Many people have experiences. Those experiences do not necessarily have anything to do with a book, and are no more fictional than falling in love.
Presuming that those experiences are fictional, are constructed to fit some preferred category, or are otherwise manufactured from some set of prejudices is entirely likely to lead to errors in interpretation and understanding.
This is neither “making something up and imbuing it with preferred characteristics” nor being “given a block of literature”. Both of these are false premises; I consider them the same sort of comforting delusion as an all-knowing, all-powerful all-benevolent bouncer in the sky.
Look, as far as I’m concerned, God is a wholly made up character. WHy imbue any fictional character with certain abilities or characteristics? The simple answer: Because you can.
For example, if traditional vampire lore dictates that vamps can’t have sex and I decided to write a novel about vampires, why shouldn’t I let them have sex if I want? I’m the boss of the book, right?
Well, when discussing God, I’m the boss of what she is, because it’s wholly my construct. And I have decided that should a God exist, then God should be able to have limitless powers. Just like I’ve decided that should vampires exist, they should be able to have wild hot monkey sex.
While this is all very interesting, it’s not quite the discussion I was hoping to awaken. The question is “What is required to make God God?”. What separates a god from a merely very advanced intelligent being with access to terraforming technology?
The very advanced beings with access to terraforming technology will be our own mind children- and yes, they will be gods-
even if only with a little ‘g’. The AI Gods
Well, yes, there ARE religions that are NOT based on a specific scripture.
As to what makes a god a god (as opposed to what makes a god The God), we quickly wind up in the realm of the unfalsifiable. A god’s attributes would, in most human definitions, be based in the supernatural plane. Can we prove anything to be supernatural?
“Aliens who created the Earth” would fall under Clarke’s Law (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic)”; this could also apply by analogy to beings with extraordinary powers derived from a special knowledge and use of (to us) “unknown” laws and forces of the universe (the writers of Star Trek suffer a nasty addiction to these). Their power, or their transcencence or immanence would not be supernatural, it would just look that way. But unless there were some way that this was made manifest, for those whom they create or control, they would be indistinguishable from gods.
Thing is, even with supernatural qualities, each culture has defined “gods” differently – sometimes 100% immortal, sometimes not-naturally-mortal-but-destructible; sometimes with an intrinsic physical/spatial aspect, sometimes not; sometimes requiring food/sex, sometimes not; sometimes demanding of humans or active in the worldly plane, sometimes laid-back and noninterventionist. Never mind “gods” whose only power is over a tiny specialized set of phenomena. And there are even religions where you do not really need the God or gods to be personalized or even around (e.g. Buddhism)
An Omni-Everything All-Purpose One-and-Only Kick-Everyone’s-Ass The God could be seen as a way of conceptually making an end-run around the pitfalls of tagging as “god” anything not-well-understood. Move the goalpost all the way to Allpowerful, Everpresent, Allknowing, Eternal and Allmerciful and anything that is found wanting along the way was not really The God anyway.
Anyway, deism is a concept, like the fourth-dimensional cube or even merely the idea of Zero- a number used to illustrate something that doesn’t exist. (IE, there are zero penguins on this table. No penguins exist there, but we can clearly count them anyway. There are zero.)
And being a concept unbound by physical law of any shape, the concept is shaped only by each conceiver.
The theoretical advanced race of aliens are, at this point (and may always be) also nothing more than a concept. We can theorize, we can make assumptions, we can make what we think are educated guesses. But in the end, they are just that, merely guesses.
In both cases, we have writings that describe either- or both- that some find plausible, but those writings invaribly refer to powers or technology we don’t have, may not have, may be physically impossible in this Universe. (Anti-gravity, transmutation, ressurection.)
Thus, each person’s god, deity or space alien is merely that which he or she can conceive. Your God might be an all-compassionate, all-knowing, all-powerful being who created the entire universe. This other guy’s God might be a little more vengeful- he thinks his God is intentionally smiting (insert hated group here) with (insert disease or other affliction here) because He hates them.
Still another’s God is more limited- he has multiple gods for various conditions and events. (God of Thunder, God of the Underworld, God of Wine, etc.)
Still others are free of God or gods. If God wants to show up and say ‘hi’, that’s great. 'Til then I’ll be over here getting something done.
The difference is that your work on vampires is regarded as fiction. People take it as such. It might be an interesting variation on the vampires mythos but no one would seriously take your work as reality. In the case of “making up” God, you want people to believe that this God is real. You will want to convince them of the reality and trueness of this God. If you make a god so unbelievable, then the natural reaction is not to believe, at which case you defeated your own purpose.
Doc Nickel Not all concepts of God need to be ‘unbound by physical law of any shape’, and concepts of Advanced Aliens are by necessity bound by physical laws (though quite possibly beyond our current understanding of those laws).
Also ‘fourth-dimensional cube’ and ‘zero’ are not concepts open to interpretation, unlike a God, these are things that can be identified and valued so that one persons view of ‘zero’ for instance can be shown to be correct or wrong unequivocally.
Maybe a better example concept would be ‘good’ or ‘beauty’.
Appart from those minor points your ideas are very interesting. Am I right in summerising them with
“What is required to make God God?” = That since God is a concept, all that is required is that the “God-like” being fits the observers personal concept of what a God should be.
Doc Nickel Not all concepts of God need to be ‘unbound by physical law of any shape’, and concepts of Advanced Aliens are by necessity bound by physical laws (though quite possibly beyond our current understanding of those laws).
Also ‘fourth-dimensional cube’ and ‘zero’ are not concepts open to interpretation, unlike a God, these are things that can be identified and valued so that one persons view of ‘zero’ for instance can be shown to be correct or wrong unequivocally.
Maybe a better example concept would be ‘good’ or ‘beauty’.
Appart from those minor points your ideas are very interesting. Am I right in summerising them with
“What is required to make God God?” = That since God is a concept, all that is required is that the “God-like” being fits the observers personal concept of what a God should be.
Actually, that’s the oft-repeated definition of the big-G God; he’s not bound by any physical law. He doesn’t experience time, he can create matter and energy from nothing, he exists somewhere outside our time/space yet can observe and interact with it, yet that interaction itself cannot be detected, he can raise the dead, he sees everything from the smallest ant to the motion of entire galaxies…
True, other concepts, Odin, perhaps, Zeus, the lesser gods Apollo or mephistopholes, are not as powerful, but the whole idea of a god is that he or she somehow trancends mere humanity.
But that gets back to the OP: Where does a power or ability stop being a comic-book superpower, and start being those of a God? Odin is obviously a god, but as far as I can recall from Norse mythology, he didn’t actually create the universe, and Midgard and the World Tree.
Ah, I wasn’t intending them to be analogies to God, my point was they’re representations of ideas, of concepts that cannot exist in reality. In other words, we can concieve them, we can draw representations, we can write about them, we can use them on stories, but the object for which the concept stands, does not or cannot exist.
Everyone knows what zero is, most everyone understands the concept implicitly. We all use it daily- often my the billions in our PC’s calculations. But you cannot actually physically interact with a zero. You can’t pick it up, you can’t paint it a different color. You can only utilize the concept of a number that represents no number at all.
Similarly, we have only the concept of God. We can write about him, read about him, erect buildings in his honor, murder our fellow man in his name. But we cannot see him, talk to him, interact with him. We can only interact with each other, using the name of a concept as a stand-in for that which the concept represents.
Or, as a summary, just because we can think of a thing, doesn’t mean that thing exists.
Essentially, yes.
Whenever we read a book, we all get very different ideas about key portions: We all visualize the characters differently, we all see the layout of the house or building differently, we all have different interpretations of the monsters and aliens and spaceships.
Whenever we watch a movie, we all have different ideas for what the director was trying to “say”. (Just look at all the interpretations for the ending of Reloaded.)
We all have different points of view, we all have a different set of values, and previous experiences, and prior readings, all of which color our perceptions. I believe someone on these boards once mentioned that there were around 27,000 different versions of the Bible (though I assume some of those must be alternate languages.)
A light is seen in the sky: The theist sees it as a sign from God. The Roswell believer interprets it as a UFO. The astrologer notes it’s near Capricorn and thus bodes ill for those born in early January. The astronomer realizes it’s a meteor.
How do you convince folk to “believe” in what you are selling? Offer them an incredible return on their investment.
-Simply swallow two pills a day and the fat will melt away.
-For the price of a lottery ticket, you too can be a millionaire.
-And if you only believe in the true God, you will obtain everlasting life, yadda yadda.
Believability is highly overrated when marketing to a willingly gullible public eager to discard reason in exchange for hope.
Great point Dinsdale…
Thanks Doc Nickel, I didn’t mean to sound as negative about you previous post as ended up sounding.
I see God if it exists as having defined the Physical Laws for this Universe. In which case God breaking those laws to do something, or allow another being to do something, would be as “out of character” as God revoking one of the 10 commandments for itself or another being. The possibilities that follow from a God being outside time (perhapse viewing time as a forth physical dimension) and being able to interact with this four dimensional Universe seem to me to grant omnipotence, omnipresence, and access to all knowledge (if not knowledge of all things). Though such interactions would be measurable/detectable from within the Universe. I strongly believe that anything which does not interact with the physical world has no existance with respect to the physical world.