The existence of God is easy to prove, accept and comprehend, as easily as proving the existence of any sort of order in the universe. The question is what attributes God encompasses.
My way of comprehending existence, form, ideas and relationships separates the material from the non-material. Humanity lives in a non-physical or rational world. The largest part of the non-material is the rational. That which we think, which humanity represents in words and names is not material. Even simple things like say “chair” refers to a concept, not a physical. The order that exists in the universe is the foundation of human knowledge and intellect. The order is distinct and separate, though intimately related to the matter in the universe.
The premise of RE is that we understand order not physical existence. We see relationships, aspects and attributes of existence, not existence itself.
The order in the universe “preexists” and includes all matter, behavior and phenomenon in that universe. This is how we think, the basis of our rational and conceptual reality. We accept implicitly that order exists but we cannot know or understand existence itself, only the implications of existence.
Humanity is, of course, not able to discern every sort of order possible, but some types and examples of order we find have proved useful to us in our shared rational model of reality.
God is What He is by definition only, just as every concept we have is so by definition only. The existence of a chair is subject to the definition, and the existence of God is likewise subject to the definition.
To express that which exists are words and names which place whatever order we discern in relation to other things. In this way, we build and reify our world. Everything is in some way semantic the way humanity understands everything, including God. We use words, concepts, models and imagination to understand things.
If order exists, which must be accepted at some point (or at least rationally acknowledged) and God is defined as that which emanates order, and further, that such order is a good thing, then we have the existence of God as fundamentally existent as any rock or relationship.
And ego, well, someone said ego was a bad thing. I am not so sure. Many things, like conquering the world, theories of general knowledge, massing fortunes for charity, centers of learning and spiritual awareness, were accomplished for ego. Look at the great names of history, and if you took everything those people accomplished away, we would have a very different world.
As with all the essays of this class we must take into account the background of the discussion is Rational Existence, or RE. This is the conviction that our existence is non-physical and better said to be conceptual or rational. The reasoning of the following essay is conditional upon acceptance of this point.
God is an idea, a conceptal model, expressed as a name. Just as with any name, model or idea, is as true and real as it’s definition. Simply put, God can be defined as a real and true or imaginary and silly. We can construct a straw god, made only for the purposes of disproving a real and living God, or we can accept that several intelligent, inspired and respectable people have constructed a rational model to which the word God can be reasonably applied.
Several irrational definitions of God can be found. But our purposes here are to discover if there are any rational definitions. The most common heard is that of the “Creator”. A ational definition of a creator would be implied by the creation. Whatever exists was created, in some way, and whatever principles or laws which caused, instituted, generated, or inspired a creation can be therefore defined as God.
From the standpoint of Rational Existence all words and names represent ideas and concepts which exist in a sense that is more real, more pertentant, more true than an undefined physical existence. In other words the definitions of physical objects are, from a human standpoint, more important than the physical objects themselves.
By reference to God we can now see that Creator is itself a definition of a conceptuality that must exist by implication. If we know what creates then we can define and imply the existence of a creator. In a larger sense, if creation exists in a universal sense then, by the human way of ordering things a Creator in the universal sense is implied.
As for other definitions, descriptions or names of God another very common one is the “all Powerful”. By implication we would see a more figurative definition here. If there is a power, then there is an implication of a source of the quintessence of power itself. Any relationship, aspect of attribute of a thing that has power over some other thing, then, has the power in common.
Beliefs… 1/11/08
With a Mormon running for President in the US pundits and regular folk are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of rejecting the beliefs of another religion and having to examine the beliefs of their own religions.
Catholics have some strange beliefs, in my opinion, as do Mormons, heck, every religion has such beliefs. I was going to name this thread “Stupid Beliefs” or “Silly Beliefs” but I was afraid the Mods would complain.
Recently a point that has been made over and over on these pages is that beliefs among Baha’is are certainly not uniform.
One Baha’i said recently “…the only two symbols in existence are the straight line and circle and all things proceed from these.” Both of us were Baha’i but our beliefs were so very different it was hardly recognizable as the same Faith.
In the interest of community, Baha’is put up with a lot from their fellow Baha’is. My mother would say a true Baha’i is a Baha’i who remains a Baha’i after meeting the other Baha’is. I don’t think it is a specifically Baha’i problem that people are pushy about their beliefs, but I do know that Baha’is often assume I believe as they believe just because I accept Baha’u’llah and His Covenant. That does not mean I want to attend their therapy sessions or discuss the “calamity” or the afterlife in hushed tones after midnight drinking coffee. There was such a problem in the 1970s of Baha’is selling Amway at Baha’i meetings that it merited a letter from National.
Another Baha’i recently said “…if you are referring to pre-existence, my understanding is that this is exclusive to the Manifestations.”
This seems just the sort of misconception that we can discuss here.
Abdu’l-Baha spoke at length about “contingent reality” and preexistence.
Another Baha’is recently said: “…As a concept you pre-existed your physical self” I think it is obvious we are not concepts unless we are stretching that English definition a bit, but what do I know? I am just a Baha’i.
Another Baha’i said “The heart of the matter is your acceptance or otherwise of the truth of Baha’u’llah’s claims” In a very general way, I guess that is the heart of the matter. But whose conception of Baha’u’llah’s claims? Mormons believe in gold tablets, revelations from God, a Eurocentric planetary focus, but should we question every single Mormon I suggest we will find many who do not believe as we conceive of their beliefs. I know this for Catholics. In private they speculate on the basic, fundamental Physical Resurrection of Christ, quite freely. So we can’t say what Catholics believe.
And we certainly can’t say what Baha’is believe, except for their acceptance of the Covenant of Baha’u’llah.
–Kent
1/25/08 All the confusion
It seems to me there is great confusion in our earthly languages which make it impossible to make sense of words like “supernatural” and “metaphysical”. How do we define such words?
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But what we should be paying attention to is rational existence. All words have a rational existence, and may or may not refer to something that has a material existence. If we think of things in that way our confusion goes away.