zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jul 19, 2026 3:36 pm
For amusement value, perhaps we could work out a brand-new set of heresies based on modern understanding of the brain. Actual believers will probably want to look away. (Though no disrespect is intended; as the universe is
not Aristotelian, the traditional theology can't be correct anyway.)
I'll assume that God is outside the system entirely, thus not made of matter; I'll also assume that there is no such thing as a non-material soul. What does he do to incarnate?
This
is fun -- though I'd second the warning, this is going to be a little irreverent.
(also, did Jesus have a Y chromosome?)
God exists outside all physical constraints, including causality. So I'd say he arranges matter "beforehand" (really, outside all time and causality constraints) so that the brain develops in such a way He thinks divine thoughts. No remote control needed.
God being omniscient, He knows the position of every particle in the universe. There is something of a theological problem here, because incarnated he can't physically hold that information. However, knowing beforehand what information he needs and when, and so can make sure the necessary information is available in some neural pathway when he precisely needs it.
God isn't limited by 20th century or even 25th century biology, and most likely no one is going to dissect his body. Perhaps he just creates a human-shaped frame whose inside doesn't look anything like human flesh, but is better able to support divine consciousness and power. Of course, the end result is no more "human" than Superman is, even if he's optimized more for teaching than for fighting crooks.
It's not explicitly in the rules, but I'm pretty sure dissecting God's body is a mortal sin according to Catholicism.
Following the spirit of the idea, logically, the physician who would do so would probably notice nothing unusual. Following the idea of God working outside time altogether, I think matters would be arranged in such a way that the appropriate piece of divine consciousness is available at the proper moment.
But maybe we could have a sort of schism here -- is God like a computer programmer, inclined not to waste time and CPU cycles on the parts no one will see? Or is he like an old-school craftsman or fashion designer, who'd spend as much time on the visible parts as on the invisible ones?
Was the planet Mars fully rendered before interplanetary probes? Or did those rock formations appear when Viking rendered, as if they had existed for billions of years?
(If I had to answer, I'd say fully rendered. It's not like God has to preserve resources. )
This reminds me of something I once read in Gershom Scholem.
Apparently, there was in early Jewish mysticism a tradition of working out the physical dimensions of God's body. Did they still have an idea of God as corporeal and physical at the time? Or is it a metaphor? Or is it something else entirely? I don't know. Gershom Scholem's too complicated for my poor brain.
In defense of dualism -- we do know objects that are real but not physical. For instance, the English language. English manifests somewhere in the Broca area of English-speaking brains, also as ink on paper, patterns in electronics, sound waves or morse code. It can produced and processed by mechanical processes too (with LLMs for instance, but with enough time we could probably work out something with index cards.)
Another is the Catholic Church, which manifests as physical phenomena: cathedrals, churches, specific words or rituals, the Pope but can't be directly identified with any of these material things.
Of course we can retort that English is ultimately the product of human minds; Catholics would insist that while there's a human component to the Church it's essentially created by God (not being a believer, of course, I believe it's a fully human construct, but I can't
prove it. )
But what the most intriguing example, to me at least, is mathematics. A mathematic objects, say a sine function, is not material, it manifests in many distinct phenomena: from the behavior of electrons to drawing a circle in the sand with a stick.
I don't think we can settle the question of whether mathematics is purely a product of human brain. Doing advanced math is like exploring within a distinct realm (I've forgotten most advanced math, but it certainly felt that way, and actual mathematicians certainly report the same feeling). Often math starts with some sort of practical problem; but at other times pure and abstract mathematical speculation leads to objects that turn out to have completely unexpected applications.
To put it another way, there is something to the Platonic idea of Forms.
I've used the idea for a con-religion: to Tarandim scholars, a god can be seen as an abstract form that can manifest as the sea during a storm, or as a human-like presence, or a spooky feeling during a temple ritual. As they believe in reincarnation, they believe the same abstract soul can manifest as different people at different points in time (or a scary presence when you're alone in the dark.)
