Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “What is the definition of God?”, Leave a Reply below!
I take it as a given premise that God is unknowable, so far above what we can comprehend that the only way we can try to comprehend Him (masculine pronoun used although He is genderless) is to use our insufficient imagination. This is why He is pictured in our Old Testament readers as a bearded old man on a throne. Its what we can comprehend as Someone Verable, All-Knowing, All-Powerful even though these terms are lacking.
God is the sum total of all that is and that is not. It is chicken and egg. It is beyond comprehension by finite mind. So what’s the fuss?
God is the universal self.
God is to us and is like water is to us. It or God exists and reacts in reality in myriad ways. So many ways, in fact, that we can’t as people figure out all the ways that water interacts with reality or makes life go. Religion tends to make god into a kind of self important guy who wants to tell you what to do, lay down the law, and call the shots, and can only be understood through study of ancient scripts. Religions are all about belonging and believing and having people come to your birthday party or bah mitzvah or whatever. I should say that i think Jewish folks seem to have the most socially functional religion, but they tend to support the lies and fallacies of power and status and this way seem to want to control everything with general bias. Good social skills seems to create a messy kind of uber-controlling intent of their hierarchal figures and leaders.
God is like unshrouded reality while religious god is like enforced reality guided by who get to override or punish whom. It doesn’t matter in religion if there is any particular grasp of truth but there is enforced belief and behavioral traits. If you are a religious person you might be ok as long as you don’t try to use this status to enforce lies or beliefs through “acceptable intimidation”.
For almost all of us God is “common reality” or common knowledge. God is not about thinking or solving so much as it is about saying how things are and preparing to back it up with a threat of violence or death by exile or unstabile future.
It seems in common logic God can do anything but doesn’t like outsiders or inferiors and only likes “important doctrine purveying people” who hold god to be big on bias.
To me, God helps me figure stuff out. Thank you God!!.
Gods are superhuman mythological (fictional) entities. Aphrodite for example is a goddes.
The best definition of “God” I have come across is… THAT which exists beyond all definition.
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To name is to define and to define is to limit. If we say “God” is THIS then we are suggesting that “God” is not THAT but since the nature of Pure Consciousness is UNLIMITED … IT is This AND That, Neither and Both. The finite mind is truly outclassed inthe Divine arena.
It is true that FINITE mind of man cannot FULLY comprehend THAT which is LIMITLESS …however…. this does not mean that “God” cannot be KNOWN in ITs totallity.. via Tranascendent Knowledge.
Transcendent Knowledge is unique. It is not about the intellect or the power of reason. It is NOT about BELIEF, nor is it about knowing via the finite mind.. it is about moving BEYOND the finite mind and merging into Divine Consciousness itself… THAT which is the SOURCE of mind.
The best way to discribe “God” / Infinite and Perfect Consciousness is to simply say… “God” IS … and stop right there. The finite mind wants to apply all these different adjectives to try and bring “God” down to their level … but God cannot be KNOWN that way and those adjectives just lead one away from the Absolute TRUTH of the actual unchanging reality of “God”, Perfect BE~ing.. as in the verb TO BE.
Trying to discribe the Absolute Reality which IS “God” is a little like trying to discribe the color RED to a color blind person. No matter how many words we throw at it .. still the actual reality of RED will elude one who does not have Direct Transcendent Awareness of it.
One CAN know (small k ) certain aspects of “God” via the mind .. and that is most wonderful but …. to KNOW ( cap. K ) “God” FULLY… Transcendently… that is a WHOLE different type of KNOWING and far FAR beyond any worldly understanding that the finite mind might be able to comprehend by its own efforts.
the ultimate in every thing ( power, love, Ability, mercy, justice, revenge, truth.. etc )
Say God is One, Allah, the Eternal, the guide and was not born and did not have one no longer
WHAT IF GOD IS ONE WITH US?
WHAT IF GOD IS IN THE ONENESS WITHIN US?
All that is: beyond the finite and infinite; the eternal and the here and now. It is beyond definition.
I do not know what is “THE” definition of god. I only know that there are MANY definitions of god, and these are as many and varied as our vibrant species.
All I can say is this: If any such god-thing exists (by whatever definition), I do not presently perceive it (much less any “purpose” it might have for me to fulfill), and I certainly don’t perceive that I have any genuine need for it to begin with. Therefore the definition of god is just personally irrelevant to me at present. You can call it whatever you like. I don’t feel a need for it.
An energy superior to all energies. A Rational entity from our world of origin.
I used to think “God” was everything that existed, was in us and around us, and was so massive as to be beyond comprehension. Then I realized what I was describing was the universe, and we already had a name for that.
The definition of gods depend on the believer(s) you ask. What time they lived, what part of the world you’re in, who is holding political power during that particular age..
It’s for the theists to decide the cut of their emperor’s cloth.
‘God’ is an anthropomorphic identity our species-biased minds give to the natural order at large. As humans we tend to view all things has being guided by a conscious akin to our own. We ask of everything, “why?” ‘Why’ desires a guided purpose, an intent, in a universe that needs no such instigator. It is simply that our species-bias towards the idea of a conscious mind being the instigator of all things, our egocentric approach to understanding causality, refuses us to perceive a completely abstract mover behind the fabric of reality. Our imaginations struggle to comprehend that mover not having a mind and a will like our own. Hence ‘God.’
This tendency to see anthropomorphic qualities in identity-less things occurs on even the mundane level. We see shapes in the clouds, faces in wall patterns, figures in shadows. We scream and yell out our computers for crashing when they possess no conscious and not will of their own. We assign them a persona, a guided intent. They are deliberately aggravating us. But of course they are not. They are inanimate and we are simply projecting human qualities onto them as that is our tendency with the outside world. Seeing ‘God’ in everything is the same.
God is also a response to fear. “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to ha…” ummm, I mean “the unknown leads to fear and fear leads to the need for comfort.” In this sense we need boundaries. We need to feel there is a finite be-all and end-all to everything, be it existence, knowledge, morality, whatever. ‘God,’ an ad hoc transcendental conscious, conveniently and instantly addresses this fear. We can defer our fears to ‘him.’ We can stop worrying and questioning. Much in the way a small child looks to their parents for protection and trusts their parents’ knowledge and experience unwaveringly humans, when faced with the fear of unanswered questions and existential uncertainty, insert a parental figure to allay their fears.
Or.. the Naturalistic Pantheist in me considers ‘God’ a figurative term for the cumulative power of the universe.
Any god would be supernatural and the supernatural doesn’t exist so there are no gods to define.
The definition of a God requires something supernatural beyond and outside all reality. Meaning it requires faith. A provable God is no God at all. On the terms of religion itself there can never be a God that’s the essence of faith. Where reason is, God isn’t.
It depends on who is doing the defining. The gods were/are the attempt on the part of ignorant people to explain reality. They are illogical delusions that suppress critical, logical thought.
… a Singularity…
an aggregation of all that is, was, and will be…
all bundled-up whole and complete.
a supernatural being who seems to care a little too much about us humans. a delusion that people invent and adopt with appalling regularity
god-the totality of infinity
you are a piece of infinity
you are god
If you can define your god, it’s not God. The God of all is beyond definition.
God is the white noise you get when you ask for a definition.
“What is the definition of ‘god?’”
It does not have one. The word “god” is utterly meaningless. Nobody has any idea what a god is, nor what the gods do, nor what they are made out of, nor what the gods think, nor where they are, etc. The question “What is the definition of ‘god?’” is not even a valid question: one cannot define that which there is no knowledge of.
That which was before anything was, and brings all that is into being.
My definition of God:
God is the main character of a collection of short stories and essays called “The Holy Bible.”
There is no evidence-grounded definition of God in these stories. Nothing to observe or check for accuracy.
There are several Bible-collections, with different amounts of differences and dependencies. Since there is no physical evidence for God, or any gods, all god-stories and Holy books are evidence-lacking fictions. The same goes for all supernatural (not natural) stories.
In philosophy, God is a subject itself, researched and looked at independently from religion. God is typically considered an infinite being.
Though there is no direct evidence for God that does not necessarily mean God is an idea of fiction. There are many facts that are proven “a priori” or prior to experience i.e. are independent of evidence. The fact that all bachelors are unmarried is something that requires no evidence to prove. It’s a self proving statement: a tautology. Many argue Saint Anselm’s Ontological argument portray’s God in a way similar to this. Consider the following:
If God exists God is infinitely good
infinitely good thing’s have infinite good attributes
Existence is a good attribute; it’s an attribute that is better than non-existence
God posseses the attribute of existence
therefore, God exists.
In addition to philosophy’s verison of God, there are many other versions other than the Bible’s version.