In the OT,Moses is said to have asked God to let him see Him. God was said to reply that He could only show his back side. From this it causes one to wonder how tall etc. the Old Testement God is.
If God has dimentions then can he be every where at once?
The more one studies the idea of a God there become more questions than answers.
Monavis
Just goes to show how nice he is.
When asked to show himself he says he can only show his arse, charming
This is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of Creation. God exists outside of His creation, he is outside of time and & space. There was nothing before God because He created time, there is no measuring His height or weight or any other dimension as He is outside all of them.
The bible indicates that God is a [spirit] person, who has a dwelling place. The bible further indicates that while God’s knowledge, power and understanding are omnipresent, his person is not.
In other words, God doesn’t need to be everywhere at once to know what’s going on everywhere, nor demonstrate his will/power everywhere. There are [few] texts that speak to omnipresence, but taken in both local and global context they are clearly metaphor that speak to God’s qualities, not his person. (IIRC, Psalms 139 is one example)
If this were true, it wouldn’t necessarily make him immeasurable. At any rate, the bible indicates that God lives in the heavens, clearly his creation, yes?
More than one person has used the analogy of higher-dimensional space to explain, or at least, to provide a model for Gos and His/Her relation to creation. And I believe it predates Abbott’s Flatland. If God inhabits* a fourth dinensional or higher dimensional pace, then He/She can view everything that happens and has happened simultaneously, and exists outside of time As We Experience It. And it gets away from those pesky problems about whether God can know what happens or not, or how God can be omniscient enough to know everything that will happen, in apparent violation of Heisenberg;s Uncertainty Principle and Free Will and the requirements of Omnibenevolence (How can a loving God, who knows such awful things can possibly happen, allow the to?). God is like the Divine Author, when can change what happens and what will happen and what has happened at any time (for him/her) with stroke. It’s a nifty idea, and it illustrates how completely differently God may view and experience the World, and is a useful model even if it may be only a crude approximation, and illustrates the sort of limitations on human knowledge and understanding.
There are several ways of viewing this.
(1) The bible was written in human language of its time; namely, ancient Hebrew. That language did not have words for multi-dimensional concepts, and so uses terms like “the hand of God” or feet, or the breath of His nostrils. These are not meant literally, but poetically, as a way of trying to express concepts that are beyond human comprehension.
(2) The biblical view of God did evolve over time. In the earliest stories, God seems to be in a place or to take on human semblence; by the later Old Testament writings, after the Babylonian exile, the Israelites understood that God was not confined to one place. So their understanding of God’s nature expanded as they underwent historic experiences, and this is reflected in different biblical expressions or terms used to describe God.
(3) The Jewish mystics (starting around the 1200s or thereabouts) conceived of God as having ten “attributes” or “dimensions” or characteristics – for instance, a “right hand” representing mercy and a “left hand” representing justice. This stuff (kabballah) gets very complex and VERY mystical.
(4) For Christianity, God-in-human-form is part of the basic religion and so there are measurements and hands and feet and nostrils, etc.
In Judaic theology, G-d does not have any physical aspect. G-d does not have any degree of limitation (e.g., size, duration of time) in any dimension.
However, the Bible uses human terms to speak of G-d in order to translate divine, non-physical activities into something human beings can understand. Hence, the Bible speaks of the “hand of G-d” to refer to G-d taking action.
In the verse you quoted, Moses does not ask G-d to show him his face, but his glory. G-d replies that “no man can see his face, but he would show Moses his back.” This is metaphorically saying that man is not capable of directly (“his face”) perceiving G-d’s ways, of understanding the reasons, the infinite scope of knowledge and wisdom upon which basis G-d acts. Man can only perceive G-d indirectly (“his back”) by seeing the way G-d works in this world, we can endeavor to understand his ways.
“The more one studies the idea of a God there become more questions than answers.”
I should think the more you study writings about gods the more you realize how they all sound alike for all the different gods since gods were first invented. And since it’s easy to dismiss all the Egyptian Greek and animist gods as funky lore, bad science, and wishful thinking, it should be easy to see that gods exist in zero dimensions.
I’ve long since speculated that this is the case. It seems to makse sense so far as it goes.
The Christian creed say’s" Jesus sits at the right hand ot the Father and from there he will judge the living and the dead".
Jesus is also qouted as saying if you have seen Him you have seen the Father. would the people of His day translate this in a different way than Christians do today?
Monavis
I have often wondered who created the place for God to be,or is God place?
Monavis
Since God exists outside our dimensions, He has no place, just as He has no location. So, there is no spacial heaven, no matter how far Jon-Luc drives the Enterprise, he cannot find heaven.
To further confuse the issue, instead of God dwelling inside or outside the whole time-space construct, consider that the time-space construct might exist inside of God.
And he was wearing a leopard print g-string! Which i must say he really pulled that look off well!
BTW. If god is a spirt why does he have an arse? He doesn’t need it right?
I think possibly his “glory” (if you know what I mean) had such impressive “dimensions”, he was doing Moses a favour in not making him insecure by showing it to him.
Allegedly.
This cannot be supported in the bible. On the contrary.
Yes, but understand that it’s simply a model, not an assertion that This Is How the Universe Is. And it’s a model that long predates Abbott – philosophers long ago spoke of God being “outside Time”. The real point is that Reality can have aspects and facets well beyond common human understanding, and that it’s important to bear that in mind when trying to understand how God Works or what might be “moral” for a deity.
Oh, yeah – agnostic. It’s just that I get annoyed with how limited a conception of “God” most religious people frequently have. If God or Gods exist, it wouldn’t surprise me if they inhabit metadimiensions or metarealities of some complex sort.
I thought that we were made in God’s image?
Anyway God is an old bloke with a beard - evertyone knows that.
I don’t want to post out of my league here but I studied all kinds of religious aspects of God and what it is. God is love so explain love to me using every correct pattern of letters to perfection then that will be the dimension God is found.
Nobody can explain love or life because it is what God has given. God also gave us pain and terror so we can understand the feelings. God gave us feelings and emotions and no matter how hard anyone will try it will just not be a good enough answer.
The major reason this has happened because I lost a friend of mine for the fact of the matter god gave us choices.
No one in the world will ever know exactly everything so people just check this out.
My friend asked me “Why do you not all ready know what we should be doing right now?”
I did not answer because at that moment I just felt nothing at all.
God is dimensions in every way you choose because he gave you a choice to believe in everything and nothing.
I don’t want to get to the point so quickly but it’s in my nature to find people who can really put up a good argument.