Proofs of God

Exploring the cleverly-hidden axioms of divine existence

“In the Void of Perfection, what do you see?”

Advance Warning for Pragmatists:
This article is ontologically dense and is therefore practically impractical to the lover of applicability in everyday life. Please continue reading at your own risk.

Absolute vs. Relative Omnipotence [1]

Absolute omnipotence is the ability to do anything and everything that can possibly be imagined by a creative mind within our common, objective reality. Thus, if an idea can be imagined, it can immediately be accomplished by an agent of absolute omnipotence in this “real world”. This is generally accepted to be the domain of the God of Abrahamic traditions and the Brahman of Advaita Vedanta.

Examples of absolute omnipotence include, but are not limited to: creating entire universes filled with galaxies, granting sentience to self-sustaining units of matter, bringing deceased persons back from the dead, walking on water, etc.

Relative omnipotence is the ability to do anything and everything that can possibly be imagined by any creative mind within their own, subjective reality. Thus, if it can be imagined, it can be accomplished by an agent of relative omnipotence in their “dream world”. This is generally accepted to be the domain of dreamers who successfully gain lucidity (awareness of relative omnipotence) within their dream before waking up.

Examples of relative omnipotence include, but are not limited to: creating entire universes within a dream, granting sentience to self-sustaining units of matter within a dream, bringing deceased persons back from the dead within a dream, walking on water within a dream, etc.

When a dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming, they are said to gain lucidity, or:

1. Omnipresence within the dream, as everything and everyone within the dream is merely a flat image projected upon the brain by the subconscious mind. The dreamer may feel like they are moving around in their dream, but the body and brain both remain motionless in bed all the while. Omnipresence is thereby a liberation from the illusion that the perceiver is not also the environment being perceived within the dream.
2. Omniscience within the dream, as the dream itself is a series of sensory experiences created by the dreamer’s own imagination to keep the dreamer perpetually focused on the present moment. We keep ourselves from thinking about the past or future when we dream and are therefore distracted from our own knowledge of the dream’s illusory past and vast potential of alternate futures. Omniscience is thereby a liberation from self-imposed ignorance of all unknown information, or “external” information.
3. Omnipotence within the dream, as each and every cause-effect relationship within the dream was formerly guided by expectations taken from “absolute reality” prior to lucidity, but are later guided by the dreamer’s willful intentions once lucidity is achieved within the dream. Omnipotence is thus a liberation from the pseudo-extrinsic authority of established relations between cause and effect.

Given the establishment of these three aspects of agency within any given lucid dream, the lucid dreamer may subsequently realize that they are, at the same time, subconsciously controlling every other person in the dream and subconsciously experiencing every other person’s perspective within the dream.

Have you ever wondered who is guiding the actions of all the other people in your dreams? Do the other people in your dreams wonder the same thing about you or about their own free will?

If the dreamer is simultaneously every person in their dream (whether they know it or not) then the lucid dreamer would be a Relative God compared to everyone else in their dream, but only when they become aware of their omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence within their Dream Reality.

All it takes for a consciousness to become a Relative God in their relative reality is to become aware of their divine nature. Thus, our own Absolute God was likely the first consciousness to achieve lucidity (often called “enlightenment” or “awareness”) within our own Absolute Reality and is now controlling all of us by sending desires and fears, ideas and inspirations, and countless distractions and doubts into our minds from its own lucid mind.

As long as we are distracted, the dream will remain stable. If too many of us become lucid, the dream will likely collapse.

From where do we receive our ideas and desires?
Do you truly control which foods you like and which you avoid?
How about your preferences for people, books, music, careers?

Psychologists point to “nature vs. nurture”, but what exactly is that Nature? A random dice-roll of genetic predispositions? Or a subconscious, unpremeditated preference originating from… the soul?

Ask someone in your dream tonight to name their favorite color.

According to this framework, God would be a Relative God within its own Dream Reality but an Absolute God within our Reality, just as the lucid dreamer is a Relative God within their own Dream Reality but an Absolute God to the other participants in their dream.

The Paradox of Perfection [2]

Social, political, and spiritual misuses of the name “God” throughout history have spoiled the true connotation of proper, logically exhaustive omnipotence.

Instead of God, let us now use the connotatively, and denotatively, pure:

Perfection

so that we may attempt to abstract and expand the definition of Perfection.

In the beginning was the Void,
and the Void was with Perfection,
and the Void was Perfection.

Void is the Word (that is, the concept or idea) that came before all other words, concepts, and ideas. Before the existence of the universe and our Absolute Reality, there was nothing that existed. When nothing existed, there were no imperfections because there existed nothing that could be imperfect. When there are no imperfections in a given system, that system is perfect.

Ergo, our Universe (Absolute Reality) was perfect before it existed because at that point it had no imperfections.

Subsequently, all instances of perfect abstractions [things] in this reality are merely imperfect examples of the perfect conception they represent.

• Every “real” apple is an imperfect actualization of the abstract/“perfect” apple.
• Every “real” triangle is an imperfect actualization of the abstract/“perfect” triangle.
• Every “real” mind is an imperfect actualization of the abstract/“perfect” mind.

How does something perfect become imperfect?
Through actualization [i.e., material existence].

How does something imperfect become perfect?
Through abstraction [i.e., conceptual existence].

“But true perfection is impossible!”, it will be said.

A parable, then, for illustration.

An artist, a scientist, and a philosopher are each tasked with representing a perfect equilateral triangle using their medium of choice.

The artist spends several hours drawing the cleanest possible triangle using various tools in their studio, but the artistic triangle is deemed imperfect once it is discovered, under microscope, that the pencil marks do not constitute a straight line since the paper itself is an uneven surface with varying altitudes.

The scientist, not to be outdone, sits down at a computer and swiftly generates a digital triangle with perfectly-straight, and perfectly-even, sides all on the same plane of altitude.

Just before the award is handed over to the scientist, the philosopher objects:

And yet, the pixels are not connected. That triangle is no triangle at at all, but only a succession of dots that resemble a triangle from afar.

The scientist demands the philosopher to provide a more perfect triangle, to which the philosopher assures the crowd that the philosophical triangle is, indeed, truly perfect.

Unfortunately, the philosopher’s triangle resides in the philosopher’s mind and so they would all have to believe that the triangle is perfect because there is no way for them to measure it.

The philosopher is ridiculed and disqualified from the contest, even though the philosopher’s triangle is the only perfect triangle.

There was nothing to know before knowledge was created. [3]

Before time and space existed, before biology and psychology existed, before economics and politics existed, before past and future existed, before life and death existed, before good and evil existed:

“Nothing existed.”

If nothing existed, there was nothing to know. Before a creator creates any universes, all knowledge of history and reality (i.e., past and present) is equally irrelevant because any particular universe that could be described does not yet exist.

Ergo, prior to the Big Bang, there was only one thing to know: Nothing. (Ask a physicist if anything existed before the Big Bang and they will likely answer “Matter” or “Energy”, which is only a slight lexicographical shift from the preacher’s answer of “God” given that matter and energy are also regarded as self-causing)

So, before that First Cause of Parmenides, Aristotle, and Aquinas, there was Nothing for an immeasurable amount of time. Immeasurable time is not infinite time, however, but is simply an amount of time that cannot be measured—the absence of time itself.

How does one measure something before it is created?

Creation precedes measurement. If measurement of a thing follows the creation of the thing being measured, it follows that time needed to be created before it could be measured, and so that period of nonexistence “before time” was the Void of Perfection in which our reality was completely and perfectly abstract—not yet actualized or realized.

At that time before time, all knowledge was immediately known because there was nothing to know. What else is there to know if the past and future are merged into the present?

The reason we can’t find perfection now, in our reality, is simply because the very existence of reality is itself an act of imperfection. Even though we may strongly hope and believe that perfection is attainable within reality, we can only really achieve perfection indirectly by the abstraction of the mind.

Perfection is approached not by addition, but subtraction.

The Propagation of Minds [4]

Even when the existence of the soul is disputed—it is disputed by a mind, and so the primacy of the mind’s existence is inherently accepted by anyone who disputes the existence of the mind because the very act of disagreement can only be considered valid if it exists within an already existing mind. Therefore there are no ideas outside of minds because minds cause ideas, so ideas are the effects of minds.

The existence of minds are known to us through many forms of experimentation:

1. thinking about thoughts, ideas, and imaginations in your own mind;
2. communicating with another minds through language, art, numbers, etc.; and
3. writing about the content of your own mind and reading the content of other minds.

Given the evidence of birth and death, it is possible for a mind to exist in a form that is different from its current form. Before every mind is born, it either did not exist at all or it existed in a different form. If a mind can exist after not having existed, that very change in existence must be brought about either by itself or by an outside force.

If the mind caused itself to be created—as the people in our dreams are created by the mind in which they live and experience their reality—it is considered to be a Causal Mind because it is capable of causing existence from nonexistence. The causal mind is able to move between existence and nonexistence at will simply because it exists outside of that particular binding duality, much in the same way that an audience lives outside the timeline of the movie on their screen.

If, however, the mind was created by another mind or multiple minds—as is the case of our actual minds [the ones reading this article] which were created by the biological union of our parents (nature) and the sociological influence of our cultures (nurture)—it is considered to be an Effective Mind because its own successful creation was the intended effect as intended by the Causal Mind(s) which preceded its existence.

If the minds of two parents can cause the existence of a new mind, and all parents are themselves a child of their own two parents’ minds, then by tracing the process of birth backward in time we find that there must have been an Original Mind from which all other minds were produced.

From where did that Original Mind come? If it was the only mind in existence, and it caused it own existence from nonexistence, it was a Causal Mind.

Ergo, all Effective Minds in human society are the descendants of an original Causal Mind.

Imagine if someone in your dream tonight disagrees with your theory that your own dream was created by a Dreaming Mind. Instead, they believe the dream is the result of a 13.7 billion-year-old explosion. How would you prove your case?

Into what, exactly, is the Universe expanding? [5]

The tribe of Atheism claims victory over the tribe of Theism whenever a new subatomic or astronomic discovery “proves” that the Universe is guided by Nature instead of God. Sidestepping the curious irony of praising the vague concept of “Nature” in the same way religions praise their vague concepts of “God”, the expansion of spacetime itself begs the question that spacetime is currently expanding into something that is, itself, not spacetime.

If the Universe is expanding into something that is literally outside of itself (outside of both space and time), what do we call that spaceless and timeless region? Given that space is the third dimension [Difference], and time is the fourth dimension [Persistence], wouldn’t this Void represent a fifth dimension [Sentience/Free Will]?

What is beyond the farthest edges of your dream’s landscape? Unconsciousness?

If you think the Universe is big, imagine how “large” the area surrounding the Universe must be. What does that area look and feel like? How small must the Universe appear to something as large as this all-encompassing Omniverse?

For the sake of argument, let’s call this place outside of spacetime “God”. It’s not a father, it’s not a king, it’s not a lord, it’s not a person. It’s a concept, a conception of perfect nothingness (void) in relation to “everything” which is inside the Universe.

And now, we bring it home.

1. If spacetime is expanding into the Void (Not-Spacetime), the Void preceded, and still precedes, spacetime; the Void must also be larger than the Universe which is now expanding into it because a larger area cannot expand into a smaller area.
2. If the Void outside of spacetime existed prior to spacetime, it was an environment of Perfection in which there were no imperfections.
3. If the Void is a spatial and conceptual Perfection, and the Universe is that which is not Void, the Universe is imperfect in at least one way to distinguish it from the surrounding Perfection.
4. If the Universe can be imperfect in one way, it can be imperfect in many ways. If it can be imperfect in multiple ways, it can be imperfect in every way, compared to the Void which cannot be imperfect in even one way.
5. If the Universe is the collection of all possible imperfections, and the Void is only perfection because it lacks all imperfection, then the Void itself created an imperfect Universe in order to maintain its own relative Perfection, for nothing can be perfect unless imperfection is also possible.
6. If the Void [Perfection] created the Universe [Imperfection], and “Void” is an expedient alias for God, then God created the Universe.

If God created the Universe to maintain relative Perfection, then God needs us to be imperfect as much as we need God to be perfect.

God created us in order to become divine.

Without humanity, divinity is the lowest form of life.

Without us, God is nothing. We cause one another.

Though a perfect God can create an imperfect Universe (anything is possible to an agent of perfect omnipotence), a perfect God cannot exist within an imperfect Universe because the mere act of actualization would introduce a measure of imperfection into Perfection.

It is, therefore, a logical impossibility for God to exist within our imperfect Universe as an acting agent of Perfection. It does, however, remain possible, and highly likely, that an imperfect Universe can be the result of a perfectly-omnipotent Creator for a perfectly-omnipotent creator can create infinite possible universes except for one—the perfect Universe; the perfect Universe is the uncreated Universe.

Ergo, God simultaneously does and does not exist.

Deus est, et Deus non est.