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Comment by bonesss | Hacker News Reader

Not too far removed (philosophically), from 'theological noncognitivism ' [0]: the idea that 'god' is more of a concept like 'hope' or 'love', not a thing like 'milk', and a poorly understood & undefined one at that.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism

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"Theological noncognitivism" is not too far removed from "ignosticism", according to your link. Ignosticism states: the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term "god" has no coherent and unambiguous definition. Totally valid, to the extent that saying that something that we can't bottle and stopper must be irrelevant helps anyone sleep at night.

I suppose my one point of disagreement is that the poem is philosophically aligned with Questions of God-ness being pointless...the poem doesn't strike me that way (totally subjective of course). And Buckminster Fuller was well known to have undergone a pretty profound mystical experience (whatever that means) that shaped the rest of his life.

I’m a regular Church-going Christian, and could definitely go along with that theory. As a gross over-simplification Jesus is a noun, the Holy Sprit is a verb, God is an entire language.

Curious: what is the Father, then?

In the context of the post I think that by God GP meant the Father.

EDIT: I re-read the post and no, they didn't seem to mean that.

I just thought about it... and I'm not really sure. I'll cop-out and say something like "God is unknowable, undefinable, and constrainable".

In the Holy Trinity, God is the father, the son, and the holy ghost. I understand these terms to signify 'aspects' of the same thing.

The Bible has a lot of different names for God to teach people about who and what he is.

So you could say all those names explain the concept of God.

This link provides some examples: https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html

Edit: maybe more interesting is the Wikipedia articles listing the names of different kinds of religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God

Within the Christian tradition as I understand it, you could read every single word ever expressed about God and you still wouldn't understand. It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.

>It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.

Your analagy is akin to The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual guide to becoming closer to god by "unknowing", written by a 14th century christian mystic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing

Similar to something I read in a Jack Kornfield book the other day, about a Zen tradition called "just sitting" where you dispense with any goals or concepts of enlightenment and, well, just sit. Presumably it gets you somewhere...or nowhere :)

Black holes can be observed. God cannot.

Under what religious or philosophical tradition can God not be observed, even partially?

You tell me. Has any philosophical tradition demonstrated the existence of god outside of the human imagination?

That depends on how we define god. Which is what this whole thread seems to be about :) Needless to say, yes, getting people to agree on whether they're talking about the same thing takes a lot of patience. For a certain type of person, definitely worth the effort.

Personally I didn't care at all until I had a direct experience that I couldn't explain without "spiritual" vocabulary. And now I'm embroiled in these sorts of debates for fun...

If god is only known as a personal experience that is impossible to fully express; if it is invisible, unexplainable, unprovable, then it has all the properties of things that only exist in our imagination. Believers can give whatever name they want (as they did over the centuries), it doesn't make any difference.

Hmm. "Subjective experience" doesn't feel the same to me as "imagination," but they're related I suppose. My experience of the world is real, as you would probably categorize yours. Invisible and unexplainable, not at all...see the many suggestions on this page. "Unprovable"; 1) if you've experienced it directly, your proof is there but it's limited to one person, 2) all mathematical systems break down when pushed to a limit (Godel's incompleteness theorem, the necessity of different physics/math under different conditions, etc.); we're talking about a way to encompass all of these things while adhering to a concise definition, it's hard.

I actually think these academic discussions of "what is god precisely" and "how does it work" only really sway a small subset of people. IMO it's "try these techniques out for yourself and decide for yourself," not "surely this explanation of the entirety of existence will sway you!" I'm with you, I don't think there's a formal text definition of god that ever would have convinced me to "believe." Either you have a notion of a higher power or unitive/connective force and have experienced it, or you haven't and you're working with the evidence you've got (math, the Bible, whatever). Take a few psychedelics or do a bunch of meditation and you'll end up feeling like most practitioners do, which is that you have a strong ineffable experience that doesn't translate well into words. Or don't! God's just a made-up word anyway for an aspect of the universe / human experience that we have a hard time defining (one of my definitions).

In other words, let's "define" god so imprecisely that it becomes impossible to refute its existence...

I mean, it'd be malicious if that's what I was after. I don't engage in these discussions because I'm a troll, I engage because I think they're important. It's possible that every "believer" throughout history is delusional and yanking your chain...seems like too much work though.

Well, at a minimum we certainly know Jesus was a word. In the beginning, at least.

That "we" certainly doesn't include judaism, or you know, the ones that wrote the book.

It is funny that god is a language, but he lived alone for the eternity. Was he communicating with himself alone?... Just another "mystery" that believers will sweep under the rug.

What's truly interesting about this is your assumption that God is an individual, a single person.

What's more interesting is the comment you're replying to actually describes the super-personal nature of God - what Christians call the Trinity. Writings expounding on the Trinity have filled many volumes of Christian theology - it's something far from being "swept under the rug".

I think you're applying our concept of time to God. Time is a human construct.

As for believers, you can see from this thread that there are many interpretations of God, but on HN they do lean toward the fairly abstract.

Personally, I see our mere existence as proof of God. We can observe God because we are God.

The only thing I've ever really been hung up on is the question of whether God can observe himself to validate his own existence. It's fairly paradoxical.

> We can observe God because we are God.

This is the god of Spinoza. A god that is everything and everywhere is, at the same time, nothing. It is nothing more than the worshiping of the universe.

For whatever it's worth, at least as that wiki page described it, 'god' isn't cognitively meaningful. Most Christian philosophers I've read fall into a camp that would say that "hope" and "love" are real and cognitively meaningful, but also metaphysical and therefore something that we can know partially but not completely (and, as you say, understood poorly as a result of the incomplete knowledge).

yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is

It corresponds with God's name of himself in the OT as well as Jesus's name of Himself as well:

“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”.

“Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’"

then in John's Gospel, Jesus says, "before Abraham was, I AM"

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Those passages in the Bible are some of the most relevant to the OP.

I've come to expect it in the current climate. People see bible passages and have an instant visceral reaction. I can understand it to an extent.

I've got some gripes with Jordan Peterson's popularity but everyone needs to hear this (paraphrasing): "OK, you're going to disregard all of Christianity because there are literal untruths in the Bible? We have a word for people who insist on the literal truth of sacred texts: fundamentalists. I'm sorry, it was probably never meant to be literally true, it's describing stuff that's better understood as story/myth. You're going to have to try a little harder."

While persecution is expected and desired by that particular faith, I think you're awful quick hopping to a visceral reaction to religious sources instead of HNs visceral reaction to factual inaccuracy.

> yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is

This is a reply in the context of an epistemological argument that that word you are using simply cannot mean things if you keep using it like that, and very much not the things you quoted... Not "yes": "NaN" or "undefined symbol" or "mu".

How many liters of god can I pour into my bathtub? How many liters of Coca-cola? ... We used to, but we no longer talk about god as a 'thing'.

"Coca-cola is love, coca-cola is hope, but coca-cola is so much more"...? Sure. Things respond well to metaphor, and simile.

"Hate is love, hate is hope, but hate is so much more"...? No, doesn't work, because hate is a meaningful concept. Meaningful concepts cannot arbitrarily be ascribed other meaningful concepts while retaining their meaning. "God" can though. Despite its framing, like in your post, as something that should not be able to arbitrarily be ascribed to other concepts.

God is itchiness, god is morning sunrises, god is monkey brains covered in dew. God is all, god is nothing, alpha and omega...? That "god" cannot be a god, or GOD. That "god" is both an abstract and meaningless notion. That god is awesome for selling subscription services, tho.

> HNs visceral reaction to factual inaccuracy.

Interesting claim.

In any case, I wasn't responding to your comment about theological noncognitivism, I was commenting on parent's reference to apophatic theology (theology which emphasizes our inability to know God with our minds) by merely driving the point home with some traits or characteristics commonly used to refer to God but also saying these things are not the entirety of God's being or character. The rest of your silliness doesn't really apply since I was not arguing "God is everything"

"God" has so many definitions it's completely useless as word to be used for conversation, even between 2 people of the same faith, maybe even for a single person to have internal thoughts about. It's amazing how much conflict arises just because everyone wants to use the same word for an intangible thing.

Maybe we can start a database and every person creates a unique id for their current definition of intangible things. Even if they copy the exact definition for an intangible thing from someone elses intangible thing, it gets a new id. If they want to modify a definition of their own intangible thing, new id. Then every recorded use of the word requires a link to the definition that individual was using at the time of the conversation. In the case of "God", I don't think UUIDs will be big enough. The db will, of course, have to be decentralized and blockchain based.

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