God

A conversation I had the other day dealt with what proof an atheist would need to believe in a god. Now naturally, most atheists I've met reject the Judeo-Christian God since that's the one most prevalent in our culture and we're taught that the gods in all other cultures are, of course, false. I suggested that outside of monotheism, the requirements for godliness are relatively low. After all, the Aztecs thought Cortez was a god cuz he had shiny armor and facial hair. Even actual gods like Hermes or, say, Freyr are pretty achievable deities, relatively speaking. If one takes the conservative route, then Storm from the X-Men would be a full fledged goddess. But no one now would call a bearded man in armor a god, and Storm is just a mutant. I think the atheists don't believe in gods outside their culture not because it's the 1st Commandment but because they are raised with the idea that nothing short of the Judeo-Christian God qualifies as a god at all. The atheists reject Christianity but still define a deity by their rules.

The qualification for godliness in modern society I think is the cause of atheism. God, according to Wikipedia, is supposed to have "omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence" and since people have difficulty conceiving all those omni's and consider "good" to be subjective they then deduce that no deity or deities exist. Personally, don't see how these are necessary qualifications for a god. I think transfinite knowledge and power are good enough to be a god, especially since people try to argue God doesn't exist along the lines that He can't make a rock heavy enough that He can't lift it and is therefore not all powerful. One of the necessary abilities that was mentioned in my conversation was that a deity should be able to make something out of nothing. This isn't inconceivable since matter can be converted to energy and vice versa. That ability falls within the laws of physics, unless one considers energy to be "something" and therefore not creating something out of nothing. I find that idea flawed since that suggests a deity would be infinitely (or at least very) powerful without using any energy. Another criterion was that they have to have at least the ability to create, even if they did not themselves create, the Universe or the Earth. Except fro creating the Universe, this is not so hard. All one needs to do is bump a nebula and it will eventually it will create a solar system. Then you just guide organic molecules to a planet in a habitable zone around a star. If one thinks like the scientific atheist in this regard, the Universe does this naturally so none of this should require omnipotence.

To refer to the world of sci-fi, would we consider a being which meets all the criteria for a god as a god, or just a very powerful alien? The Q from Star Trek are effectively gods but they do not claim themselves as such. The ascended Ancients and the Ori in Stargate SG1 have seemingly limitless power, but only the Ori claim themselves as gods and demand worship. If humans were to one day encounter such beings, why not call them gods? As they say, "if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck..." Is it the obligation of worship that is then the defining characteristic of a god? Might that be the root of it all? Again, the standards for worship are low; from worshipping the bones of really good people to praying to the sun. My personal opinion is that worship isn't mandatory for deities any more than it is for the seasons. So basically, if you ignore our culture's requirements for being a god and remove the worship aspect, why is it difficult to imagine such beings exist?