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[Temporary]

It has been said that we get insight into His genuine and hurtful grief over our sin, into His intense love for us and how it rides over our offenses, about how it pains Him to judge people, but these are just snapshots.

But humans and other biological beings feel emotions because we have hormones and neurons. That's the reason why our heart rate increases when we become angry/fear.

So why would an Omnipotent being who isn't biological feel anything? Why he isn't over these petty biological side-effects?

[jimwalton]

It's a great question. It seems that biology, hormones, and neurons are not the only way to feel. Those mechanisms are obviously the way biological organisms feel, but we're not to be so limited in our thinking to assume that's the ONLY way to feel.

Let me put it this way. Our astronomers and astrophysicists are actively looking for life elsewhere in the universe. What will that life look like? Can we assume it's carbon-based and biologically-oriented? That may not be a safe assumption. In a sense, we don't even know what we're looking for. If it's similar to ours, we hope to recognize it. But what if it's not similar to ours at all, and we have no definitions to describe it as "life"? In a conversation with Jennifer Wiseman, the astrophysicist in charge of the Hubble Telescope, she said, "We are biased to looking for life that we would recognize. Otherwise we wouldn’t know what to look for. We have no other paradigm. We have no other definitions or characteristics than the ones we know. We are limited in our perspective until some other data or observations change our current knowledge."

It would be the same with emotions and God. Can we be certain that biology, hormones, and neurons are the only way to experience emotions? We can't, even though that's our only paradigm. We are biased to look for emotions in life that we would recognize. Our perspective is too limited to give us full understanding.

And, frankly, there's nothing petty about them. Emotions are one of the things that separate us from machines. They are the very "stuff" of personality.