What is God?

[memphis]

Any ideas?

[Alcon]

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Option A


Option B


Option C


Option D


Option E


I hope that answers your questions.  All of them.  I will assume it does.

[Daniel Plainview]

There is no God, only some sort of amorphous entiety which doesn't interfere in human affairs but is the reason that we exist today

[Hash]

Fred Thompson. 6th image.



God is also homophobic, btw

[Keystone Phil]

I hope He has Morgan Freeman's voice.

[Psychic Octopus]

I hope He has Morgan Freeman's voice.

I hope so too, and you know what I think he does.

[Josh/Devilman88]

What is God? Answer: God....

[memphis]

Total number of decent answers thus far: 0

[pbrower2a]

My definition: the laws that underpin the reality that is our universe. Those are the laws of mathematics, physics, and simple categorization. God is to be found in the Law of Binding Energy that sets iron as the low point of potential energy so that some magnetic elements can form, but that such troublesome elements such as arsenic, selenium, bromine, and krypton (the latter would suffocate a planet by shoving lighter gases into the upper atmosphere of a planet) are scarce. Without iron, mammalian blood would not form, and a no planet would have a magnetic field capable of driving off the high-powered radiation that would cook life on a planet close enough to a star to be warm enough to have biochemistry -- let alone the copper and zinc necessary for technology.  I find God in the inverse square laws of gravitation and electromagnetism. I find God in the periodic law of chemical elements. I find God in the basic laws of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. I find God in the laws of logic that allow the Universe to make sense.

Above all I find a God merciful enough to allow intelligent life capable of questioning how the universe operates itself the result of a finely-tuned universe. I don't know... do you -- could God have played dice with universes dissimilar to ours and found them unsettling, only to settle on ours? Maybe it isn't a perfect Universe, but God must find this one, or at least our species -- at least as fascinating at times as it can be appalling.     

[A18]

The omniscient mind whose laws all matter obeys.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Total number of decent answers thus far: 0

He is an eteral spirit being that is all powerfully, all knowing, omnipresent, and the creator of all things.

[12th Doctor]

Total number of decent answers thus far: 0

He is an eteral spirit being that is all powerfully, all knowing, omnipresent, and the creator of all things.

Jmf and I actually agree on something... except his spelling of "eternal".

[anvi]

Don't believe in a personal God, like the God portrayed in the monotheistic religions,  an overarching supernatural and divine personage.  I'm more sympathetic to Asian naturalistic conceptions of the sacred, such as brahman of the Hindu Upanisads or the dao of Daoism.  But, if God is to be described as the creator of all life on earth, then the closest thing we have to God in the modern scientific worldview is DNA polymerase.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Beyond human comprehension.

[© tweed]

a side effect of the human evolutionary capability of introspection.

[Alcon]

Beyond human comprehension.

Isn't certainty that something is beyond human comprehension sort of self-contradicting?

If you accept that a property of an entity is inability to be comprehended by humans, then that basically constitutes a concession that such an entity's existence would also not necessarily be observable.  So treating it as a certainty does not seem rational.

[Eraserhead]

A creation of the human mind. It is used to explain away various complicated issues by simple people.

[Keystone Phil]

It  is used to explain away various complicated issues by simple people.

Very kind. Tolerant, too.

I'm sure this type of attitude doesn't contribute at all to the conflicts between the religious and non-religious.

[RI]

It  is used to explain away various complicated issues by simple people.

Very kind. Tolerant, too.

I'm sure this type of attitude doesn't contribute at all to the conflicts between the religious and non-religious.

Even so, you can not deny that the invocation of God has come in rather handy for many a crackpot and wannabe despot over the course of history.

[Keystone Phil]

It  is used to explain away various complicated issues by simple people.

Very kind. Tolerant, too.

I'm sure this type of attitude doesn't contribute at all to the conflicts between the religious and non-religious.

Even so, you can not deny that the invocation of God has come in rather handy for many a crackpot and wannabe despot over the course of history.

Even so, you can not deny that religion has been incorrectly used as a reason for many of the worlds problems.

[RI]

It  is used to explain away various complicated issues by simple people.

Very kind. Tolerant, too.

I'm sure this type of attitude doesn't contribute at all to the conflicts between the religious and non-religious.

Even so, you can not deny that the invocation of God has come in rather handy for many a crackpot and wannabe despot over the course of history.

Even so, you can not deny that religion has been incorrectly used as a reason for many of the worlds problems.

That is equally true. I do not doubt that religion has been scapegoated for many problems that it did not cause. I do not doubt that religion can be a force for good.

I am merely making the point that religion has its inate flaws and that pointing them out is not intolerance, even if it was worded harshly and rather smugly.

[anvi]

I do have to say here that, even though I am not a fan of monotheistic religions anymore, and I agree that religions have been used to justify incredible violence and injustice in history and now, I've also been witness to what good such faiths can do.  A few years ago, I attended an international conference on peace studies, and there were hundreds of deeply religious activists there who put their lives on the line every day to try to stop fighting in so many perilous regions in the world, Israeli Jews and Palastinian Muslims, Hindus and Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians too.  They found themselves on battlefields, beaten, imprisoned, often in mortal danger, and what gave them their strength was their faith in what they believe to be God.  Their strength is a strength I gravely doubt I could ever have.  So, I myself cannot bring myself to believe in such things as monotheists do, and I recognize clearly that religion has been put to the service of evil.  But I have also seen how real faith, not fake faith or superficial faith, can be put to the serivice of almost superhuman good, and I can't help but feel enormous respect for people who have such faith and put it to such service.   

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Isn't certainty that something is beyond human comprehension sort of self-contradicting?

No. I don't see why it should be either; you can easily acknowledge the existence of something while admitting that you will never be able to understand it anything more than an extremely basic level.

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That depends what you mean by "observable", doesn't it. But, then again, I wasn't really thinking of observation.

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Of course it isn't rational. I never claimed it to be rational. Rationality is a human concept anyway; an attempt to impose order (as we see it anyway) on chaos. Not that that's necessarily or always a bad thing. Many good things have come from it. It's just we should be more aware of its limits than we generally are; rationality does not (and obviously does not) have an objective existence.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I am merely making the point that religion has its inate flaws and that pointing them out is not intolerance, even if it was worded harshly and rather smugly.

Everything we do has inate flaws. Religion is, in this respect and many others, no different from other human institutions.

[Alcon]

No. I don't see why it should be either; you can easily acknowledge the existence of something while admitting that you will never be able to understand it anything more than an extremely basic level.

The very concession that humans are unable to empirically observe a phenomenon means they are not omniscient, and therefore are not capable of transcending their ability to observe.  You can acknowledge anything you want, but it is done through that lens.  Therefore, it is no less fallible than any other empirical observation you make -- owing to the complexity of the issue, I'd argue more.

This is essentially the problem I have with both hard theism and hard atheism, but the former is more common.

That depends what you mean by "observable", doesn't it. But, then again, I wasn't really thinking of observation.

Then, other than observation, how did you reach the conclusion you stated?

Of course it isn't rational. I never claimed it to be rational. Rationality is a human concept anyway; an attempt to impose order (as we see it anyway) on chaos. Not that that's necessarily or always a bad thing. Many good things have come from it. It's just we should be more aware of its limits than we generally are; rationality does not (and obviously does not) have an objective existence.

That is a somewhat impotent definition of rationality.  "1=1" is not an "attempt to impose order"; in fact, I would as go as far as to argue that it is objective.  Could our sense of what is objective be incorrect?  Yes, but that does not mean we should assume that such an observed phenomenon is subjective.  That does not follow under any sense of rationality.

There are, I'll concede, other levels on which our "rationality" is a cultural construct, but I am not talking about those.

Everything we do has inate flaws. Religion is, in this respect and many others, no different from other human institutions.

I don't think anyone is arguing that we should ignore the flaws in other human institutions.  I would also argue that religion receives special treatment unlike any other human institution, though, so in that sense it's "different."