Question about y'alls theologies!
Does the existence of gods predate or postdate humans as we currently exist as a species?
(atheists need not reply)
@starkatt Do concepts pre-exist the beings that concieve of them?
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying gods are entirely mental constructs, dangit Coyote /stop glaring at me/)
@starkatt @indi Well, as a parallel question, does math exist? Is math discovered or is it decided? Did negative numbers exist before we described them? Square roots? Imaginary numbers? Octonions?
At what point does a concept cease to be a creation or a conceit and become a property of the world awaiting discovery? Depends on your question and your perspective.
@orrery Yes that's what I was trying to say too. :)
@indi Okay, right, I did misread your statement. Vehement agreement! Apologies!
Theology, Craft Sequence
@starkatt This whole thing less me down an awesome train of thought that ended up with me pondering the epic colonialism of the Craftworker mindset. I can derive arithmetic from first principles too, that doesn't mean it's invalid.
Theology, Craft Sequence
I was trying and failing to source a specific quote from Craft Sequence about creation myths, and how they can be retroactively true, earlier in this thread. Something like "as soon as we discovered gods, they had always existed." But maybe that was from Gunnerkrigg Court.
Closest I found was from Fulm Fathom Five (paraphrased): "I suspect that if we could go back in time to the beginning, we'd find all of [the creation myths] happening simultaneously."
@indi @starkatt But... does it?
It really comes down to "what math is." If I've already shared the IdeaChannel "Math May Not Exist" video, I won't do it again, but there's currently an argument in the philosophy departments of some universities as to whether math is a property of the universe or an "unusually effective symbolic language for describing physics." There is an argument to be made we have, at least at some level, "made math up."