The Arts (Art)

by Carl, Thursday, October 02, 2008, 02:55 (5684 days ago) @ Mark

Mark: "I don't see the point of imagining the existence of a God emergent from the material universe. What question does the existence of such a being answer? On the other hand, it is clear why people may believe in God as an eternal necessary being who is the ground of all being, for most people want an answer to why we are here."
Reality is whatever it is, so the point of imagining one kind of God or believing in another is beside the point. We don't get to choose reality. It may be that the King James version of the Bible is totally literally true. If it is, I and several other people on this site are in really big trouble. We are betting it isn't true, but we don't get to choose.
A vision of an emergent God doesn't have to be too inconsistent with the popular idea of God. If God were co-existent with the universe, then He would not have created it. But in the early times when the universe was infinitely small, hot and dense (assuming the Big Bang is true), He would not have had a lot of work to do, so He would not need to be so powerful. His complexity would grow with the inflation and expansion of the universe, so that, when things began to get untidy, He would have had the powers necessary to cope with it. In the same way an embryo can develop to become Pope, God could have grown into the job so that He is everything people think He is. I think this idea might have some things in common with David's ideas except for the last part.
There is absolutely nothing to argue for or against this idea. It is simply an exercise in imagination, putting the pieces together in a different way to see if anything plausible can be developed. It would be nice if there was something that could be predicted for God and verified like the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation for the Big Bang, but I don't foresee it.
But emergent entities don't have to have the attributes of God. One can envision limited entities emerging that function in their local environment much as humans on earth do. Humans are proof of concept, so it is not so outrageous to suppose there are other ways of doing it. It works for science fiction writers anyway. Even Carl Sagan had his flights of imagination.