Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 05:35 (5484 days ago) @ David Turell

"You are saying that you do not know in any way what God 'is', that he has no substance."-No I am not. I'm saying that within process philosophy (and even since Kant!) the concept of "substance" is meaningless. I'm also saying that it is meaningless to ask what God is "made out of." The only things we can talk about being made out of something are "things" in our universe. I can say my ring is made out of Gold. But all I can say about fundamentals is that they are made out of God, not that God has "changed" portions of himself into energy. God hasn't changed anything at that level. In any case, fundamentally, all "things" aren't "things" anyhow, but everything is nothing more than process.-"Unless, of course, he changes portions of himself into energy."-God doesn't change anything at that level. God spins off minimal reflections of himself that manifest themselves in our universe as fundamentals, whatever they are, and whatever they are, they are processes. In our universe, fundamentals are indeed mass/energy, in terms of today's science. But "fundamentally," underneath, fundamentals are just processes. They aren't something that "persists" outside of process.-When God "spins" fundamentals of himself off into the universe, he isn't "changing" anything. He's not "changing portions of himself into energy." The fundamentals are minimal reflections of God that manifest themselves to science as mass and energy, but there is no "transformation" going on when God "does" this. Fundamental reflections of God "show up" in the universe as the particles and fields that science studies. Each fundamental process has its own nature, which determines its experience and how it reacts with other fundamentals, and ultimately all of them acting together over the ages produces the universe we live in.-When fields and particles "hook up," not as piles of "stuff" like lumps of dirt and disorganized sticks and stones, but as organisms, the individual fundamentals that make up the parts of the organism "coalesce" and come to a focus, exhibiting themselves as a unified, something "new". An atom for example isn't just a bunch of isolated electrons, protons, neutrons, gluons, and photons all "stuck together," but entirely new processes with newly emergent properties that could not have been foreseen beforehand. More of the same goes on, as atoms build up into molecules and macromolecules, and macromolecules unite together into cellular apparatus and cells themselves. -A living cell is just like an atom or molecule, in being an individual, not just lump of molecules all crammed together, but an organism that acts as a single being with experience richer than what is experienced by individual molecules, and so on up the scale of complexity until experience gradually exhibits itself as consciousness.-Now before reading all this, you might have felt that you were understanding everything I was saying. Now you're probably more bewildered than ever. That's good. I sense a flurry of new questions coming my way.