I like your answer.
In what way is God immanent? Forget what the New Testament says, tell me what you say?
badger578,
What an incredible first impression you make!
I am aiming for precision. We talk about a law of gravity which can be represented mathematically, but gravitation, along with the other three fundamental forces (the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear force), is a general rule we’ve drawn up to fit a limited number of observed instances. Our current idea of gravity, however well it correlates with our observations and allows for accurate predictions, could be wrong. Gravity may not be universal and it may work in a radically different way than we think. So when James says that the law of gravity exists eternally and outside of the physical falling, I think that’s a rather strong statement to make.
Like felix, I had also been thinking about the idea of immanence. Why must gravity, if we are going to treat it as a thing, exist outside of the interaction and not within it?
Because the concept of gravity persists even if there is no gravity being practiced at the time or location. Gravity as a principle/concept is “outside of time and space” (same is true of God for the exact same reasons).
Additional, the falling cannot occur unless there is a cause. That cause is named “Gravity”. Similarly, the universe cannot behave as it does without a cause (or set of causes). That cause (known as the “First Cause” or “Principle Cause”) is named “God” (also recently referred to as “The Unified Field Theory” and “The Grand Unified Theory” just to divorce it from those religious people).
One way of thinking about it is to start with mind, or subjectivity, ideation, cognition, thoughts, feelings, volition. Whatever this mental stuff is, it is immediately experienced and not primarily expereinced as physical. It is, if not identical to , it is at least akin to what the ancients referred to as “spirit”. Now God is supposed to be Spirit as well. Thus, in everyday experience, our internal life is the closest thing to what God is supposed to be like. So, if it is possible to know God, it is most likely that we would learn to know God subjectively.
But that isn’t really ‘knowing’ god, is it? Subjectively implies as we think but more so as we feel, but not necessarily as is real.
I’m not so sure that we can ever really know god because we will always be coming from a personal place. And if you will look around you, you will see that there is nothing ‘personal’ about a god. We can only know what or who we can relate to.
Christians agree with Jews, though with a different criterion- the ultimate revelation being personal, not textual. They have a different conclusion, also, and say that the prophesied Christ, deity himself, entered space-time as a human- thus making deity personal, to be known as a person, in the sense of having the spiritual and moral characteristics of humans. Christians therefore say that divine revelation is best seen, and God is best known, in humans- known as ‘saints’, who have become his ‘temples’. So people become Christians, become saints, ultimately because of revelation through existing saints, rather than through scripture. Or, to put it another way, the proof of the supernal Christ is in the practical, useful daily ‘eating’ of the ‘pudding’ of the fruits of the spirit of Christ- kindness, patience, humility, peaceableness, willingness to forgive, reliability, love. These characteristics are what they value, are what for them make a society, if only a micro-society, work to their satisfaction.
But all of that is based on belief and what it leads to.
This thread is about ‘knowing’ god. KNOWING god.
How does one know anyone?
arcturus–
Are you sure we can really know anything? If so, how? Looking around you may not see anything personal, looking inside you might. Many people believe they have found someone personal that they can relate to looking inside themselves.
Yours seems like a Roman Catholic take on Christianity. Anyway, arcturus raises a good point. Apparently God can’t be known in the same way externally observable phenomena can. That makes sense, since God is not merely a being among beings but rather the ground of all beings. I mean God cannot, as God, walk on the stage which is the observable world. If God “appears” it is as a manifestation not as God’s self. So in a strict since there cannot be direct observation of God.
By studying them, listening to, communicating with them, walking with them (figurately speaking). We cannot do that with god.
It might appear that we can but then we would be assuming that the god who exists, if in fact, god does exist, exists on the same plane as we do, and has the same characteristics as we do.
We even do this with humans and later discover that we did not, in fact, know the person we thought we knew…we only knew what we wanted to know. In a sense, we saw and felt our own essence, if in fact we even know what this is.
Sure, we can unless we are far out there beyond skepticism.
But what I am talking about here is the word 'personal. As individuals, as a person, of course we may/can relate to another person, to finding some understanding of them, to having a ‘personal’ relationship with them, because our nature is that of being a human being, a person.
But how are we able to know god on the same level that we do people? There is this wonderful Oak in the park that i used to feel that i had a personal relationship with in a sense. But did I really? How could I? A tree is a tree and i am a human being. What we feel for something that is not human, what we sense, is a part of what we sense or intuit that is already within us or that perhaps we would like to be. Perhaps, the rest is simply brain chemicals and how they are capable of deeply influencing and acting upon our inner experiences and rendering qualia. Those inner experiences and sensations are beautiful and wonderful and appear to be about relationship, but are they really?
If someone already believes that there is a god and that that god is personal and loving, they will feel that they are in a relationship with god - but what is it that they are really relating to and loving? What is it that they believe they know about god? Can we be in a relationship with a concept, with an ideal?
Unless, as Christianity claims, the deity himself entered space-time as a human- thus making deity personal, to be known as a person, in the sense of having the spiritual and moral characteristics of humans. Of course, humanity, having such a catastrophic moral record, might conceivably find that it gets to know deity too much, said manifestation too hard to accept, and try to pretend that this event never occurred. It may be that the mere mention of kindness, patience, humility etc. is too demanding, so some people respond with evasions, that certainly seem to have taken many forms in the last two thousand years, and we see evidence of new ones here in this forum. As Mark Twain put it, “It ain’t what I don’t understand in the Bible that bothers me, it’s what I do understand in the Bible that bothers me.”
Well just how far out is that skepticism? Science is usually held up as the pinnacle of knowledge. Yet all scientific knowledge is provisional, i.e. subject to change when more data comes in. So what we think we know today may be disproved tomorrow. All factual knowldge is sense content plus interpretation. What is interpretation? Subjectivity translated into discourse. So our knowledge claims are circular. Whats far out about doubting given that?
ochaye wrote:
Sure, if Christ was indeed god, then we could at least relate to the human side of him. He was supposedly fully divine and at the same time fully human. We could then have a personal relationship with the human side.
What do you mean by what you put in bold?
Well, for me, I would have to ask Mark Twain what he meant by that. Well, on the other hand, what I don’t understand from the bible might greatly bother me too, if it weren’t for the fact that we could acknowledge to ourselves, if we are honest, that everyone in the bible is a reflection, or could be, of who we are as humans today, of who I am today, if looked at honestly. We can put ourselves into many, if not all, those figures and learn from them. But that is still because basically we are all humans…
But can god truly be knowable except through the making into our own image and likeness? Which then would raise the question - would we really want to know this god - this two-faced god or this two sides of the same coin god? 
Right, but what make us think other people have minds in the first place? Why do we feel that we are persons in the first place and than infer that about other people? What is lost when depersonalization occurs?
Check this out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou
Good questions. I don’t have the final answer. But the experience is available to anyone who is open to it.
Yes, but we can still know certain things. There are facts known because of experimentation and evidence. And yes, some of this knowledge changes, is not totally conclusive or absolute, but we can come closer to the truth of some things.
But we can’t really do that with god though, can we? When i said ‘far out there beyond skepticism’ I meant more or less a pathological skepticism or maybe nihilism where nothing can be known and nothing exists, though there is certainty of many things being known and proven.
Also to the divine aspect, of course, as reading all of what I wrote reveals! 
I didn’t put anything in bold. What is meant by what you put in bold is this: the Jesus narrative has been represented by many varying factions, all calling themselves the church of Jesus, or sometimes attempting to persuade Jesus’ followers that they should believe another version than the one they have. Some of them have even been violent. This proliferation (predicted, as it happens) goes on even now. They can’t all be right. They may all be liars. Only one version can be the right one.
That’s the Christian claim. It may be incorrect, of course. However, the way people have reacted to it for 2000 years, as mentioned, show that Jesus has ruffled a lot of feathers. They have tended to be those of less than upright birds, too. So the evidence for Jesus is partly provided by those who oppose him.
Because I abhor violence, I have a certain amount of understanding for people who see Christianity as extremely oppressive throughout history, and often the Church has fought for its dogma using the opposite means to what it preaches, whether Coptic, Greek Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. I think that this is absolute proof that Christianity shows a chronic misunderstanding of its origins and that the widely spread understanding of the Trinity a big mistake. There is only one way to understand the Christ, and that is in the way the Mystics have understood him.
There is only one way to “know” God and that is to be silent and be assured that we are known, because the reality of what the Christ called God is vastly different and more mysterious than the simplistic answers that are often given, which often fail to realise that what can be spoken can’t be the true God, but only a weak representation of the Mystery. God is ineffable, and his name shouldn’t be taken in vain, which is why the Christ Jesus used the metaphor “Abba” or Father.
Take Care
Christ was a god, one self-realized man among a number of others scattered throughout history. What is a self-realized man? The self-realized man is the one who has through love realized his fundamental identity with God (as Atman with Brahman). The god is the man pure in heart.
This rings true to my ears.
Self-knowledge is ultimately knowledge of God; but knowledge of God also presupposes a deep ground of humility, an acknowledgement of ignorance and uncertainty with regard to oneself and God’s will for oneself - knowledge of God begins with this: ‘I know that I know nothing’.
A man’s soul is a battleground of two usually opposing wills, his own selfish will and God’s. But love is unified, unconditional, without conflict; and a god is a man who has, through love, persistently surrendered his fearful self-centeredness and thereby aligned his will with God’s - that is why it is ‘not mine, but thine be done’.
What is God’s will? God’s will is the present moment.