So what is God, anyway?

Like, definition-wise? People have said some really interesting things about God on this forum, but I don't know how much it means unless everyone's talking about the same thing. Does anyone have an actual definition?

For me, talking about god limits what god is and how we can think of god. If we say "god is love" or "god is all", we limit what god is and prevents us from knowing god. Even "god is" limits it. To me, it's best to experience god through reason and science rather than define god.

But that doesn't leave much room for discussion, does it? It's difficult to argue over something that isn't well defined.

Discussion is pointless.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/tran_imm.htm

<snip>

Most religions define deity according to one of the following four theological belief systems. In alphabetic order, they are:
Belief system:

Very brief description:
Deism Deity created the universe, started it functioning, but is no longer actively involved in it.
Panentheism Deity is the inner spiritual essence of everything in the universe, but it exists beyond the universe as well.
Pantheism Deity is the inner spiritual essence of everything in the universe.
Theism Deity created the universe and continues to actively participate in the world's activities and in human history.

Each of these four systems will be defined in greater detail later in this essay...<snip>


Theism can be subdivided into various types, according to the number and relative ranking of the deity or deities:

What is a "spiritual essence"? And what properties does God (or any particular type of God) possess beyond what's listed here?

"spiritual essence" is the nature of conciousness?

It seems like you'd have to pick-a-diety before you could discuss properties though. I mean, it seems like from that list, each type of God described would have different properties.

Religion is something that occupied a lot of my thought when I was younger. Then maybe ten years ago when I was at the library where someone had swiped the reference copy of "The Book of Common Prayer", I thought I would look up how the unabridged Oxford dictionary had handled the situtation over the centuries.

I thought the first definition one of the most brilliant things I had ever read. It defined God as "the ultimate reality." It was one of the big events of my life.

Seems to work just as well.

That ref is reminiscent of the ontological argument of St. Anselm. I think you'd like it.

--IMM

personally. :)

St. Anselm described God as "That, than which, nothing greater can be conceived." and he derived from that that a god that is real is greater than one which is imaginary. Sounds a lot like what you wrote.

What would St. Augustine have said? I think he was more along the lines of the watchmaker empirical argument. You could correct that if you have other info.

If you asked me what is more real, god or you, I'd have to consider that you are answering my questions, and god...silent or absent? Which is more real to you, me or god? Be honest now.

On edit: Just realized I am addressing two different posters. I think you know which is which. Sorry for my confusion.

--IMM

It's just that Augustine was a Neo-Platonist and a Christian, so he equated God with good and good with existence. God, therefore, is maximally existent, maximally real. In Free Choice of the Will, Augustine identifies God with "wisdom," the fundamental rules of reality by which the entire universe is ordered. So I thought "ultimate reality" sounded more reminiscent of Augustine, but I see the connection to Anselm too.

But what does that mean exactly? That God is somehow more real than other things? Is that even possible? I mean, is God more real than 2=2? Or does it mean that God issimply all real things? That's a perfectly reasonable pantheistic definition of God, but it doesn't do much to endow God with traditional divine qualities like omnipotence, omniscience and personhood, on which the former two are predicated anyway.

edit: Welcome to DU, by the way! :hi:

...

I see... well that clears everything up then.

It was funny.

*edit*

Philosopher David Chalmers talks about matter being information from the outside, and consciousness being information from the inside.

One can think of God as self-subsistent Reason, which is the highest form of Being.

And with those two ideas in mind, let me try to say how I conceive of God...

One can conceptualize God as pure, unlimited Information communicating Itself to Itself, which just is, or which eternally generates, (infinite) Consciousness, and therefore also (infinite) Value.

It generates Consciousness, because consciousness just is (the result of, or is 'begotten' by) self-communicating information.

It generates Value (goodness, love, beauty, bliss, peace, etc) because this unlimited, self-communicating, self-revealing Information is eternally united in harmony with itself, and thus is eternally One and Whole, and both desirable and desired, and hence is Love.

These concepts are also partly inspired by, and suggestive of, St Augustine's theology of the Trinity, which he suggests we try to grasp on an analogy with the operations of intellect/knowledge and will/love, which are the defining operations of the mind.

And if one runs with Chalmers' idea that information is matter from the outside, the reason we don't 'see' God is not so much that God isn't physical---it's rather that God is infinite. God is the unlimited self-communicating rational consciousness that knows the mathematics of string theory (or whatever the ultimate physical theory is). God is the infinite self-communicating consciousness that grasps the infinity of multiverses, or multiverses of multiverses, etc. Hence God is omniscient.

So the reason we don't 'see' God is that there's just too much information for anyone looking at this unlimited information from the outside to be able to see it---finite minds can only fully comprehend finite information. But 'inside' the unlimited information, it's infinite consciousness---God fully comprehends Godself---and thus all of reality is ultimately intelligible, because God is an unlimited act of rational understanding (or self-communicating information), and hence understands Godself.

And this relationship of finite minds peering into the infinity of God is one key reason why heaven, or the beatific vision, or the ultimately loving union with the presence of God cannot be boring. There is always more information in God for us to become conscious of, and to value.

If one's epistemology requires observation and rational intelligibility, and your ontology is infinite, then you need an infinite mind to 'do' the observing and rational understanding of that ontology, which of course will include itself. In other words, the defining criterion of reality or being is intelligibility, but that implies that there is something in principle which can understand reality fully. If nothing were ever capable of understanding the whole of reality, then reality would not be holistically intelligible. But I define reality as that which is in principle holistically intelligible, and hence there must be such an unlimited Understander. God is this unlimited act of rational understanding, or infinite consciousness, or 'information from the inside'. If God is real, then God must be intelligible, which God is---because God understands Godself, even if we don't.

Our loving union with God consists in forever growing into a greater and greater participation in the infinite consciouness and value of unlimited self-communicating information, which is the very life of God.

In the theistic view, all created reality flows from this eternal, self-subsistent Reason/Consciousness/Value. For the theist, reason/consciousness/value necessarily precedes matter. For the materialist, matter precedes reason/consciousness/value. But for me, it's obvious that reason and intelligibility characterize matter all the way down, to the lowliest quark or string pr whatever. If something lacked intrinsic intelligibility, we wouldn't posit it as being real at all.

All physical reality displays mathematical intelligibility and order. To me that implies the existence of an unending Mind or Reason at work, imbuing creation with the sheer mathematical beauty of its own conscious understanding. But from our own experience of ourselves, we also know or are at least dimly aware of moral and aesthetic value.
And infinite self-communicating information also implies moral and aesthetic value beyond the mathematical. It implies the possibility of morally autonomous creatures. Which implies the possibility of sin. But God (=Infinite Self-Communicating Information constituting Consciousness and Value) acts to restore harmony and wholeness through love of creatures.

What a fascinating answer! I'm sure I'll have more questions tomorrow after I've thought about this for a while, but for now I wonder if you'd mind clarifying a few things.

Firstly, you say that "consciousness just is self-communicating information." Why do you believe this? How does "self-communicating information" give rise to consciousness and subjective experience? More fundamentally, what does it mean for information to be "self-communicating"?

Secondly, I don't think I understand how the unity of God "generates" goodness. Isn't that committing the naturalistic fallacy?

Thirdly, putting aside for the moment whether or not to accept your definition of reality, do you identify God with reality? Or do you merely claim that God is necessary for reality?

Fourthly (and finally for now), an infinite consciousness would be capable of understanding, and therefore (by your reasoning) at the very least making possible all possible worlds. Do all possible worlds exist, a la modal realism? If not, what other properties of a world than intelligibility are necessary for that world to exist?

1. When information communicates itself to itself, it becomes self-aware. I think self-awareness is ontologically key for consciousness. The more self-aware something is, the more conscious it is.

Information is something that gets communicated--to be information, it has to be available in principle. Communication is the process of making available in principle. Something communicates it. But that something can itself be understood as information. Like right now, I am communicating information to you. What am I? I'm information. Something communicated the information that is me. And so on--there's a chain of dependencies for communicating information. God is that information which is not dependent upon something else making it available. I.e. not dependent on something else communicating it. But it is communicated. Hence it's self-communicated.

But information is also intelligible in principle. So if there's nothing else to make the information that is God available, God being the ultimte stopping point in the dependency chain, then God is the information that is self-intelligible. Hence conscious, self-aware, etc.

2. I think the naturalistic fallacy is meant to apply to nature, and God transcends what we normally think of as nature. However, one could redefine nature to include God. I don't think the naturalistic fallacy would be committed at that point, because value itself turns out to be ontologically basic. The fallacy is only a fallacy if value is not ontologically basic. But value is constitutive of that which is ontologically basic (i.e. God).

3. God is necessary for reality in the sense that if God did not exist, nothing would exist. Intelligibility is a criterion of reality, which is why "square circles" and "prime numbers with 3 divisors" don't exist.

4. There are various versions of modal realism. I'm not a Lewis-type modal realist, if that's what you're asking. I think possible worlds can be viewed as part of the information in God, and the actuality of this world as a further aspect of the information in God. Reverting to Augustine's model of the Trinity, possible worlds are in God's intellect, and one of them, this one, is willed by God. A bit like you thinking about various computer programs, and then actually writing and running one of them. I think the ultimate theory of physics, if we found it, would exhibit features which make it understandable as to why God would choose to instaniate it rather than an alternative, if indeed any other coherent alternatives are possible. I suspect, but can't prove, that given a desire to create physical beings endowed with rational consciousness and moral autonomy, only the actual physics of this universe (or something very similar to it) will do.

NB. I've written this very quickly, and might want to amend some answers later. But I'm in a rush.

First of all, you haven't put forward any plausible means by which "self-communicating information" produces consciousness. Unless you've solved Chalmers' hard problem and just haven't been forthcoming as to how, it seems as though you're asking me to accept this assertion of yours as axiomatic, which I don't.

Secondly, if we understand information abstractly as "pattern" or "ordering principle," then strictly speaking, no, you are not information; you are information instantiated in a certain medium. Information is dependent upon its medium for communication. So how can it be that God is "self-subsistent"? It seems to me that the idea of God you put forward - "self-subsistent Reason" - is internally inconsistent.

I'd also like to take a closer look at the argument you presented toward the end of your first post for the existence of God, that (as I understand it):

1. In order for something to exist it must be intelligible.
2. A thing is intelligible iff something exists that can understand it.
3. An infinitely complicated thing is intelligible only to an infinite consciousness
4. Reality is infinitely complicated.
5. Therefore an infinite consciousness exists.
6. For all x, if x is an infinite consciousness, then x is God.
7. Therefore God exists.

I'd be interested to hear further justification for premises 2 and 4. In order for a thing to be intelligible, isn't it enough that something could exist capable of understanding it?

DAVID CHALMERS
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as
fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the
addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in
physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We
might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience
can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be
like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental
feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we
take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of
constructing a theory of experience.

I am not attempting an explanation of how consciousness gets to be causally produced. And the reason I'm not attempting that is because it is ontologically fundamental. But that's obviously consistent with what theists have always said.

In other words, the reason the Hard Problem is hard is because one is trying to give some ontological/causal explanation of something that is actually ontologically and causally basic or metaphysically rock-bottom.

So, when I say that self-commuicating information just is, or just constitutes, consciousness, I am saying what it is, not what causes it. To use Aristotelian terminology, I'm giving the formal cause, not the efficient cause. But that's ok for me, because, of course, in a theistic ontology, consciousness is fundamental. It's the naturalists for whom it is truly a Hard Problem. That's why some of them such as McGinn and the New Mysterians have simply declared it a mystery. But of course, it's not a mystery for the theist that there is consciousness in a material world. The mystery of consciousness for theism is simply the mystery of God. But we theists have always said that--but also said that God is not incomprehensible to God. Here I personally find the literature of theistic mystics rather helpful.

And so I'm explicating a different question---the question, what is consciousness. I am explicating the notion of consciousness by the notion of self-communicating information. But that is not a causal relation except in the formal cause sense deployed by Aristotle.

As for me being information instantiated in a medium, I don't disagree. But the medium itself (living matter) is itself an instance of information. And the medium of that can be viewed as energy. For Aristotle, the Prime Mover is pure 'energeia', or in Aquinas' terminology, pure 'act'.

In other words, information is ineliminable. There ain't no pure informationless matter, or informationless energy.

Of course, something has to be ontologically basic, whether one is a materialist or a theist. If one thinks of matter or the 'medium' of information as basic, then one arrives at a notion of that which is ontologically ultimate being formless, informationless stuff. I don't think that is a coherent notion, to be perfectly honest.

In my view, information, classically called 'Form', is what is basic. And I'll go along with the idea deriving from Plato that God is 'Pure Form', which in my idiom translates to 'unlimited or infinite information'. Which, upon analysis, must be self-communicating because it's ontologically ultimate---it doesn't get communicated by something else. And self-communicating information is self-experienced as consciousness and value. We are 'made in the image of God' because that's what we're like---information that is self-experienced as consciousness and value.

One short way to put this, of course, is that personhood is metaphysically basic. The rest is just an analysis of personhood, combined with the idea that it's the best candidate (and better than matter in particular) for characterizing what is ontologically ultimate.

Reality is ultimately personal, versus reality is ultimately impersonal. That's the debate, isn't it? And I'm explicating what it would mean for the former to be true, as well as suggesting that not only the phenomena associated with reason and value with which we are familiar, but also the deep structure of the material world itself makes the former the more reasonable ontological option.

You constructed this out of what I said:


1. In order for something to exist it must be intelligible.
2. A thing is intelligible iff something exists that can understand it.
3. An infinitely complicated thing is intelligible only to an infinite consciousness
4. Reality is infinitely complicated.
5. Therefore an infinite consciousness exists.
6. For all x, if x is an infinite consciousness, then x is God.
7. Therefore God exists.

Actually, I wasn't really trying to give an argument for God's existence in that post. I was trying to explicate what is involved in the notion of God's existence, in answer to the question in the thread title.

But yes, that is something like an argument I would be prepared to offer for God's existence. It is certainly not original, and in this form, was presented in the well known book by the Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan SJ, entitled Insight, published in the late 1950s, I think.

But Lonergan's argument doesn't so much rely on the notion of infinite consciousness as on the notion of an 'unrestricted act of understanding'. But I suppose they might well come to the same thing.

I'd have more hesitation in agreeing to the idea that God is infinitely complicated. In fact, Aquinas following Aristotle's act-potency metaphysics, would say that God is 'omnino simplex' --altogether simple. The simplicity being referred to is ontological. Meaning, God is not composed of any parts, either physical or metaphysical. In particular, God is not composed of act and potency (in Aristotle, 'energeia' and 'dynamis'); but rahter is 'actus purus'. God is not a metaphysical composite of subject and attribute, of essence and existence, of matter and form, or of genus and differentia. God is, 'esse ipse subsistens'---self-subsistent Being---not a being among other beings.

What I was suggesting is that we ought to interpret 'being' as information. Whenever we encounter a being of any kind, we encounter information. Information is the ultimate 'stuff' of being.

In the case of God, it is not limited. Hence there's no potentiality in God to gain or lose information. Hence, to reiterate Aristotelian-Thomistic points above: God does not gain or lose intrinsic properties; God's does not come into or go out of existence; God's form is not limited by a particular material medium; God doesn't depend on a prior species of which God is an individual instance, and hence does not depend on a genus. Etc.

It will turn out, though, that infinite self-communicating information
constitutes both Consciousness and Value. But there is no division or composition, involved. The model here is the human person. The person is, roughly, information getting communicated, thus constituting consciousness, thus constituting value. We tend to think that human persons are intrinsically, not merely instrumentally valuable, and it is this which undergirds morality.

The ontological simplicity of a person's rational moral consciousness, was of course, held by Plato & Descartes, but there are important differences between P & D, and Aquinas & Aristotle. For one thing A & A were not substance dualists. (I think this is one reason why it's not an accident that Christianity preaches not merely the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body. But that would take us off in another direction.

The point I want to stress here is that God can be viewed as the reality that is the least composite possible. Of course, as Aquinas explicitly recognizes, it's God's lack of compositeness that makes it really tough for human minds and human language to grasp God intellectually.

I'm trying to think of an analogy here, and the one that comes to mind is mathematics. It's in one sense terribly complicated. But math itself, viewed metaphysically, as it were, is terribly simple. Once you understand it, it all makes perfect sense, and all holds together in a nice logical unity. Of course, if God is consciousness, then God is more than just math, because God. being infinite, can understand and know the truth of undecidable Godel propositions. But so can we.

In order for a thing to be intelligible, isn't it enough that something could exist capable of understanding it?

Yes, but I'm looking at this question sub specie aeternitatis. Suppose there was something which never is actually understood at all by anything. Like a Kantian 'ding-an-sich'. Ok, if it's never a 'ding' for some knower, then it strikes me that it makes no difference to say of such a thing that it exists or doesn't exist. One may as well say it doesn't exist. And returning to Lonergan, to know that something exists or is the case necessarily involves understanding. So, if something is never understood, then it is never known to exist or to be the case. And if it's never known to exist or be the case by anyone or anything, then one may as well say it doesn't exist or is not the case. Of course, since God exists, this is never a problem. But if there is no transcendent knower, no unrestricted act of understanding, then you're stuck with the quasi-Kantian antinomy of things that exist but are never known to exist. But if nothing and no-one knows about their existence, what could it possibly mean to say they have actual (as against merely possible) existence?

I am not an idealist. I believe that things can exist mind-independently, and "under the aspect of eternity," even when no mind knows of their existence.

What I hear you saying is this:

1. If no one knows about a thing, then that thing can not be said to exist.
2. Things exist about which only God could know.
3. Therefore God exists.

Premise 1 holds only if you accept that all things exist mind-dependently, which is far from incontestable. I don't think I've seen any justification at all for premise 2.

I'm saying if something is never ever ever known about by anything or anyone, then to say that it actually exists is meaningless. That's not equivalent to saying that if something exists, its existence is mind-dependent. It could be that it's known about, but exists mind-independently. If Mount Everest was forever unknowable, then it just wouldn't make sense to affirm the existence of Mount Everest. But it doesn't follow that if one affirms its existence, that its existence depends on our minds. In other words, for the purposes of this thread, I'm not arguing that reality is mind-dependent. I'm only arguing that intelligibility is a criterion of reality. But a criterion of reality is different from a cause of existence.

In fact, I've not given in this thread an argument for God's existence. I've been explaining what I think God is, in answer to your question.

It is the case, though, that I believe the intelligibility of reality implies a theistic ontology, rather than a materialist one. But as I said, I'm explicating the ontology, not arguing for it.

I kinda got off on a tangent. I think the distinction between something not existing/existing but in such a way as to render its existence meaningless is lost on me, but that's not your fault.

Anyway. I do have another question about your definition, but it might take me a while longer to articulate it.

See also The Argument from Counterfactuals here.

One can conceptualize God as pure, unlimited Information communicating Itself to Itself, which just is, or which eternally generates, (infinite) Consciousness, and therefore also (infinite) Value.

It generates Consciousness, because consciousness just is (the result of, or is 'begotten' by) self-communicating information.

I don't know. This still seems to leave us with that same old chicken and egg question. Which came first, "information", "consciousness", "self-communication"? Or maybe, the generative "it" came first.

I think God is a nice fantasy that people make up to help them deal with the unknown. But that's just how I define it, personally.

In terms of interpreting the world, it's a useful tool. It helps the brain wrap itself around some of the most difficult problems, ones that may not have an answer.

The downside is that "God" isn't an answer in itself, just a stopgap solution. Like emotions, ideas, etc. it can't be shown to exist outside a person's mind, and thus cannot have an impact on reality. Sure, once a person ACTS on an emotion, or implements an idea, or burns a "witch" to honor their god, THEN there is an impact on reality. But that was performed by an individual, not the concept.

Fear of the unknown. Fire, lightning, the stars, eclipses, etc. All very scary natural phenomena, especially to primitive humans. If you can assign a cause to something, you can "control" it. So I think early concepts of gods, spirits, etc. most definitely had their origins in trying to explain frightful events.

Ever since Marx and Freud, even people who are not Marxists or Freudians frequently offer those thinkers' theories as to the illusory nature of religious belief.

It is important to see how atrocious these sorts of psychologizing arguments are, as arguments. They are, despite their popularity, amazingly weak to the point of being rationally unusable.

Let me quote from philosopher Nicholas Rescher:


Of course, there still remains the well-trodden prospect of antitheological psychologizing. The general line is all too familiar: "You see the traditional monotheistic God as desirable merely because he answers a psychological need of yours. You have a psychological yearing for acceptance, validation, support. Your God is a mere parent-substitute to meet the needs of a weak and dependent creature." So argues the psychologizing opponent of axological theism. But this sort of facile sort of psychologizing ultimately cuts both ways. For the axological theist can readily respond along the following lines: You see the traditional monotheistic God as undesirable because you find the very idea threatening. You atheists too are "God fearing," but in a rather different sense. You are afraid of God. You have an adolescent's fixated fear of and a condemnation by authority. Your atheism roots in self-contempt. Recognizing what an imperfect creature you yourself are, you have a fear of being judged and found wanting. The very idea of God is threatening to you because you fear the condemnation of an intellige nt observer who knows what you think and do. You are enmeshed in an adolescent aversion to parental disapproval.

So runs the psychologizing counterargument. And this line is not without surface plausibility. Many people are in fact frightened by the prospect of a belief in God because they ultimately have a contempt of themselves. They feel threatened by a belief that God might exist, because they feel that, were it so, God would not approve of them. For them, atheism is a security shield of sorts that protects them against an ego-damaging disapproval by somebody who "knows all, sees all." Atheists are not infrequently people on whose inmost nature the vice of self-contempt has its strongest hold. Pretentions to the contrary notwithstanding, the atheist's actual posture is generally not a self-confident independence of spirit, but a fear of being judged. In this regard, then, there is simply a standoff in regard to a Freud-style psychologizing about religion. Those psychologizing arguments that impute rationally questionable motives that can be deployed against the believer are not difficult to revise and redirect as arguments against the atheists. Psychologizing is a sword that cuts both ways in regard to axiological theism. Both sides can easily play the game of projecting, on a speculative basis, a daunting variety of intellectually non-respectable motives for holding the point of view that they oppose.

And Alvin Plantinga says this:

Freud's jejune speculations as to the psychological origin of religion and Marx's careless claims about its social role can't sensibly be taken as providing argument or reason for... the nonexistence of God; so taken they present textbook cases (which in fact are pretty rare) of the genetic fallacy. If such speculations and claims have a respectable role to play, it is instead perhaps that of providing a naturalistic explanation for the wide currency of religious belief, or perhaps that of attempting to discredit religious belief by tracing it to a disreputable source. But of course that doesn't constitute anything like evidence for {the non-existence of God} or a reason to think theism false. One might as well cite as evidence for the existence of God St. Paul's claim (Romans 1) that failure to believe in God is a result of sin and rebellion against God.

In other words, if it is open to the atheist to speculate about the psychology that underlies theism, it is just as open to the theist to speculate about the psychology that underlies atheism. And of course some theists (e.g. St Paul, Pascal) have done just that. But at least they, unlike some atheists, don't make the blatant logical error of thinking that their psychological speculations are evidence or arguments for the falsity of atheism. Theists don't typically argue that atheism must be false because of the psychological motivations of atheists. They only point to those motivations to explain the occurrence of atheism, not its falsity.

Would that the reverse were true!

I'm certain that there are many aspects of fear that come into play, but the most obvious one, I think, would be the fear of death.

Specificaly, the fear of death would be a combination of two things: the inability of someone to accept the reality and finality of their OWN mortality, *as well as* the mortality of their loved ones. It helps people to cope with (or deny) the fact that they will never see their loved ones beyond this life.

It's also the fear illogical randomness of death. It provides an answer to those who lament "why me?" when their own death is immenent--or it provides an answer when someone asks "Why her? She was to young to die". A belief in a deity and afterlife allows them to comfort themselves with the belief that death is actually part of some divine plan... or that the soul of the departed was 'needed' in Heaven.


edit: typo/clarity

Even among non-traditional theists, such as New Agers, the idea of an afterlife remains popular. And people take such offense when you question the concept, I guess because it's painful.

Just below is an encapsulated version of what she wrote. Follow the URL below and scroll to the bottom of the page to read the complete text.

-- Allen

When my husband died, ... many people would ... ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. ... Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. ... I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. ... Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. ... We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html

---

Carl Sagan suffered from a rare blood disorder that led to cancer and ultimately to his death on 20 December 1996. He remained skeptical until the end, saying, "If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be scientific data, not mere anecdote. ... Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."

Demon-Haunted World, p. 204.

I was diagnosed with lupus a couple of years ago and I've spent a lot of time explaining to well-meaning people that I'm much more concerned with enjoying my life now than planning for an afterlife later.

"Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."

A terrible loss, that one was. Humanity could use a lot more Carl Sagans.

I recently lost my Dad and this articulates very well how I feel.

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence.

Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

(from his book "Billions and Billions," p. 215)