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Not too far removed (philosophically), from 'theological noncognitivism ' [0]: the idea that 'god' is more of a concept like 'hope' or 'love', not a thing like

Not too far removed (philosophically), from 'theological noncognitivism ' [0]: the idea that 'god' is more of a concept like 'hope' or 'love', not a thing like 'milk', and a poorly understood & undefined one at that. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism

blowski 9y ago
I’m a regular Church-going Christian, and could definitely go along with that theory. As a gross over-simplification Jesus is a noun, the Holy Sprit is a verb, God is an entire language.
- kendallpark 9y ago
  Curious: what is the Father, then?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - klez 9y ago
    In the context of the post I think that by God GP meant the Father. EDIT: I re-read the post and no, they didn't seem to mean that.
    - blowski 9y ago
      I just thought about it... and I'm not really sure. I'll cop-out and say something like "God is unknowable, undefinable, and constrainable".
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - rusk 9y ago
    In the Holy Trinity, God is the father, the son, and the holy ghost. I understand these terms to signify 'aspects' of the same thing.
- pasta 9y ago
  The Bible has a lot of different names for God to teach people about who and what he is. So you could say all those names explain the concept of God. This link provides some examples: https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html Edit: maybe more interesting is the Wikipedia articles listing the names of different kinds of religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God
  - blowski 9y ago
    Within the Christian tradition as I understand it, you could read every single word ever expressed about God and you still wouldn't understand. It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      >It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library. Your analagy is akin to The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual guide to becoming closer to god by "unknowing", written by a 14th century christian mystic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - 09bjb 9y ago
        Similar to something I read in a Jack Kornfield book the other day, about a Zen tradition called "just sitting" where you dispense with any goals or concepts of enlightenment and, well, just sit. Presumably it gets you somewhere...or nowhere :)
    - coliveira 9y ago
      Black holes can be observed. God cannot.
- stult 9y ago
  Well, at a minimum we certainly know Jesus was a word. In the beginning, at least.
  - redial 9y ago
    That "we" certainly doesn't include judaism, or you know, the ones that wrote the book.
- coliveira 9y ago
  It is funny that god is a language, but he lived alone for the eternity. Was he communicating with himself alone?... Just another "mystery" that believers will sweep under the rug.
  - padobson 9y ago
    What's truly interesting about this is your assumption that God is an individual, a single person. What's more interesting is the comment you're replying to actually describes the super-personal nature of God - what Christians call the Trinity. Writings expounding on the Trinity have filled many volumes of Christian theology - it's something far from being "swept under the rug".
  - katzgrau 9y ago
    I think you're applying our concept of time to God. Time is a human construct. As for believers, you can see from this thread that there are many interpretations of God, but on HN they do lean toward the fairly abstract. Personally, I see our mere existence as proof of God. We can observe God because we are God. The only thing I've ever really been hung up on is the question of whether God can observe himself to validate his own existence. It's fairly paradoxical.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      > We can observe God because we are God. This is the god of Spinoza. A god that is everything and everywhere is, at the same time, nothing. It is nothing more than the worshiping of the universe.
jkingsbery 9y ago
For whatever it's worth, at least as that wiki page described it, 'god' isn't cognitively meaningful. Most Christian philosophers I've read fall into a camp that would say that "hope" and "love" are real and cognitively meaningful, but also metaphysical and therefore something that we can know partially but not completely (and, as you say, understood poorly as a result of the incomplete knowledge).
- jimmy1 9y ago
  yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is It corresponds with God's name of himself in the OT as well as Jesus's name of Himself as well: “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”. “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’" then in John's Gospel, Jesus says, "before Abraham was, I AM"
  - padobson 9y ago
    I don't know why you're being downvoted. Those passages in the Bible are some of the most relevant to the OP.
    - jimmy1 9y ago
      I've come to expect it in the current climate. People see bible passages and have an instant visceral reaction. I can understand it to an extent.
      - 09bjb 9y ago
        I've got some gripes with Jordan Peterson's popularity but everyone needs to hear this (paraphrasing): "OK, you're going to disregard all of Christianity because there are literal untruths in the Bible? We have a word for people who insist on the literal truth of sacred texts: fundamentalists. I'm sorry, it was probably never meant to be literally true, it's describing stuff that's better understood as story/myth. You're going to have to try a little harder."
09bjb 9y ago
"Theological noncognitivism" is not too far removed from "ignosticism", according to your link. Ignosticism states: the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term "god" has no coherent and unambiguous definition. Totally valid, to the extent that saying that something that we can't bottle and stopper must be irrelevant helps anyone sleep at night. I suppose my one point of disagreement is that the poem is philosophically aligned with Questions of God-ness being pointless...the poem doesn't strike me that way (totally subjective of course). And Buckminster Fuller was well known to have undergone a pretty profound mystical experience (whatever that means) that shaped the rest of his life.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
"God" has so many definitions it's completely useless as word to be used for conversation, even between 2 people of the same faith, maybe even for a single person to have internal thoughts about. It's amazing how much conflict arises just because everyone wants to use the same word for an intangible thing. Maybe we can start a database and every person creates a unique id for their current definition of intangible things. Even if they copy the exact definition for an intangible thing from someone elses intangible thing, it gets a new id. If they want to modify a definition of their own intangible thing, new id. Then every recorded use of the word requires a link to the definition that individual was using at the time of the conversation. In the case of "God", I don't think UUIDs will be big enough. The db will, of course, have to be decentralized and blockchain based.

blowski 9y ago

I’m a regular Church-going Christian, and could definitely go along with that theory. As a gross over-simplification Jesus is a noun, the Holy Sprit is a verb, God is an entire language.

kendallpark 9y ago
Curious: what is the Father, then?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- klez 9y ago
  In the context of the post I think that by God GP meant the Father. EDIT: I re-read the post and no, they didn't seem to mean that.
  - blowski 9y ago
    I just thought about it... and I'm not really sure. I'll cop-out and say something like "God is unknowable, undefinable, and constrainable".
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- rusk 9y ago
  In the Holy Trinity, God is the father, the son, and the holy ghost. I understand these terms to signify 'aspects' of the same thing.
pasta 9y ago
The Bible has a lot of different names for God to teach people about who and what he is. So you could say all those names explain the concept of God. This link provides some examples: https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html Edit: maybe more interesting is the Wikipedia articles listing the names of different kinds of religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God
- blowski 9y ago
  Within the Christian tradition as I understand it, you could read every single word ever expressed about God and you still wouldn't understand. It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    >It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library. Your analagy is akin to The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual guide to becoming closer to god by "unknowing", written by a 14th century christian mystic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - 09bjb 9y ago
      Similar to something I read in a Jack Kornfield book the other day, about a Zen tradition called "just sitting" where you dispense with any goals or concepts of enlightenment and, well, just sit. Presumably it gets you somewhere...or nowhere :)
  - coliveira 9y ago
    Black holes can be observed. God cannot.
stult 9y ago
Well, at a minimum we certainly know Jesus was a word. In the beginning, at least.
- redial 9y ago
  That "we" certainly doesn't include judaism, or you know, the ones that wrote the book.
coliveira 9y ago
It is funny that god is a language, but he lived alone for the eternity. Was he communicating with himself alone?... Just another "mystery" that believers will sweep under the rug.
- padobson 9y ago
  What's truly interesting about this is your assumption that God is an individual, a single person. What's more interesting is the comment you're replying to actually describes the super-personal nature of God - what Christians call the Trinity. Writings expounding on the Trinity have filled many volumes of Christian theology - it's something far from being "swept under the rug".
- katzgrau 9y ago
  I think you're applying our concept of time to God. Time is a human construct. As for believers, you can see from this thread that there are many interpretations of God, but on HN they do lean toward the fairly abstract. Personally, I see our mere existence as proof of God. We can observe God because we are God. The only thing I've ever really been hung up on is the question of whether God can observe himself to validate his own existence. It's fairly paradoxical.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    > We can observe God because we are God. This is the god of Spinoza. A god that is everything and everywhere is, at the same time, nothing. It is nothing more than the worshiping of the universe.

jkingsbery 9y ago

For whatever it's worth, at least as that wiki page described it, 'god' isn't cognitively meaningful. Most Christian philosophers I've read fall into a camp that would say that "hope" and "love" are real and cognitively meaningful, but also metaphysical and therefore something that we can know partially but not completely (and, as you say, understood poorly as a result of the incomplete knowledge).

jimmy1 9y ago
yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is It corresponds with God's name of himself in the OT as well as Jesus's name of Himself as well: “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”. “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’" then in John's Gospel, Jesus says, "before Abraham was, I AM"
- padobson 9y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. Those passages in the Bible are some of the most relevant to the OP.
  - jimmy1 9y ago
    I've come to expect it in the current climate. People see bible passages and have an instant visceral reaction. I can understand it to an extent.
    - 09bjb 9y ago
      I've got some gripes with Jordan Peterson's popularity but everyone needs to hear this (paraphrasing): "OK, you're going to disregard all of Christianity because there are literal untruths in the Bible? We have a word for people who insist on the literal truth of sacred texts: fundamentalists. I'm sorry, it was probably never meant to be literally true, it's describing stuff that's better understood as story/myth. You're going to have to try a little harder."

09bjb 9y ago

"Theological noncognitivism" is not too far removed from "ignosticism", according to your link. Ignosticism states: the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term "god" has no coherent and unambiguous definition. Totally valid, to the extent that saying that something that we can't bottle and stopper must be irrelevant helps anyone sleep at night. I suppose my one point of disagreement is that the poem is philosophically aligned with Questions of God-ness being pointless...the poem doesn't strike me that way (totally subjective of course). And Buckminster Fuller was well known to have undergone a pretty profound mystical experience (whatever that means) that shaped the rest of his life.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

"God" has so many definitions it's completely useless as word to be used for conversation, even between 2 people of the same faith, maybe even for a single person to have internal thoughts about. It's amazing how much conflict arises just because everyone wants to use the same word for an intangible thing. Maybe we can start a database and every person creates a unique id for their current definition of intangible things. Even if they copy the exact definition for an intangible thing from someone elses intangible thing, it gets a new id. If they want to modify a definition of their own intangible thing, new id. Then every recorded use of the word requires a link to the definition that individual was using at the time of the conversation. In the case of "God", I don't think UUIDs will be big enough. The db will, of course, have to be decentralized and blockchain based.