Quote:
Originally Posted by bhutocracy
You are wrong, atheists don't get their definition of god from Christians. There were atheists long before Christianity was around. Also I question the point of redefining God out of significance. What if god is electricity? Electromagnetism is just one out of many forces. Would that make you a pantheist with an electromagnetism god, a gravity god, a weak nuclear god and a strong nuclear god? Pointing to a force and calling it god is exactly the same thought process as pre-historic man pointing to lightning and calling it god. At least the pre-historic man would have worshipped the thunder god and probably felt some sense of order and ease in his world that when he performed certain rituals the thunder god would be satisfied and His favour would appear to shine on him afterwards boosting his immune system with the feeling of control over his environment and helping to ensure he lives long enough to produce offspring.
What is the point of having an electricity god today? So that you may thank Him every time you turn your plasma TV on and pray to his greatness for bringing you Geraldo? Of course not, so it's entirely superfluous, an intellectually lazy game. Like a university student saying "What if.. god was like... heheheh... a bong? hehehehheh"
You've got to ask what the benefit in humans assigning a status to a part of physics is.. (Or a chemical process, or a complex system) How and why would it advance or augment our understanding of the universe to call electromagnetism or gravity god rather than plain old "vanilla" electricity or gravity. Only then can you decide if there is an "issue" with atheism as it relates to this particular god of the gaps. It's called atheism, not agravitism or aelectromagnetism. If what you call god doesn't have any actual godlike attributes then is it anything other than empty thought games?
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I'm not trying to call anything a god of *. You are missing the point with that. What the goal is, is to possibly answer questions of what natural forces can do the work of God. By a modern basic definition, God is the creator of everything in the Universe. So the only godlike attribute we should discuss, is creation.
The creation of the Universe has quite a few different theories and it is all but impossible to know which one, if any, is correct. So, we have to look for patterns in observable creation and try to build from that.
Gravity creates stars in nebula clouds and planets from debris rings in the cosmos.
Electricity sparks simple life in primordial soup experiments. Sure, gravity and electromagnetism are just natural forces, but they are creative forces that produce can life.
Then again, the whole Universe could be inside of some alien's SimUniverse game, and no we aren't going to call him the 'God of Nintendo'.
We can never be too sure about the biiiig picture. But we can try to whittle away at the unknown with repeating patterns in enviroments that are known.