For any theists reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on God and love -- especially if you agree with my husband (God fully understands love) and not me (God is evolving alongside us and therefore God's understanding of love is evolving too, love is an asymptote).
The simple Christian Theistic position is that God fully understands love and a core aspect of his interactions with us is to let us experience a generous taste of it
The NT authors claim “God is love” & “We love because he first loved us”. Or Jesus in John 17:24: “because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”
These are all descriptive claims rather than philosophical arguments but they do bear strongly on your question
I think of God as incarnated in his creation (though greater than creation) and so omniscient by virtue of directly "being there, everywhere." Therefore God has experiential knowledge of love and fully understands it as it can be presently understood, in full. And yes, God is evolving. :-)
Yes! But as God and we evolve, so does the love (the relationship) between us! So God would learning about love constantly. The asymptote -- an abstract concept we can only get infinitely close to, but never completely touch.
We do have free will, but God knows our actions, even if he does not will them. I think it is our love that evolves. God's is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Okay, but I mean, I'm familiar enough with the stories to know that God sometimes gets into moods. It seems to me that do something like the flood God would have had to be loving humanity a little harder or a little less (or both) at the time. Maybe I'm personifying God too much.
The stories, if you follow through the Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) show God becoming increasingly benign, but that is due to the development of our understanding of God's works and nature, not changes in God's nature
A mentor taught me understanding has two components: knowing and being. Which is a concise way of putting what I think you were getting at—experience/ being—is a form of understanding that holds weight rather than merely knowing
This is a great way to put it! One of the issues I had in that debate was that I struggled to put my argument into words. Also just the dynamic of it being literally the only class discussion where one person was arguing with half the class and everyone knew I was a fine arts major and only 20 or 21.
The puzzle strikes me as hinging on the difference between experiential knowledge and didactic knowledge. Like learning about a mushroom from a guide, and groking a mushroom by picking it and eating it. I think of experiential learning/knowing as whole-brain, whereas didactic learning/knowing seems left-brain (and therefore much more stressful and often disconnected from context).
Metaphysical aspects of healing are well known , but maybe not explored or appreciated in biology and psychology ( was it? ) graduate studies . Anyway its fascinating in that I myself have experienced this miracle . Having returned from the dead quite literally after a long dangerous illness. God was not evolving in my view at all . Only my understanding was. A real time demonstration if you will. In Orthodox Theology, to my knowledge , God is constant . That seems to be something uniquely God about God.
Robert Anton Wilson discusses this in Prometheus Rising! It's fascinating. But you need to have faith. I have a series called "Talking to God on Psychedelics" that's partially about some insane healing I experienced on magic mushrooms, including odd encounters with an entity I think might have been God.
As I understand it, quantum theory demolishes Laplace’s Demon. It’s telling that you were with a bunch of biologists and psychologists; physicists might have responded differently.
This actually explains a lot about why I struggle with ritual and spirituality, which is a strange thing for a believing and practicing Orthodox Jew to say. I do ritual, but I feel – am I missing something? What am I supposed to feel? This is autism again, probably.
Lately, I’ve been trying intellectualise less and just experience things. In particular, to try not to intellectualise my marriage.
I think your argument about fractals can still point to God understanding love. If we are like God that means God understands like us, but not necessarily developing with us. God is whole, unified and outside time; we are incomplete (maybe the human race as a whole is more like God than any one individual) and inside time. If God is outside time, God can not change, because change is about development over time. God has a holistic understanding of love. If anything, our love is incomplete compared with God’s.
There is a lot more I could write here, but I have to go to a Zoom class in a minute, appropriately on Maimonides’ tenth and eleventh principles of faith, that God knows everything and rewards and punishes.
Yes! The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect demolish Laplace's Demon -- the Demon is impossible. I think fractal geometry also demolishes the Demon. I'm pretty sure I would have known this when I took the class (I'd gone through a stage where I was pretty into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle a few years earlier) but the question was posed in a way where it seemed we were supposed to accept the underlying premise and work from there. And yeah, I think that conversation would have gone better for me if it had been a bunch of physics and math nerds instead of biologists and psychologists.
Your take is on God and love is pretty close to what Zach (my husband) said! So there you go. But some romantic part of me kind of likes the idea that because love is relational, and because we are all part of God, both God and God's love are fractally evolving alongside us and our ability to know love.
I had to chime in here, in the middle of some vague generalities... Chaos is not the same as fractals. A chaotic determinstic system has strange attractors (for different parameter values), which are usually (maybe always) fractal. QM is not deterministic so chaos doesn't really apply, though people can study QM systems whose classical limit is a chaotic system.
We do not know either what God is, or what love is (beyond the brain states), so our penchant is to identify the two, since they are both described by feel-good words.
But there is something new emerging in science: downward causation, where an understanding at higher (more macro) levels beats (in a demonstrable way, both mathematically and through evolutionary arguments, having more causal power) an understanding at lower levels, such as the one where Laplace's demon resides. Love only makes sense at the higher levels (such as the right hemisphere). It makes no sense on the level of neurons, or anything lower (like organic molecules, etc). Laplace's determinism is old school. We are just beginning to understand emergence.
Given that, I would say that God is probably emergent and aspirational, not something that actually exists yet. It would need certain conditions such as to make the whole universe coherent, similar to how other levels have emerged, such as organelles, cells, organs, multi-cellular oranisms, families, village, tribes, nations, etc.
I see God as emergent too. That makes sense to me. Kind of what I meant by "evolving". Re fractals, I meant that there is some chaos in them -- the patterns are self-repeating but also not completely predictable.
One thing I don't understand about why strange attractors are usually (always?) fractal, is that it seems possible in principle to satisfy the exponential sensitivity to initial conditions (and resulting unpredictability) of a chaotic system, with a non-fractal attractor, that the system visits points of in unpredictable, non-repetitive ways. A fractal is a geometric structure, out of or without time. It has unpredictability in space (you don't always know in advance, without a potentially infinite computation, whether a point belongs to the fractal or not, though sometimes it seems obvious that a point does not belong), but there is no notion of time. Whereas the chaotic system is embedded in time, and all we know is that after a long time, it must land and continue to land on its attractor.
More: love seems to be about communion and integration, with other beings, or between one's own brain modules (left/right, but also other lower levels/processes/experiences)
I asked the AI" is there an example of a strange attractor of a chaotic system, that is not a geometric fractal (meaning it has an integer dimension)?"
AI Overview
Yes, while many famous strange attractors like the Lorenz attractor and the Henon attractor are fractal-like, exhibiting non-integer dimensions, it's important to distinguish between strange attractors and fractal attractors. Not all strange attractors are geometric fractals. A strange attractor is defined by its non-trivial dynamics and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, while a fractal is defined by its self-similarity and non-integer dimension.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Strange Attractors:
.
These are attractors in a dynamical system that are complex and chaotic. They are characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning that small changes in initial conditions can lead to drastically different outcomes over time. The trajectories of a system in a strange attractor may be unpredictable and seemingly random, even if the system is deterministic.
Fractal Attractors:
.
These are a specific type of strange attractor that exhibit fractal properties. They are characterized by self-similarity, meaning that they have similar patterns at different scales, and they have a non-integer Hausdorff dimension. Examples include the Lorenz attractor, Henon attractor, and various fractal sets like the Mandelbrot set.
Non-Fractal Strange Attractors:
.
While the term "strange attractor" often implies fractal structure, there are examples of attractors that are strange (complex and chaotic) but do not exhibit fractal self-similarity or have non-integer dimensions. These attractors may still be sensitive to initial conditions and have complex trajectories, but their structure is not fractal-like.
Examples of non-fractal strange attractors:
Strange nonchaotic attractors (SNAs):
.
These are attractors that are strange in the sense of being non-piecewise differentiable, but they are not chaotic. They can still exhibit complex dynamics and sensitivity to initial conditions, but they lack the chaotic behavior of typical strange attractors.
Attractors with non-integer dimensions but not fractal-like:
.
Some attractors can have a non-integer dimension (determined by measures like the Lyapunov dimension) without exhibiting self-similarity or the characteristic fractal structures seen in well-known fractal attractors.
In Summary:
While many famous examples of strange attractors are fractals, it's important to remember that the definition of a strange attractor is based on its complex, chaotic dynamics, not necessarily on its fractal nature. There are examples of strange attractors that do not exhibit fractal self-similarity and have non-integer dimensions, but still display the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that characterizes strange attractors.
Very cool essay. I'd say the fact that your professor made it all about love made your job easier but also doomed you. It made your job easier because it's obvious that love, like seeing the color red, has an experiential component. You can read about it in books all you want but, until you've experienced it for yourself, you don't fully understand it. But it also doomed you because it forced you to frame your argument in terms of love's ineffability, which made you sound like a poet.
But the experiential component is actually a red herring because, in truth, Laplace's demon wouldn't know anything beyond the microphysical, whether or not it was experiential. To think otherwise is to think that you can explain, say, what caused WWII with particle physics. You could know where all the particles are and which way they're moving, but how are you to know the larger objects they comprise? How are you to group and categorize (i.e. to individuate) the microphysical? How are you to know where the lines are that separate objects -- where one object ends and another begins? To have knowledge as we understand it, you'd have to share our concepts, which means that you'd have to individuate actions, objects, and events as we do. And you can't get that information from the microphysical facts alone.
If this all sounds obscure, here's a potentially clarifying example. Ask yourself: how many actions are you performing right now? And the answer is: it depends on how you individuate actions -- the invisible line you draw that tells you which are the real actions and which are merely the action-parts. And the micro-physical facts are compatible with infinitely many action/event/object individuation schemes. And that's why you can't learn about WWII (or love) by studying particle physics.
This makes sense! I think Laplace's Demon actually violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (?) so such a being is actually theoretically impossible.
"My psychedelics-fuelled sense of God is of a consciousness that is evolving alongside us, in a fractal relationship akin to the one we have with our gut microbiomes, one that cannot predict the future with certainty"... This is an interesting perspective. I may need to adopt it.
I find it more interesting to think of God as a consciousness we're in a dynamic, evolving relationship with, rather than an all-knowing, static being.
God is love. He demonstrated this by sending His Son to die for us, He didn't have to do that. To say that He doesn't understand love and is evolving with us is complete denial. It is also equating God as our equal when He is not. He is our creator and Father, not our contemporary.
If you watch the Mandelbrot zoom video you'll get an idea of what I mean. Say we're at a pattern level earlier in the video. God's pattern is infinitely more complex than ours ... but it can still get more complex. The universe is expanding, God is expanding, God's love is expanding.
I'm not implying God is our equal! I'm implying the relationship is fractal, as in mathematically God is significantly more complex -- and there would be many fractal levels of God, with the highest being infinite. I'm also using the word "understanding" to suggest "understanding" everything there is about love, which would suggest love is finite. But if both God and love are infinite and evolving, then full understanding at a single moment in time would be theoretically impossible because love would change. I liked Jaye's take on this.
I disagree. If God is "evolving" then you are saying He isn't complete or whole or something. He is already as evolved as evolved can be. He created everything including you whom He loves completely. To experience His love is like no other experience. We are the ones who are incomplete, we are incomplete without Him. Its very simple, but those who follow New Age concepts complicate it and over think it. What we call love here is nothing in comparison to what He brings to the table, we do not understand love in the least bit.
Okay, but God appears to evolve over the course of biblical scripture, so do you agree with Jaye's point that it's not God who is evolving but our understanding of God? If so, would you concede my previous point (made in a different comments section) that scripture should be taken with a grain of salt because the people who wrote the Bible were writing from their left hemispheres and an incomplete / distorted / filtered sense of God?
I agree with Jaye on that, we may learn more about God and therefore change our knowledge through maturation. As for the writers of the Bible being "distorted" or "incomplete", it depends on it being the OT or the NT. The OT does jump around a bit and can be confusing at times, but I think the message is pretty uniform in it's entirety. The NT, on the other hand, stays on point and is in no way distorted. Of course Revelation is in it's own league, lol. I think taking the Bible with a grain of salt is by no means a good option, the words of the prophets and the words of Jesus Himself should never be taken lightly.
What I'm saying though is that okay, let's agree that God is complete / perfect / omniscient / unchanging etc. But humans aren't. We're flawed and biased and sometimes selfish and frequently cognitively distorted. And we're the ones who write stuff down.
True, but if one is inspired by the Holy Spirit, there can be no mistakes. God, being complete/perfect/omniscient/unchanging/omnipresent etc. would never allow His Word to be defiled, even by flawed humans. The message of the Bible has survived the test of time.
For any theists reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on God and love -- especially if you agree with my husband (God fully understands love) and not me (God is evolving alongside us and therefore God's understanding of love is evolving too, love is an asymptote).
The simple Christian Theistic position is that God fully understands love and a core aspect of his interactions with us is to let us experience a generous taste of it
The NT authors claim “God is love” & “We love because he first loved us”. Or Jesus in John 17:24: “because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”
These are all descriptive claims rather than philosophical arguments but they do bear strongly on your question
I don't know if this will be of interest. a lateral thought.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/love-is-an-egg-and-un-uf?utm_source=publication-search
I think of God as incarnated in his creation (though greater than creation) and so omniscient by virtue of directly "being there, everywhere." Therefore God has experiential knowledge of love and fully understands it as it can be presently understood, in full. And yes, God is evolving. :-)
God is love. God is also omniscient. Therefore I'd say that God knows what there is to know about love
Yes! But as God and we evolve, so does the love (the relationship) between us! So God would learning about love constantly. The asymptote -- an abstract concept we can only get infinitely close to, but never completely touch.
God operates in kairos time, rather than chronos time, as we do. Everything for God is present.
Yes -- but we have free will. So the future is not determined. God can see the probabilities, but they would be ever-shifting as the present evolves.
We do have free will, but God knows our actions, even if he does not will them. I think it is our love that evolves. God's is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Okay, but I mean, I'm familiar enough with the stories to know that God sometimes gets into moods. It seems to me that do something like the flood God would have had to be loving humanity a little harder or a little less (or both) at the time. Maybe I'm personifying God too much.
The stories, if you follow through the Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) show God becoming increasingly benign, but that is due to the development of our understanding of God's works and nature, not changes in God's nature
A mentor taught me understanding has two components: knowing and being. Which is a concise way of putting what I think you were getting at—experience/ being—is a form of understanding that holds weight rather than merely knowing
This is a great way to put it! One of the issues I had in that debate was that I struggled to put my argument into words. Also just the dynamic of it being literally the only class discussion where one person was arguing with half the class and everyone knew I was a fine arts major and only 20 or 21.
The puzzle strikes me as hinging on the difference between experiential knowledge and didactic knowledge. Like learning about a mushroom from a guide, and groking a mushroom by picking it and eating it. I think of experiential learning/knowing as whole-brain, whereas didactic learning/knowing seems left-brain (and therefore much more stressful and often disconnected from context).
This makes sense! And haha yes for mushrooms it's best to be well-prepared and if possible to do them with someone who knows what they're doing!
Also reflects on our school system -- too much left brain, not enough right brain.
Haha... I was actually picturing an edible mushroom scrambled in butter with eggs. Yum. :-)
My mind goes straight to magic!
Metaphysical aspects of healing are well known , but maybe not explored or appreciated in biology and psychology ( was it? ) graduate studies . Anyway its fascinating in that I myself have experienced this miracle . Having returned from the dead quite literally after a long dangerous illness. God was not evolving in my view at all . Only my understanding was. A real time demonstration if you will. In Orthodox Theology, to my knowledge , God is constant . That seems to be something uniquely God about God.
Robert Anton Wilson discusses this in Prometheus Rising! It's fascinating. But you need to have faith. I have a series called "Talking to God on Psychedelics" that's partially about some insane healing I experienced on magic mushrooms, including odd encounters with an entity I think might have been God.
Faith is the key . There must be a palpable shift in one's ontology .
As I understand it, quantum theory demolishes Laplace’s Demon. It’s telling that you were with a bunch of biologists and psychologists; physicists might have responded differently.
This actually explains a lot about why I struggle with ritual and spirituality, which is a strange thing for a believing and practicing Orthodox Jew to say. I do ritual, but I feel – am I missing something? What am I supposed to feel? This is autism again, probably.
Lately, I’ve been trying intellectualise less and just experience things. In particular, to try not to intellectualise my marriage.
I think your argument about fractals can still point to God understanding love. If we are like God that means God understands like us, but not necessarily developing with us. God is whole, unified and outside time; we are incomplete (maybe the human race as a whole is more like God than any one individual) and inside time. If God is outside time, God can not change, because change is about development over time. God has a holistic understanding of love. If anything, our love is incomplete compared with God’s.
There is a lot more I could write here, but I have to go to a Zoom class in a minute, appropriately on Maimonides’ tenth and eleventh principles of faith, that God knows everything and rewards and punishes.
Yes! The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect demolish Laplace's Demon -- the Demon is impossible. I think fractal geometry also demolishes the Demon. I'm pretty sure I would have known this when I took the class (I'd gone through a stage where I was pretty into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle a few years earlier) but the question was posed in a way where it seemed we were supposed to accept the underlying premise and work from there. And yeah, I think that conversation would have gone better for me if it had been a bunch of physics and math nerds instead of biologists and psychologists.
Your take is on God and love is pretty close to what Zach (my husband) said! So there you go. But some romantic part of me kind of likes the idea that because love is relational, and because we are all part of God, both God and God's love are fractally evolving alongside us and our ability to know love.
Why does fractal geometry demolish the Demon?
Because they are chaotic -- Chaos Theory.
I had to chime in here, in the middle of some vague generalities... Chaos is not the same as fractals. A chaotic determinstic system has strange attractors (for different parameter values), which are usually (maybe always) fractal. QM is not deterministic so chaos doesn't really apply, though people can study QM systems whose classical limit is a chaotic system.
We do not know either what God is, or what love is (beyond the brain states), so our penchant is to identify the two, since they are both described by feel-good words.
But there is something new emerging in science: downward causation, where an understanding at higher (more macro) levels beats (in a demonstrable way, both mathematically and through evolutionary arguments, having more causal power) an understanding at lower levels, such as the one where Laplace's demon resides. Love only makes sense at the higher levels (such as the right hemisphere). It makes no sense on the level of neurons, or anything lower (like organic molecules, etc). Laplace's determinism is old school. We are just beginning to understand emergence.
Given that, I would say that God is probably emergent and aspirational, not something that actually exists yet. It would need certain conditions such as to make the whole universe coherent, similar to how other levels have emerged, such as organelles, cells, organs, multi-cellular oranisms, families, village, tribes, nations, etc.
I see God as emergent too. That makes sense to me. Kind of what I meant by "evolving". Re fractals, I meant that there is some chaos in them -- the patterns are self-repeating but also not completely predictable.
One thing I don't understand about why strange attractors are usually (always?) fractal, is that it seems possible in principle to satisfy the exponential sensitivity to initial conditions (and resulting unpredictability) of a chaotic system, with a non-fractal attractor, that the system visits points of in unpredictable, non-repetitive ways. A fractal is a geometric structure, out of or without time. It has unpredictability in space (you don't always know in advance, without a potentially infinite computation, whether a point belongs to the fractal or not, though sometimes it seems obvious that a point does not belong), but there is no notion of time. Whereas the chaotic system is embedded in time, and all we know is that after a long time, it must land and continue to land on its attractor.
More: love seems to be about communion and integration, with other beings, or between one's own brain modules (left/right, but also other lower levels/processes/experiences)
I asked the AI" is there an example of a strange attractor of a chaotic system, that is not a geometric fractal (meaning it has an integer dimension)?"
AI Overview
Yes, while many famous strange attractors like the Lorenz attractor and the Henon attractor are fractal-like, exhibiting non-integer dimensions, it's important to distinguish between strange attractors and fractal attractors. Not all strange attractors are geometric fractals. A strange attractor is defined by its non-trivial dynamics and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, while a fractal is defined by its self-similarity and non-integer dimension.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Strange Attractors:
.
These are attractors in a dynamical system that are complex and chaotic. They are characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning that small changes in initial conditions can lead to drastically different outcomes over time. The trajectories of a system in a strange attractor may be unpredictable and seemingly random, even if the system is deterministic.
Fractal Attractors:
.
These are a specific type of strange attractor that exhibit fractal properties. They are characterized by self-similarity, meaning that they have similar patterns at different scales, and they have a non-integer Hausdorff dimension. Examples include the Lorenz attractor, Henon attractor, and various fractal sets like the Mandelbrot set.
Non-Fractal Strange Attractors:
.
While the term "strange attractor" often implies fractal structure, there are examples of attractors that are strange (complex and chaotic) but do not exhibit fractal self-similarity or have non-integer dimensions. These attractors may still be sensitive to initial conditions and have complex trajectories, but their structure is not fractal-like.
Examples of non-fractal strange attractors:
Strange nonchaotic attractors (SNAs):
.
These are attractors that are strange in the sense of being non-piecewise differentiable, but they are not chaotic. They can still exhibit complex dynamics and sensitivity to initial conditions, but they lack the chaotic behavior of typical strange attractors.
Attractors with non-integer dimensions but not fractal-like:
.
Some attractors can have a non-integer dimension (determined by measures like the Lyapunov dimension) without exhibiting self-similarity or the characteristic fractal structures seen in well-known fractal attractors.
In Summary:
While many famous examples of strange attractors are fractals, it's important to remember that the definition of a strange attractor is based on its complex, chaotic dynamics, not necessarily on its fractal nature. There are examples of strange attractors that do not exhibit fractal self-similarity and have non-integer dimensions, but still display the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that characterizes strange attractors.
Very cool essay. I'd say the fact that your professor made it all about love made your job easier but also doomed you. It made your job easier because it's obvious that love, like seeing the color red, has an experiential component. You can read about it in books all you want but, until you've experienced it for yourself, you don't fully understand it. But it also doomed you because it forced you to frame your argument in terms of love's ineffability, which made you sound like a poet.
But the experiential component is actually a red herring because, in truth, Laplace's demon wouldn't know anything beyond the microphysical, whether or not it was experiential. To think otherwise is to think that you can explain, say, what caused WWII with particle physics. You could know where all the particles are and which way they're moving, but how are you to know the larger objects they comprise? How are you to group and categorize (i.e. to individuate) the microphysical? How are you to know where the lines are that separate objects -- where one object ends and another begins? To have knowledge as we understand it, you'd have to share our concepts, which means that you'd have to individuate actions, objects, and events as we do. And you can't get that information from the microphysical facts alone.
If this all sounds obscure, here's a potentially clarifying example. Ask yourself: how many actions are you performing right now? And the answer is: it depends on how you individuate actions -- the invisible line you draw that tells you which are the real actions and which are merely the action-parts. And the micro-physical facts are compatible with infinitely many action/event/object individuation schemes. And that's why you can't learn about WWII (or love) by studying particle physics.
This makes sense! I think Laplace's Demon actually violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (?) so such a being is actually theoretically impossible.
"My psychedelics-fuelled sense of God is of a consciousness that is evolving alongside us, in a fractal relationship akin to the one we have with our gut microbiomes, one that cannot predict the future with certainty"... This is an interesting perspective. I may need to adopt it.
I find it more interesting to think of God as a consciousness we're in a dynamic, evolving relationship with, rather than an all-knowing, static being.
I think of it that way also
God is love. He demonstrated this by sending His Son to die for us, He didn't have to do that. To say that He doesn't understand love and is evolving with us is complete denial. It is also equating God as our equal when He is not. He is our creator and Father, not our contemporary.
If you watch the Mandelbrot zoom video you'll get an idea of what I mean. Say we're at a pattern level earlier in the video. God's pattern is infinitely more complex than ours ... but it can still get more complex. The universe is expanding, God is expanding, God's love is expanding.
I'm not implying God is our equal! I'm implying the relationship is fractal, as in mathematically God is significantly more complex -- and there would be many fractal levels of God, with the highest being infinite. I'm also using the word "understanding" to suggest "understanding" everything there is about love, which would suggest love is finite. But if both God and love are infinite and evolving, then full understanding at a single moment in time would be theoretically impossible because love would change. I liked Jaye's take on this.
I disagree. If God is "evolving" then you are saying He isn't complete or whole or something. He is already as evolved as evolved can be. He created everything including you whom He loves completely. To experience His love is like no other experience. We are the ones who are incomplete, we are incomplete without Him. Its very simple, but those who follow New Age concepts complicate it and over think it. What we call love here is nothing in comparison to what He brings to the table, we do not understand love in the least bit.
Okay, but God appears to evolve over the course of biblical scripture, so do you agree with Jaye's point that it's not God who is evolving but our understanding of God? If so, would you concede my previous point (made in a different comments section) that scripture should be taken with a grain of salt because the people who wrote the Bible were writing from their left hemispheres and an incomplete / distorted / filtered sense of God?
I agree with Jaye on that, we may learn more about God and therefore change our knowledge through maturation. As for the writers of the Bible being "distorted" or "incomplete", it depends on it being the OT or the NT. The OT does jump around a bit and can be confusing at times, but I think the message is pretty uniform in it's entirety. The NT, on the other hand, stays on point and is in no way distorted. Of course Revelation is in it's own league, lol. I think taking the Bible with a grain of salt is by no means a good option, the words of the prophets and the words of Jesus Himself should never be taken lightly.
What I'm saying though is that okay, let's agree that God is complete / perfect / omniscient / unchanging etc. But humans aren't. We're flawed and biased and sometimes selfish and frequently cognitively distorted. And we're the ones who write stuff down.
True, but if one is inspired by the Holy Spirit, there can be no mistakes. God, being complete/perfect/omniscient/unchanging/omnipresent etc. would never allow His Word to be defiled, even by flawed humans. The message of the Bible has survived the test of time.
That’s the beauty of the infinite.