The God Hypothesis

[Tank]

Tank & Gawen

I edited an old response I posted a while ago on this forum and I add a few new lines.
Tell me whether this is the right direction.

Hypothesis:

In Islam God has 99 sacred names in order for human beings to understand Him (The Most Merciful, The Avenger, The Loving, The Light and so on..).
God rules and sustains the universe with the aspects of Tanzih and Tasbih. Tanzih is declaring incomparability of God with other creatures.
Tasbih is affirming similarity with other creatures.

{snip to be dealt with later}

Would I be correct in understanding that you are saying that the 99 names of god are descriptions of the characteristics of the expected behaviours of god?

[Gawen]

As I explained earlier in another topic and once again here, the similarity of religions or the themes that are used within religion are mostly the same, this proves that there is more than materialism. Something beyond the scientific method.
If it's not God, then it's some sort of collective unconsciousness. I have a few reasons to assume that it is God, but I will go into detail later.

Your evidence covers at least two aspects.
1) Miracles
2) Similarity (loose religious pluralism)

Too much for me to go into right now, but will go over them after work tonight. Hopefully I'll not have to because in the next 12 hours, other will have posted...*chucklin*

[iSok]

Tank & Gawen

I edited an old response I posted a while ago on this forum and I add a few new lines.
Tell me whether this is the right direction.

Hypothesis:

In Islam God has 99 sacred names in order for human beings to understand Him (The Most Merciful, The Avenger, The Loving, The Light and so on..).
God rules and sustains the universe with the aspects of Tanzih and Tasbih. Tanzih is declaring incomparability of God with other creatures.
Tasbih is affirming similarity with other creatures.

{snip to be dealt with later}

Would I be correct in understanding that you are saying that the 99 names of god are descriptions of the characteristics of the expected behaviours of god?

That is a bit of oversimplification, the 99 names gives us an understanding in what way in every creature is dealt with.
The 99 names are also a part of us and they are also divided in the rest of the universe.

God - Has 99 names
Human - Has all 99 names but dimmed (He's the vicegerent)
Cosmos - 99 names scattered among the rest of creation.

[Sweetdeath]

Why do humans need 99 names instead of like... two?

Human and homosapien. It's confusing.

[Too Few Lions]

Evidence:

Well I can be short about this, it's religious pluralism.
Most religions are teaching the same.
To give an example, the resemblance of the Mayah creation Myth looks a lot like the Abrahamic, not only that but just about
every  symbol or story that is used in one religion to make people understand is used in another.

Ironically, an article written by the Pakistani Atheists & Agnostics summs up the evidence for me.
Here's a part of the article.

One of the most interesting stories for me has been the great flood, represented in almost all ancient texts; from the story of Ziusudra hero of the Sumerian flood epic to Noah's Ark a biblical and Quranic account. The same myth can be found in Puranas, which is a part of the ancient Hindu, Jain and Buddhist religious text. In the great deluge in Hindu mythology, Manu saved mankind from the great flood sent by an avatar of Vishnu, Matsya. The commonalities in all these stories include a person who is aware of the flood in advance, an angry deity, a vulnerable population of animal and humankind and the hero who saves all.

My second favorite is the miraculous birth myth.  Like the story of Krishna, in which Vishnu descends into Devaki's womb and is born as her son; Vasudeva (Krishna). Similar is the story of Perseus, son of Danaë who was locked away so she does not have children, however Zeus turned into a shower of gold and impregnated her. The story of Danaë has actually a lot more to share with the story of Maryam or Mary in the Quran. It is mentioned in Surah Maryam 19:16 – 19:22 that while she was fasting in seclusion in a place facing east, she was approached by Gabriel who gave her the tidings of a son and she conceived.

Next is the story of Moses, who was found in a basket floating in the Nile, and the Sumerian King Sargon of Akkad, who was found in a basket floating in the Euphrates. Despite that many claim the myth was written after Moses's birth, the similarity in religious stories at least clarifies one thing, and that is, there is no such thing as an only true religion. All have branched out one from another, since almost all religious books tell the same stories and share the same myths with a bit of variation depending on geography, culture and language, dependent on human understanding.
http://www.e-paa.org/content/myth-divine-books


As I explained earlier in another topic and once again here, the similarity of religions or the themes
that are used within religion are mostly the same, this proves that there is more than materialism. Something beyond the scientific method.
If it's not God, then it's some sort of collective unconsciousness. I have a few reasons to assume that it is God, but I will go into detail later.

iSok, you're not providing any evidence 'beyond the scientific method' here. Firstly the examples you give for religious pluralism aren't religious teachings, they're mythology. The fact that the same standard mythological themes are found in many cultures / religions isn't evidence for any god or collective unconsciousness. It can be explained very easily (and relatively scientifically);

Religious ideas and mythological metaphors were shared between many societies and were often incorporated into newer religions from older religions / myths. Different cultures and religions influenced each other. Hence Moses' birth story was indeed based on that of Sargon of Akkad, the virgin birth story of Jesus was based on those of other sons of god who were also born of virgins such as Heracles and Perseus, and the 'Massacre of the Innocents' was written into the gospels so that Jesus' birth story mirrored that of Moses.

A lot of the earliest myths were originally written to explain the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in the heavens. Most ancient civilizations were based in the northern hemisphere, and they shared the same stars and night sky. Hence myths could often easily be imported from one civilization / religion to another.  The flood myth is the prime example of this, there are flood myths known from cultures that never experienced flooding. The reason for this is that the flood myth was allegorical for the movement of the stars in the heavens due to precession, societies that had never experienced flooding could still import an allegorical myth that was actually about about the stars in the night sky and not an actual flood.

[iSok]

Evidence:

Well I can be short about this, it's religious pluralism.
Most religions are teaching the same.
To give an example, the resemblance of the Mayah creation Myth looks a lot like the Abrahamic, not only that but just about
every  symbol or story that is used in one religion to make people understand is used in another.

Ironically, an article written by the Pakistani Atheists & Agnostics summs up the evidence for me.
Here's a part of the article.

One of the most interesting stories for me has been the great flood, represented in almost all ancient texts; from the story of Ziusudra hero of the Sumerian flood epic to Noah's Ark a biblical and Quranic account. The same myth can be found in Puranas, which is a part of the ancient Hindu, Jain and Buddhist religious text. In the great deluge in Hindu mythology, Manu saved mankind from the great flood sent by an avatar of Vishnu, Matsya. The commonalities in all these stories include a person who is aware of the flood in advance, an angry deity, a vulnerable population of animal and humankind and the hero who saves all.

My second favorite is the miraculous birth myth.  Like the story of Krishna, in which Vishnu descends into Devaki's womb and is born as her son; Vasudeva (Krishna). Similar is the story of Perseus, son of Danaë who was locked away so she does not have children, however Zeus turned into a shower of gold and impregnated her. The story of Danaë has actually a lot more to share with the story of Maryam or Mary in the Quran. It is mentioned in Surah Maryam 19:16 – 19:22 that while she was fasting in seclusion in a place facing east, she was approached by Gabriel who gave her the tidings of a son and she conceived.

Next is the story of Moses, who was found in a basket floating in the Nile, and the Sumerian King Sargon of Akkad, who was found in a basket floating in the Euphrates. Despite that many claim the myth was written after Moses's birth, the similarity in religious stories at least clarifies one thing, and that is, there is no such thing as an only true religion. All have branched out one from another, since almost all religious books tell the same stories and share the same myths with a bit of variation depending on geography, culture and language, dependent on human understanding.
http://www.e-paa.org/content/myth-divine-books


As I explained earlier in another topic and once again here, the similarity of religions or the themes
that are used within religion are mostly the same, this proves that there is more than materialism. Something beyond the scientific method.
If it's not God, then it's some sort of collective unconsciousness. I have a few reasons to assume that it is God, but I will go into detail later.

iSok, you're not providing any evidence 'beyond the scientific method' here. Firstly the examples you give for religious pluralism aren't religious teachings, they're mythology. The fact that the same standard mythological themes are found in many cultures / religions isn't evidence for any god or collective unconsciousness. It can be explained very easily (and relatively scientifically);

Religious ideas and mythological metaphors were shared between many societies and were often incorporated into newer religions from older religions / myths. Different cultures and religions influenced each other. Hence Moses' birth story was indeed based on that of Sargon of Akkad, the virgin birth story of Jesus was based on those of other sons of god who were also born of virgins such as Heracles and Perseus, and the 'Massacre of the Innocents' was written into the gospels so that Jesus' birth story mirrored that of Moses.

A lot of the earliest myths were originally written to explain the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in the heavens. Most ancient civilizations were based in the northern hemisphere, and they shared the same stars and night sky. Hence myths could often easily be imported from one civilization / religion to another.  The flood myth is the prime example of this, there are flood myths known from cultures that never experienced flooding. The reason for this is that the flood myth was allegorical for the movement of the stars in the heavens due to precession, societies that had never experienced flooding could still import an allegorical myth that was actually about about the stars in the night sky and not an actual flood.

This makes more faith to believe in than faith in God...

Also you're talking of influences, they were all separated demographically, geographically.

[Crow]

iSok, you're not providing any evidence 'beyond the scientific method' here.

The evidence required of a hypothesis isn't required to be as strict as evidence for a theory. A hypothesis is a starting point that uses limited or loose evidence to define a direction for further examination and research, which would then latter develop into solid forms of evidence if that hypothesis was correct.

[Sweetdeath]

Writing explainations for why the stars move is an interesting way to show how religions are myths.

[Too Few Lions]

A lot of the earliest myths were originally written to explain the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in the heavens. Most ancient civilizations were based in the northern hemisphere, and they shared the same stars and night sky. Hence myths could often easily be imported from one civilization / religion to another.  The flood myth is the prime example of this, there are flood myths known from cultures that never experienced flooding. The reason for this is that the flood myth was allegorical for the movement of the stars in the heavens due to precession, societies that had never experienced flooding could still import an allegorical myth that was actually about about the stars in the night sky and not an actual flood.

This makes more faith to believe in than faith in God...

Also you're talking of influences, they were all separated demographically, geographically.

iSok, rather than reading and blindly believing and quoting your Qur'an and other Islamic books, you might try reading some books on comparative mythology (such as the works of Mircea Eliade) that might help you understand where your idea of god and the myths of your religion derive from.

So do you believe that there was an actual historical flood? If not (after all there is no evidence for it) you could then ask the question could it possibly be allegorical for something else. Many ancient sources talk of the flood myth as being related to the myth of a conflagration (eg Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis and the final conflagration that Christians believe will accompany Jesus' second coming). From my reading of the sources, it seems to me both were allegorical myths for the movement of the stars over the Great Year. Here are few quotes from ancient Greek / Roman sources to back me up;

'There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water...[this] is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on the earth...on the other hand the gods purge the earth with a deluge' – Plato

'There is a Great Year, whose winter is a great flood and whose summer is a world conflagration. In these alternating periods the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water.' – Censorinus

'After cycles of years and because of the fortuitous conjunctions of certain stars there are conflagrations and floods, and that after the last flood, in the time of Deucalion, the cycle demands a conflagration in accordance with the alternating succession of the universe' - Celsus

Anyway, whether or not you agree or disagree with my (and Plato's!) interpretation of the flood myth, my point was that there are similarities in myths from different religions / societies because;

1- Religious ideas and mythological metaphors were shared between many societies and were often incorporated into newer religions from older religions / myths

2- A lot of the earliest myths were originally written to explain the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in the heavens. As people shared the same sky, myths could often easily be imported from one civilization / religion to another

The similarity of myths between cultures isn't  evidence for the existence of a god or a collective unconscious.

[iSok]

We can continue discussing the similarities within different religion till we drop dead.
At the end of the day it's how you take the interpretation. I have a certain mindset and I'm sorry to quote so many people.
But it takes time to write everything down, which I don't have.....

So once again, my apologies but Reza Aslan exactly puts it down the way I think about it.

One should become acquainted with the unmistakable patterns--call them modalities (Rudolph Otto), paradigmatic gestures (Mircea Eliade), spiritual dimensions (Ninian Smart), or archetypes (Carl Jung)--that recur in the myths and rituals of nearly all religious traditions and throughout all of recorded history. Even if one insists on reducing humanity's enduring religious impulse to causal definitions, dismissing the experience of transcendence as nothing more than an anthropological (e.g. Edward Tylor or Max Muller), sociological (think Robertson Smith or Emile Durkheim), or even psychological phenomenon (ala Sigmund Freud, who attempted to locate the religious impulse deep within the individual psyche, as though it were a mental disorder that could be cured through proper psychoanalysis), one should at the very least have a sense of what the term "God" means.

Of course, positing the existence of a transcendent reality that exists beyond our material experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of a Divine Personality, or God. (In some ways, the idea of God is merely the personal affirmation of the transcendent experience.) But what if did? What if one viewed the recurring patterns of religious phenomena that so many diverse cultures and civilizations--separated by immeasurable time and distance--seem to have shared as evidence of an active, engaging, transcendent presence (what Muslims call the Universal Spirit, Hindus call prana, Taoists call chi'i, Jews call ruah, and Christians call the Holy Spirit) that underlies creation, that, in fact, impels creation? Is such a possibility any more hypothetical than say, superstring theory or the notion of the multiverse? Then again, maybe the patterns of religious phenomenon signify nothing. Maybe they indicate little more than a common desire among all peoples to answer similar questions of "Ultimate Concern," to use the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich's famous phrase. The point is that, like any researcher or critic, like any scientist, I'm open to possibilities.

I became interested in this when I read the Primordial Ocean by Professor Perry (Egyptologist), he was of the opinion
that the ancient egyptians had sailed around the world to spread their religion, even reaching Indonesia.

You might have read books by Eliade, but you should also give Schuon, Guenon, Smith and so on a try.
The journal of comparative religion is also a good source.

[Gawen]

One should become acquainted with the unmistakable patterns...that recur in the myths and rituals of nearly all religious traditions and throughout all of recorded history.

Unmistakeable patterns. Well, people find all sorts of patterns. It's the way they think about the patterns that makes a difference. Religious correlations of a flood in ancient civilisations without dates proves basically nothing, for example. There is no pattern here. It's not even a correlation, per say because all the flood stories do not parallel, compliment, support causal or reciprocate each other. 

...one should at the very least have a sense of what the term "God" means.

For many people, it is as natural to believe in fairies and witches and evil eyes and God as it is to believe that fire is hot and snow is cold and two plus two equals four. But this is all irrelevant to whether there are fairies or witches or gods or fire or snow or math. And why is it natural? Communal reinforcement is probably the biggest factor here. So how do we "sense" what the word "God" means let alone if one exists?

Of course, positing the existence of a transcendent reality that exists beyond our material experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of a Divine Personality, or God.

That's right. So to posit the existence of a "transcendent reality" we must at least have a "sense" of what the term "transcendent reality" means. Then we have to provide some sort of evidence.

But what if did? What if one viewed the recurring patterns of religious phenomena that so many diverse cultures and civilizations--separated by immeasurable time and distance--seem to have shared as evidence of an active, engaging, transcendent presence...that underlies creation, that, in fact, impels creation?

There's quite a few assertions in that sentence. Viewing suspected patterns does not prove transcendence, creation or an active and engaging presence.

Is such a possibility any more hypothetical than say, superstring theory or the notion of the multiverse?

Maybe, maybe not. But it is just as hypothetical to posit and believe in a invisible pink unicorn.

Then again, maybe the {interpretations of alleged} patterns of religious phenomenon signify nothing.

Oh no. They signify many things. Lack of cognition; lack of critical thinking skills, faulty reasoning, gullibility, perpetrating a fraud, delusional, drug use, lack of oxygen to the brain and on and on and on. And a lack of the knowledge of Ocham's Razor.

Maybe they indicate little more than a common desire among all peoples to answer similar questions of "Ultimate Concern," to use the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich's famous phrase. The point is that, like any researcher or critic, like any scientist, I'm open to possibilities.

One can be open to possibilities. Even I am open to transcendent divine possibilities. But I have not yet seen any good evidence.

I became interested in this when I read the Primordial Ocean by Professor Perry (Egyptologist), he was of the opinion that the ancient egyptians had sailed around the world to spread their religion, even reaching Indonesia.

Where are his sources?

"There is no subject -- and can be none -- concerning which any human being is under any obligation to believe without evidence..." - Robert G. Ingersoll

[Crow]

...one should at the very least have a sense of what the term "God" means.

For many people, it is as natural to believe in fairies and witches and evil eyes and God as it is to believe that fire is hot and snow is cold and two plus two equals four. But this is all irrelevant to whether there are fairies or witches or gods or fire or snow or math. And why is it natural? Communal reinforcement is probably the biggest factor here. So how do we "sense" what the word "God" means let alone if one exists?

Exactly! not only does the word "god" have many different meanings but when a person says the word "god" there are so many different interpretations of the idea just within the religions alone, never mind the individuals perception of their own god. To have a sense of what "god" is you need to acknowledge all the different forms people associate with the word which only creates more problems as a lot are totally opposing concepts.

[Gawen]

Isok's Hypotheses of his God

1) God has many names
2) God has no dimension
3) God is one
4) God controls the Universe in an organized way by preventing chaos.
5) God has a concern over other creatures
6) ...look at the universe, everything has divine attributes of God (essentially, God is the Universe)Italics mine

a) Contradiction with #4 Man can set up rivals with God, this is destroying Tawhid and ultimately destroying the reality of others, because it causes chaos. Therefore, God cannot prevent chaos.

Isok's evidence

1)Faith
2) Perceived correlations and/or patterns from other religious faiths
3) Miracles

I have an experiment for you Isok. Please put all the Gods that do exist in a cage and all the Gods that do not exist in another cage. Let us know when you're done so we can see.


Oh...and don't get me going on miracles....*chucklin*

[iSok]

Isok's Hypotheses of his God

1) God has many names
2) God has no dimension
3) God is one
4) God controls the Universe in an organized way by preventing chaos.
5) God has a concern over other creatures
6) ...look at the universe, everything has divine attributes of God (essentially, God is the Universe)Italics mine

a) Contradiction with #4 Man can set up rivals with God, this is destroying Tawhid and ultimately destroying the reality of others, because it causes chaos. Therefore, God cannot prevent chaos.

Isok's evidence

1)Faith
2) Perceived correlations and/or patterns from other religious faiths
3) Miracles

I have an experiment for you Isok. Please put all the Gods that do exist in a cage and all the Gods that do not exist in another cage. Let us know when you're done so we can see.


Oh...and don't get me going on miracles....*chucklin*

- God is One
- God is Infinite
- God has many names, so humans can perceive Him in a certain way
- God sustains everything that is
- God is the Source all
- God is the Destination of all

Compare God with the Sun.
The grass is green because it reflects only the green light of the total spectrum of light given by the sun.
Green light is a divine attribute.
A flower might reflect multiple waves of light, so it has multiple divine attributes.
If the sun turns off, then the grass is no longer visible, the same can be said about the universe.
God is not the grass, so He isn't the universe.

The human being is like a mini-sun if he corrects the inward balance.
Otherwise he'll see the grass as blue and will make faulty actions.

lol, I never said anything about miracles as evidence....
And what's 'chucklin'?

[Asmodean]

This makes more faith to believe in than faith in God...

Ok. it's 3AM, I can not sleep and am more gray and grumpy than I can remember being this month, so I just have to ask:

What kind of bullshit statement is that?

What is the universal unit of measure of faith? How do you objectively compare things in terms of faith required beyond a simple boolean variable?