Comments on: Emerging God

By: Omer Cevdet

Omer Cevdet — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:19:22 +0000

This is something I wrote down recently before I discovered this blog. I think it could be relevant:

GOD EXISTS WHEREVER AND WHENEVER HUMAN BEINGS COME TOGETHER.

UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES (WHERE PEOPLE LIVE TOGETHER IN A COMMUNITY) EVERY PERSON IS AN ELEMENT IN THE CONSTITUTION OF GOD.

TO THE HUMAN BEINGS WHICH ARE COMPONENT PARTS OF GOD, GOD IS NOT VISIBLE. HIS EXISTENCE IS NOT PROVABLE.

ALL GOODNESS AND EVIL COME FROM GOD WHO IS THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL HUMANS WHO MAKE UP THE SOCIETY.

WHERE THERE ARE DISTINCT AND SEPARATE COMMUNITIES, THEY FORM DISTINCT AND SEPARATE GODS.

GODS CAN COOPERATE OR COMPETE.

The above assertations are made by drawing an analogy between the concept of God and the concept of Person:

A Person exists whenever and wherever cells (making up a human being) live together.

Under such circumstances (where cells make up a human being) every cell is an element in the constitution of that person.

To the cells which are component parts of a person, that person is not visible. His existence is not provable.

All goodness and evil come from the person who is the sum total of all cells making up the person.

Where there are distinct and separate living collections of cells, they form distinct and separate persons.

Persons can cooperate or compete.

22nd December, 2007

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:32:00 +0000

Thanks for commenting. I agree: “Panentheism” is a very good work, hampered only by its obscurity, which means you have to explain it every time you use it. But that may be preferable to using words whose meanings we think we already know – always a big danger when grappling with theological questions.

By: Abe Van Luik

Abe Van Luik — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:53:13 +0000

As a person who finds panentheism attractive, I really like your description of god as emergent property but would not agree that is resembles pantheism. If pantheism is the belief that the divine is in all and is the totality of all, it doesn’t fit near as well as panentheism, the belief in which the divine is in all things as in pantheism, and gives unity to all things like in pantheism, but in addition it is greater than all things: making god an emergent property. Just a thought.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:51:04 +0000

Yeah, I agree. Probably at the time I was making a distinction between animism and pantheism (both fairly bogus categories) – who knows what the hell I was thinking in 2004. I can barely remember what I believed I believed last week!

By: David Harmon

David Harmon — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:59:07 +0000

And pantheism is no better than traditional theology at explaining such urgent questions as â€œthe mystery of evil,â€? as Clayton calls it.

On this one point, I beg to differ… pantheism has no problem with the presence of evil spirits or petty gods — indeed, those are much of what keep shamans and the like in business!

By: Via Negativa » Blog Archive » Walking with/out

Via Negativa » Blog Archive » Walking with/out — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:05:25 +0000

[…] Can you really call it freedom, though, if a higher power had to grant it? To my way of thinking, freedom of action is intrinsic to all living things. If it makes sense to talk about divinity at all — and an intuition of “something more” often persuades me that it does — then I think we must be careful not to separate it too much from the way things naturally work. My worldview doesn’t have any room for a supernatural, I guess. The new idea of divinity as an emergent property of complex living systems has definite appeal, though, especially to someone with a strong animist bent. […]