God is a What?! Part Two

I think God has no form or comeliness, nor any beauty that we should desire him.

I don’t know what He looks like, but I know what He feels like. And none of the examples really cover it.

God is an ageless, humble astronomy professor at a not-especially-prestigious school, with a joy of life and a fine (if slightly pun-infected) sense of humor.

I don’t know what He looks like, but I know what He feels like. And none of the examples really cover it

Agreed, that is why I used them.

#7 TomD

I know we have those references, and that is what my image of God was like at one point. But, they are all representations of a white, Western looking man with a beard – likely because all of the paintings we generally use in the Church are by white, Western artists. And JS was a Westerner.

What about blacks and Asians and other races? Do they all look like Caucasians in the next life? Other cultures represent deity very differently. Why don’t we have any images of resurrected women? Why are beards forbidden at BYU if all the images of God and Christ we have include one? Do we just wear a robe as the description of Moroni you mention seems that there are no garments or anything else on? Do we eat? Do we sleep? I don’t know that any of these questions have any true answers, but to be honest, I don’t know that any of these questions are important to me in mortality. I have therefore cared less and less about them and figure I’ll find out the answer soon enough.

For me, having a vague image of someone in heaven that I can’t see doesn’t help me as much as what I stated before: seeing the image of God in everyone on earth, realizing our vast interconnectedness, and realizing that every action I do has a very real effect on literally everyone else (some more than others, but everyone to an extent – much like a wave equation). This outlook has lead me to have even more charity to my fellowman than worrying about doing something because I may someday be judged in a process involving justice and mercy that I don’t really understand.

There is the idea of an “average face” — it was originally used to try to predict the “look” of a criminal. The researches found that “average” faces got more and more attractive.

Here is a site that lets you make your own — http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average

It might be a good method to determining the face of resurrected persons. Also, concerning the “whiteness” of God — our skin, if all coloring agents like melatonin and blood are removed — it would be a creamy white.

Stephen @11

Thanks for the quotes, not for the insight, but as a reminder of how easily one can butcher the Bible. Holy cow, no wonder why there are so many religions.

When I think of God, I think of Jesus, who is a manifestation of the Father. Before He was crucified, Jesus told his disciples, “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him )John 14: 7). Jesus showed us in everything He said and did what the Father is like. We make the Father and His appearance more complicated than we need to, for Jesus, with his pure love and unfathomable kindness, is the Father and, although He has no apparent beauty, is the magnificent image of His Father.

While I’m fairly certain I’m not right, I’ve always pictured God looking a lot like my grandfather. It’s seemed easier to put him in the role of the distant, but loving father that way. It also encouraged me to really open up and talk during prayers, and my prayers are a lot more meaningful that way.

The other image I often picture of God is simply that of a blue sky, sometimes cloudy, sometimes starry. No doubt related to the constant referral that heaven is up and skyward. This has resulted with me often praying outside, looking upwards and just pouring out my soul.

#17: Do you honestly believe that if a NT author had written an honest account of god’s dealings with the Midianites, it would have come off as a more “honest” description amounting to an OT version of the Sermon on the Mount?

I do not think that if someone else wrote the account of what the Israelites did to the Midianites that it would sound more like the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t think there is a way to “honestly account” for that event because it seems incongruent with the character of God. I am saying that the understanding of God that is found in the OT is a product of the writers and the culture of that time — not so much directly from God. I likewise feel that much of the NT “God” is a product of the minds of its authors. Neither provides an accurate picture of what God is — only fragments remain.

There are many things in the NT that I feel like Jesus — in all probability — didn’t do as a matter of historical fact. I think that things like that are written into the NT b/c the authors felt such things did, however, accurately reflect their understanding of God — a faith promoting story as it were.

I see the OT “God” like that as well. He is a reflection of what ancient Israelites that He should be — not an autobiographical sketch of how He really is.

That’s what this post causes me to reflect on: how have I made God in my own image (like the OT or NT authors did) versus how can I better reflect the fact that I am made in His?

21 – Dan, I’m sure you probably understood Dexter’s analogy of an empty box, and considering the number of unique opinions of god, not just from responders on this blog, but for the rest of the world, his analogy is far more probable than your defending statement. i.e. A delusion, is the best explanation of what god is.

JTJ,

Yes, I understood. Yet I stand by that God is not an empty box nor a black hole.

1. We actually know what is in an empty box.

2. We actually have no clue what is in a black hole.

3. We have several accounts that describe God, though the rest is left to our imagination.

well JTJ, I fundamentally disagree with anybody who says God does not exist.

There are also thousands of contradictory, poorly evidenced accounts of a flying spaghetti monster.

Prove it.

JTJ,

I don’t have to ask myself why I fundamentally disagree with the non-existence of God.

How about this one.

What does an invisible man look like?

Dawkins is a decent enough biologist, but he is definitely a village atheist. He is as conceited, self-promoting, and overrated as Erwin Chemerinsky, and that’s saying as much as I can ever imagine saying. There hasn’t been a halfway decent atheist mind since Diderot.

Dawkins and Harris are the type who rip the logical crap out of some Bible-thumping Baptist’s Sunday School conception of God, and declare they’ve disproved the existence of a being who is presumed to exist beyond the reach of ordinary physical observation. QE not precisely D.

Thomas, I always like what you have to say. I’ve got to say though, the pomposity of #38 is a bit over the top.

As Homer Simpson once told Bart, “No matter how good you are, there’s always about a million people better than you.”

Don’t Mormon teachings indicate that an exhaulted being has the appearance of a human in his/her prime? Therefore, viewing God as elderly would not be logical, amirite?

Thomas, you appear to be a pretty intelligent guy. But you hurt your credibility with your arrogant and pompous comments. You said, “There hasn’t been a halfway decent atheist mind since Diderot,” among other ridiculous things. I suppose you think you are smarter than Bertrand Russell and HUNDREDS of other atheists who have accomplished much more than you in both the discussion on the existence of god AND many other fields. Give me a break.

No more pompous and arrogant than the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster mockery. You want respect from theists, show some, ya froggin’ heathen.

Re: Diderot, grow a funny bone and learn to recognize hyperbolic license. So Bertrand Russell is smarter than me. Well, G.K. Chesterton and Immanuel Kant are smarter than you. And neither Russell nor Chesterton, were Russell or Chesterton when they started out. You would have us sit in the shadows of previous giants, never daring to make a bold point — because what more can we say than to us hath been said, by our betters?

I still say that the present round of atheists — Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, with maybe my old neighbor Bill Lobdell thrown into the mix — are far inferior to their intellectual forebears, from Diderot to Russell. And that’s a pity, because good honest atheists are something believers definitely need, to keep them honest. I doubt religion would have risen to the intellectual heights to which its best aspects have, without the goad of a sophisticated and serious opposition shining light on the injustices, pettiness, and absurdities religion tends to fall prey to.

I keep coming back to “Fools mock, but they shall mourn.” Satire is devastatingly effective, in its proper place, but when the line is crossed into simple mockery — which carefully ignores engaging its target on its strongest points, and thereby presents its audience with a deliberately and dishonestly incomplete statement of the issue — it stops being serious, and loses its claim to my respect.

You see, JTJ, I wouldn’t call someone’s belief in Zeus (the word, of course, from which all the Latin languages derive the word for “God”) a “delusion.” Or at least all a delusion. Their conception of the true God may be a few meters off target — God may actually be more into truth and beauty and less into transforming into a bull and seducing comely young Greeks — but I believe the overall religious impulse is almost always aimed at the true God. I have reasons for concluding that an ethical monotheistic God (call him Deus, Dios, Allah, or whatever) is more reasonable to believe in than one of the capricious deities in the pagan pantheons (if a god is capricious, then by definition you don’t have much hope of figuring out how to get him on your side or avoid cheesing him off, so why bother?), but I don’t for a moment pretend that my conception of God is completely error- or “delusion”-free.

“You can rail against these men as demons or saints, but the measure of a man is not evidence for or against a god.”

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. No, a person’s character says little if anything relevant about the quality of his argument. Even if Gloria Allred or another despicable person is the one who says 2+2=4, it’s still true. What I am saying, with “fools mock,” is that when a person resorts to mockery, and avoids dealing with his opponent’s strongest points, it’s reasonable to conclude that he lacks more substantial support for his position.

And anyway, I just read back over the post you’re commenting on. That’s “railing”? It’s “ad hominem” to find a guy’s tone overly sarcastic? You must’ve gone to junior high in a much nicer neighborhood than I did.

Thomas, you continually criticize atheists for mocking theists, as you do nothing but mock atheists. You’re such a hypocrite.

If I may be forgiven just one more bit of assholerly in response, two things: (1) Inconsistency is not a synonym for “hypocrisy,” as vast numbers of clever people seem to think; and (2) If there is ever a proper context for mockery, it’s in mocking mockery.

Once the transparently silly flying spaghetti monster is deployed, I know I’m not dealing with a serious person.

Short version: You don’t bother hypothesizing an invisible flying spaghetti monster, because even if one exists, it’s irrelevant to you. Even if the FSM is something you could conceivably win over to your side, and get it to do good things for you, you have no possible way at guessing what you would have to do to accomplish this. So why bother?

(This, by the way, is why the FSM argument *may* work against old-school Baal-worship, or performing more or less random rituals in the hope of pleasing a god. Who knows whether your god likes roasted meat, or whether his tastes run more to sacrificed virgins, or rain dances But the FSMites don’t limit themselves to that — they think they’ve disproved the existence of God altogether. Again, not a particularly scientific approach.)

What kind of a God *would* be worth hypothesizing? (1) A God that can’t be influenced by human action or thinking can be dispensed with — that kind of being, by definition, will do what he’ll do, so no point bothering with him. Likewise, a God who *might* conceivably interact with humanity, and have those interactions shaped by how humans dealt with him — but whose conditions for allowing those dealings to have an effect, are arbitrary — is also not worth bothering with. We can’t guess what the conditions are, so again, no point bothering.

But what about a God who blesses humanity, because it is his inherent nature to be for humanity? (The existence of human suffering doesn’t rule this out, if you take the long view.) In that case, there are two possibilities: He does so unconditionally (see #1, above — we can just lie back and wait), or he does so conditionally. If God’s nature is to bless humanity, but conditionally, the only condition we can reasonably deduce from the nature of the God we’ve hypothesized, is that we align ourselves on God’s side as being for humanity.

So that’s the “slight conjecture” which natural religion takes for its starting point. Obviously, you can take it or leave it. Some people find that even making this first step, and following where it leads, is too much effort for what they calculate (on I don’t know what considerations) to be long odds against the wager paying off. My experience has been different. I don’t think faith has been, overall, a waste of time and effort. And more to the point, silly talk about flying spaghetti monsters is not remotely close to proof that it has been.

Thomas,

Paragraphs 5 & 6 (starting with “What kind of…) are outstanding. Thanks

Thomas, certainly the FSM is a transparent spoof, and in your mind, so would be Icelanders belief in fairies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_people), Zoroastrianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism), or the mother of all frauds, Scientology, except in each of these beliefs, the followers have the same sincerity, and formulate the same rhetorical explanations just as you do for your belief. You just need to go one god further in you rejection of bad ideas, although its unlikely you will get there anytime soon. And since you persisted down the slippery slope in defining what god worth be hypothesizing over, I actually would like to challenge you to explain to the bloggernacle how you came to this unique knowledge of the limits and bounds of what that god is. Then we’ll have the opportunity to compare that to the testimony of a pastafarian and see whose is more ridiculous.

Thomas, aside from challenging your already/to be presented revelatory explanation of god (which, let’s face it, if half convincing, you could make billions off of), let me dispense of your narrowing down challenge. 1) You don’t need to start with a god to begin with. To borrow an argument from Feynman, nature is how she presents herself, she’s going to come out the way she is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfjWa6yW2mk&NR=1 if you don’t like it, go to a different universe, or bring better evidence than what we have to explain it. You can’t start with the conclusion and try to work backwards, and to add, the Judeao-christian history and understanding of the universe (i.e. god) has been thoroughly debunked. The same goes for fairies, zeus, FSM, the parthenogenic jesus and sathia sai baba (both surprisingly had mothers whose birth canal only went one way). 2) Yes, and I dispense with the foolish idea just as I do yours. Why do you not see the same for your own beliefs?

“Thomas, aside from challenging your already/to be presented revelatory explanation of god”

Who said anything about “revelatory”? My argument, above, is to establish a rational basis for entertaining a general theistic hypothesis, and demonstrating that the modish atheists fail to address that argument (as opposed to the argument for a sectarian God, which is what they’ve actually focused on).

“You don’t need to start with a god to begin with.”

No. But neither do I need to not posit a God. And there may be reasons why I might want to.

After all, we do and think all kinds of things, which, strictly speaking, we are not compelled to do or think. I don’t need Swedish Fish, but they give me great pleasure.

Hi Stephen.

I like this question.  I think that in as much as we work with the Holy Ghost and not really with the Father, that it is easy to think of God as “faceless”.  After all, the Holy Ghost does not take Glory to Himself and really does not testify of Himself per se.  Nor does He “show” Himself to us as a man speaks to a man “face to face”.  It is even possible that He does not work with us directly all the time but through intermediary agencies — who are even less known to us.

I sometimes visualize God the Father and when I do, I suppose “patriarch” is the closest thing out of your list that applies.  But really, more often, when I pray, my sense of it is a lot more like talking on my phone without skype.  I speak and I listen but I do not see the other party.