the original question did not have to do with whether one believes in
God or not, but in what kind of God one believes in (if one believes).
But one can only describe what kind of God one believes in terms of familiar concepts and language. For example, when science fiction writers describe alien beings, they are always described in terms of familiar elements, merely arranged in different ways. For example, most alien creatures have eyes of some kind, ears of some kind, language, etc. Some writers go so far as to describe alien beings as force fields. But IMO it is more likely that alien beings, if they exist, will have attributes which are completely beyond anything we have experienced and are beyond anything we are capable of imagining.
When you ask what kind of God one believes in, you are describing God in our language -- terms such as omnipotent, loving, omnipresent, etc. Why does God have to be any of these things? For me, the whole field of descriptive theology is based on a fundamental fallacy.
Describe the difference between red and blue to a person who has been blind from birth. Describe a Mozart symphony and a Joplin rag to a woman who has been deaf from birth. Describe the concept of justice to a newborn baby. When you have proved capable of these things, you may be 1% of the way toward being able to describe God.
I don't mean to be demeaning here, or belitteling. Really I don't. I have stayed out of this topic for a long time. But I got so frustrated at the ongoing assumption that God somehow had an implied duty to make him/her/its/their self definable in human terms that I finally had to jump in. |
