The Mind of God (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by jclinch , Friday, October 15, 2010, 12:54 (4935 days ago) @ dhw

Hi, dhw. It's been a while since I visited this site and I'm delighted to see that the old controversies are still very much alive.-I couldn't help but think that your posting on the mind of God commits the mistake of considering as a literal reality an expression that was always intended to be a metaphor. It derives, after all, from the concluding passage of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and is the title of a rather excellent book by Paul Davies (which, it is no exaggeration to say, changed my life but that's another story). -Of course, if you accept that "God" is a being with a "mind" situated in time (though, conspicuously, not in space it seems) then you are forced to consider all sorts of anthropocentic notions like "what was He doing before creation?" and "why didn't He speed up evolution?" Which, of course, leads to absurd paradoxes. The very use of a personal pronoun at all is, in my view, revealing since it demonstrates an unstated premise that that God is a bit like us. Religious people often take this thinking much further and then commit a more extreme blasphemy by supposing that God agrees with them. -The fundamental error, in my respectful view, is anthropomorphism. If God can be said to exist in any meaningful way, the only thing of we can be sure is that God is nothing like us and is beyond anything that we can conceivably imagine. Moreover, God is surely beyond any human notion of volition, morality, goodness, justice, mercy or any of the other attributes that the world's monotheisms typically ascribe to God. And "He" certainly can't get bored!-By the way, since last year, on the recommendation of people on this blog, I read Anthony Flew's "There is a God" and found it disappointingly unconvincing. A good enough read but essentially a rehash of the cosmological and teleological arguments. I was kind of left wondering why, when he was a renowned atheist, he was not better acquainted with Aquinas.