Dawkinsian God
What is god?
God is a being. God is a concept. God is a metaphor. God is nature. God is the sum total of our collective ignorance.
In short, god means different things to different people. Oftentimes, God means different things to different people of the same faith. So what really is god? Can we arrive at a universal definition of god? Much of the roots of misunderstanding in a god debate is that god is not well-defined and atheists usually suspect that because god exist only in the mind of its believers. For any dialog to continue, there must be a common ground where points of view can continue coming back to - a concept that should work as the pivot of the discussion. Specially in a god debate, god should not be left undefined or unbounded. Otherwise, the debate will most likely just go limbo. So what are some definitions of god? Recently, I came across a possibly new definition of god. Richard Dawkins says god is a scientific hypothesis. By this he means that the god hypothesis is in the realm of scientific inquiry and hence can be empirically verified or falsified. He is referring narrowly to a certain flavor of the god of the Abrahamic religions. I call this scientifically verifiable-falsifiable god the Dawkinsian god. This god is the god that is micro-managing the lives of some believers as the born again Christian would say “surrendering their lives to Jesus.” The Dawkinsian god is a god who is meddling with the natural world by influencing its events and outcomes by, presumably, its actions. Another attribute of this Dawkinsian god is that it’s hypothesized by the Creationists and Intelligent Design camps as The Creator, a designation shared by the Deistic god. According to orthodox Dawkinsian thinking, since god is the intelligent designer, and since ID hypothesizes that the irreducible complexity is the proof that there is an intelligent designer, i.e., god, this can be falsified by showing that the irreducible complexity is nothing but a failure of venturing further to really honestly find out what other natural cause or mechanism produced the apparent complexity.
What is your definition of god?
November 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
One thing i keep noticing about ‘God’ talks is how the OTHER living or non-living aspects of the ‘bigger picture’ fare with people’s description of it. We seem to be constantly and unconsciously stroking our egos here — our ‘uniqueness’ — as if we solely own the rights to god.
It would seem that since animals, plants, planets, stars, and other stuff aren’t sentiently the same as humans are; we humans are the ones actually imposing upon these things ‘OUR’ conception of god. And that’s just talking about the physical. Â
Does a pine tree, for example has an inkling for ‘god’ as humans do? (assuming it has a ‘consciousness’ all it’s own as New Age proponents theorize). A dog’s relationship with it’s owner that feeds it could invariably follow this ‘human induced’ god pattern… or is the dilemma just a human construct borne out of his deep-seated psychological needs?Â
Maybe elephants, chimps, octopuses, or dolphins know a lot more than we do? Do they have a ‘Dolphin God’?Â
Just to speculate ;).Â