Conde Lucanor wrote:
You are missing the present now. Is it also a metaphor? But if the past and the future are only metaphors, that would apply then to all beings, who would not live in the past or the future, either. But objects known in the present have had previous states and will have future states, in other words, we observe in them movement and change.
I do not understand '
You are missing the present now', but yes, there is no place or object that corresponds to 'the present', such that I can miss it. Similarly, objects do not literally '
have' previous states or future states. An object is just what it is - it is not simultaneously what it is not, which would be the case if it also somehow 'had' its past a future states (which would presumably be infinite).
To say '
we observe them (objects) in movement and change' is not strictly true. To say an object has changed would be self-contradictory; if it has changed then it is not the same object. The change we observe and measure using time will only be of another measurable attribute. For example, the water was X degrees and is now Y degrees and the time between those two states was T. This observation relates degrees to seconds, it is not a description of the meaning of 'water'.
Whether both temperature states would still count as 'water' is a question of how we use language. Is 'ice' water? In one sense it is 'changed water' but we might want to say that the change is so significant it has become a different 'object'. Or we might go the other way and say that everything that involves H2O counts as 'water'. There is no right answer. So what counts as an 'object' is a social construction, so likewise would be the notion of change as it applies to 'objects'.
If your god lives in an eternal present, then it does not move, it does not change, therefore it cannot have will, thought, and it's not involved whatsoever in anything else in the universe. No power, no knowledge, no nothing. The moment (a place in time) it does something, a before and after are revealed.
Absolutely; all these words describe the way we humans comprehend the material universe. If used about God they would be only figurative. As I suggested earlier, to say God has 'power' would not mean he has very big muscles! It would be saying that God is outside the universe in which such terms have a meaning.
Regarding '
your god', he is mine in the sense that this is my understanding of what follows from the description given by those who use that word. So, given that God (capital 'G', as I assume we are talking about monotheistic religions) is understood as the creator of the universe, thus creating
all the power relationships in the universe, I do not see how God could be thought to himself have only a finite (i.e.quantifiable) amount of that power.
And other than your wishes to believe so, is there any support to that statement from empirical evidence or logic? You say that "he can know", but assuming such a deity existed, how do you know it has consciousness?
The same answer as above; God is plainly not going to be conscious in the sense that humans are conscious.
Saying that god is outside a system is the same as saying that god has a location outside a system. You are then contradicting yourself, first saying god has no location and then stating what its location is. But if god is in a given place, why shouldn't we consider that place as part of a larger system that contains your system and god? Wouldn't that be the universe? Wouldn't you need to explain how your god came to existence in that universe?
I do not agree that '
Saying that god is outside a system is the same as saying that god has a location outside a system'. Again, that would only be the case if God was supposed to be a physical object, understandable using the same mental concepts that we humans use to understand physical objects.
You could indeed say that both the universe and God was part of a larger system, but if you used the word 'universe' to describe it, then what would that word mean? If you expand a word to include everything then it becomes meaningless. You would then need to invent a different word to distinguish the system that includes God to the system that includes us. If you didn't, then what would the word '
is'(exist) mean, if it also covered things outside all possible human experience?
In these discussions I think the analogy is with the word 'infinity'. If we say something is 'infinite' we do not mean
it is a very big number since, if it was, you could always have '
infinity plus one'. We rather mean '
it is outside the system of numbers'. Is there such a thing? We could argue that to talk about any subject which is unquantifiable is a sign that the subject described is meaningless, in the sense that talking about God in the way I am doing above might be called meaningless.
But, on the other hand, we cannot quite do without the notion of 'infinity'; it comes up in maths, it comes up in physics and nor are certain aspects of our own experience easily quantifiable (because they are subjective). So my point here is not to preach the existence of God, my point is that it is not a simple matter to define and distinguish only those funny ideas that pertain to the nature of God and chuck those in the philosophical dustbin. The problem is that the same funny ideas crop up all over the place.