What is God?

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God is that which nothing greater can be thought.

-Immanuel Kant
 
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Suma Theologica posted 5 proofs for God, one of which was THE FIRST CAUSE.

You cannot explain anything, even the big bang theory without having a FIRST CAUSE. Evolutionists have to go back to THE FIRST CAUSE. Who initiated the first cause, whether it was immediate life within a 6 day week, as we know “a week” to be now, or a big bang from which all matter was created. Who created the “what” that was the spark for everything else?

Even this week, with the announcement of the first man made bacteria, the story went beyond the reality of the creation by crediting this creation with “created life”, when in fact it was mutated life as it required “existing chemicals and yeast and living cells” to fabricate and mutate and then reboot into a new cell. Without all the exiting material “first causes”, this bacteria would have been impossible to establish.

The first cause is one of many explanations of “what” God is.

Start with your most favorite and comfortable theory on which you rest your life and existence without God, and begin asking “how” or “why” to every minute detail that is given to explain that theory. If you are intellectually honest, you will reach a point that cannot be explained. Through the entire reverse engineering of your questions, you will arrive at the unanswerable point upon which then the entire theory rests. No one, will be able to explain the first cause, whether its “how did the atoms get there?” or “how did the protons get created?” or “how did the gases that exploded come to be?”
 
Just because we can’t explain how the first cause works does not mean it doesn’t exist.
 
If we can **think **of a perfect being(all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent and all-present) then we can agree that this perfect being must exist in thought or in idea. If this perfect being exists in thought and if **existence in actuality is necessary for perfection **than we must admit that the perfect being not only exists in thought but in actuallity aswell.

Hope this helps.
 
Benedict_777 said:
If we can **think **of a perfect being(all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent and all-present) then we can agree that this perfect being must exist in thought or in idea. If this perfect being exists in thought and if **existence in actuality is necessary for perfection **than we must admit that the perfect being not only exists in thought but in actuallity aswell.

Hope this helps.
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And since we cannot think of that perfect being in meaningful terms?
 
Benedict_777 said:
Says who?
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Well, I’ve asked a simple question, what is God?

So far, I’ve been answered with vague riddles, abstractions, and glib one liners. That’s not just on this thread, but from every deist I’ve ever spoken to or read the words of on this subject

If you can think about what God is, then why don’t you explain what God is? Tell us your thoughts.

Incidentally, I can think about a teapot orbiting Neptune. It doesn’t mean there is actually any possibility worth considering of it.
 
I didn’t think I answered in ‘a vague riddle’ or whatever you want to call it. I said ‘God is’. You must not know how to interpret it.

God tells us who He is in Exodus: ‘I AM who AM’, in other words, God is the very act of existence itself. He has no creator, rather He is the Creator Himself: “through Him, all things were made”.

So the best answer to your question, IMO, ‘what is God?’ is ‘God is existence itself’ (or ‘God is’, my original answer).

I hope that’s clear enough.
 
Moonstruck888 said:
Well, I’ve asked a simple question, what is God?

So far, I’ve been answered with vague riddles, abstractions, and glib one liners. That’s not just on this thread, but from every deist I’ve ever spoken to or read the words of on this subject

If you can think about what God is, then why don’t you explain what God is? Tell us your thoughts.
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Why don’t you explain what you are? What are you? A mindless body? :rolleyes:
 
coolduude said:
I didn’t think I answered in ‘a vague riddle’ or whatever you want to call it. I said ‘God is’. You must not know how to interpret it.

God tells us who He is in Exodus: ‘I AM who AM’, in other words, God is the very act of existence itself. He has no creator, rather He is the Creator Himself: “through Him, all things were made”.

So the best answer to your question, IMO, ‘what is God?’ is ‘God is existence itself’ (or ‘God is’, my original answer).

I hope that’s clear enough.
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God is existence… That doesn’t really explain anything at all. Where did it come from? Why is it here? How long will it last? What size is it?
 
tonyrey said:
Why don’t you explain what you are? What are you? A mindless body? :rolleyes:
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I am a self motivating automaton constructed from protein, water and electrolyes, based on information contained in a self replicating nucleic acid molecule, a transitional phase in a nested cascade.

What is God. In those kind of verifiable terms?
 
Something you have to understand is as humans evolve, their conception of God comes closer and closer to the truth. The savage believes that his God is the highest version of himself, he believes his God too takes joy in slaughtering his enemy, and that his God has his moral belief’s.

The Abrahamic God was created a LOOOONNNG time ago, to where the Old Testament seems very savage to us, because it indeed is.

There have of course always been those who are much more highly ascended above the rest of the race who have had a bit closer ideal of the truth.

If you’d like to study a bit more up to date version of the conception of the Abrahamic God, I would suggest you read “A Course in Miracles”.
 
Moonstruck888 said:
Well, I’ve asked a simple question, what is God?

So far, I’ve been answered with vague riddles, abstractions, and glib one liners. That’s not just on this thread, but from every deist I’ve ever spoken to or read the words of on this subject

If you can think about what God is, then why don’t you explain what God is? Tell us your thoughts.

Incidentally, I can think about a teapot orbiting Neptune. It doesn’t mean there is actually any possibility worth considering of it.
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Moonstruck,
I will assume that you are seriously seeking answers to your OP question and not just, as most atheists in this forum do, play games with we theists’ inability to answer such questions. So with that assumption in hand, I have a challenge for you, one that if you are sufficiently perspicacious and willing to expend some mental effort, will suggest an answer to your OP question.

Here is my challenge to you: go to page 17 of the philosophy forum and look up my thread entitled “God Exists, But How?” and see if you can understand what I am driving at. I good mind will be able to extract the meaning of an intellectual proposal, even when the one in possession of the good mind does not agree with what the idea implies. If you succeed you will have an answer (although not one that is satisfying to you perhaps) and you will be the first in this forum to come close to understanding what I am attempting to convey as a possible means that God uses to design and supervise reality. God’s involvement occurs at the ground of reality in such a way that it is manifested at our current level of human understanding as what we observe and science describes.

When that thread died and went to heaven (pg.17) there were 189 posts, with none as far as I can recall, from an atheist. I took that to mean that it represented a danger to scientific materialistic thinking. Here’s a chance for you to carry the ball for your team. I will save you the trouble of scanning through the mish-mash of posts and suggest that you can get a suggestion of what my hypothesis involves by reading posts 1, 21, 45, 46, 56, 63, 66, 67, 79, and 83. They should provide you with a suggested answer if not a whole answer to your OP question.
Yppop
 
Let me add a few things to my above post (since I am not allowed to edit :mad:), maybe this will help to the OP.

God is the Infinite Eternal Being that everything exists within. This is how God is omnipotent, in that it contains within it all force/power, Omniscient in that all knowledge that can be known is within it, omnipresent in that it is everywhere, being that everything is inside of it.

The Holy Ghost as the bible calls Him is God in true form, the universe is an emanation of God. Much like the light on earth is of the Sun, it is not the Sun itself.

Its a very complex subject, and we can not fully comprehend God, though we can comprehend the Laws of God, such as physics for the material world, but we cannot fully comprehend God, as you need to be outside of something to observe it to truly understand it, and nothing can be outside of the All aka God. 👍
 
Moonstruck888 said:
And since we cannot think of that perfect being in meaningful terms?
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Putting aside that not everyone will define “meaningful” the way you do (and it’s very important to keep that in mind), the answer to your question is that we are reminded of the following: We have no real reason to believe that our intellect and senses are so perfect that we will be able to intellectually grasp everything that is real, and so finding that something evades our ability to “define” should be no surprise, nor does it follow that such a thing is in itself meaningless or nonexisting. It would be, in other words, a non-sequiter if we were to jump from “we cannot adequately/directly] define God in material terms” to “God is meaningless and/or not real.”

This is not an answer to your original question, but it is a reminder that the inability to answer that question (should no one answer it to your satisfaction) doesn’t carry the implications you may think it does.

As to your question, the person who said “God is a Spirit” was correct. It is true, defining “Spirit” is a problem. However, consider that, when broken down to the barest, tiniest, indivisible pieces, “What is matter” is a similarly difficult (if not impossible) question to answer, and at some point (after every specific expression of matter, such as protons, etc., have been defined) one will reach the point to where there are no other terms to define it on its own merits rather than by relative terms such as what it does or what forms it takes, etc., which would be like answering your question with: “The Creator of the Universe”. Let’s face it: If the only meaningful way to define something is by saying what it’s made of or why it is what it is, which is your implication, then logically we’re going to eventually have the same problem defining matter (and, in turn, defining everything made of matter, since ultimately that means that such forms are just as mysterious/inexplicable when one gets down to the fundamental question). Or, if matter itself is divisible into something “nonmatter”, we will have the same problem defining those divided parts, and so on and so on–it is logically inevitible that at some point what I’m saying will be true and we will reach the point ot where we must answer: “I have no meaningful terms for that in and of itself. It just is what it is.” So the existence of things we cannot really define in the “what is it?” manner is fully precedented by applying logical inevitability to the scientifically observable reality in which we live. 🙂

Blessings in Christ,
KindredSoul
 
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