@Dustin phil,
Dustin wrote:You're exactly right: there is no such thing as an external creator; everything exists within God - framed by His Word.
Ok, if everything exists within God, then God is synonymous with everything -- which means he fails to have any distinctive quality, and he fails to have meaning as a unique moral entity. You've just permitted God to be evil, to be death, and to be suffering -- because they exist within God as well. Is that what you want? The Kabbalists neatly solved this problem by allowing God to NOT be everywhere and everything, and creating an idea of reciprocity by which God recedes a bit from the world with every creative act -- and evil is allowed to enter in his absence. But your contention here is very much like the Buddhist idea that everything is just a manifestation of the one thing.
Furthermore, if as you say there is no such thing as an eternal creator, then do you now deny that God created the world and humans and everything else? Is the universe not a real thing, but just a flickering thought in God's mind? If we're all just part of God, does that mean we lack our own independent agency and therefore lack free will? And if that is true how can we be held accountable for any moral choice?
saiboimushi wrote:You're on to something, I think. My question is, How
many conscious, sentient entities would we have to be before we could distinguish between a general, absolute truth and our own solipsism? Or would we have to start talking like madmen about infinitely large quantities? (Which would be fine with me.)
Truth is conventional, isn't it? Everyone agrees the world is flat until someone shows it's a sphere. I just went to an exhibition about Renaissance mapmaking in Chicago, showing how at the beginning of the Renaissance the world maps were essentially identical to Ptolemy's maps from ~ 1500 years previously. Then, over 200 years, as the new world was discovered and mapped, the maps became increasingly more like what we recognize. The amount of agreement and evidence required for something to be held as true depends mainly on the importance of the fact and on the degree of skepticism / challenge out there.
