I was reading a forum thread when I came upon a post that got me thinking. It was about the danger of anthropomorphizing God. My thought was this: If we aren't supposed to think of God as a human, how far out do we have to go in our quest to be objective?
We can start at the most obvious trait attributed to God: Power. Anything we choose to call God must fulfill some lower bound of power. The generally accepted lower limit is more power than everything else in the universe put together. Well, the simplest way to fulfill that is to just define God as the universe itself, that way there is nothing else to consider at all as a competitor. However, as the universe appears to have subsets that fight amongst themselves, and there is no immediately obvious purpose that the universe as a whole fulfills, it is conceivable that there are subsets of the universe with greater power than the entire universe as a whole. Of course, why limit ourselves to something in the universe? If the universe is best thought of as a simulation within a larger cosmic whole, then it would be the caretaker of the simulation that could be best identified as God. However, then we lose the original idea that God is more powerful than everything else combined, for if the universe is just a simulation, what's stopping there from being a much larger simulation next door, or our simulation being in another simulation, and so on ad infinitum. Then we are left right where we started with a big universe with difficult to identify power. Now who says we can even identify what God would be? If it is solely by power, what's to say that God would even be something identifiable to humans? What if the most powerful thing in the universe wouldn't even pass for a thing by human standards?
The only way to end this is by saying that God is such an ill defined concept that you might as well believe what you want, as we will probably just argue about it anyway.
