What's God made of?

[JoeyKnothead]

Late edit to clean quotes...

From Post 182 here:

...
God is not made of matter...
...

For debate:

What's God made of?

[Difflugia]

Only don't it beat all, we can't confirm the properties of something we can't show exists.

Unless "God's all 'iffy'", then maybe we're on to something.

Isn't that the game? In debates, God is an ephemeral, but omnipotent bit of indefinable energy that doesn't have any defining attributes, so can't be disproven. In private, though, He created all life 6000 years ago, sent a worldwide flood, and responds to prayer by direct intervention. Any one of those is so contradicted by collected human experience that His divine hatred of crab salad sandwiches and hot gay sex seem almost plausible by comparison.

[Difflugia]

Properties exist so they are properties of something. That something is existence.

Is this one of those, "anything I can think of must be real somewhere" arguments?

[Goat]

The bible* indicates God has a spirit body.

Your comments indicate you can't put you the first bit of truth to that claim.

Are you asking me to prove that the bible indicates that God has a spirit body?

* NOTE :

Of course it is permissible to mention the bible in this sub-forum.

I am ONLY mentioning the bible to show what Christianity says in line with subforum guidelines, not to prove that a statement or story therein is true. ​I am not presenting the bible as authorative or proof of truth and have no intention to add an argument to that end in this subforum See LINK for details: viewtopic.php?p=1058158#p1058158

What is spirit made from? Can you show that 'spirit' is something more than a metaphysical concept that does not have any correspondence to anything but imagination?

[JehovahsWitness]

Can you show that 'spirit' is something more than a metaphysical concept that does not have any correspondence to anything but imagination?

Why are you asking me that? Did I make any claim it was?


JW

NOTE : I usually use conditionals ( ... or suppositions, hypothesis etc ) when discussing God in this subforum in order to respect forum guidelines while also avoiding making any absolute claims in this regard.This hopefully avoids being sidetracked by challenges to prove God's existence when that is not the point of discussion.

[tam]

Peace to you Joey!!

Late edit to clean quotes...

From Post 182 here:

...
God is not made of matter...
...

For debate:

What's God made of?

Well, the first and simplest thing that came to my mind is "energy". Maybe that's not quite adequate or complete; maybe energy is something that only comes from Him (but would it not also be part of Him so as to be able to come from Him?)


He HAS breath, and blood, and seed though. Otherwise known as holy spirit (the breath that He breathed into Adam and made Adam a living being; the breath/blood/seed that is the holy spirit which Christ breathed upon the apostles, that God gives to Christ, and Christ gives to others. God and His Son share the same blood - holy spirit - just as human sons share the blood of their human fathers. If we are adopted as sons, we get to receive and share in that blood as well, which is pretty awesome!)

This holy spirit (the breath/blood/seed of JAH) is also referred to as the water of life, so I guess that would mean that kind of water is part of God as well.

Of course God also has emotions (or He could not be described as being love.) I don't know if that would apply in a question of 'what is God made of', though.


He is spirit as some have said, but spirit is also made of energy (what isn't, right, on some level?)


Anything more than that, dear friend, I do not know it. I can only get a sense of it.


I cannot prove these things of course. Just reason a bit on them with you (or others).



Peace again to you!
your servant and a slave of Christ,
tammy

[Goat]

Can you show that 'spirit' is something more than a metaphysical concept that does not have any correspondence to anything but imagination?

Why are you asking me that? Did I make any claim it was?


JW

NOTE : I usually use conditionals ( ... or suppositions, hypothesis etc ) when discussing God in this subforum in order to respect forum guidelines while also avoiding making any absolute claims in this regard.This hopefully avoids being sidetracked by challenges to prove God's existence when that is not the point of discussion.

You made the statement that 'God is made from spirit'. I want to see if you can show that statement has any semantic meaning.

[JoeyKnothead]

Peace to you Joey!!

And peace back. It's a joy to read your posts cause you're always so kind, and we need more of that - even as I falter here and there.

What's God made of?

Well, the first and simplest thing that came to my mind is "energy". Maybe that's not quite adequate or complete; maybe energy is something that only comes from Him (but would it not also be part of Him so as to be able to come from Him?)

I could see that, given my *limited understanding of physics. (*Limited as couldn't drive it the three miles to town if it was down hill the whole way.)

He HAS breath, and blood, and seed though. Otherwise known as holy spirit (the breath that He breathed into Adam and made Adam a living being; the breath/blood/seed that is the holy spirit which Christ breathed upon the apostles, that God gives to Christ, and Christ gives to others. God and His Son share the same blood - holy spirit - just as human sons share the blood of their human fathers. If we are adopted as sons, we get to receive and share in that blood as well, which is pretty awesome!)

This part'll be hard to confirm.There's so many claims going on, I'll just note the three main ones...

Breath. Does this mass of energy also have lungs?
Blood? A cardiovascular system?
Seed? I won't ask about that to a lady. Maybe someone else can ask it.

This holy spirit (the breath/blood/seed of JAH) is also referred to as the water of life, so I guess that would mean that kind of water is part of God as well.

I could kinda understand this, given that life is so dependent on water.

Of course God also has emotions (or He could not be described as being love.) I don't know if that would apply in a question of 'what is God made of', though.

We describe a god in many ways. It's the putting truth to the discussion where it gets difficult.

He is spirit as some have said, but spirit is also made of energy (what isn't, right, on some level?)

My understanding is that 'spirit' is a good bit different from energy, so without particulars we're stuck.

Anything more than that, dear friend, I do not know it. I can only get a sense of it.

Miss tam called me dear friend, and that makes me better'n all y'all.

I cannot prove these things of course. Just reason a bit on them with you (or others).

Your description reminds me of the more "nature centric" religions of old.

Yet, being you, and why I like you so much - your god is also "made of" love. It's my firm conviction our gods reflect who we are, more'n the other way.

Peace again to you!

And to you, nice lady.

your servant and a slave of Christ,
tammy

Cause I didn't wanna cut ya off

Here's hoping you never meet you a biscuit ya can't whoop!

[JehovahsWitness]

You made the statement that 'God is made from spirit'....

No I did not, I said...

The bible* indicates God has a spirit body.

JW

* I am ONLY mentioning the bible to show what Christianity says in line with subforum guidelines, not to prove that a statement or story therein is true. ​I am not presenting the bible as authorative or proof of truth and have no intention to add an argument to that end in this subforum See LINKS for details: viewtopic.php?p=213491#p213491

[theophile]

The bible* indicates God has a spirit body.

Your comments indicate you can't put you the first bit of truth to that claim.

Are you asking me to prove that the bible indicates that God has a spirit body?

* NOTE :

Of course it is permissible to mention the bible in this sub-forum.

I am ONLY mentioning the bible to show what Christianity says in line with subforum guidelines, not to prove that a statement or story therein is true. ​I am not presenting the bible as authorative or proof of truth and have no intention to add an argument to that end in this subforum See LINK for details: viewtopic.php?p=1058158#p1058158

What is spirit made from? Can you show that 'spirit' is something more than a metaphysical concept that does not have any correspondence to anything but imagination?

Not to speak for JW here, but I would say you are correct. And further, what's the problem with that?

Spirit is akin to idea (with no correspondence for all we know to anything but imagination). But that doesn't mean it can't have tremendous power.

The funny thing about ideas / spirits is that we can give power to them.

(Just think of the spirit of Nazism in WW2, and the tremendous power it was given. Even up to today as that spirit ebbs and flows in time, and shifts in name and form.)

[theophile]

Are you willing to accept some form of the maximum entropy principle/principle of insufficient reason? Basically, it states that, prior to any evidence coming in, our prior probability distribution should be as uninformative as possible.

Nah. Sounds more like word salad than anything meaningful to me.

Word salad? So you would contend that every systematic notion of probabilistic inference is just so much "word salad" as well?

It's a bit of a word salad. Like, instead of saying "prior to any evidence coming in, our prior probability distribution should be as uninformative as possible," why don't you just say "we should start by removing all bias" if that's what you mean?

I didn't say that because that's a lot more simplistic and a lot less precise than the thing I wanted to say.

But it begs the question for me of where all this is going. Like, what God are you even trying to show the probability of here? The biblical God? If so, I have a suspicion that whatever argument you conjure could apply just as well to Zeus or Vishnu, and lose its desired effect as a result.

"A mind-like transcendent Something."

Zeus was not transcendent in the relevant sense. He had limits - most obviously, limits on his ability to retain worshippers.

Vishnu is a more interesting case, but I believe that the Dharmic religions can be ruled out by other means, well before we have any reason to look at the Bible specifically.

Maybe instead of providing a full-on dissertation that will take you hours to write, or snippets that make it hard for us to see where you're going, you can just outline the broad strokes of your argument. Like in 5-10 bullet points.

I appreciate precision, I really do. But there's also a time for keeping things simple.

Stripped down to its bare essentials, my train of thought proceeds as follows:

1. Every claim has a burden of proof.

2. Claims about who has the burden of proof are claims.

3. Therefore, claims about who has the burden of proof also have a burden of proof.

I could sketch a more complicated/formal argument - one that shows that claiming someone has a large burden incurs, by the very nature of the case, a large burden - but that would require going into Bayesian mathematics that nobody seems interested in.

I don't disagree with the outline of your argument, but I can't for the life of me see what this has to do with God

(I remain a bit concerned that your definition of God ("a mind-like transcendent Something") is jam-packed with ambiguity and therefore introduces way too much error to achieve or even warrant the level of precision you're going for here.)

It's precise enough to exclude physicalism, while being general enough to include everything from the "social trinitarianism" of modern Theistic Personalists to Middle Platonism's "Form of the Good/First Intellect."

Okay... So how do we go from claims about burden of proof to actual proof of probable existence?