particles and connections (General)

by BBella , Thursday, February 09, 2017, 20:35 (2843 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: God is connected to all animate organisms as a universal consciousness, even if those organisms have no consciousness. He is most closely connected to those with some degree of consciousness.

dhw: As you will have realized, I am probing your nebulous panentheistic concept of God being “within and without”. Why have you suddenly limited your God's universal consciousness to animate organisms? A pebble is not an animate organism. If your God is not within it, then he is not “within” everything. And of course that would extend to all inanimate objects, such as rocks, oceans, stars and solar systems (unless you believe them to be animate.) So are you now saying that your God is ONLY within living organisms? If not, once again: how is he "within" the pebble?

DAVID: I doubt very much he is inside inanimate objects. But He is control of the objects in the universe, such as galaxies with contents since He created the universe.

So just to clarify: “within and without” the universe and everything in it (which I understood as being the essence of panentheism) is almost certainly wrong, then. Your God is only “within” the living organisms we know on Planet Earth, and he simply manipulates matter from the outside, presumably by psychokinesis.

I would disagree with this, not because I know better, but just because logic tells me that if God were in the beginning and that's all that was, then anything made would be from that which was God; the fabric of God, if you will. That means to me, that God's consciousness may not be in all that IS, but what IS is all God. That does not minimize the aspects of that which is not alive as less than or it that which is evil as less than (God), it just means to me that God is not a person, God is all that IS. Either that, or that which we think of as God, has been made by all that IS along with everything else. To me, it can only be one or the other.

Also, I wanted to let you know I did a long, in depth reply to your question to me about my experience with interconnectedness, and it got lost when my computer froze (ugh!!!), so I will be answering that question asap. Thanks for your patience!