gad-fly wrote: ↑April 7th, 2021, 5:03 pm
I have never heard of little God. Are you talking about some minor ones in a heaven full of gods? If there is only one God, I cannot imagining him being little. More likely: God is Great.
So the term 'demiurge' generally gets thrown around for something that's just essentially like a human but made of other stuff - ie. it would be as much a mind spawned by the universe in a similar manner trying to figure out what to do with it's own consciousness. It would be within the stream of matter and energy, would at best be trying to figure out what it can or can't do, what would or wouldn't work, it could very well by our standards have an IQ that's in the 1000's but it would still be quite unlikely that it could predict the outcomes of its own behaviors and... not so much creations but whatever it 'built' out of same matter that it's made of.
The above is pretty much what I take for granted when people talk about polytheism, little 'g' gods and goddesses like Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, etc. and when they aren't using those terms in Jungian or Kabbalistic ways but as literal identities.
If one were to look at the god of the old testament for example one gets the sense that it's a little 'g' god, and that's again only throwing around the parameters considered if we assume that the God of the old testament was actually a real agency interacting with Moses and Israel rather than a cultural contrivance.
gad-fly wrote: ↑April 7th, 2021, 5:03 pmA God, sophisticated and intelligent beyond our imagination, would bring along very complex creations, beyond artificial intelligence, to sin, to falter, to invent the Tower of Babel, to pick between right and wrong, to have free will, and to pay the price in hell, but not a factory worker cobbling up shoes.
I think most of the ways of thinking that lead to these kinds of strange polarities, or stories of rebellion in heaven, would be shot to pieces on first principles - unless the idea was to cultivate us like mushrooms by feeding us manure at certain stages.
gad-fly wrote: ↑April 7th, 2021, 5:03 pmBack to the title. God is dying because human has advanced to the stage when they can re-invent themselves to the extent that increasingly they do not need God's helping hand. If I were God, i would say: Fine. Make my day.
I'm somewhat agnostic on what we're dealing with.
I'd say the frame I feel comfortable in, at least from my best assemblage of the facts, is that the universe is a sort of Darwinian idealism, Darwinian in that everything's moving forward along the lines of Darwinian evolution, differential success, heritability, etc. and that on examination of matter it essentially seems to be mental - just that it's so tightly bound to law that you can make I11 processors with nanotransistors or predict what's needed to send a mission to Mars with accuracy.
Past that - NDE's strongly suggest that it's either one mind subsuming all other minds as extensions of itself or, in the reverse, it could simply be an emergent property of all other minds, ie. panentheism or hylozoism I suppose takes some stab at the question of whether lesser minds are emanation or whether greater minds are emergent. I suppose I'm open to either of these, along with process philosophy, so long as we get out a) a universe that behaves as if it's mental, b) Harry potter is just a book, movies, and merchandise), c) Darwinian evolution, d) we get all of the physics back out of it that we're accustomed to. To that last point and many others I see that Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash are quite serious about taking a stab at getting quantum mechanics and general relativity back out of conscious realism, and as far as modern theories of consciousness go theirs is the one that's probably impressed me the most so far.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me