The Supreme Being
In his Metaphysica Lambda, the Greek philosopher Aristotle went in search of the Unmoved Mover. The idea here was that everything has a cause, but that there must be something that is not the result of something else, because the chain of cause and effect cannot go back to infinity. There is something that is the cause of everything else, but has no cause itself.
If the above sounds too abstract to you: it is about the phenomenon that we tend to call 'God' in today's society. In a more anthropological, general and abstract sense, that is.
Although some philosophers are critical about the concept of the Unmoved Mover, this principle is the starting point for many people to think about God. The question for them is not so much whether there is such a thing as a god, but especially what that god is and how it manifests itself. And that in turn leads to intense discussions, for example between atheists and believers. For example, there are atheists who believe faith in a creating god as unprovable and irrational nonsense. On the other hand, there are believers who find it perfectly logical that this Universe, which appears to be mainly complex in nature (but may not be at all), could never have arisen out of itself, and that something like a creative god (or gods) must have been.
In the scientific debate, a select group in recent years has advocated the so-called Intelligent Design : the idea that certain characteristics of the universe and organisms are best explained as the work of an intelligent "designer". What that intelligent designer then looks like is briefly left out, but it is clear that it complies with the god principle.
There is a lot of criticism to be made about the movement that is referred to as ID and its theories, but for me personally there is only one argument to deal with ID: Intelligent Design pretends to solve a problem: the problem that it involves be the Universe that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory or other scientific insights. This Universe would be so complex in nature that there must be an intelligent something like a god. The existence of a watch also presupposes the existence of a watchmaker, and God is that proverbial watchmaker.
My simple objection is: if I accept the watchmaker's principle, I must also ask myself who the watchmaker's dad and mom are. Then I have to wonder who the parents of that are. And so on and so forth. Intelligent Design does not solve the problem, it creates a new problem! Unless of course you want to claim that God is the cause of all things, but you know for sure that he had no father or mother, let alone grandparents. But what problem does this solve that cannot already be solved by accepting the Universe as an Unmoved Mover? After all, we can reasonably assume that the Universe exists.
Aristotle already said it: anankè dè stènai : it cannot be otherwise or it must end. Either to the series of causes and effects, or to the endless analysis in our search for God, because the scholars unfortunately do not know what exactly he meant. But both interpretations are relevant to this discussion.
For me the solution is simple: as far as I can empirically perceive, the Universe itself is the Unmoved Mover. Any attempt to explain the Universe as the result of something that can be interpreted as a god principle does not solve the problem, but only makes it bigger. And attempts to scientifically explain the Universe as a result of something else are as yet only hypothetical theories for which there is no empirical evidence. The result is that at a certain point, due to a lack of information, we still have to make a choice: anankè dè stènai .
I am fairly happy with the idea that the Universe is the cause of everything that exists but has no cause of its own. Does this mean that I am an atheist? Yes and no: I do not believe that the Universe was created by a creative god, but I do not rule out such a thing as God. According to many people I contradict myself now.
One of the biggest obstacles to understanding reality is that people are inclined to elevate themselves to the measure of all things. Usually unnoticed and without malicious intentions. Without realizing it, we use ourselves as a measuring tape to measure other things. Mathematically, but above all teleologically , because we mainly want to understand the goal-directedness of everything. So we say that an elephant is large and a mouse is small. We implicitly conclude that God has human traits (such as the tendency for purposeful action) and creative power. We believe that the universe is ancient with its 14 billion years. But compared to the cosmic scale of the Universe or the microscopic scale of molecules and atoms, elephants and mice do not differ that much in size. God does not have to be anything that looks like a person or has creative power. And the Universe is perhaps elegantly simple and not ancient, but very young compared to the age it can reach, according to current insights. Insofar as there is already an autonomous existence of such a thing as time, because in my opinion the Universe does not exist in time and space (as most people implicitly assume), time and space exist in the Universe; the Universe is of a higher order than time and space. Our conclusions say much more about our 'ego-centric' natures than about the topics they should be about.
There is a lot to say about the neurotic aspects of believing in a god and higher dimensions. Nonetheless, many people believe in a god, in gods, in multiple dimensions, in life after death, etc. If you are more sociologically or anthropologically inclined, you start to wonder what the intention is. It seems to me to go too far to say that believing is something schizotypal when a very large majority of humanity is concerned with it. Is there a way out of this dilemma?
There is. By considering the divine as something that is a property of the Universe, and not so much something that is equal to it (pantheism) or above or beyond it (theism). If God, like time and space, is of a lower order than the Universe, we can make room for the mysticism that seems to be hidden in existence, without having to get stuck between religion and science, and we take a stand without having to take a stand.
"Yes and no" I answered to the question of whether I am an atheist. You now know why.
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:" hitting cap makes me envision cervix smashing"
Originally Posted by sbbds
if I say any words it is because they are mine and come from my heart, not yours.
Perhaps philosophy is ultimately an argument about the meaning of words.
