Thursday 28 August 2014

God-like or god-like

Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (London, 1977).

See previous post.

I compared a Community Association overseeing wildlife to the advanced civilization overseeing average IQ races. Although Nat Lewis says that they will be neither gods nor guides but givers, I think that their role will be god-like although not God-like.

"God," in the Biblical-Koranic sense, would be the omniscient, omnipotent creator from nothing of everything else. Such a being would be directly involved with every moment and every detail of every creature. By contrast, a "god," powerful but finite, would oversee one aspect of life, possibly from a distance, e.g., would preserve an ecology incorporating worms, birds and cats but without protecting any worm from a bird or bird from a cat.

They "'...will see that evil does not flourish too strongly...'" (p. 187). So they would have prevented the Holocaust? "'...and that hope and chance happen when they are most needed...we will not be embodied Fate, but perhaps we can be Luck.'" (ibid.) He means that they will cause beneficial events that look like luck, as when Brock's future wife, Sheila, reaches the farm but with their prior knowledge. (A friend of Italian descent reveres the Roman goddess, Fortuna.)

"God" in a mystical, monistic sense is an impersonal unity of all things, not to be confused with the personal God.

No comments: