A few thoughts on the God of the Gaps (warning: theology in progress)

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Universalists are pretty cool.

I'm more and more inclined to go with the idea that God is the universe.

That sounds to me like you're saying god exists as a set of physical laws.  That seems to both reduce god from godhood (because god would have the same limitations as the physical laws), as well as simply being a semantic substitution for said laws.

...


When I go deeper (because, oddly enough, I've been re-reading LessWrong's Quantum Physics sequence), the Universe, and everything in it, are amplitudes in configuration space.  So what you appear to be saying is that God is a wave function, no more and no less.

I can't agree with your assessment of what I'm saying that God "is", because I have no possible way of knowing what God "is". You appear to be applying an extremely reductionist view (all things are no more than the sum of their parts) whereas I am applying the opposite view (all things have properties that are not expressed by their parts).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Universalists are pretty cool.

I'm more and more inclined to go with the idea that God is the universe.

That sounds to me like you're saying god exists as a set of physical laws.  That seems to both reduce god from godhood (because god would have the same limitations as the physical laws), as well as simply being a semantic substitution for said laws.

...


When I go deeper (because, oddly enough, I've been re-reading LessWrong's Quantum Physics sequence), the Universe, and everything in it, are amplitudes in configuration space.  So what you appear to be saying is that God is a wave function, no more and no less.

The no more and no less is up for debate. 

But I tend to agree with the universalists that a God would have to exist OUTSIDE of the rules (and thus the universe), because the universe's rules don't allow omniscience or omnipotence (athough omnipresence would be implied).

Yeah, but neither you nor the Universalists get to define my view of God.

Further, I would argue that we don't, and can't, know the rules of the universe on a scale that might be defined as God, for the reason that we are unable to observe the emergent properties of a system on that scale.

[Doktor Howl]

Universalists are pretty cool.

I'm more and more inclined to go with the idea that God is the universe.

That sounds to me like you're saying god exists as a set of physical laws.  That seems to both reduce god from godhood (because god would have the same limitations as the physical laws), as well as simply being a semantic substitution for said laws.

...


When I go deeper (because, oddly enough, I've been re-reading LessWrong's Quantum Physics sequence), the Universe, and everything in it, are amplitudes in configuration space.  So what you appear to be saying is that God is a wave function, no more and no less.

The no more and no less is up for debate. 

But I tend to agree with the universalists that a God would have to exist OUTSIDE of the rules (and thus the universe), because the universe's rules don't allow omniscience or omnipotence (athough omnipresence would be implied).

Yeah, but neither you nor the Universalists get to define my view of God.

Further, I would argue that we don't, and can't, know the rules of the universe on a scale that might be defined as God, for the reason that we are unable to observe the emergent properties of a system on that scale.

Oh, sure.  The whole point of this post was that God doesn't vanish from view as we learn more about the universe because we could never see God in the first place.  And I strongly suspect that an all powerful, all knowing, and all present God would by definition be different for every intelligent being.  Not appear different, be different.

[LMNO]

Nigel, you're absolutely right that I was coming from a Reductionist point of view.  Because functionally, I believe that's all I have to work with.  Accepting ineffable qualities that are not contained in any given combination of amplitudes in configuration space seems like excess work, and a step too far.

Did I mention I'm a non-theist?

[Doktor Howl]

Nigel, you're absolutely right that I was coming from a Reductionist point of view.  Because functionally, I believe that's all I have to work with.  Accepting ineffable qualities that are not contained in any given combination of amplitudes in configuration space seems like excess work, and a step too far.

Did I mention I'm a non-theist?

Well, it's obviously metaphysics, because by definition, none of this is testable.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel, you're absolutely right that I was coming from a Reductionist point of view.  Because functionally, I believe that's all I have to work with.  Accepting ineffable qualities that are not contained in any given combination of amplitudes in configuration space seems like excess work, and a step too far.

Did I mention I'm a non-theist?

Emergence is observable at all other levels of organization; it would run counter to science to assume that it is not existent at levels of organization too large for us to observe. What form it takes is something I can't speculate on, but it seems not unreasonable to label it God.