What is god?

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Charles_Darwin

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If i was to ask you what is a car, a human, a god? What would you reply?

Would you say that a car is fast, good looking, a polluter?

Would you say that a human is caring, evil, pretty, strong?

Well if you did you would not have told me a single thing about what these things actually are.

If i asked you, what is Albert Einstein? Would you say he discovered relativity? Is that what he is? NO. Hes a human. So what is a human, what is a car?

Well a car is a wheeled mechanical device designed to transport people.They normally carry between 2-8 people. They have there own internal combustion engines, and wheels blah blah blah.

A human is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae.

Domain: Eukarya
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Superclass: Tetrapoda
Class: Mammalia
Infraclass: Eutheria
Order: Primates
Suborder: Haplorrhini
Infraorder: Simiiformes
Parvorder: Catarrhini
Superfamily: Hominoidea
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Tribe: Hominini
Genus: Homo

They are carbon based life forms which DNA contains the genetic instructions blah blah blah.

Now even before we had such detailed explanations of what a human is we still knew what a human was. We just did not know the intricate details.

Ok now onto the biggy…

What is god?
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I don’t want a list of attributes like “god is love”. As that is not an answer. I do not want he is the creater of the universe, for that is NOT what IT is.**

Now tell me this… How can i believe or disbelieving in something, what i don’t even know what that thing I’m supposed to be believing in is?
 
But… the normal way of defining something is by listing key attributes.

A car is a mechanical device. It has wheels. It transports people. It has some sort of engine which allows it to move… Sounds like a list of attributes to me.

A human is a primate. It is a carbon-based lifeform. It has DNA to contain genetic instructions… Also sounds like a list of attributes.

So here are your key attributes for God: the only eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being. The first cause; the source of all creation. Objective truth and objective morality personified.
 
It sounds as if you are asking for a physical i.e. observable & measurable description of God. We know Him through His acts, from his nature and through the person of Jesus Christ. I can give you a physical description of the human aspect of Christ, but not His divine nature.

And we do know what and who it is we believe in, Alindawyl has told you.
 
Charles_Darwin said:
Now tell me this… How can i believe or disbelieving in something, what i don’t even know what that thing I’m supposed to be believing in is?
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Describe to me what dark matter is. I doubt you can.

We infer the existence of dark matter from what we know, but we have very little idea of its nature. So it is with God.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
Describe to me what dark matter is. I doubt you can.

We infer the existence of dark matter from what we know, but we have very little idea of its nature. So it is with God.
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Who says i believe in dark matter, i am happy with the answer i don’t know what dark matter is.
 
Alindawyl said:
But… the normal way of defining something is by listing key attributes.

A car is a mechanical device. It has wheels. It transports people. It has some sort of engine which allows it to move… Sounds like a list of attributes to me.

A human is a primate. It is a carbon-based lifeform. It has DNA to contain genetic instructions… Also sounds like a list of attributes.

So here are your key attributes for God: the only eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being. The first cause; the source of all creation. Objective truth and objective morality personified.
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Yes physical attributes will do fine.
 
Alindawyl said:
But… the normal way of defining something is by listing key attributes.

A car is a mechanical device. It has wheels. It transports people. It has some sort of engine which allows it to move… Sounds like a list of attributes to me.

A human is a primate. It is a carbon-based lifeform. It has DNA to contain genetic instructions… Also sounds like a list of attributes.

So here are your key attributes for God: the only eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being. The first cause; the source of all creation. Objective truth and objective morality personified.
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Sorry that but that does not tell me one things about the entity, what is the entity? I am quite happy for you to say you don’t know. Again i do not want a list of personality traits etc,** i would like to know what it is? **
 
Charles_Darwin said:
Ok now we are getting somewhere. God does not have a physical body, what is it made up of?
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For God to be made up of something he would have to have a physical nature. As he doesn’t, the question is meaningless. You may as well ask what the space between atoms is made up of.
 
Alindawyl said:
For God to be made up of something he would have to have a physical nature. As he doesn’t, the question is meaningless. You may as well ask what the space between atoms is made up of.
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Well there must be something to the entity, are you telling me god is just nothing? I think we may be closer in belief than i first though 🙂
 
Charles_Darwin said:
Who says i believe in dark matter, i am happy with the answer i don’t know what dark matter is.
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I am happy with the answer I don’t know who God is.

With dark matter, we can know everything that it is not, but we do not know what it is. Similarly, we can only know God by His negations – those things He is not. He is not physical matter, and He is not dependent on the universe. It follows that He is “aphysical” – although we do not know what that means – and that His essence is existence (He cannot not be).

I’m not saying that this is a proof of God. But this is “what we talk about when we talk about God.”
 
Prodigal_Son said:
I am happy with the answer I don’t know who God is.
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Ok, good. I will start by saying that there is nothing wrong with the answer “i don’t know”, it is in fact the intellectually honest answer.

Now can you understand why one might withhold belief when we don’t actually know what it is we are talking about?
 
Charles_Darwin said:
Well there must be something to the entity, are you telling me god is just nothing? I think we may be closer in belief than i first though 🙂
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Of course I’m not telling you God is nothing. You’re merely inferring that because you want everything to have physical attributes. But it’s illogical to demand that a being without physical form be described using physical terminology.
 
Alindawyl said:
Of course I’m not telling you God is nothing. You’re merely inferring that because you want everything to have physical attributes. But it’s illogical to demand that a being without physical form be described using physical terminology.
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No I’m not asking for physical attributes, i am asking what the entity is? If the entity is not physical what is it, what is it made up of, how does it think, store knowledge, interact with the cosmos. What on earth IS IT?

How can you expect someone to believe in something, when you can’t even tell then what that something is?
 
Charles_Darwin said:
Well there must be something to the entity, are you telling me god is just nothing? I think we may be closer in belief than i first though 🙂
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What is God? A great question, but obviously not easy to answer. Here is **my view **of what God is.

I don’t see that God is separate from anything. For example, if you create something out of various materials, like a table for example, the table is not part of you. You have not created it out of yourself. You are not part of the table, nor is the table a part of you. The universe that God created, however, which includes us, is not separate from him, but rather a part of him (FYI, I use “him” as a pronoun for God, but could just as easily call God “her” or “it”). God is truly infinite, so that everything that exists is contained within God. We are like a skin cell on the “body” of God (if God had a body).

God is not in any place, since if he is infinite he is everywhere. We can not really “go” to God, nor does he need to come to us, since he is right here. He is in us, and we are in him.

So, one way to answer the question is to say that God is comprised of us, of all the matter of the universe, and more. If you have followed the sciences for the past 100 or so years, you can see that we keep discovering more minute particles, more and more layers within the atom. How far does it go?

We are also discovering more and more kinds of “matter” (and anti-matter) within the universe, either through observation or by means of explaining what we observe happening in the universe. Space isn’t quite as empty as we once thought. Could matter be infinitely tiny as the universe (or universes) could be infinitely large?

The problem we have is we tend to think of God anthropomorphically, as having human characteristics or attributes. We picture him as a human like figure. That is partly due to our point of view; we do the same thing with animals with plants, and even non-living things. The other reason, I think, is due to the statement in Genesis that God created man in his own image. We think physical image, rather than spiritual. The part of us that knows (or at least believes) that we have this connection with God is unique to the world (can’t speak to the entire universe). We are the only life form that is “aware” of God. That is the gift he gave us, but it is a spiritual gift, not a physical one.

In physics, we read about the “big bang” and that the universe may have started from a “singularity”. Could that singularity have been God?
 
Charles_Darwin said:
No I’m not asking for physical attributes, i am asking what the entity is? If the entity is not physical what is it, what is it made up of, how does it think, stored knowledge, interact with the cosmos. What on earth IS IT?

How can you expect someone to believe in something, when you can’t even tell then what that something is?
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I can’t speak for anyone else but I have no expectation that any given person will believe in God. God created us all with free will. If want to exercise yours in favor of disbelief then that’s your choice.

I’m sorry that my answer did not meet with your approval. Perhaps the problem is not with any particular answer you’ve been given but with your preconceived notions on what form the answer should take.
 
Alindawyl said:
I can’t speak for anyone else but I have no expectation that any given person will believe in God. God created us all with free will. If want to exercise yours in favor of disbelief then that’s your choice.

I’m sorry that my answer did not meet with your approval. Perhaps the problem is not with any particular answer you’ve been given but with your preconceived notions on what form the answer should take.
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Well i was not specifically meaning you, i just meant any general. How can one be expected to believe in something without actually know what it is they are supposed to believe in?
 
why must you “know” to believe something. If that is the case, then you should never be satisfied with the majority of things in the universe, as our “knowledge” of things changes all the time. You might as well just throw all of science and philosophy out the window, as there are very few things in those subjects that we can say 100% are absolutely exactly true.
 
From the CCC article 36 : God is: “…the first principle and last end of all things…”
 
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