A grammar mistake.

Care to elaborate?

I believe we should consider another definition of "God" — Lif3r

Then perhaps we should not try to address Her as though she has 'scientific' existence? God exists; Harry Potter exists; Judi Dench exists. But not all in the same way, and definitely not all in the literal sense of a simple dictionary definition. Words are ambiguous; they carry multiple meanings (sometimes connected; sometimes not). I suggest that a definition of God is not a useful thing to pursue. :chin:

I disagree. If God is everything, and we are a piece of it, then our purpose is to perpetuate and observe it, just the same as it's own purpose.

We can change the word from "God" to "Reality" and reap the same responsibility.

The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe is way beyond my full comprehension, but it's creator made a verbal statement on God that I interpreted essentially as this:

God is everything in existence, including any potential. — Lif3r

If you've got a new concept to reference, you need a new name to do so with. 'God' is already taken, why re-use it here?

Because redefining what I see as a current plague of social dogma on our species is important to further understand the difference between the current social dogmatic approach it'self and the nature of the "omnipresence" it references.

Am I similar to a synapse firing in the "brain" of the essence of reality, or no?

Are we meant to observe reality and to become more intelligent in order to strengthen our ability to report the nature of reality back to it's existence and "Strengthen the brain of reality",or no?

I believe we should consider another definition of "God" other than the definition that seems to be prevalent of "Magic sky person". — Lif3r

Then it would not be a god.

re·de·fine
ˌrēdəˈfīn/Submit
verb
define again or differently.

No one wants to touch on the subject of why God can't be all of existence. Everyone is too predisposed to the original definition of God.

That's my point. We are trained by diction to refer to it as a particular popular concept, when in reality it contains aspects of that concept plus additional aspects, and these additional aspects further explain it's nature.

Someone please say something about the theory. Has anyone even looked at it to consider why we might ought to try redifining? Or reducing? Or adding a new definition?

No... I just made a ridiculous name and everyone has dismissed the theory completely with no reference to it what so ever.

I think the idea you're gesturing towards is pretty close to the view of God being explored in the most prominent and interesting work being done today in the philosophy of religion. You might want to check out, for example, the exchange between Zizek and John Milbank.

As to why very smart members like Streetlight are quick to dismiss or ignore the sort of discussion you want about religion, I think there's a mix of reasons. (a) This forum is rife with people aggressively justifying their religious convictions with shoddy arguments and it gets tiring; (b) Philosophy of Religion has historically been a hotbed of really bad philosophizing and so people tend to start thinking about it derisively; (c) The two most absurdly dry and pedantic areas of philosophy at the moment are ethics and religion. The arguments being produced in these areas often take the form of frustrating self-righteousness and imperatives about how everyone else in philosophy should think and behave, and this tends to breed some contempt and wilful ignorance about contemporary work in these areas. It can get painfully boring and obnoxious to put in the energy necessary to talk deeply about these things--you have yourself admitted you don't have a very good grasp of the theory addressed in the OP.

Thank you John Doe. I was beginning to feel like I was the only person even considering this topic at all and it felt pretty lonely after a while... Ha

I suppose I can accept that the conversation is exhausting. It's still important to me, and I feel like the information is useful, however I suppose I can't just get my hopes up that anyone will be willing to discuss anything anytime.

Consult Nietzsche

Which part

Streetlight's reference

Neitzsche is basically saying that definitions are imperfect. Obviously they are imperfect because we aren't fully capable of grasping things in their entirety. This doesn't mean we aren't capable of observation; it merely suggests that our observations are incomplete. This doesn't refute the claim that God is everything in existence including any potential.

Perhaps we should say about any definition ever that the term in question "could be" something, instead of saying that it "is" something, but when I say something "is" something it's by means of current understandings of the term in question, not by means of what is true, 100% perfect understanding in some sort of "divine" sense of it.

Of course we don't have a perfect definition, that is why I'm aiming at one in the first place, but we don't get to opt out of observation simply because we only comprehend reality in the state that we are currently in. If definition is pointless then there is no point to learning anything and our entire existence is a complete misinterpretation that serves no purpose at all.

What is God?
Magic Sky Dad
Everything in existence — Lif3r

Many of us grew up in the fading age of the triple-decker universe: heaven up there, hell down there, earth in between. God was definitely Big Daddy. All this was very old school.

The Sky God was apparently a creator apart from his creation. God made the cosmos; did God then inhabit the cosmos, or did God exist outside the cosmos? Well, damned if I know. But that is one of the questions.

Another question which I am damned if I know or not is this: Is God co-terminus with the cosmos? God is everywhere the cosmos is. How big is God? As big as the Cosmos. How old is God? As long as time. ("Time is the magic length of God" Buffy St. Marie sang... "God is alive, magic is afoot...").

If God is coextensive with the material universe, is even one with the material universe yet more than a mere god of rocks, trees, hills, and rivers), is that consistent with OT/NT beliefs about God?

In one interpretation of the Gospel story of Jesus' birth, the Great God of heaven lay in a manger. God became Jesus. What about mein Gott in Himmel? if God lies in a manger, in flesh now appearing, then heaven must be empty. God gave up godhood to become human. Jesus wasn't a small graft of got inserted in the BVM by the Archangel. Jesus was God, lock stock and barrel.

This God, formerly sky god, Big Daddy, formerly coterminous with creation, etc. etc. etc., reduced himself to the most ungodly existence of humanity. This God, formerly immortal, invincible, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-everything else, cashed it all in on behalf of humanity. Christ wasn't an affordable sacrifice of an offshoot of Jesse's Branch -- the death of Christ was the death of the whole kit and caboodle.

Now we have an invisible God spread over the earth who lacks the power and glory of heaven. God with us.

You like that version, Lif3r?

I like the separation of the two for sure. It's at least somewhat along the lines of my understanding.

I would say that God is in the material and out of it at the same time. (Any potential)

Oh come on, commit yourself: is God in or out of the material world?

What do you prefer? God in the material world, or absent?

Take your pick. You're as qualified to edit God's profile as anybody else is.

I think you're making a serious point, somewhat lost in its presentation. I think that for many people, both atheists and believers, 'God' is a figure like 'Jupiter'. And the name 'Jupiter' is actually derived from the Indo-European pantheon - from 'Dyaus-', sky, '-father', god. So it literally does, or did, mean 'Sky Father'. Also Jupiter, or Jove, was the head of the ancient pantheon, so all this dovetails very nicely in the popular imagination with 'father in Heaven'.

(Then there's 'Jehovah', which sounds similar but is actually from a completely different source. That name originated in the Tetragrammaton of ancient Israel, which was a name constructed entirely of the consonants YHWH. This name was literally unpronounceable, or un-sayable - which was the point! The whole purpose was to avoid the profaning of the sacred name by enabling it to be casually spoken. The Wikipedia article notes that 'Religiously observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce יהוה‬, nor do they read aloud transliterated forms such as "Yahweh"; instead the word is substituted with a different term, whether used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Common substitutions for Hebrew forms are hakadosh baruch hu ("The Holy One, Blessed Be He"), Adonai ("The Lord"), or HaShem ("The Name").)

But in any case, for our purposes here, I think that in popular culture, both 'Jupiter' (and even 'Jehovah') correspond with what many will take to be the meaning of the term 'deity' as a 'sky-father'. I don't want to disparage religious believers or put them down for that, as that is the level on which they understand it.

But if you study comparative religion, you will find that it contains many very different perspectives on the 'nature of the holy'. After all, the Greek philosophers concepts of the 'first cause' or 'demiurgus' or 'One' were never depicted as persons. But many of those ideas were synthesized into theology by providing a coherent philosophical account of the Divine very early in the Christian era, giving rise to different and sometimes even contradictory layers of meaning in Christianity itself.

I glanced at the CTMU article, and also looked up the author entry on Wikipedia. There are other, comparable ideas floating around the noosphere, like Robert Lanza's 'Biocentrism' and Bernard Haisch' 'God Theory', both by scientifically-educated but also (let's say) highly imaginative authors. Contrary to the wishes and hopes of the 'new atheists', religious ideas are not simply going to curl up and die in the light of scientific scrutiny, but will continue to be reborn in new cultural and symbolic guises.

Both simultaneously

redefining what I see as a current plague of social dogma on our species is important to further understand the difference between the current social dogmatic approach it'self and the nature of the "omnipresence" it references. — Lif3r

Why is it important? If we call The CTMU theory 'God', what is it you're hoping will happen that will be beneficial? Your explanation here is limited, but my understanding of "... to further understand the difference between the current social dogmatic approach it'self and the nature of the "omnipresence" it references." is that you're suggesting that this CTMU theory might be what religions were getting at all along and if they could agree then that would remove some of the harms caused by religious dogma. Is that something like what you're saying here?

If so, then I think you have a very generous and unjustifiably homogeneous view of religion. I think that the history of religious war and persecution shows us quite terrifyingly clearly that getting to the core of what all religions might have in common is very much not the point of religion.

So the problem is at best you have have come across an interesting idea which is sufficiently well thought out that it could be the case, but since you have no way of demonstrating that it is more likely to be the case than any other competing idea, nor any argument that things would be better if we acted as if it were the case, then there's no discussion to be had really. It's like so many of these extremely speculative metaphysical theories, the only real response is "yeah... maybe..."

I read a bit about the CTMU theory, and mostly it's gibberish with words like "cognition" and "reflexive" generously mixed together in a rather sloppy bouquet of self-congratulatory pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophical righteousness. (if you think that sentence is verbose, try reading Chris Langan directly.

I think what he attempts to explain is quite interesting (the emergence of complexity) but he just gets lost in his own presumptions and offers nothing testable or of substance. One comes away from CTMU with the impression that the universe is itself capable of cognition and that it interacts with our own cognitive minds...

Here he's half right: our cognitive minds interact with the universe ("objective reality"), but the universe itself isn't "aware" of these interactions in any cognitive sense (i.e: it's not a thinking thing).

Now, you might object (or Langan might) and say: human minds are just matter in the universe, so obviously the universe is capable of doing cognition, but like the alchemists of old you would committing ye olde fallacy of composition: our brains have cognitive faculties, but the individual parts of our brains do not posses cognitive faculties on their own. It's a careful arrangement of matter (neural networks and their support structures) that actually does cognition (that actually "perceives" things and can make predictions) and the attributes of the whole (the mind/brain) are not the same as the attributes of its individual parts (a global feature of emergence Langan seems to have missed). If the universe is a big mind a la "pantheism", it's not as if we would be able to communicate with it any more than a parasitic amoeba communicates with the brain of its host. That which is above is not the same as that which is below; the alchemists were wrong.

Langan rightly guesses that cognition is an emergent feature that can be vaguely described as modeling the universe, but he seems to have no sweet clue how that actually happens and goes off the deep end by suggesting that reality itself is some kind of cognition-having entity, one which we interact with. There's no obvious way to test or explore these ideas, which relegates them to the same category of claims espoused by your average child of heavenly sky-father.

I see no more reason to redefine God as everything in existence than to redefine Zeus as everyone wearing a hat. I'll refer to everything in existence with the phrase "everything in existence", and I'll refer to everyone wearing a hat with the phrase "everyone wearing a hat". There's no need to name these things, as if they're a pet or something. If that kind of anthropomorphic tomfoolery floats your boat, then go ahead, but you can count me out.

No body cares about people wearing hats. People care about God.

People care about God. — Lif3r

Not me.

...offers nothing testable... — VagabondSpectre

Testability, or falsifiability, is not an attribute of any metaphysic. Falsifiability was devised to distinguish empirical science from metaphysical speculation (among other things. Except now even this sacrosanct principle is being challenged by string theorists.)

our cognitive minds interact with the universe ("objective reality"), but the universe itself isn't "aware" of these interactions in any cognitive sense (i.e: it's not a thinking thing). — VagabondSpectre

I think a pretty good working metaphysic is that humans are the universe becoming aware of itself. I don't know how else it could go about doing that. Maybe 'the universe' felt like, I don't know, sleeping in until 11:00 am and then getting up and eating a lemon gelato. It's not going to be able to do that, unless it evolves into something like us.

On a more serious note, I think this basic idea is a good stand-in for the role played by God in Berkeley's esse est percipe. As you will recall, Berkeley's answer to the question, 'why doesn't everything vanish when nobody is perceiving it?' is that it is constantly being 'perceived by God'. Whereas in this model, human consciousness plays a formative role in the universe as a whole.

Now, you will say, this is absurd, because humans have only been around for, what, a couple of hundred thousand years, and the Universe is measurably billions of years old.

To which a response is: 'before' and 'billions' both imply a perspective - a perspective which provides a linear sense of time (hence, 'before' and 'after') and meaningful units in which time is measured. The mind provides or furnishes that. How, or whether, time is real apart from that 'primary intuition' is a meaningless question, as we have no way of conceiving it, or rather, in the absence of any such perspective, the notion of time itself is meaningless.

This actually has been noticed by physics.

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.

(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271 and elaborated in this Closer to Truth interview.)