God, part one of...

Let’s begin by talking about god, and eventually lead up to God at a later date.

This is the first part of a collection of musings upon the nature of god.

First, the number of god. (not in the ancient sense of the power of numbers. That topic, while amazing, is later.) I am referring to how many gods there are. This question plagues me greatly. The Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths all have one central god at their core. The Hindi and Shinto religions, however, argue for quite a lot of gods. So, who is right?

My thoughts on this are decidedly confused. On the one hand, I find the ‘Shinto 101’ type’s ideas of holiness in all things very interesting. Here’s part of my thought process.
One day, I stood on a hill and just looked at the trees. Then, many hours later, I came to the conclusion that nature is incredible, and has an innate beauty. There was a sense that there is indeed something above what I can see initially with just my senses. Now, whether that is Kami(神) or not I shall not judge, but then I took another day to sit and watch people instead of nature. I got this feeling that I was missing the punch line of a cosmic joke. I considered all I had studied about the human brain. “nah, the love that mother feels for her children is just chemicals to help preserve the species” my own chemicals told me. But then I thought, “is it? Doesn’t the fact that I can think “I am thinking” mean that I am beyond the chemicals?” also, if all of me is determined by chemical reactions, then we should be able to predict the entire history of our race. But we can’t, because randomness changes things, changes influences, which would change the chemistry, and thus change us. This has become a bit tangential, but the basic point here is to say that we MUST have a will, or we do not exist. “Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am” is an excellent proof. And even if we do exist and are just a bunch of chemicals, there’s no point to discussion because there can be no outcome. So, we must assume we have a will for discussion to continue. Relating this back to gods, perhaps we are all Kami(神) ourselves, and we can recognize this holiness in other things.

But wait.

Holiness? Wouldn’t that mean I am recognizing something that is a part of something greater? Something like God? Oh dear, now we have a monotheistic god. Now, perhaps we can take a pantheist view; God is in everything and the belief in Kami(神) is an interpretation of observing this innate goodness in nature.

Now, by mentioning goodness, I should explain that God is often described as the source of all good. This has been proven multiple times by others, so I will not repeat their success here. Look it up, or if you are too lazy email me and I will give you a quick break down. For now, have these suppositions: God is order, God is goodness. God is not necessarily a higher being, though that is often where discussion leads. If you ask me about ‘what is evil then’ I will get quite irritable and tell you to be patient for another post.

So, I will not pass judgment on Shinto. I am not here to examine religion; I’m talking about faith, at least for now. So, in conclusion, Shinto to me is an attempt to respect the goodness and order (the two principle parts of God, remember) in nature.
Good for them. Let’s continue.

Another thought on the number of god is ‘why one’? I think it was Carl Sagan (correct me if I’m mistaken) who proposed that if god exists, then god is the universe, as a whole. Note this is another pantheist thought. Sao that could be why there is just one: there can only be one completeness. Another thought on numbers is the examination of the Q concept from Star trek. If you have beings who are omnipotent, why are they not gods? They have to breed in their own way, and there are more than one of them. But the question arises, “if they are within our timeline, who made them in the first place?” thus we can conclude that God must be everything at once, and must be without beginning or end, because it’d have to make itself… and that just doesn’t work without another creator. All in all, god must simply BE, always. Thus, it must also be out of our conception of time, because with our interpretation of time, God cannot exist. There, a logical if somewhat scattered argument for the eternal nature of god, and it came from an atheist too.

Now that we’ve established there is one God, but the interpretation of it as multiple ‘examples’ (Kami) is not a problem, merely religious, we come across the problem of religion.