quibbling over Who, What, When, and Where might be God. Anyone for an extremely minor Holy War? <g>
In a more serious vein, we have reached a point where we are only tangentially discussing the nature of "chairdom", and have instead revealed a fairly fundamental dichotomy between our respective views of the Godhead.
I'm not sure there is a way to reconcile Deism and Pantheism, in our human perceptions. It may require a Divine viewpoint to understand how God can be simultaneously separate from and at one with creation. I simply find it easier and more comforting to tend toward the latter perception, but that is my Path.
To say that "to be God is to be that which exists, and which *must* exist" is, to me, a very Pantheistic view. After all, I exist, and there is much around me that also exists, at least to my senses. Must I exist? Well, if I am to partake of this conversation, then I certainly must. Must anything else exist? I do not believe myself to be insane, therefore there must be some reason my senses tell me of the existence of these other things. So your statement seems to say to me that God is all that I perceive, including this "self" which carries on at such length about the nature of existence. But perhaps it is the Path I have chosen that causes me to see things in this way.
I will say I have to agree with your assessment of God's relation to time; if God exists separate from creation, then God cannot be subject to time. And so God may be capable of perceiving an ideal chair in some manner beyond the capacities of such as you and I to conceive. But this leaves us grasping for an impossible ideal, ourselves, when we ask "what is a chair?" The ideal chair would necessarily subsume within itself all chairs, past, present, and even merely imagined. To answer the question "what is a chair?", we must be able to somehow point to this ideal chair and say "anything that is within this ideal is a chair." But the ideal is a thought of God, who Himself is not subject to time. How can we, who are subject to time, point to that which is beyond time? We cannot answer the question. Only God could do so, and only in a framework unconstrained by time or physical being. |
