Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Atheism Community Weighs In (2)


(image credit)
In the Google+ Atheism community, Michael Meridius asks the following:
What's #God? 
Here is the interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which he articulates the context for the quote above:

"If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for god, then god is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance."

After explaining that all of the physically understood matter accounts for only 4% of observed energy and gravitation in the universe, Neil Tyson is asked to reconcile the unexplained.
The God we invoke in an article or conversation is, whether we intend to or not, often a human construct.  In other words, we have an understanding of God that is inviolably human in nature, so to draw on Him to make an argument, or to refer to Him to rebut an argument, is to come back to that understanding.  Therefore, as science builds on our knowledge of the world around us, and the broader universe, that human construct is actually the ever-receding pocket of ignorance. 

So what is God? 

I'm not sure that anyone, from any discipline, school or belief, truly understands what God is.  However, I'd like to believe that that is part of the world and the universe we are in a collective effort to understand, even though we may disagree vehemently or argue pointedly.  In saying this, I emphasize that we as people are part and parcel of that world and universe, so I also hope that we are in a collective effort to understand, that is, to empathize, each other's perspectives, beliefs and arguments.  We have the sciences as well as the arts and, yes, even the religions at our disposal for such empathic understanding.
 

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