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fisherman_carl
Guest
God doesn’t experience stupidity either.
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fisherman_carl
Guest
God doesn’t experience what it is like to be an un employed farmer in Kansas. Or what its like to be a milkman in Ohio. (Actually, I heard this one guy say that God experiences everything through us. Like he needed us to experience the world.
). But, basically you could take millions of examples like that. And, by your logic you would be saying that unless God experienced all these things himself he would have a lack of knowledge about them. Well, that may be true for you and me, but not for an omnipresent and omnipotent being. He doesn’t have to experience something to know it. That would imply he needs to learn it. Yet, an omnipotent being doesn’t need to learn. Since by definition he can’t learn anything since he already knows everything.
). But, basically you could take millions of examples like that. And, by your logic you would be saying that unless God experienced all these things himself he would have a lack of knowledge about them. Well, that may be true for you and me, but not for an omnipresent and omnipotent being. He doesn’t have to experience something to know it. That would imply he needs to learn it. Yet, an omnipotent being doesn’t need to learn. Since by definition he can’t learn anything since he already knows everything.
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Kevin12
Guest
You’re just dismissing the question by introducing a bunch of things I never even mentioned. All I’m referring to is pain.God doesn’t experience what it is like to be an un employed farmer in Kansas. Or what its like to be a milkman in Ohio. (Actually, I heard this one guy say that God experiences everything through us. Like he needed us to experience the world.
“He doesn’t have to experience something to know it.”
How do you “know” what its like to experience something if you’re never experienced it, or more precisely (because I’m not requiring God to actually be an unemployed farmed) if you are incapable of experiencing it? By definition, you can’t. I’m pointing out that if he doesn’t know the experience of pain, it’s difficult to call God omniscient, because there is something we know that he does not know.
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Kevin12
Guest
What does transcendent even mean in this sentence? With all charity, it seems like you’re just using a vague word to cover up the fact that you don’t have an argument.
I’m not objecting to the fact that God lacks a body and therefore can’t experience pain. Although I don’t particularly care for Dennett as a philosopher, I think his position that a basically omniscient computer (in his rejoinder to the Mary’s Room thought experiment) could simulate any kind of physical experience by understanding its underlying physical mechanisms (though this doesn’t prove Dennett’s point about qualia since that would still be experiential knowledge) can be applied to God as well. My issue is that according to theologians, God can’t experience pain outside of the Incarnation (and even then its complicated) because it would imply passibility.
meltzerboy
New member
Are you talking about physical pain only or also psychological pain? I just want to be clear about the terms you’re using.
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Kevin12
Guest
Both, but the point of the scenario I just mentioned is that I can at least imagine a being without a physical body, particularly an omnipotent one like God, would be able to simulate, or if you like, imagine, what pain would feel like even without a body. I don’t think the issue about God being unable to experience pain is the lack of a body, but the idea that any kind of pain on God’s part would compromise impassibility. Furthermore, the souls of the damned are supposed to experience sensible pain, so I don’t think its an issue even without bringing simulation and imaginings into it.
But actually, psychological pain and physical pain are really one and the same. You obviously wouldn’t even know you were suffering psychologically unless you had sensations like you stomach clenching or your heart racing.
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clem456
Guest
A fundamental reality is missing. God’s omniscience is one with his timelessness. God experiences nothing. God does not sense things in time like we do. He simply knows everything, prior to, our outside the realm of, experience. He sees all time at once and he knows all things at once. What does it mean, “to know”, for God? If he does not experience anything, what is his knowing?
For your question to have a chance you must assume God is not eternal, and he is not omniscient. It seems to me that is the point of your question, to dispute the nature of God.
For your question to have a chance you must assume God is not eternal, and he is not omniscient. It seems to me that is the point of your question, to dispute the nature of God.
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Kevin12
Guest
It seems to me that you are just obfuscating the issue because you don’t know how to respond. In the first place, Aquinas points out that God does have delight and joy in a way that is atemporal. In general, the fact that God knows everything at once is completely irrelevant. We could very well suppose that God has an experiential knowledge of pain in the same way that he has propositional knowledge of other things. The objection is that God should not be able to have such knowledge because he is supposed to be impassible.
But supposing you are right that an eternal being can’t have experiential knowledge, all the worse for you, because the point still stands that God doesn’t really know it is like to experience pain and therefore is not omniscient. And absurdities like the fact that God doesn’t know some very particular experience or the experience of doing evil are not relevant here—I am only concerned with the experience of pain, something which is clearly not incompatible with God’s goodness as can be seen in the Incarnation, in which God under the Person of Christ was crucified and died.
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clem456
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Lucretius
Guest
My argument is that we can only understand God by analogy, and so when we try to univocally appliy our kind of knowledge to God’s knowledge, we are necessarily misunderstanding God.
All aspects of pain cannot be reduced to mechanics. Dennett would either have to propose that the qualia of pain exists in the subject (and thus consciousness necessarily becomes a different kind of thing, and Cartesian Dualism holds), or dismiss that we experience the qualia, which is absurd. The who reductionist project on these sort of issues fails horribly.
I ignored this (sorry). No, God can experience emotion like we do, because emotions are inner physical experiences, and God is not physical. But, even though God doesn’t experience emotions, he knows what it’s like to experience them. Emotions are a part of our animal nature (which is why St. Paul calls disordered emotion “the flesh”). If you haven’t noticed, emotion are not things you can control through pure willpower, so even if God has emotions (which I’m opened to arguing that not all emotions are physical, although I think it is a result of our culture spiritualizing them), by necessity His will would directly control them.
You seem to be saying that you find the idea that God doesn’t feel emotions distasteful, correct?
Christi pax,
Lucretius
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clem456
Guest
I think you mean to say that God cannot experience emotions?
What is your take on this question:
What does it mean to experience something?
Does experience require the passing of time? “what does God know, and when does he know it” or “I, as God, didn’t know pain then, but now I experience it and know it.” In other words, as God, “my own creation has changed me, from this time to that time”. Doesn’t seem to make sense.
How is the question of experience a coherent one, when applied to an eternal being like God?
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Irishmom2
Guest
Where does this come from?
Seriously. I am not a theology graduate or a very deep thinker. Where “is there an issue?”
God knows all things. Simple as that to me.
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ericc
Guest
If he made it, he would know it. Otherwise we would have to assume that the mechanism to experience such things come into existence on its own without a source information provider.
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Kevin12
Guest
You’re just avoiding the question by saying it doesn’t apply. That isn’t an answer.
God can feel delight and joy, as I’ve already pointed out. Yes, I do have a problem with the notion that’s all God can feel in the first place, but that’s not the point.
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clem456
Guest
He’s not avoiding the question. He’s providing you with a reality.
You are avoiding that reality, and others.
If you don’t believe in God, *(I don’t know if you do…) we are talking about different views of reality, and we are not going very far.
How does God experience something, if he is outside time?
How is an eternal being not aware of something at one moment, then aware of it another moment?
You cannot separate omniscience, omnipotence, and eternity. It is we as humans who are none of these things. God has them all. Hence we cannot even begin to apply our understanding of “experience”: to God. The square peg does not fit the round hole.
God is a unity of these things.
You are assuming some attributes to God, and ignoring others.
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Lucretius
Guest
When God is described by emotional words, it is an analogy and an anthromorphism.
Joy, however, just is a possession of some good, and in a human, there is an emotional reaction. That is, Joy is a spiritual experience that in spiritual animals also is accompanied with an emotional response. Similar to love too. Love just is the will desiring some good, but because humans have flesh and well as spirit, we experience an emotional response to a spiritual reality. God is a spiritual reality, and so doesn’t experience the emotion that we do, even if He possess the spiritual good.
Christi pax,
Lucretius
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laocmo
Guest
All of this silly speculation about God and what he feels or can’t feel points out the ridiculous futility of theologians over the centuries trying to list His attributes. God is supposedly completely unknowable. That’s one of his attributes I think. Long winded discussions like this which conclude nothing serve to drive me closer and closer to atheism. The simple solution to all these speculations seems to be to conclude He doesn’t really exist. That certainly ends the speculation about all His supposed attributes. Some day science will have an answer to the why of the “Big Bang” and I don’t think it will involve the need for a God. Are you ready for that?
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TimothyH
Guest
God became man and felt pain.
He also laughed, cried, got hungry, angry and tired, saw sin first hand and saw the effects of sin, experienced death, went into Hell and rose from the dead.
This isn’t difficult. God became man. That’s the whole point of Christianity. He isn’t completely unknowable nor is this futile theology. People ate with God and listened to God speak. St John rested his head on God’s chest at the last supper.
God became man so that we could know him. That’s the point.
-Tim-
He also laughed, cried, got hungry, angry and tired, saw sin first hand and saw the effects of sin, experienced death, went into Hell and rose from the dead.
This isn’t difficult. God became man. That’s the whole point of Christianity. He isn’t completely unknowable nor is this futile theology. People ate with God and listened to God speak. St John rested his head on God’s chest at the last supper.
God became man so that we could know him. That’s the point.
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Lucretius
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Kevin12
Guest
You are wrong..
“Delight is the perfection of activity, perfecting activity as bloom does youth.176 But the activity of the divine understanding is most perfect. If therefore our act of understanding, coming to its perfection, yields delight, most delightful must be the act whereby God understands.”
Even if it is analgous, it is still joy, and in a way that Aquinas is not willing to admit for any other emotion.
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