A student at the University of Minnesota has come up with a unifying concept of god.
First
The idea of a deity is to provide hope and purpose to our existence. A deity also provides unchanging truth. So is God real?
It’s irrelevant if god is real as long as the majority of people agree in his realness. It doesn’t matter if he’s the creator of heaven and earth. The role that mankind needs fulfilled is someone or something to instill hope and purpose.
Second
Plato defined two realms, the being world and the becoming world, in order to create an unchanging truth to counter act the changing nature of this world (Remember Heraclitus’s changing river). Plato envisioned these forms to establish unchanging truth for morality.
Unchanging truth is not required to provide absolute truth and morality. I rigid, slow changing idea of truth (god) will serve the same purpose while allowing flexibility for human evolution. I call this evolving deity, the “concurrent” god.
Third
The natural problem with a changing idea of truth is it all becomes relative. Morality and values become impossible to judge due to the ever changing nature of truth.
This is where the “pop” comes into play. This slowly changing, rigid truth (“concurrent” god) is influence over generations by social groups at a certain time in history. It’s not relative to the individual but to the group as a whole. Pop Deism is a reflection of the current beliefs and culture, thus becoming truth. Truth (god) slowly evolves with the sway of human consciousness.
------ When looking at truth this way, no metaphysical realms are needed. The idea of rationalism losses credibility and empiricism holds strongly. Our mind is defined by “nurture” while instinctive functions alone rely on “nature”.
It’s not the enire collective human conscience. “Concurrent god” a reflection of the subgroups or cultures during a snapshot in time. This would explain why we have Christianity, Islam, Shintoism, Misticism, Hinduism, etc. This allows flexible truth and unifies belief.
i’m not sure that’s much different from an hazy polytheism - your deity would just be an abstract concept signifying various patterns of belief, but not actually unifying them, except perhaps in name - if it’s all relative and true in different ways at different times then why even bother positing a deity? “god” just becomes a codeword for whatever’s true at a given moment in time and space
besides, throwing up your hands and saying “it’s all true” is, from the POV of someone of faith, essentially the same as throwing up your hands and saying “nothing is true”- the more conservative the faith, the truer that is. You’re not going to reconcile everything that easily - if it works for you, that’s fine for you, but those who already have faith in a particular version of god aren’t likely to buy it
the “transcendental unity of religions” is itself an object of faith.
I’m not trying to reconcile everything. I’m simply trying to dismiss the need for fairytails and things we can’t know. The added benefit of Pop deism is it explains how there can be so many translations of God to derive morality and value from.
I don’t believe in unchanging truth.
Two guitar players with identical musical ability sit on a hill playing the exact same song. This is the only song they both know. As time passes, the second player begins to change the song in subtle ways. The first player continues to play the original song with no changes. Days pass and the second player continues to change the song learning new skills and creating new sounds. The first player continues to play the song, unchanged.
The sun rises and the sun sets. Years pass, as the players sit upon that hill playing their songs. After ten years of playing the song, a young boy walks by. He listens to the two players but can hear no similarities between the them. Both the musical skill and song of the players are separate and share no commonality. The tunes being played (truth) are different in every way.
If there was unchanging truth in another realm, it would be separate and irrelevant from the changing world. As things in this world change, it would continue to move further away from the unchanging world, until they share no commonality other than the fact that they both exist.
Perhaps, but ‘this way’ is so fraught with bias and fallacies and unsupported assumptions, that it makes small reason to look at anything “this way”, much less ‘truth’!
The OP is very arguable on almost every point.
If i were that student’s instructor, though, such thoughts are a good beginning to his education on how to think critically.
I would have him support and refute his own hypothesis. From numerous Perspectives.
He shows ‘promise’.
I agree that belief in a deity provides a sense of meaning and purpose, however, you must understand that such a sense only arises from the honest belief in that deity’s reality and that deity’s metaphysical stature. E.g. what I do has absolute value because it’s a part of God’s plan for existence. If it’s just magically bestowed with a purpose from the pop deity, then where does any right, wrong, or anything else come in?
Furthermore, you are simply elevating the value of hope and purpose to the level of God; the exact same questions still plague your system. Is there really a purpose to life? How do you know? What gives purpose to the purpose of life? What is the nature of the purpose of life? Is the meaning bestowed by this purpose always right; would you defend it with violence? Etc.
If this is meant to undermine the less-pop deities, I think it fails. The Christian God or any other god is never unchanging nor exclusively in ‘another realm;’ in my case, I believe God contains all forms of existence, including this ‘realm.’ Plus, if our world is meaningless without a god, then it does not matter how little commonality we share with that which has meaning; our world would still be meaningless.
Thats the point… everything is meaningless and without purpose except what the popular conscience of the social group assigns value. This agreed idea of value becomes truth and finally is reflected in the deity of the day, concurrent god.
That’s a different proposition and not one I endorsed at all. I first said that the Christian God, along with every other religion’s god that comes to mind, is not totally separate from our ‘realm,’ so your argument toward nihilism is meaningless.
As to what you just said, why can’t I assign meaning without the social conscience? Why is the social conscience’ meaning valid, whereas mine is presumably not? Why would this value have anything to do with the truth?
youre a part of the social conscience Alun, so you assign value on behalf of it - your meaning is as valid as anyone elses - it’s not quite nihilism, because it acknowledges truth’s existence.
He’s the one making an argument from from the consequence of nihilism. As I read it, he claims that belief in absolute truth yields nihilism, so that contemporary religions’ gods can’t be right, and therefore God exists as a concurrent representation of social consciousness. Not only is that invalid reasoning; its premises are false: The Christian God is concurrent with mankind, the world, and everything else (just like almost all non-Deist gods), and therefore no nihilism results. There’s no reason to make it a product of our imagination.
Are you saying that ‘god’ is whatever our “idols of worship” are replaced by over the centuries? Some think of the idea of freedom as having replaced God. Some say science has. Some say material consumption. Some say hollywood. Is it just a matter of being worship as a god?
When you say that “no metaphysical realms are needed”, by whom do you imply this is needed? Us who are interesting in explaining and defending morality and the existence of a meaning to life, or the societies in question who worship their “concurrent god”?
How does raising relativism from the individual to the community make it non-relativistic? You still have hundred of different cultures, beliefs, religions, moralities, etc. around the world, so there still isn’t an absolute or global standard by which to settle disputes and make judgments. Even if the whole world one day becomes a unified global village in which the vast majority of citizens agree on the same ideals, beliefs, worldviews, etc., you’d still technically have to call it relativism since it is relative to the current phase in the development of this global society.
When I say life is meaningless, I’m trying to provoke thought. I belive there is no meaning to life other than what we assign. I’m not argueing that there is no truth or that values are invented as in nihilism. Pop Deism argues that truth is a reflection of the ourselves. If enough people thought drugs were ok, it would be legal. Pick any offense and the same could be said.
Remember Heraclitus… He said you could never step in the same river twice. The nature of our existence is that it’s forever changing. In order to know truth and judge right and wrong, Plato believed there was an unchanging world. Creating metaphysical realms with unchanging truth is not needed once you accept truth defined by the masses. This truth changes very slowly over generations as the group accepts or denies ideas. It is relative but without the pitfalls of relativism.
Gib, you said…
How does raising relativism from the individual to the community make it non-relativistic? You still have hundred of different cultures, beliefs, religions, moralities, etc. around the world, so there still isn’t an absolute or global standard by which to settle disputes and make judgments.
That’s exactly the point. It’s not fixed absolute truth but instead its rigid and slowly changing to meet the needs cultures around the world. These groups define truth and can pull morality from it to judge right and wrong.
Alun said…
Not only is that invalid reasoning; its premises are false: The Christian God is concurrent with mankind, the world, and everything else (just like almost all non-Deist gods), and therefore no nihilism results. There’s no reason to make it a product of our imagination.
Pick a religion or any idea or moraility. As we learn (read, hear, see) about right and wrong we “understand” truth based on our experience. Our experience is formed by our upbringing and our culture. As a group of people with simular experiences pass on this knowledge of truth (god) it will change based on their understanding. Just because homosexuals are not allowed to be priests today does not mean it won’t happen as it becomes more accepted by the group.
I don’t suppose then that you consider this a solution to the world’s problems - at least, those stemming from conflict between cultural views, religions, moralities, etc. - relativism may only exacerbate it.
this is not a metaphysical analysis but a sociological one. the points above confuse these two types of analysis, in that positing sociological explanations is mistaken as a ‘solution’ to a metaphysical problem.
that aside, however, certainly the idea of a universalism taking the place of absolutism makes sense when doing an historical or evolutionary analysis of concepts such as ‘god’ or religion in general. beliefs in the absolute unchanging Truth of claim x (say a claim in God, or some specific type/form/aspect/reality of God) are of course nothing more than relative conceptual memes which are directly tied to social usefulness and the psychological factors of the people comprising that society at the times. that so-called absolute concepts change over time, and in fact are in constant interpersonal flux, is proof enough that there is and never was any sort of unchanging or absolutely objective meaning behind God or any other idea, religious or otherwise.
tying this need, for psychological purposes, for an unchanging stable construct to a generational universalism rather than an intergenerational absolutism is indeed more useful, in that it is both a more correct model of interpretation as well as a more dynamic mindset for individuals believers… insofar as they are not sufficiently undermined in their belief of the construct itself, i.e. from the loss of ‘permanence’. if such a permanence or positing of UNENDING or UNCONDITIONAL changelessness is in fact a fundamental aspect of either the construct itself or of the psychological needs of the individuals, then this sort of interpretation will be highly counterproductive. but it nevertheless still remains, as indicated, a more correct interpretive model.
It’s not a solution to the world’s problem but a description of it. Pop Deism is counterproductive because it shows not only that all reliogions are true but more specifically they’re all false and created by man.
are “we” all a perception, of a perception, of a perception, of perception?
are “we” the equivalent of a follicle of hair growing a head, that wants to learn how to reverse entropy for one strand on one rock, on one rock, on one rock, in one rock, in an infinite, or finite sea of “stars”?
it matters not,
because “god” will damn me for thinking such.
my peers will damn me.
and i’ve had too much to drink,
but in one moment,
it doesn’t matter.
Yes, that is how US laws are made. If enough people believed they could fly by waving their arms in a comical fashion, do you think they could do it?
Modern religion isn’t defining a metaphysical realm that is totally unchanging; the point of religion is belief in a metaphysical realm with ultimate value. Solidity is not the issue.
You are talking about people’s beliefs and ideas, not truth. Yes, people’s understanding changes; yes, our experiences are different; but no, we don’t just stop caring about whether or not God is real. Believing in God still has to mean believing God is real, otherwise you’re just talking about a theoretical purpose. A theoretical purpose (which you know you just made up) doesn’t provide the motivation of a real purpose.
That’s a statement about the legal system, not about truth. Take a popular vote on which tide tables to use when out sailing, and find out how much use a democratic truth is worth
Alternatively, go to a rifle range and fire some shots into a blank piece of paper. Take the paper and draw bullseyes around each bullet hole. You haven’t become a perfect shot, you’ve made failure impossible and can’t talk of success. Similarly, defining truth as “whatever your bullet/statement happens to have hit” removes all purpose of falsity.
In any case, have you studied William James and Richard Rorty? They’ve both developed ideas along similar lines.
He was wrong, of course: part of our definition of river is that the water is constantly changing, or we’d use the word to mean “long, thin puddle”
So, are you presenting this theory as the truth? How long do you expect it to hold as true for? If everyone here disagrees, does that make it false?
You don’t avoid any of the pitfalls of relativism, really, as those pitfalls apply equally to cultures that are separated in time as to cultures that are separated in geography.
So why do you think a god necessary at all? Your philosophy seems a clear way to expose religion as the socially-contingent powerplay it is. Going back to the original post:
A deity provides unchanging truth - it’s a supernatural stick for society to beat those who disagree with it
It’s irrelevant if god is real as long as the majority of people agree in his realness - it’s a fiction used to overrule dissent; a collective hallucination agreed upon to obviate the need to defend decisions rationally or consider how things really are, a holiday for the conscience where dogma is concerned
The role that mankind needs fulfilled is someone or something to instill hope and purpose - a psychological teddy bear, opiate of the masses
Is it “irrelevant that god exists” when his alleged existence justifies acts that many consider horrific?
the OP falls prey to a confusion of types of analysis/interpretation. political/sociological interpretations are indicative of political/sociological truths/facts. they do not supercede upon or affect the metaphysical or “real” facts about God or religion (whatever those may be)… they MAY shed some light upon these so-called metaphysical facts or the real nature of God, but the OP has thus far failed to make that case.
