Photographer – Colton
Where God and Heaven used to be long ago, compared to currently, and where will he be in the future?
In primitive times, people used to think that inanimate objects had their own life, spirit, and consciousness. Folks back then had no method of reasoning to distinguish between what is living and nonliving. They would apologize to the log before they threw it on the fire, and worshiped the fire. This was before the times of Aristotle’s Laws of identity around 2400 years ago or Francis Bacon’s scientific method a few hundred years ago.
Before understanding the Laws of identity, people didn’t realize that matter and energy have certain universal, predictable, and consistent behaviors. They used believe that nothing could be identified or known for sure. Nowadays we know how to validate the truth value of any proposition in relation to all that exists.
So when someone says, “we can’t be sure of anything”, they are using a primitive form of reasoning (non-reasoning). As philosophy and science was able to explain and predict the behavior of the elements in a universal manner, people started to realize that physical objects didn’t have consciousness, and therefore were not Gods, so that’s probably when Gods or “God” had to be pushed out of reach and into the sky in order to justify any contradictions.
During the time period when the sky was the location of God and the Heavens, that’s the time when the mechanics and identity of that which was beyond the atmosphere was not known. Then came along some smart creative people who curiously explored the mechanics of the unknown Heavens.
For example, Isaac Newton was a brilliant physicist who was able to figure out the calculation of the earth and moon in relation to the sun, but when he tried to calculate the relation of multiple planets in the solar system, it was too complex for his knowledge and known evidence at the time.
Before the time of Newton, God was in control of everything in the “Heavens” (the solar system viewed from earth). As Newton figured out how and why earth orbits the sun, God was no longer in control of that portion of the “Heavens”.
But he couldn’t figure out the elliptical orbits of our other planets, so Newton’s “answer” to the areas or parts of celestial mechanics that he could not figure out, was that God had control of it, and mortal minds cannot figure out God’s territory.
So that’s when God and Heaven moved past the sky and atmosphere of the earth, and settled just past the known parts of our solar system.
But then came Pierre Laplace who built upon the foundation of Newton’s observations, and developed a more comprehensive way to measure the cosmos by using a method of calculus to explain the mechanics of the solar system that Newton assumed was God’s territory.
The mechanics of the supernatural Heavens was now explained and validated scientifically, and God and Heaven again had to be pushed further out into the cosmos just beyond the edge of what was known at the time.
It’s as if anything that has not yet been figured out is by default, God’s supernatural territory that we have no business trying to figure out. Every time another pesky curious person discovered and validated the behavior of “Gods territory”, God then has to move further out to other unexplained areas.
As generations went on, the traditions and stories of who and what is a God or God, kept evolving to stay outside the parameters of what was known about matter/energy at that time and place in a society.
As science and technology expanded the capacity to understand reality, that’s when the story of where and what God is, had to keep changing, and God had to become a being that was in another dimension, or out of the dimension of space-time, and out of our physical reach, or hiding in the unknown areas of quantum mechanics in order to keep the claim of his existence just out of reach of falsifiability.
This is where believers use the ad ignorantiam logical fallacy, where one invokes an arbitrary assertion and concludes it to be true since it can’t be falsified.
Over time, the logical fallacy of “moving the goal post” (aka –shifting sands fallacy– where the parameters of a claim such as, “God exists here,” shifts or changes to accommodate new evidence which affects the truth value of that claim) is built upon the ignorantiam fallacy, and then you end up with a logical fallacy salad, and you may as well pour a glass of wine and call it a day.
The phenomena that used to be called “the hand of God” or “miracles from God” are incrementally being rationally explained through the scientific method. So God, and his miracles have to hide out in the areas that science hasn’t figured out yet. Right now, many folks claim that God is hiding out in the quantum world or in other speculative dimensions, and when that is rationally explained, God will have to retreat somewhere else.
These claims of where God is, never seem to be prefaced with a definition of “God” by these folks either. You can’t make truth claims of where God is without defining what God is.
Just look at how many wonders and phenomena were “explained” through religion as supernatural around say 200 years ago, that science has now rationalized to be natural. Folks used to have religious “explanations” for why there was sickness, and the answer was to pray.
Thunder, lightning, or comets used to be explained as God showing emotions or giving signs.
People used to think the Aurora lights were from dead people that died too early, or unjustly. Science has made exponential progress in identifying the mechanics of these things. Never in history has science identified the behavior of something, only to be proven wrong by God or religion. If God is responsible for that which has not yet been discovered, Gods department is shrinking, not expanding.
Do you believe we were created and designed by God?
Why would God create curious beings who invalidate the creator as more discoveries are made, even when there is no intent to invalidate the creator, just an intent to discover that which exists?
You might be saying that science and epistemological logic are unreliable since the physics of LaPlace replaced Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics replaced LaPlacian physics, and so on.
The fact is, these were replaced only because they identified the behavior of the cosmos in more expansive detail than the previous physicist.
Einsteinian physics doesn’t contradict or invalidate Newtonian Physics. It just gives more detail. For instance, if you want to traverse the earth, Newtonian physics will guide you, and if you want to traverse the universe, Einsteinian physics will guide you. One does not invalidate the other.
For example, let’s say you have a pirates treasure map with a drawing of a palm tree and a dotted line to an X on the beach. That map is useful, but not as useful as a topographic map with more details to scale, and that topo map doesn’t identify as much detail as Google Earth. Google Earth doesn’t invalidate the topo map or the pirate map, it just identifies more for you.
In the same way, each physicist just expands upon the previous by identifying the universal and consistent behavior of the cosmos.
The pattern we see throughout history is that God is always just beyond what is known at the time. Maybe this is why believers can’t come up with a definition of God, because the modern God and Heaven is different from the past versions God and Heaven, and as more becomes known, the future versions God and Heaven will be different from the current one.
This pattern shows that God and Heaven are not objective, universal, or measurable, just subjective and undefined.
That which is subjective and undefined does not become subject to laws of identity, and that which does not become subject to laws of identity can not exist in reality.
Thanks for finishing Part 4 of this 8 part Series.
Join me next time where we explore some contradictions and get to the core metaphysics of all this stuff.
