This topic contains 1 reply, has 1 voice, and was last updated by 
David Hayward 1 year, 2 months ago.
-
Posts
-
We understand things by forming analogies and metaphors to other things. It therefore becomes useful to examine the analogies and metaphors used to understand God. The analogy that works best for me right now is the concept of infinity within number theory.
Start off by considering the natural numbers (1,2,3,..) counting up indefinitely. If you count up high enough, you can have numbers so large as to be beyond anything we typically experience. You can have a number that is thousands of digits long (or millions, or billions, or 10^billion). Within this population of theoretical countable numbers there are lots of very interesting properties. Some numbers are “perfectly” (or evenly) dividable by other numbers. For example 6 is evenly dividable by 3 but 7 is not. Many numbers will have an interesting sequence of digits that may have meaning for people. For example, when a bible is stored digitally, it is possible to view the storage as a single very large number.
Infinity, though, is a different concept. You can’t treat infinity just like a very large finite number. You can’t really say whether or not infinity is evenly divisible by a particular number. For example, you can’t calculate a remainder for dividing infinity by 3. It is also not meaningful to talk about any particular sequence of digits within infinity. Any particular sequence of digits would tend to describe something other than infinity.
With this background, I view the description of God from scripture and most of the world’s religions as being analogous to describing properties of a very large finite number. Some conventional “properties” of God might be analogous to saying a very large number is evenly divisible by some number like 3. Other “God properties” might be analogous to interesting sequences of digits within a very large number – perhaps notions of fallen, damnation, getting saved, and who gets saved and why.
My God concept is analogous to infinity. I resist including properties of finite numbers in my conceptualization of infinity. I also resist including the properties attributed to God in scripture and contemporary religion in my conceptualization of God.
I suck at math but this is fascinating.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.