What is God?

[Mr.Badham]

As an atheist, I have a hard time understanding what a god might look like. Please help.

[Dimmesdale]

In my view, God is the ground of all being. That which is, and without which, nothing could "be."

As an analogy consider a movie projector. Without a screen or some object to serve as a back-drop the movie projector would not be able to show the movie. Likewise, everything in the phenomenal world is like the motion picture, and the underlying basis or substratum upon which it exists, is God. God maintains the motion picture. God maintains and sustains all lesser "beings" by letting them participate in His (or It's) ultimate Being.

God is not a person in my view. At least, not in the mainstream sense. He transcends personality, not having any physical or psychological limits. He (or It) transcends both space and time, and yet is omnipresent, serving, again, as the ground of all being. So in a sense I am a pan-entheist, that is, someone who believes that everything is within God and yet that God also transcends the world. God is both immanent and transcendent. How this is, I cannot fully fathom. No one can, at least not in this life. However, I see it as a practical reality.

Ultimately, I think it all reduces to the Hindu concept of Brahman, - the Unfathomable Ultimate Reality at the heart of all things. And here's the kicker: we, everything, are all that One Brahman, - as the great saying goes: sarvam khalvidam brahma - all of this is Brahman. Ultimately, there is no meaningful distinction between Brahman and everything else that exists.

That is what I believe about God and I consider it a very reasonable view.

[shnarkle]

In my view, God is the ground of all being. That which is, and without which, nothing could "be."

Given that you claim that God does exist, would you then deny that nothing could be without God? In other words, the existence of nothing doesn't require the existence of God, does it? Conversely, just because God exists, doesn't necessarily negate the existence of nothing, does it? The more I look at it, the more it looks like nothing and God are synonymous terms. God is not a thing.

God is not a person in my view. At least, not in the mainstream sense. He transcends personality, not having any physical or psychological limits. He (or It) transcends both space and time, and yet is omnipresent, serving, again, as the ground of all being. So in a sense I am a pan-entheist, that is, someone who believes that everything is within God and yet that God also transcends the world. God is both immanent and transcendent. How this is, I cannot fully fathom. No one can, at least not in this life. However, I see it as a practical reality.

I think you're onto something except that it needs to go a little bit farther. I agree that God is synonymous with transcendence. God transcends existence. Therefore God doesn't exist, except in, with, and through existence. God exists only in, with, and through eternal existence. Apart from existence God cannot exist. Existence is immanent in, with, and through all of us.

there is no meaningful distinction between Brahman and everything else that exists.

Except that Brahman is not a thing; that's the distinction.

[ThePainefulTruth]

As an atheist, I have a hard time understanding what a god might look like. Please help.

God, if It exists, must necessarily be the embodiment of Truth, and likely the universe as well. How do you say was a supernatural consciousness looks like, which no one has ever "seen", BTW?

[Walterbl]

God is the sum of all there is.

Something like a superintelligence to a degree that humans can't grasp.

[ThePainefulTruth]

God is the sum of all there is.

Or, if I might, more precisely stated, God is the embodiment of Truth, where Truth is knowledge, justice, love and beauty.

[mgb]

https://religiousnaturalism.org/god-as- ... l-tillich/

[ThePainefulTruth]

[Replying to post 46 by mgb]As an alternative, he suggested that God be understood as the “ground of Being-Itself�.

So then, according to his illogic, what created that ground of Being-Itself? Before the Big Bang, there was no time, or more properly, the ether was timeless. So words such as "before" and "always was" have no meaning.

[mgb]

So then, according to his logic, what created that ground of Being-Itself? Before the Big Bang, there was no time, or more properly, the ether was timeless. So words such as "before" and "always was" have no meaning.

I don't think the question 'what came before time?' is very important. What is important is 'what came before created things?'

Philosophically this concerns the different between contingent things and necessary existence.

That is, everything we see around us requires a previous state. An oak tree requires carbon etc. A house requires bricks or wood. A planet requires processes in stars to make the chemicals they are made of. No matter what we look at we can see it is made of something else. And often that something else is made of something else again. Where does this end? If everything is made of something else can we get to something that is not made of something else? This unmade existence is a necessary existence; it is self existent. That is essentially the same question as 'what came before time?' but it looks at things in ontological terms rather than temporal terms.

Substance (substantia – underlying, underlying – the Latin translation of the Greek) is that which exists independently, in itself, unlike accidents, or properties existing in another (namely, in substance) and through another. Substance – something stable and permanent, as opposed to the volatile and transient; essence (Greek), underlying the phenomenon; indivisible, one, comprehended by the mind, in contrast to the plurality of the sensually perceptible. In the concept of substance, the most important aspect of being finds expression. In European thought the notion of substance received different interpretations: it was regarded as a concrete individual and as a single foundation of all that exists; as ontological reality and as a logical subject; as a spiritual principle and as a material substratum; as the invariable, self-identical essence of the phenomenon and as the law of change, the principle of constructing a series of events, the relation of the accessory of the set of single cases. https://simplyphilosophy.org/study/subs ... efinition/

[ThePainefulTruth]

So then, according to his logic, what created that ground of Being-Itself? Before the Big Bang, there was no time, or more properly, the ether was timeless. So words such as "before" and "always was" have no meaning.

I don't think the question 'what came before time?' is very important. What is important is 'what came before created things?'

Time was created or at least included with the Big Bang. We don't know the nature of what preceded it or is exterior to it except its apparent timelessness. We certainly don't know whether it was created or not. But the fact remains that if (since) what is external to us is timeless, it therefore could have had no "beginning", and exists yet in parallel with our universe. Our nature necessarily projects time onto whatever we attempt to contemplate.

That is, everything we see around us requires a previous state. An oak tree requires carbon etc. A house requires bricks or wood. A planet requires processes in stars to make the chemicals they are made of. No matter what we look at we can see it is made of something else.

We can't say that of the universe. We know nothing of what preceded or caused it and indeed may not have been caused. All we know it that it began.

And often that something else is made of something else again. Where does this end?

For us, at the Big Bang--it is an information firewall. We may eventually determine some information about what caused it or preceded it, but for now, our ignorance is total, and that could well be intentional.

[mgb]

We can't say that of the universe. We know nothing of what preceded or caused it and indeed may not have been caused. All we know it that it began.

Yes but I do not mean 'precede' in terms of time. I mean, logically, something must precede what is contingent or created. Things that are created must be created from something. You cannot have a bronze coin unless you have bronze. You can't have bronze unless you have tin and copper. The universe is made of something so that something must, logically precede the universe.