Is God an embodiment of Nature?

Many people in the early modern period were upholding what had become a tradition of using classical thought as a vehicle for evaluating religious phenomenon (theology). If it hadn’t been for certain scholars, then the idea of materialistic god would have lost its way. This ideology attributes a god to a being of ‘motion and rest’ which is not the same as attributing God to living bodies. There exists a naturalistic conception of God with which one can assert its corporeality and the mechanical structure of the universe. The idea that God is corporeal in itself lends to the thought that God is discoverable.

The belief that God is purely incomprehensible seems to be incompatible with the idea of a corporeal god inter alia a god which is real, has dimensions and is existing somewhere. Even if the God in totality cannot be comprehended but is corporeal and discoverable through reasons then how it manifests itself through nature can be found out through reasons too.

However, the masses are guided by an impulse and not by reasons alone. As a result, it would be preferable to exclude them from the readership of this blog rather than make themselves a nuisance by misinterpreting it after their won’t.

Coming back to the issue. The greatest objection levelled against those who wish to establish connections between God and nature is that God can only be labelled with infinite power, causing God to be the only beneficiary of the equation ‘irresistible might with the right‘. In the natural state of men, an irresistible power gives the right of ruling and commanding those who cannot resist; so that the right to do anything whatsoever is an essential and direct attribute of omnipotence i.e. God. The ‘right’ here is identified with power. The idea is that man cannot act rightly in all that it does in the state of nature. Hence, man remains accountable to God, whose right extends from his power (meaning, men is attributable to committing injustice, even in the state of nature).

The objective of identifying God as an irresistibly powerful being can be derived out of necessity. God’s power is infinite because it must be by definition. A god has his existence from his own power. it does not derive its power from anything else, and therefore, it exists from eternity and for eternity; and because there was nothing which gave god existence, there also will be nothing which will make him not exist. Because of what God is, that is:

1. mover, by his own power it must exist; 
2. it exists from eternity, it must, therefore, be eternal or infinite.

The quantity (this term is used loosely since God’s power is beyond measure) of God’s power derives from the fact that it created all out of nothing and nothing out of all (origin of the idea of God). Thus, its power must necessarily be infinite. God’s power, however, delimits man’s power, making it the only entity whose might always makes right. Therefore, there are quantitative limits to the natural right with which man can act in the state of nature.

But it is an accepted belief that every person in nature acts and persists according to nature, that is, by necessity and without limitation, which contradicts the foundation of a human god.

Thus, within the supreme law of nature “each thing endeavours to persist in its present being, as far as in it lies, taking account of no other thing but itself. It follows that each individual has the sovereign right to exist and to act as it is naturally determined“. So, the term ‘Nature’ can be used interchangeably with ‘God’.

-by boringbug

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