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[Limp Biscuit]

Or, if not “metaphorical,” then a characterization of time or some broader concept - even one that goes beyond our understanding?

I realize this is vague, but in terms of trying to understand a God figure, is it possible that it isn’t a He, or an Individual but a construct?

We have proof that a Jesus of Nazareth existed; Is it possible Jesus was an enlightened being who - by being the Chosen One - had a connection to this greater source?

[jimwalton]

If God is not real, but only metaphorical, it has tremendous implications for life. Then we are truly just an agglomeration of chemicals without any implicit meaning. And there is truly no purpose to anything or anyone except consciousness while alive. Good and evil have no meaning except the meaning we choose (or choose not) to give to them). But none of this makes sense to me because it's not a reflection of the reality we see and know.

Also, if God is not real, but only metaphorical, then we have no explanation for personality in the universe. We have no justification for seeing that one thing is right and another wrong except subjective arbitrariness. We have no cause to trust our sense of reason and our notions of truth, because they all came about by processes (natural selection and genetic mutation) that have no association with conceptual truth. . Is it really much as possible that language, say, or consciousness, or the ability to compose great music, or prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, or to think up natural selection, should have been produced by mindless processes of this sort? That’s an ambitious claim.

If God is not real, "enlightenment" is a meaningless term. All we have is forces and chemicals, atoms and cells. There is no "greater source."

If God is not real, but instead a construct, personality is an illusion and consciousness is basically unexplainable. Science can only theorize about its genesis and how it could rise from non-consciousness. It's for sure a problem for scientific naturalism. If you start with only matter, you can’t pull consciousness of out the hat of the universe. You can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat unless the rabbit was in there to begin with. Since that is the case, it is logical to look for another explanation of the existence of personality and consciousness. Theism can explain it completely, thus theism has sufficiency of explanation that science doesn't.

I say God cannot be metaphorical, nor does it make sense that He is a construct and not an Individual. Nor is it reasonable to consider Jesus an enlightened individual if all there exists is forces, matter, energy, and gravity.

[Tarnished]

> Something has to have always existed

Maybe, but a panacea, a god, isn't the only available thing. Asserting a god here, because no other options appear available, doesn't make it true or even likely true. And it's a fallacy.

> because things do not and cannot self-generate out of nothing (non-existence).

They don't appear to, we have no examples of it happening, except maybe at the quantum level, but absence of evidence isn't proof of absence.

> So, both logically and scientifically, something (or someone) has to be eternal.

I'm with you on the reasoning, and I'd say its likely the case, but your conclusion seems much more than tentative. To say it has to be eternal is speculation, at best.

But what is more likely, something natural being eternal (like more space from which universes happen), or an eternal supernatural god being? Let me remind you that we have no good, independently verifiable evidence for any gods, yet we do have evidence for space and how other celestial bodies form.

It seems much more reasonable to expect the explanation to be as natural as any other explanation. Seems unreasonable to have to go to something like a supernatural explanation.

> You can never have an infinite chain of causes—it regresses.

I won't argue against this claim because we have no good evidence either way to say it's possible or impossible. But I don't think it's even relevant. We don't know what caused the big bang, asserting any answer before we have the data, is nothing more than speculation, and at least one logical fallacy.

Anyway, I'm not here to debate, I'm just pointing out where your reasoning is flawed.

[jimwalton]

> but a panacea, a god, isn't the only available thing.

This is quite an illogical bias. A presupposition that God is nothing but a panacea negates the case unfairly before it gets out of the gate. It's like saying, "Well, miracles are impossible, so prove to me miracles are possible."

> Asserting a god here, because no other options appear available, doesn't make it true or even likely true. And it's a fallacy.

Except that I didn't do this. I argued, and gave reasons, for why "God" was a more reasonable conclusion than regarding the concept as metaphorical. Therefore I didn't commit the fallacy you are ascribing to me.

> They don't appear to, we have no examples of it happening, except maybe at the quantum level, but absence of evidence isn't proof of absence.

I agree, but we are trying to be both rational and reasonable here. Until there is science or evidence to tell us otherwise, it's both reasonable and logical, as well as scientific, to assume that nothing can bring itself into existence from non-existence. Ultimately we have to be down-to-earth as much as logical.

> To say it has to be eternal is speculation, at best

I appreciate your honesty (it's likely the case), but I don't think the conclusion is more than tentative. It actually fulfills every logical sequence. Since logic and science both tell us that nothing can spontaneously generate itself out of nonexistence, then from some angle there MUST be something that has always been around to be the first cause.

> But what is more likely, something natural being eternal (like more space from which universes happen), or an eternal supernatural god being?

It is more likely, from the logic I gave, of an eternal supernatural being (personal, purposeful, conscious, intelligent, powerful).

> yet we do have evidence for space and how other celestial bodies form.

Yet there is a obvious disconnect between the impersonal (time + matter + chance) bringing forth the personal, the non-conscious bringing forth consciousness, purpose arising from an "explosion," and intelligence and truth coming from the processes of natural selection and genetic mutation.

> I'm just pointing out where your reasoning is flawed.

But it seems that every argument you have advanced makes far less sense and has far fewer connections than the theistic position, and that was my only point. Given the evidence and logic, theism is more probable than atheism.

[Limp Biscuit]

Thanks for this! I hear you. I may have misspoken; I’m not arguing whether or not God is real. I’m musing over the form of God. Omnipresence is a powerful idea and as a former Christian still debating my faith, I’ve always found it interesting that we often won’t dwell on these admittedly harder to grasp concepts, instead turning to the available proof points in the Bible.

If we accept Him as omniscient and omnipresence, God is an otherworldly being. For me, contextualizing God as he would have to be from our perspective (wholly not like us, although created in his image) helps me to understand how little we truly know about what lies beyond human understanding.

And if the gap beyond what we see and hear is THAT large, imagine what else we don’t know.

[jimwalton]

> I’m not arguing whether or not God is real

I don't understand. If God is metaphorical, he's not real. So I don't understand how you are not arguing whether or not God is real. You'll have to explain it to me further.

> I’m musing over the form of God.

Then it seems that "metaphor" is not one of the choices on the table, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.

> Omnipresence is a powerful idea

Indeed it is, and an often misunderstood one, at that.

God's omnipresence is obviously a variable attribute. He can be more present and less present, depending on the situation. Obviously God is everywhere, but when Solomon built the Temple, God descended on it in glory (1 Ki. 8.10-11), just as He had done with the Tabernacle and on Sinai (Ex. 19.18). Wasn't God already there? Yes, but His presence came in a new and different way. We can also say that God indwells Christians by the Holy Spirit in a different way than He is present elsewhere.

> If we accept Him as omniscient and omnipresence, God is an otherworldly being.

One of the uniquenesses of Christianity is that God is both transcendent and immanent—both otherworldly and knowable/relational.

> helps me to understand how little we truly know about what lies beyond human understanding.

Full agreement here.

> And if the gap beyond what we see and hear is THAT large, imagine what else we don’t know.

Agreed, again. But God has revealed enough of Himself that Peter can say, "His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness" (2 Peter 1.3). We have enough to go by, even though there's a lot more: "However, as it is written: 'What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived'— the things God has prepared for those who love him—" (1 Cor. 2.9)

It's impossible, obviously, to know how large this category of "what else we don't know" is (otherwise, uh, we'd know it). I imagine that it's HUUUUUGE.