Philosophy Now Forum

Reflex wrote: Movement. Many have the impression that movement implies change, but the acting nature of God, the personality of God, is changelessness in the presence of change.

God cannot move since it is spiritual and cannot occupy any location.

sthitapragya wrote: Why do you need to resolve the problem of beginning? How will it help you?

Because we are curious creature and we would like to know how things started.

sthitapragya wrote: How do you think jumping to an unsubstantiated conclusion that God created the world will help?

I am not jumping into conclusion. In here I am just discussing that we cannot have relation with changeless God.

sthitapragya wrote: Also which God should one believe in?

The world is full of religion so we cannot know which one is true.

bahman wrote:

sthitapragya wrote: Why do you need to resolve the problem of beginning? How will it help you?

Because we are curious creature and we would like to know how things started.

And you propose to do that with God how?

sthitapragya wrote:

bahman wrote:

sthitapragya wrote: Why do you need to resolve the problem of beginning? How will it help you?

Because we are curious creature and we would like to know how things started.

And you propose to do that with God how?

We are not discussing the problem of beginning now. We are discussing that relationship with a changeless God is impossible.

bahman wrote:

sthitapragya wrote:

bahman wrote:
Because we are curious creature and we would like to know how things started.

And you propose to do that with God how?

We are not discussing the problem of beginning now. We are discussing that relationship with a changeless God is impossible.

Oh Ok. Then I will come back later, maybe.

bahman wrote:

Reflex wrote: Movement. Many have the impression that movement implies change, but the acting nature of God, the personality of God, is changelessness in the presence of change.

God cannot move since it is spiritual and cannot occupy any location.

Are you saying that spirit does not have an acting nature?

bahman wrote:

Harbal wrote:

bahman wrote: God is changeless.

Do you mean God as a real thing is changeless or just that our definition of God includes the quality of being changeless.

We don't really know what God is. We define God as Changeless being.

Actually, every religious text I've ever seen describes God as doing things. So where, exactly, is God defined as a changeless being?

bahman wrote:

sthitapragya wrote:

bahman wrote:
Because we are curious creature and we would like to know how things started.

And you propose to do that with God how?

We are not discussing the problem of beginning now. We are discussing that relationship with a changeless God is impossible.

If it's just that you're stipulating "Let's say that we have an unchanging God," that's another story than saying that God is (conventionally, somewhere) defined as unchanging.

Before getting too much into a hypothetical stipulation, though, I think that for one it's important to define just what you mean by "relationship." What are the characteristics and limits of relationships in the sense of the term as you're employing it?

Terrapin Station wrote:

bahman wrote:

sthitapragya wrote:
And you propose to do that with God how?

We are not discussing the problem of beginning now. We are discussing that relationship with a changeless God is impossible.

If it's just that you're stipulating "Let's say that we have an unchanging God," that's another story than saying that God is (conventionally, somewhere) defined as unchanging.

Before getting too much into a hypothetical stipulation, though, I think that for one it's important to define just what you mean by "relationship." What are the characteristics and limits of relationships in the sense of the term as you're employing it?

Very good point. For example, I define a human being as the relating of a relation -- a synthesis if the Infinite and the finite, Eternal and temporal, Freedom and necessity -- relating to itself. I also that said that what sets us apart from God is that God as he is known and worshiped is without the finite, temporal and necessary. In this scenario, saying we cannot have a relationship with God is absurd.

Terrapin Station wrote:

bahman wrote:

Harbal wrote: Do you mean God as a real thing is changeless or just that our definition of God includes the quality of being changeless.

We don't really know what God is. We define God as Changeless being.

Actually, every religious text I've ever seen describes God as doing things. So where, exactly, is God defined as a changeless being?

Yes, that is true but most of theological discussions are around changeless God since time/change is a part of creation.

Moreover the concept of eternal (without beginning and end) God is problematic since we cannot reach from eternal past to now by limited set of waiting.

Terrapin Station wrote: If it's just that you're stipulating "Let's say that we have an unchanging God," that's another story than saying that God is (conventionally, somewhere) defined as unchanging.

Before getting too much into a hypothetical stipulation, though, I think that for one it's important to define just what you mean by "relationship." What are the characteristics and limits of relationships in the sense of the term as you're employing it?

Relationship is simply about cause and effect between a pair of beings.

bahman wrote:Yes, that is true but most of theological discussions are around changeless God since time/change is a part of creation.

Maybe if you gave some (literature) examples.

Moreover the concept of eternal (without beginning and end) God is problematic since we cannot reach from eternal past to now by limited set of waiting.

Sure,that's a different issue though. Presumably one way it's solved is due to the religious conception of time you're referring to above: if God created time, then "without beginning" doesn't suggest extending infinitely back in time. It would just be "existing prior to time with no starting point."

bahman wrote:Relationship is simply about cause and effect between a pair of beings.

That seems wholly reductional, or maybe even dead wrong.

Is the relationship between, say a man and his wife just a matter of how the wife causally alters the husband and how he changes her? Is it "cause and effect"? Or is that, at most, a single aspect of a much more multifaceted "relationship"?

I think the latter is obvious, don't you?

If "cause and effect" are definitionally sufficient for the word "relationship," then we would have to say a falling rock has a "relationship" with the car it crushes, or a forest fire has a "relationship" with the animals it kills. That seems a possible but very, very insufficient use of the word.

What sort of "relationship" is intended by the original question? Is it just "cause and effect"? If so there would be no reason to question its possibility if God existed at all...of course He could "cause" or "effect" us...but so what?

bahman wrote:

Terrapin Station wrote: If it's just that you're stipulating "Let's say that we have an unchanging God," that's another story than saying that God is (conventionally, somewhere) defined as unchanging.

Before getting too much into a hypothetical stipulation, though, I think that for one it's important to define just what you mean by "relationship." What are the characteristics and limits of relationships in the sense of the term as you're employing it?

Relationship is simply about cause and effect between a pair of beings.

Do you require both cause and effect? I'm just asking for this reason: if we imagine something like a (small, irreducible/monadic/part-free) billiard ball, we can imagine that for whatever reason, its momentum can't be affected by other things, but that wouldn't stop it from hitting another sort of billiard ball and changing its momentum. So we could have something that's unchanging but that causes effects in other things.

Of course, that doesn't allow effects to obtain in the unchanging thing, but we could have a (small, irreducible/monadic/part-free) billiard ball that otherwise doesn't change aside from its momentum as a reaction to coming into contact with other like billard balls.

Which basically comes down to whether you're counting sameness vs change (a) as an issue of something "with respect to itself" only, or (b) a la relations (in a broader ontological sense) to other things.

If (a), then cause and effect can obtain with something changeless, so that a God could be changeless and we could have a relationship with God after all.

If (b), then it's dubious that you can have something changeless period, because the changes of other things would be changes of the thing in question, too. For example, x might not interact with anything else and might not change with respect to itself, but maybe x was 5 meters to the right of y from perspective p, and since y moved, x is now 6 meters to the right of y from perspective p, and thus x changed, because relations (in that broader ontological sense) to other things count as a change in x, too.

Immanuel Can wrote:What sort of "relationship" is intended by the original question? Is it just "cause and effect"? If so there would be no reason to question its possibility if God existed at all...of course He could "cause" or "effect" us...but so what?

Well, his argument seems to be that God can't affect (or cause effects in) us in any way, contra beliefs that He can, if God is changeless, but I don't think that follows. As I point out in my post above, it depends on what exactly he requires ontologically for something to be changeless. In the case of my (a) above, something could be changeless yet cause and experience effects. In the case of my (b), it's dubious--and really I'd say incoherent--to suppose that there can even be anything changeless.