toxic thought waste site

Theological whimsy, metaphysical larks, and other spiritually radioactive waste products.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Toxic Theology

In the Denys Turner video, I was surprised to learn that atheists never think about the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" and that if you do ask the question you are doing theology. Well, if it's that easy to do theology, then, heck, I can say something equally insane and unfounded. The problem is getting someone to pay me for it....

So queue the theology intro music, it's time to explore the nature of god.

Let's say god is infinitely more complicated, knowing, powerful, etc than us. Here's a chart:

god
.
.
[infinitely many dots]
.
.
.
believer (just a skosh closer to god, all things considered)
atheist

Now consider two people on earth who have some different conceptions of god. It doesn't even matter if either of them are true or false. The fact that they have a finite brains, how ever well they are working, the difference between the two conceptions of god (or lack of conception) are completely dwarfed by the vast expanse between the concept holders and the actual deity that is the object of their thoughts.

In other words, to any level of precision you wish to go, all conceptions of god are essentially equal wrt to the actual god. Even if two people completely disagree their concepts are essentially the same (are the same?) when viewed from infinitely far away.

Wow, that's almost fun...

[digg]

1 Comments:

Blogger Delusional Puppeteer said...

Thats a very good call, it hurts my brain realizing things like that.

Tue Oct 10, 11:06:00 PM  

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