God is not someone.
God is not a mysterious man with a beard.
God is a pig. (according to Italians)
Jokes aside, most people mistakenly think of God as a person.
“So God created man in his own image” — Genesis 1:27
You are the image of God but God is not your image.
We have a psychological bias called anthropomorphism (or personification) so we give human characteristics to something non-human, in this case, God.
You may think of God as someone immortal, omnipotent, loving and kind.
But God is so much more than everything you can describe with just words.
Words can’t describe God.
If you try to describe God by associating God with words, you are probably wrong about God.
So how to describe God?
Here comes my personal definition of God:
For me, in 3 words: God is everything.
But you need to understand 2 crucial concepts to understand my definition of God: emergence and the observer effect.
“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.” (source: Wikipedia)
Basically a system with multiple components can have more properties than the sum of the properties of the components.
A molecule of water (H2O) has properties that neither hydrogen or oxygen have on their own.
1 + 1 = 5
As you get bigger and bigger systems, you get more and more properties.
Now imagine if the whole universe was one single system.
That’s how I see God.
We all follow natural laws like the laws of gravity, electricity, and thermodynamics.
These laws are simply some of the properties of the system that is God.
Some people see God as a ruler.
Yes, you could say that something bigger than us rules us but I simply think of the world as one and we follow the natural laws of this one universe. Nothing rules us per se.
Now the question is: Is the world random, probabilistic or deterministic?
Are the natural laws of God fixed, flexible, or random?
Here is where the observer effect comes in.
In quantum physics, the world without an observer is probabilistic and the world with an observer is deterministic.
So I think of the absolute universe as probabilistic and random but because I only see the universe from my point of view, with me as the observer, my universe (which I see and experience) is deterministic.
My life is determined in advance because I’m always observing it and I’m part of the bigger system that is God so I follow the natural laws of the universe.
(Am I in control of my life? That’s for another post.)
Eckhart Tolle says that God is the consciousness that is everywhere.
You could say that God is the love that connects us all because we are all part of the same system.
“Under the heavens, there is but one family.” — Bruce Lee
