Define God

In a current thread (which I don’t care to link to, tho others might), it is proposed, tho not in these words, that the proposition “God does not exist” must be considered mere “opinion”.

In that thread, I have asked for God-ists simply to define this thing “God” whose non-existence is posited as “opinion”.

So far, no takers.

So rather than slog through the logjam of that thread, I ask here: What is this “God”?

Please, read the OP carefully before responding.

I would have liked to post this in GQ rather than GD, because my question in full is really: “What are the fundamental characteristics of God which theists generally agree upon?” I’m not asking for everyone’s personal opinion e.g. “I simply feel God’s presence in my life and know He is real”.

This thread is probably in vain, b/c it’s so prone to hijacks and squabbles, but maybe I’ll be surprised. If there are takers, from time to time I’ll interject to summarize what seems to have been agreed upon thus far.

If there is no agreement on the fundamental properties of God, then I submit that disbelief in its existence is not mere opinion, but does in fact hold a superior position to belief that it is real.

To steal an example from the other thread:

So my challenge – show me that God is not a qubarkaar. If this cannot be done, then atheists indeed have the high ground.

And please, no “Yes, Virginia, there is a God” type posts – they are off topic. Let’s try to stick to the issue, which is: What are the essential agreed-upon characteristics of God, regardless of the details which may be in dispute among theists.

Excellent thread idea, Sample. In other discussions of this sort, I’ve found that my first-cut comments usually fail to take something important that I’m assuming into account, but that I am extremely good at handling modifications and rewrites to help achieve consensus.

So I decline to start with an exhaustive definition. I do have some elements that might go towards creating such a definition:

  1. Paul Tillich came up with the phrase, “the ultimate ground of all being,” which covers both personal-God and impersonal-force-God schools of thought, since one of the primary characterists of the theistic God of Judaism/Christianity/Islam is His ontological precedence and underpinning of everything else which He created.

  2. As commonly used in 20th Century America, as opposed to individual conceptions, God has certain characteristics. He is “spiritual” as opposed to having a physical referent (save for the Incarnation of Jesus, which I think we can bypass for these purposes). He is personal – that is, He can be interrelated with as one does with another person, as opposed to a machine, animal, inanimate object, elemental force, etc. He has characteristics analogical to human emotions, though distinct, and most easily referenced by the terms of the human parallels.

  3. He is not necessarily defined and identified by the various descriptions and characteristics found in Scripture (Tanakh, Bible, or Koran) and attributed to Him. E.g., the scene where “God moons Moses” in Exodus is not necessarily to be read to presume that someone in 2005 A.D. claiming to believe in God believes in a god with buttocks which He exhibited to Moses. The same goes for the various concepts attributed to theologians. All these may or may not be true, but will not be part of a consensus definition.

Is that any help?

Excellent start. Thank you.

I take your point, but I’m not sure that I agree with this.

If a variety of different Gods or conceptions of God are postulated by different people, and the statement “God does not exist” is take to be a refutation of all those postulations, then it seems to me it must mean “None of the Gods which are postulated, or which could be postulated, exist”, and this is a very sweeping statement which doesn’t, without some evidence, have anything to elevate it above the level of opinion.

On the other hand, if we respond to an assertion that God exists by pointing out that God is undefined, we are merely saying that the statement “God exists” is meaningless. That may be a valid point to make, but it is not the same thing as saying “God does not exist”, and I don’t see that it elevate the latter statement beyond the level of opinion. In fact, if the concept of “God” is undefined, surely the statements “God exists” and “God does not exist” are <i>equally</i> meaningful or meaningless?

At the risk of sounding like a person that thinks you will not be able to make much progress here, I don’t think you will be able to make much progress here. Although I do like the attempt.

Even these basic ideas that are usually attributed to God do not have a consistent definition:

I doubt there is any characteristic of God to which all theists would agree. Of Polycarps excellent points, I would not feel cetain that God is Personal, certainly not more Human than Animal (if that even means anything, Humans being Animals themselves). I also happen to believe the Universe is made of the same substance as God, so he is very much physical as well as spiritual. So we can’t agree on much allready :wink:

I’ll raise some different qualities of God that many would agree with.

  1. Of all beings God is the most powerful, and the wisest.

  2. God is the reason for the existance of that which we call existance.

2 a) Therefore without God there would be no existance.

  1. People have throughout history been affected by the existance of God.

while i have semantic problems with both the statements “god exists” and “god does not exist”, i agree with this assessment. if there is no defined referent “god”, we can’t make any meaningful statements about it.

in a different discussion, we recently reached a fair consensus that god is more or less personally defined. if that is indeed the case, then there certainly is something which we might refer to as god, but we’d all be referring to something different, and we need not be referring to something that is an element of objective reality. if god exists in your heart, fair enough. perhaps i, as an atheist, am my own god, or perhaps the universe is my god.

i think the statement “god does not exist” is generally an attempt to refute the position that there is an entity which has volition and is traditionally associated with the judeo-christian conception of god. in that regard, i find the statement “god does not exist” to be preferable, given the lack of universal evidence any of us has.

to add something without trying to hijack too much, i’d say that in most of these debates, it is usually agreed upon that the entity that does or does not exist is a being with intentionality and something we should worship. i find it nearly impossible to discuss god’s existence with people who don’t believe god is something that desires our love, as we seem to essentially agree upon how we should live our lives regarding knowledge of whether or not there is a god.

Well, Bippy, I don’t agree that God is made of the same substance as the Universe, although He is physical nonetheless, in the sense that anything that transfers information into the universe can be considered physical. So THERE :stuck_out_tongue:

No, seriously, I agree with your bulleted points. Most Theistic religious followers essentially believe them, as well as Theistic philosophers.

To UDS:

If the concept of God is so undefined that it admits infinite definitions and has no discernible center, I don’t see any defense for the position that refusing to believe in it is mere “opinion”. If that were true, then you’d have to also concede that denial of the existence of the qubarkaar is mere opinion – and by the way, people can define a qubarkaar any way they please.

If all semblance of rational thought, common sense, logic, and relation to the actual world are thrown out the window at the mention of a God or a qubarkaar, then anything becomes possible, and we’re left throwing up our hands at knowing anything at all, at which point even the notions of fact and opinion lose all value.

But we can even dispense with all that…

If anyone cares to start a thread concerning the definition of a particular god which is proposed to exist, they of course they may do so. But that’s beyond (or perhaps more narrow) than the scope of this thread.

This thread is asking specifically what the fundamental core qualities of a god are – that is, those qualities which anything that can be called a god must have if it is to earn the name.

If no such core qualities exist, then the concept fails, and disbelief in its existence is not simply an opinion on an equal par with belief in such a no-thing.

Fair enough. But what I read from this is

(a) you can only make the “God does not exist” statement by assuming, explicitly or implicitly, a particular definition or understanding of God, whereas the OP’s claimi is that, in the absence of a particular definition or understanding of God, the statement “God does not exist” has a status which is higher than opinion, and

(b) given your assumed definition of God, the only claiim you are making for the statement “God does not exist” is that you find it to be preferable (to, I presume, the converse statement, “God exists”). But that is not a claim for any status higher than opinion.

I think we are agreed, then, in not understanding how the statement “God does not exist” has a status higher than opinion, and in particular in not understanding how the fact that “God” may be undefined could give it that status.

Perhaps this is futile, but I’m going to try to nip this sort of thing in the bud right now. Please (oh, PLEASE!) refer to the OP:

Here’s why. If it is mere opinion to disbelieve in things which have no definition whatsoever, then things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and literally anything and everything and nothing all become equally credible. In other words, it turns all sense on its head, knowledge becomes a farce, and everything goes.

Hi Sample

I disagree. The statements “the qubarkaar exists” and “the qubarkaar does not exist” are equally meaningless. Neither of the statments, in my opinion, has even the status of opinion. A statement which is meaningless cannot be said to be either true or false, either valid or invalid. We cannot, logically, make any meaningful statement which has an undefined entity as the subject.

Well, we cannot know anyhting at all about an undefined concept. For the statement “God exists” to have any meaning, we must have a definition or understanding, explicit or implicit, of “God”. But exactly the same is true of the statement “God does not exist”.

Not all. If the word “God” expresses no concept, then the statment “God does not exist” is meaningless, and this is not even a statement of opinion. It is just nonsense.

The proper refutation of “qubarkaar exists” is not “your statement is factually untrue” but “your statement is meaningless”. The same is true for any other statement, the subject of which is undefined.

If it is too much of a distraction, let us ignore this part of the OP:

… and simply get on with determining if God has any necessary core qualities.

Then we are in agreement. I also say, if a concept is meaningless, disbelief in what it purports to refer to is not opinion, and belief that such a thing exists is based on a meaningless foundation.

Logically, God has no universally necessary core qualities.

A may concieve of a God whose sole defining attribute is that he is the creator of all things other than himself.

B may conceive of a God whose sole defining attribute is that he is all-loving to an infinite degree.

While it is possible to postulate a God who possesses both these attributes, neither A nor B postulate such a God. In fact A could deny that God is all-loving and B could deny that God is a creator, in which case A’s concept of God and B’s concept of God do not overlap to any extent.

In this scenario, A and B may both say “God exists” but they are making two completely different statements. This does not, of itself, prove that either of their statements is untrue in the intended sense, however; just that they may be meaningless to, or misunderstood by, the hearer unless the intended understanding of “God” is communicated.

God is infinitely large.
He is infinitely intelligent.
He has always existed.
He is infinitely powerful.
He is immortal.
He is perfect.
He is invisible.
Dispite all this, everything he has created is flawed. He screwed up the Earth so bad , he decided to powerwash the whole thing and start over.

I, too, have misgivings that this thread can go anywhere meaningful. One of the problems is that many of the requested qualities of God might be so fuzzy as to defy agreement. For instance, we might say that “God is love.” Well, possibly so, but “love” is notorious for being nearly as undefinable as God - and yet, many (most?) of us would claim that we know it when we see it, and that it’s as real as reality gets.

I guess that’s my major misgiving; that regardless, with the best intentions, this could descend into the old problem of the blind men describing an elephant. As the story goes, none of them come up with the same description - so does that mean elephants don’t exist?

I may be misunderstanding what Sample is looking for here, UDS (and I request him to correct me immediately if I’m wrong).

Your points here are useful and valuable in tracking the possible uses for the term “God.”

But it was my impression that Sample was trying to pin down the essential characteristics of the consensus use of the term. I.e., what JMS@CCT, Prisoner, Baker, Siege, Bricker, Vlad/Igor, Left Hand of Dorkness, Gaudere, Czarcasm, you, and I would together have in mind as referent when we make statements about the existence (or not) and nature of something called “God” in threads addressing the issue.

This would not necessarily be precisely identical to anybody’s definition of the Jewish or Christian God, but neither would it incorporate all the possible meanings of the term – Brahman, God-as-the-purpose-of-the-Universe, “what I see when I take acid,” God as a character in “Green Mansions,” Cthulhu, the IPU, and other variants on the term that are personal usage being excluded.

My postulation is of an A+B God, as regards your character. I suspect that that is SOP – in other words, if one of the atheists denies the existence of “God” in particular (as well as of all gods in general), what he or she has in mind is the definition that I and other co-religionists are working from in averring His existence.

The question, I suppose, is which characteristics are ascribed to “God” by a general consensus of people using the term in its “normal” American usage. There are, for example, elements of Czarcasm’s assertion I don’t buy into (Note that TTBOMK he is atheist, and making an assertion for purposes of the definition – correct, sir?). Whether I’m odd-man-out on an otherwise valid consensus, as regards those differences, probably needs to be established,

If you’re right about that – we’ll see, perhaps, what others have to say – then God is a qubarkaar. If it’s equally acceptable to believe that a qubarkaar has feet but no eyes, or to believe that a qubarkaar has eyes but no feet, and so on for any possible attribute, then the concept is meaningless. Stop calling it a god, give it a name that isn’t meaningless, then ask people to believe in it.

But as we see, gods that are allowed to be defined any less loosely than this – Zeus, Odin, and El, for example – have a pretty abysmal track record. :wink:

Ok, time for me to shut up and see if this thread goes anywhere. I may learn something, as I so often do here. (And that’s meant in all honesty.)