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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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