and nothing else;no indwelling spirit.

I don't know why Spinoza used the term 'Deus'. As in "Deus sive Natura".

A hierarchical power system with God at the top is easy to envisage. Nature (in the sense of existence)is not about power but about neutral necessity ; there is nobody at the top controlling events .

[Eduk]

thanks for the clarity Belindi.
So what does saying God is existence add or change?
I mean I can say spoon is God. I can conceive of a spoon therefore I can conceive of God. Therefore my initial assertion that no God can be conceived is wrong. I would basically agree with that but it's a disappointing conception of God that I wouldn't be happy to simply accept. To my mind a minimum acceptable form of God would be one which explained existence (ours and theirs), I can't conceive of such a thing personally.
Let me put it another way. If you said I know the purpose of life and it is X. I would say I not only don't believe X but I believe X is false. This is a strong atheist stance (weak atheism being simply not believing X). I assume the average agnostic is saying they don't believe X is true but they also don't believe X is false. However if instead said I believe there might be a purpose to life then I would agree, there might be. I am agnostic towards whether life has a purpose, it's just that I am gnostic about the fact that you don't know life has a purpose and very much don't know what that purpose might be.
It is similar to the million monkeys on a million typewriters. Seems to me that a million monkeys with a million typewriters for a million years wouldn't even get close to writing Shakespeare and, just as importantly, would never ever know if they had or not. (ignoring the possibility of evolution of course, in a million years those monkeys would evolve )

[Dark Matter]

Sorry, but it's silly to refer to "religious-like faith some people have in chance and probabilities" given that the consideration of probabilities requires a lack of faith.

Of course you’d say that.

The imbalance of matter and antimatter makes sense to me. Not much in nature is exactly even so why should the amounts of matter and antimatter be exactly equal? As it turns out, they are very close to equal - just one part in a billion difference, and that was enough for all of this.

So, you don’t trust the outcome of experiments that showed no imbalance? Not even the one in a billion?

Fortunately, our private lives need not be so rigorously confined and we are mentally free to roam wherever, and if they happen to be "spiritual pastures", why not? However, science must retain rigour or it will lose its predictive power.

That’s the point.

[Fooloso4]

The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Problem:

The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found. Something must have happened to tip the balance. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to figure out what happened to the antimatter, or why we see an asymmetry between matter and antimatter.

… Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy. During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, the hot and dense universe was buzzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. If matter and antimatter are created and destroyed together, it seems the universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.

Nevertheless, a tiny portion of matter – about one particle per billion – managed to survive. This is what we see today. In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why. Researchers have observed spontaneous transformations between particles and their antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay. Some unknown entity intervening in this process in the early universe could have caused these "oscillating" particles to decay as matter more often than they decayed as antimatter.

… some unknown mechanism could have interfered with the oscillating particles to cause a slight majority of them to decay as matter. Physicists may find hints as to what this process might be by studying the subtle differences in the behaviour of matter and antimatter particles created in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Studying this imbalance could help scientists paint a clearer picture of why our universe is matter-filled. (https://home.cern/topics/antimatter/mat ... ry-problem).

[Belindi]

Eduk wrote:

So what does saying God is existence add or change?

It changed and offended a lot more people than it offends now. Spinoza was thrown out of the Amsterdam synagogue. Even the liberal Jews of Amsterdam could not afford to harbour someone who would so antagonise Christians.

Spinoza lived when everybody believed in God the personal ruler and creator of all. Spinoza was turning God inside out. When you displace God from his throne you have to substitute something else for what makes stuff happen. If existence is in God's accustomed place then existence has to explain ethics too. Thus Spinoza's ethics are naturalistic not theistic ethics. Naturalistic ethics can be explained by reasoning and owe nothing to supernatural authorities.

[Fooloso4]

Belindi:

Belindi:

Naturalistic ethics can be explained by reasoning and owe nothing to supernatural authorities.

The counterpart in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is that the political order owes nothing to religious authorities.

Still, I don’t think that Eduk’s question has been adequately answered. Some have suggested that Spinoza retains the term ‘God’ for rhetorical purposes, which would mean that he was a veiled atheist, but I do not know if I buy that.

[Belindi]

Yes, I presume that for someone to create an antithesis (Nature) he has to have the thesis (God) already to hand. Spinoza has been said to be "God-obsessed" which I take to mean that he needed to honour a superior force. So maybe Spinoza's synthesis he called God-or-Nature because he was God-obsessed.

I agree I don't think that Spinoza is well described as an 'atheist'.

[Eduk]

Yeah I'm sorry Belindi but that sounds like a teaching about why not to believe in God.

[Belindi]

Yeah I'm sorry Belindi but that sounds like a teaching about why not to believe in God.

It is what you say. More importantly Spinoza taught a rational theory of ethics which doesn't depend upon faith.

[Eduk]

Ok I guess we got our wires crossed. I was looking for teachings about God but specifically ones which supported the premise not contradicted the premise

[jerlands]

Ok I guess we got our wires crossed. I was looking for teachings about God but specifically ones which supported the premise not contradicted the premise

This is Spinoza on God...
-By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

[Dark Matter]

Clinging to the belief that chance and probability has explanatory power is no different than a creationist clinging to the belief that the world created in six days. By admitting infinity into the hypothesis, in effect saying anything that can happen happens in order to make the idea more palatable, there is the sincere belief that God is thereby rendered unnecessary. But this is special pleading. That quantum theory fails to assign a cause to a phenomenon simply does not entail that there isn’t one. If anything that can happen happens, why not a living awareness, i.e., God?

There is a distinction between a hierarchical series of causation and a linear series. There is no “first moment” in a hierarchical series of causation. There are, in fact, no “moments” at all. In a hierarchical series of causes, there must at bottom be an uncaused cause, a cause outside of space and time that upholds the material processes of which we are part and parcel. Indeterminate effects do not in the least imply there is there is no such underlying cause.

Everything that changes is a compound of act (actuality) and potency (potential). Pure actuality cannot change because it has no potential in it.

[Eduk]

jerlands. That's my exact point. Infinity is incomprehensible. And eternal is incomprehensible.
Problem is that infinity normally denotes a large number. Bounded by the imagination of the person using the term. But infinity isn't a number, it's a concept. A useful concept but not something that actually exists.
To say that a physical thing is infinite makes no sense. Of course God is often defined as not physical. But this only introduces more incomprehensible terms.