God exists, but not the way most people want it to, or recognize.

a reply to: charlyv

I'm an agnostic. I just don't have the answer so I don't pick one belief over another without evidence. But I do think something like a god is possible. Anything is possible. Here's how I see it.

When babies are born, they don't instantly have awareness. They are not self-aware and are said not to develop our idea of 'consciousness' until a couple of years later. Neurologists believe that consciousness rises out of complexity. When we are born, we have neurons in our brain but they have no connections to each other. As we age and our brain develops in our first couple of years, those neurons create trillions of connections to each other.

At some point, and we don't know which point, a spark is created. So many connections are made that it gives rise to awareness, to consciousness, and a baby becomes self-aware.

Well, if it is connections and the complexity of a system that gives rise to consciousness, then does that not apply to every system?

For example, a mycelial network growing under trees and connecting entire forests underground could have the necessary complexity to spark up a consciousness. And they connect with all the trees through the root systems, so the trees on one side of the forest can sense danger on the other side... such as a fire. Is this consciousness?

And then if you look at what the universe looks like in 3d simulations, it is almost identical to the neural networks of our brain. It looks like trillions of synaptic connections, with nuclei where matter collapses. And we already know there are trillions or quadrillions of galaxies out there, all connected by galactic filaments of dark matter. It looks like a brain, can it function as a brain?

This is what I'm open to, but I just don't know. If that cosmic network has given rise to a cosmic consciousness, then that can be seen as what we call God. How involved that god would be in our personal lives and decision making, I'm skeptical on.


Edit to add:
Of course, there is a great philosophical and religious issue with that idea: if complexity gives rise to consciousness, then cosmos created god, not the other way around.

originally posted by: Hiram33
a reply to: Raggedyman

Also makes little sense to me ... Why does all powerfull being require worship because we are insecure....in what way does that make any sense
God ( you need to worship me because you are insecure ) 🙄.. and why is god a he ? If God is the true highest of the high why is it male ? Maybe it female or a hemaphrodite ... Or better yet above any gender ....god being male shows a duality wouldnt god be nondual ?

God is not a he, God identifies as a male for many reasons, it is a familial term, father figure, something humanity could/can understand, especially in an A&NE culture
There are a few versus in the bible where God acts and is given female characteristics, even Jesus identifies in some maternal character
www.sightmagazine.com.au...

As for worshiping God
God doesn’t need it, the directive of worship is to align Gods followers with God. Serve the cause, love.
Same reason a soldier salutes a superior, a forced worship
Christianity is a choice
You are not obliged to worship

Worship is an expression of the understanding of the immensity that is God. People like to think they are the biggest and the best until they fall in awe of the immensity that is their Creator.

When you did wrong God can for instance prevent your ability to worship which can create huge suffering but He chooses to do the things whichever He likes to do, He can for instance choose to confuse you doing good to you when you did wrong, kind of messing up your perception of right and wrong.

God can be very peculiar, you know. His Might is expressed with awe since it is so mighty.

a reply to: JFredMuggs

If we live under an ALL POWERFUL, LOVING GOD, why would he/she allow an earthquake in Turkey to kill 50,000 of his children? If YOU were all powerful, would YOU allow that to happen?

Earth is still a growing body as its gravity captures the matter from the solar winds and other stuff. Its why we can find some history by digging down. As such it has some growing pains at times, earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves and such.

If something is born, it will die one day. Just the way this life thing works. So if you could change it, would you want to live till infinity? Might be fun for a while. Expect it would get pretty boring at times when stuck on a dead planet waiting for the next big event to occur.

originally posted by: Mahogany
a reply to: charlyv

... Neurologists believe that consciousness rises out of complexity. ...

Well, if it is connections and the complexity of a system that gives rise to consciousness, then does that not apply to every system?

For example, a mycelial network growing under trees and connecting entire forests underground could have the necessary complexity to spark up a consciousness. And they connect with all the trees through the root systems, so the trees on one side of the forest can sense danger on the other side... such as a fire. Is this consciousness?

No. If you want to know more about what we actually know about consciousness, try this chapter from this book:

Chapter 4: How Unique You Are! (Is There a Creator Who Cares About You?)

BEFORE starting your activities each morning, do you glance in a mirror to check your appearance? You may not have time to be contemplative then. But take a moment now to marvel at what is involved as you take such a simple glance.

...

Your Marvelous Brain

...

Use It or Lose It

...

Your Frontal Lobe

...

Unequaled Communication Skills

...

Memory and More!

When you glance in a mirror, you may think of how you looked when you were younger, even comparing that with what your appearance could be in the years to come or how you would look after applying cosmetics. These thoughts can arise almost unconsciously, yet something very special is occurring, something that no animal can experience.

Unlike animals, who mainly live and act on present needs, humans can contemplate the past and plan for the future. A key to your doing that is the brain’s almost limitless memory capacity. True, animals have a degree of memory, and thus they can find their way back home or recall where food may be. Human memory is far greater. One scientist estimated that our brain can hold information that “would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world’s largest libraries.” Some neuroscientists estimate that during an average life span, a person uses only 1/100 of 1 percent (.0001) of his potential brain capacity. You might well ask, ‘Why do we have a brain with so much capacity that we hardly test a fraction of it in a normal lifetime?’

Nor is our brain just some vast storage place for information, like a supercomputer. Biology professors Robert Ornstein and Richard F. Thompson wrote: “The ability of the human mind to learn—to store and recall information—is the most remarkable phenomenon in the biological universe. Everything that makes us human—language, thought, knowledge, culture—is the result of this extraordinary capability.”

Moreover, you have a conscious mind. That statement may seem basic, but it sums up something that unquestionably makes you exceptional. The mind has been described as “the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside.” As creeks, streams, and rivers feed into a sea, so memories, thoughts, images, sounds, and feelings flow constantly into or through our mind. Consciousness, says one definition, is “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.”

Modern researchers have made great strides in understanding the physical makeup of the brain and some of the electrochemical processes that occur in it. They can also explain the circuitry and functioning of an advanced computer. However, there is a vast difference between brain and computer. With your brain you are conscious and are aware of your being, but a computer certainly is not. Why the difference?

Frankly, how and why consciousness arises from physical processes in our brain is a mystery. “I don’t see how any science can explain that,” one neurobiologist commented. Also, Professor James Trefil observed: “What, exactly, it means for a human being to be conscious . . . is the only major question in the sciences that we don’t even know how to ask.” One reason why is that scientists are using the brain to try to understand the brain. And just studying the physiology of the brain may not be enough. Consciousness is “one of the most profound mysteries of existence,” observed Dr. David Chalmers, “but knowledge of the brain alone may not get [scientists] to the bottom of it.”

Nonetheless, each of us experiences consciousness. For example, our vivid memories of past events are not mere stored facts, like computer bits of information. We can reflect on our experiences, draw lessons from them, and use them to shape our future. We are able to consider several future scenarios and evaluate the possible effects of each. We have the capacity to analyze, create, appreciate, and love. We can enjoy pleasant conversations about the past, present, and future. We have ethical values about behavior and can use them in making decisions that may or may not be of immediate benefit. We are attracted to beauty in art and morals. In our mind we can mold and refine our ideas and guess how other people will react if we carry these out.

Such factors produce an awareness that sets humans apart from other life-forms on earth. A dog, a cat, or a bird looks in a mirror and responds as if seeing another of its kind. But when you look in a mirror, you are conscious of yourself as a being with the capacities just mentioned. You can reflect on dilemmas, such as: ‘Why do some turtles live 150 years and some trees live over 1,000 years, but an intelligent human makes the news if he reaches 100?’ Dr. Richard Restak states: “The human brain, and the human brain alone, has the capacity to step back, survey its own operation, and thus achieve some degree of transcendence. Indeed, our capacity for rewriting our own script and redefining ourselves in the world is what distinguishes us from all other creatures in the world.”

Man’s consciousness baffles some. The book Life Ascending, while favoring a mere biological explanation, admits: “When we ask how a process [evolution] that resembles a game of chance, with dreadful penalties for the losers, could have generated such qualities as love of beauty and truth, compassion, freedom, and, above all, the expansiveness of the human spirit, we are perplexed. The more we ponder our spiritual resources, the more our wonder deepens.” Very true. Thus, we might round out our view of human uniqueness by a few evidences of our consciousness that illustrate why many are convinced that there must be an intelligent Designer, a Creator, who cares for us.

Art and Beauty

...

Moral Values

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You Can Contemplate the Future and Plan for It

...

Drawn to a Creator

Many people, however, are not satisfied fully by enjoying beauty, doing good to fellowmen, and thinking about the future. “Strangely enough,” notes Professor C. Stephen Evans, “even in our most happy and treasured moments of love, we often feel something is missing. We find ourselves wanting more but not knowing what is the more we want.” Indeed, conscious humans—unlike the animals with which we share this planet—feel another need.

“Religion is deeply rooted in human nature and experienced at every level of economic status and educational background.” This summed up the research that Professor Alister Hardy presented in The Spiritual Nature of Man. It confirms what numerous other studies have established—man is God-conscious. While individuals may be atheists, whole nations are not. The book Is God the Only Reality? observes: “The religious quest for meaning . . . is the common experience in every culture and every age since the emergence of humankind.”

From where does this seemingly inborn awareness of God come? If man were merely an accidental grouping of nucleic acid and protein molecules, why would these molecules develop a love of art and beauty, turn religious, and contemplate eternity?

Sir John Eccles concluded that an evolutionary explanation of man’s existence “fails in a most important respect. It cannot account for the existence of each one of us as unique self-conscious beings.” The more we learn about the workings of our brain and mind, the easier it is to see why millions of people have concluded that man’s conscious existence is evidence of a Creator who cares about us.

In the next chapter, we will see why people of all walks of life have found that this rational conclusion lays the basis for finding satisfying answers to the vital questions, Why are we here, and where are we going?

Chess Champion Versus Computer

...

Supercomputer Equals Snail

...

From Particle Physics to Your Brain

...

Every People Has One

Throughout history, whenever one people encountered another, each found the other speaking a language. The Language Instinct comments: “No mute tribe has ever been discovered, and there is no record that a region has served as a ‘cradle’ of language from which it spread to previously languageless groups. . . . The universality of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is the first reason to suspect that language is . . . the product of a special human instinct.”

Language and Intelligence

...

You Can Do More Than Doodle

“Is only man, Homo sapiens, capable of communicating by language? Clearly the answer must depend on what is meant by ‘language’—for all the higher animals certainly communicate with a great variety of signs, such as gestures, odours, calls, cries and songs, and even the dance of the bees. Yet animals other than man do not appear to have structured grammatical language. And animals do not, which may be highly significant, draw representational pictures. At best they only doodle.”—Professors R. S. and D. H. Fouts.

...

originally posted by: Mahogany
a reply to: charlyv

Neurologists believe that consciousness rises out of complexity.

After reading the things I quoted in my previous comment (especially the part that is bolded), don't you think this is perhaps a bit too much of an oversimplification of a rather complicated mysterious subject? It might give some people the impression that just any type of (arbitrary minimum) complexity one feels like pointing at, either represents consciousness or will automatically give rise to it as it increases in complexity (such as the advances made with AI).* After all, cars, airplanes, computers and space shuttles are rather complex, but none are conscious and self-aware.

*: or as you put it, that "it is connections and the complexity of a system that gives rise to consciousness". If it really was that simple, I doubt the following scientists would have said the following about it (just a quick repeat of what was bolded in my previous comment):

Frankly, how and why consciousness arises from physical processes in our brain is a mystery. “I don’t see how any science can explain that,” one neurobiologist commented. Also, Professor James Trefil observed: “What, exactly, it means for a human being to be conscious . . . is the only major question in the sciences that we don’t even know how to ask.” One reason why is that scientists are using the brain to try to understand the brain. And just studying the physiology of the brain may not be enough. Consciousness is “one of the most profound mysteries of existence,” observed Dr. David Chalmers, “but knowledge of the brain alone may not get [scientists] to the bottom of it.”

When I said "arbitrary minimum", I was referring to the minimum "necessary complexity", as determined in the eye of the beholder (arbitrary), to think* that it's sufficient "to spark up a consciousness" (or to start talking about it, as you did, since I'm quoting you there). *: remember, in that sentence I was talking about what impression some people might get.

Quantum consciousness

There are great responses here, and I am encouraged that many people understand that this is not a "God" that watches out for you, or grants favor, or causes grief and peril. In every sense, it is truly the ultimate creator ... the enabler of all possibilities.

It is so incredibly complex, it cannot have just arisen from chaos. It has purpose and the very fact that we can comprehend this universe we live in proves that God is real.

There are endless discoveries to be made in this universe, and we have hardly scratched the surface of the evolution that lies ahead. Our sciences expose the underlying templates and basic rules (if you will) that the universe is built on, and for lack of any other explanation, it exposes a plan.

An ultimate intelligence capable of encoding everything we comprehend in a primordial seed (if you will again).

This is why I call out hydrogen, the simplest element that created all of the stars. These stars in turn synthesized every other element from hydrogen, and those elements and energies created all molecules and so forth, leading up to the ultimate molecule that can intelligently replicate itself - DNA !!!!!

Now, you talk about a plan... God's plan.

Thank you for contributing to my thread. It is wonderful to read all of these ideas, and I think they are as important as ever, especially in the challenging times we face presently.

a reply to: Mahogany

Edit to add:
Of course, there is a great philosophical and religious issue with that idea: if complexity gives rise to consciousness, then cosmos created god, not the other way around.

Wouldn't that mean someone or something imprinted on our universe when it was set into motion?

It's possible it all "just happened" and consciousness came later but I'm more inclined to think information was imprinted at the beginning. A design of sorts.

Energy isn't destroyed but it apparently decays extremely slowly, eons from now there'll be nothing left. Except black holes?

My theory is that pretty much all schools of thought will lead back to the same creation problem, some offer answers that always turn out to be a veil, a facade. There's links in the old stories and symbolism and I don't think interconnectedness was a requirement for the similarities. A universal consciousness could explain it but so could design, as in our brains and how they work.

When there's no information available from inside your being then all information comes from the world.

a reply to: Untun

So what's in the brain in absence of the world?

a reply to: RAY1990

The world is never absent so quite an inappropriate question to answer.

a reply to: Untun

You changed brain to being

When there's no information available from inside your being then all information comes from the world.

I bolded the bit you changed.

Exactly the world is never absent. I wasn't being a smartarse, I was curious if you've seen information/knowledge that comes with the package. Ya know? Something in the brain in absence of the world.

To add, it's possible I misread too

The world only exists through our observation of it.

a reply to: socialmediaclown

Through our observation of it or because it exists?

a reply to: Untun

Both. Reality exists because we perceive it. We perceive it because reality exists.

a reply to: socialmediaclown

I believe we are subordinate to reality having no deal in the existence of the appearance of it. Rather we exist because reality exists.

a reply to: Untun

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there with auditory perception to translate its vibration into sound then does the tree still make a sound? Or does the crash remain only in vibratory state.

a reply to: socialmediaclown

How do you think when there is nothing to observe an event the event does not exist?

We are talking about an existing event, how do you think without an observer an existing event suddenly does not exist?

We are talking about an existing event?

Did the tree fall? Yes.
Do trees make sound when they fall? Yes.

It's amazing how these things are stumbling blocks to people.

a reply to: Untun

The tree falls but you have no ears to hear it. You have no auditory perception to translate the waves to sound. Without the ability to interpret noise through hearing, there is no audible noise, only vibration. Your functioning ears are required in order to create sound from the waves.