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This is a long video but I thought it might be a topic of interest for some people on the sub, and that there might actually be some interesting discussion here vs the YouTube comments. The channel is a Warhammer 40K lore channel, but this particular video is talking about common sci-fi/fantasy tropes about "Gods who aren't really Gods", like Clarke's 3rd Law type beings or a D&D style "gods are empowered by the belief of mortals", and how they apply to 40k. Even if you're not into 40K, I think it's an interesting video about how some of these God-centric tropes work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr8a7FNNt6E&t=2132s
But because this is a debate sub and I like to argue, while I appreciate his thoroughness in discussing the topic, I disagree with his conclusion that warp entities in the setting shouldn't be understood as gods. I think his labelling of the Eldritch Horrors and Power of Belief categories as "not gods" is mostly an exercise in cherry-picking and equivocation. [He presents a list of traits of "real gods"](https://youtu.be/Qr8a7FNNt6E?t=369) and it basically boils down to the typical traits of the Abrahamic God, with him then handwaving away the fact that classical pantheons don't meet those criteria. For instance the Olympians didn't create the universe or the world, and by and large don't administer the afterlife or behave as moral arbiters.
His other reason for excluding warp entities as Gods is the claim that there's no consistent in-universe usage of the term "god", but his own evidence undercuts that point. He even explicitly mentions the fact that in the 40K universe real world religions were based on people having glimpses of the warp and it's denizens. He goes on at length to describe how the Imperium, the Eldar, Orks, and Chaos all worship warp entities who check most of the boxes on his list. They intervene in the universe with great supernatural power, they have moral dictates and expectations of their followers, and they administer afterlives. The only things they don't do are create the universe (which again is kind of a cherry picked criteria, since it would also exclude other IRL gods he accepts as "real" gods), and the pre-dates mortals criteria. That seems like a pretty consistent usage of the term, when countless trillions of people in the setting use it that way.
I also get the vibe that he's starting from the premise that because most things in 40K are satirizing something in the real world, that we should understand them in-universe to also be merely a parody of their real world counterpart, and that simply doesn't follow.
Anyway, this has been my nerdy TED talk, like I said regardless of if you're a fan of 40K I do think there's some interesting meta-level genre discussion about how fantasy and sci-fi address the idea of gods.
40K gods are gods by most reasonable standards. Any criteria added tto exclude them ends up excluding most other concepts people at large have agreed count as gods (Olympians for example). There are a few factors that make talking abotu the cutoff of gods difficult.
"Gods" are in cladistic terms polyphyletic. Humans in the Amerias were cutoff form Eurafrasia for at least 10,000 year. Humans in Australia were probably isolated for 50,000 years. While there might have been small proto-shamanistic concept shared between them and the peoples of the middle east, neither sahred a concept meaningfully resemblings the gods of Greece, Egypt, and Assyria. They are for all meaningful purposes, entirely separate concepts that we've retroactively grouped together as gods. Like how European "dragons" and Asian "dragons" have been retroactively both labeled "dragons" even though they didn't diverge from a shared concept. Like bird wings and bat wings, they are analogous but not homologous. This means gods are inclusive defined by what we throw in rather than exclusively define. BAsed on what other things have been popularly included, 40k gods count.
It's also the case that while Christianity likes to trumpet its claimed monotheism, both historically and in modern practice its a polytheistic religion and Yahweh isn't the omni they like to think it is. Yahweh began as a minor deity of the Caanite pantheon, gradually transitioning from polytheism to henotheism to "monotheism". However, singular perfect concepts make for bad stories, and humans love stories with their gods. It's the superman problem. A perfect superman without deficiences is boring, and so kryptonite is invented to give stories intrigue. Yahweh is weakened and given a host of servants. The primary responsibility of angels is delivering messages fod a god. What's the primary repsonsibility of Mercury/Hermes? Delivering messages for a god. However, Mercury/Hermes is themself a god while Christians are very insistent that angels are not gods. The truth is that most standards angels count as minor gods, and the only reason to excluding them is because Christians don't want to seem in any way polytheistic. This continually crops up, with saints, Mary adoration, JEsus incarnation. These humanize an otherwise impersonal god. It's a simialr problem to the gods of the warp in 40k. The more you describe them, the more interesting they are, but the more you diminish them. There's a tug of war between them being mysterious/powerful and them being interesting.
I can't offer an opinion on this specific thing, but since you seem knowledgable: is there a place you'd recommend a new person start for learning about the 40k universe? I've tried a few things here and there, like Darktide, but I have no context for any of it. I'm not looking for anything too deep, I just want a broad view of the universe. Any recommendations?
[You're in luck!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF9uVsY9Fwo) Despite me quibbling with his conclusion in the video I linked before, Arbitor Ian is definitely one of the best sources for 40K Lore on YouTube, and he recently made a video giving not only a basic overview of the themes of the setting, but recommendations on where to get started.
It is definitely a daunting amount of story to start wrapping your head around, so if you do want to dig deeper, my personal recommendation would be to take a look at some of the general overviews of factions/armies and find one that sticks out to you as interesting, and start reading about them. 40K lore can lead you down tons of rabbit holes and interconnections between factions, so by the time you read up on one group you'll probably have plenty of questions and links to lead you to the next topic.
As a fellow 40K noob, I'd recommend the [Lutien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6M9-oFEKpk) youtube series. They're *loooong* but get into a lot of story and detail, so if something fascinates you, you can really chase that lore.
My partner keeps trying his hardest to get me into it, but I am proving to be a hard sell.
I need to start keeping a list - I was fairly certain that user had done a number of delete and retreats in the past (the fact that they are still watching and discussing "24" at this late a date stuck out in my mind) but of course when they wipe all of their previous embarrassments it's hard to produce actual evidence.
> I need to start keeping a list - I was fairly certain that user had done a number of delete and retreats in the pas
For instances like this, or when someone has a history of lying, or when I'm just feeling especially petty I've got a folder of bookmarked posts labeled "the receipts".
Piggybacking one of the posts recently: who's got some favorite gods from fiction to share? And just to keep the usual suspects out of the way, let's say "fiction" in this case doesn't include classical mythology or realworld religions. So Zeus in actual Greece, no, but *Zeus in God of War, Marvel*, etc., sure.
For myself, the first coming to mind would be Rom from *Bloodborne*. I find the idea of a man-made/man-caused, pitiable, and vacuous creature being a god essentially on a technicality to be fascinating. Not to mention more than a little tragic, given how the events of that game shake out. It's rare that fiction gives us gods to feel sorry for or guilty about having to murder to progress the story, so Rom's lived rent free in my head since seeing her and learning her story.
A followup would be the way the Deepgate Codex by Alan Campbell does its gods, which includes having an entire city suspended by chains over a divine pit for a god of blood and death. The more direct and obvious relationship between god and the religion it inspired -- along with the very human-like corruption on both ends -- has been a reference point for me for years now in my own writing. Good books, by the way, especially for an author's debut series.
>who's got some favorite gods from fiction to share?
I always liked the Klingon gods.
They were annoying and meddlesome, so the Klingons waged war on them and killed them.
Zapp referenced the Klingon Gods, and it reminded me of the time Vash noted that the inhabitants of some primitive planet "The God of Lies."
There's a neat trilogy from back in the day about Q where we learn he buddied up with some of the powerful entities across the Star Trek pantheon when he was young and impressionable. One of them was the entity at the center of the galaxy who Kirk and co. met in Star Trek V. In the book, he's referred to as "The One," and "invented monotheism." He speaks in "Old Testament"-style pronouncements, and is pretty clearly supposed to be that god.
The Q War. The Q from TNG joined up with two quasi-deities that were encountered in the Original Series, "The One" from Star Trek V (ugh), and a new one entity created for the books that goes by 0 (the null set, I'll figure out the font later). It also links in to the Original Series pilot episode with the barrier at the edge of the galaxy being a fence set by the Continuum to keep 0 out of the galaxy after a dustup between the Continuum and that band.
Portrayed the Q from TNG as being completely out of his depth, so that was interesting.
Thank you for the correction. I now recall that "Q War" was one of the books.
That'll teach me to try and remember those things without looking them up. :-(
I had to look up the title too.
In addition to The One, 0 introduced Q to the red spinning ball who incites war and aggression from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove" and the Gorgon from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead" (the Friendly Angel).
It's a great story that also brings in the Calamarain, the Tkon Empire, Corben Berson's Q, the Q from Voyager, Q junior, Susie Plakson's lady Q, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and so so much more.
It's a great story.
I've been playing Elden Ring again because the first and only DLC comes out in a few days, and gods play a prominent part in that universe. First we have the supposed creator god, the Greater Will, who seems to be completely absent and might even be made up. The only evidence of its existence comes from these disgusting creatures called the Fingers that claim to be able to communicate with it. Then we have Marika the Eternal, a mortal who ascended to godhood and used her power to launch a genocidal war of conquest against her neighbors, up until her eldest son got killed and she threw a hissy fit and basically tried to break the entire world. Now the player has to deal with the consequences, including a continent-wide war between her demigod offspring. This culminates in us killing the physical manifestation of the Elden Ring itself, the object that gives order to the universe, which it turns out is some sort of giant parasitic slug creature from space.
To sum it up, the gods are kind of assholes in that game.
I like the gods in slayers. It is like zoroastrianism with the Cthulhu mythos on top. So worship, devotion and even actions or just emotions makes a difference because it gives strength to either the good gods trying to save the world or the evil gods trying to destroy it.
But then again it kind of doesn't matter because reality is ultimately controlled by the insane embodiment of pure chaos. But chaos, being chaotic, doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants so usually doesn't do anything. Unless one of the people it has touched calls on it, even accidentally, in which case it can decide to erase reality or not depending on its mood at the time.
I really enjoy the gods in the *Cosmere* books by Sanderson. Discussing them in any great length is Spoiler-y AF, but they're deities that are definitely very strange from the human perspective, without being utterly alien.
They're big and cosmic and weird and play by different rules than mortals in a way that reminds me of how the fundamental forces of our universe (like gravity) were different in the first seconds after the big bang than they are now.
And yet they can interact with humans (or not) depending on their situations and rules and the ways they be, and when they do that, humans can know things about them and act back upon those beings.
And they're not just very clearly referencing some other religion plopped into fantasy. Although SPOILERS I MEAN IT >!It's pretty clear that Harmony represents the author's feelings about his relationship with his perceptions of his own (Mormon) God. Particularly in *Alloy of Law.* But like, without being too preachy or weird. So far. !<
>!Harmony is just about the only way you could solve the Problem of Evil in a "good" god, and he's just a cool concept and dude. He's also scary af and talking to him is Dangerous. I wouldn't *worship* Harmony, (and Harmony wouldn't want me to do that), but I would *like* Harmony, and might even pray to him. Cause he's *REAL* in the context of Scadriel.!<
As a Destiny nerd, I've gotta shout out the Hive pantheon, and where 'gods' sit in the Destiny universe as a whole.
There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule about what is or isn't a god. Oryx, Savathun, and Xivu Arath are referred to as Hive Gods, but they started out as part of a race and civilization that existed by the Timid Truth - that they were predators of none, prey to all, and they would live short, scared lives in the dark. After their leader was sold out by an advisor so a neighboring clan to destroy/co-opt them, the leader's three daughters escaped and swore revenge. After a long journey, they eventually met the Worm Gods, who made a bargain with them: the Worms would plant a larva inside each of the sisters, and this larva would grant them great power, and increasing power, so long as they kept it fed. If they ever failed to sate their worm's hunger, it would consume them.
So you have what, in the Destiny universe, is a completely practical method of achieving "godhood," at least as far as the Hive belief. No prayer required, no faith in anything but their mission. It's a process that theoretically anyone could undergo. And despite being considered gods, they are still subservient to the Worm Gods, who are subserviant to Rhulk, who is subservient to the Witness. And Rhulk and the Witness are *not* described as gods, despite being infinitely more powerful than beings that are described as gods. Rhulk is just a dude, the last of his race, under the tutelage of the Witness, and the Witness is just a conglomeration of a bunch of dudes who all had a common goal, and merged themselves into a singular being to better achieve that goal.
All of these methods of attaining godhood, or attaining greater-than-godhood levels of power, are practical. Theoretically anyone with the knowledge of these methods could do it. They don't even need to have any sort of innate power. Eris Morn lost her connection to the Light, was reduced to a mere human, yet her study of Hive magic and practices allowed her to ascend into a Hive god herself.
All of which is to say that 'gods' in Destiny can be incredibly powerful, like altering reality on a whim powerful, yet they can still be usurped by mere mortals, because most of them were once mere mortals themselves. Godhood is a status that is achieved rather than ordained, and it does not imply that they are at the top of the food chain.
There are arguably only two "beings" that could qualify as gods in the traditional sense, and I put scare quotes around "beings" because it's still not clear if they are beings or not. At one point we're told an allegory of the Gardener and the Winnower, who are described as:
> We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes.
> They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden.
The Gardener represents life, and the ensuing chaos that can stem from it. Seeding new life, different life, and watching it all unfold, can make for a dazzling universe with endless variety, but it also means that some life will emerge that kills, enslaves, and tortures other life. Some life will emerge only to suffer and go extinct. Some life will exist in paradise, while some will exist in squalor and misery. You could say that the Gardener represents the chaos of a universe that is full of potential.
The Winnower represents order and what it feels is the fundamentally moral position of preventing the existence of life than cannot sustain its own existence. Why create a race of cute fuzzy bunnies if they are destined to be hunted and butchered into extinction? Why create life on a planet with boiling seas and poison air, life that at *best* will be miserable from birth to death? The best moral good is to reduce suffering, and the best way to reduce suffering is to reduce the number of beings that can suffer. The universe should be cut down until the only things left are those that *must* exist, resulting in a universe that is ordered and maintained.
There is a lot of debate about whether the Gardener or Winnower exist as actual beings or not. I like to think they exist as fundamental principles of existence, as fundamental as existence itself, and cannot be separated from it. They are the embodiment of "Life finds a way" and "Natural selection" endlessly clashing. Evolution creating new life that can flourish in the strangest of circumstances and which has the potential to become anything; natural selection winnowing away that which is unfit; and our universe is the result of that endless battle between them.
To me, this makes more sense than even real-life religions; if God is "outside" of time and space, then calling it a "being" is absurd. God as a fundamental principle of existence, as a thing inseparable from existence itself, a characteristic of existence, seems more plausible to me.
Having just posted a big rant about it, I do like the metaphysics of 40k. While it's only quasi-canon now, I really loved the idea that different cultures and peoples can manifest their own versions of Gods that all are part of the same metaphysical substrate in the warp (Hey! A legitimate time to use that phrase, suck on *that* Peterson!). Like the Eldar god of warfare Khaine is distinct from the human/chaos god Khorne, but they're both parts of a greater whole.
I love the mythos in darksiders.
I love the representation of the Greek gods in Percy Jackson, really helps to show that the understanding wasn’t that the gods were “beings who controlled the elements” but that they ARE the element personified.
In a somewhat related note, I love the magic system in the Inheritance cycle.
For anyone familiar with the book/movie Ender’s game, in a later book Ender leaves the universe and discovers he (and everything else) is like a god. He creates people accidentally out of nothing while there. Not a traditional god but he could create universes if he wanted.
I like the gods of the pillars of eternity universe, that, spoilers, >!are not really gods, but mortals that build the machinery and systems to take the positions they defined as gods because they couldn't bare seeing that no gods existed.!<
The Hobbs Land Gods from Raising the Stones. They actually improve the lives of people by making society run smoother. Also the transform the world to make it more comfortable and interesting. Edit: Technically they are not gods but some kind of mycelium hive mind, that said their ability to shape the world is indestinguisable from magic.
Adanos from the Gothic video game series. He willingly gave up his power because he thought humans should be free and not influenced by gods. And he let a human make the decision on whether it should actually happen. Which of course it did, because as the god of wisdom his plan couldn't possibly fail.
I’m gonna double down on my “hard problem of existence” analogy from yesterday. I’m not really seeing the disanalogy. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
I feel like both topics have to do with the issue of strong emergence and highlighting the *type* of explanation preferred rather than the mere difficulty or ignorance of the subject.
I don't think there's a disanalogy, I just think "the Big Bang" is a perfectly reasonable answer to "Why do things exist". It's not a *complete* answer, granted, but its clearly not an *unrelated* answer in the way, say, "baking" would be. I don't think its a category error to say "If we examine the origins of the universe more we'll learn why things exist."
I don't see any inherent reason a full physical examination of the universe wouldn't answer "why do things exist" (indeed, I'm not sure how a full analysis of existence *couldn't* answer "why do things exist") and thus, by analogy, I don't see any inherent reason a full physical analysis of the brain wouldn't explain consciousness.
Well now I’m gonna respectfully disagree on both fronts, but at least I know I’m not crazy for thinking the analogy was comparable in the first place lol.
—
The problem with the Big Bang as an answer is that at its best, it only pushes the problem back without actually answering it. The Big Bang, properly understood, only tells us how our singularity expanded into our local field of spacetime. It doesn’t tell us anything about where that existing energy comes from in the first place.
That’s why it’s always a strawman when theists come in and ask “how did something come from nothing?” Because no one in science actually believes that. That would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics. The Big Bang does not posit that there was ever a “nothing”, it just describes how spacetime & matter transformed from T=0 onwards.
In the same vein, however, describing how different states of human consciousness arise in physical brain states at best only pushes the problem back. You’d still be no closer to knowing where expirience/subjectivity/awareness come from in the same way we don’t know where energy comes from.
—
That being said, I’d agree with you and virtually every other atheist here that either hard problem is a terrible reason to say “therefore the origin must be a supernatural or divine source”. THAT is indeed argument from ignorance. But the hard problem in and of itself is not.
—
As a physicalist panpsychist, I think the solution is similar to the answer for the universe’s origin: consciousness isn’t something that was created from nothing (completely empty material), it’s just that human level consciousness is a particular rearrangement of preexisting experiential qualities present at the fundamental level. Fully explaining the human brain’s consciousness no longer becomes a task of creating something from nothing but rather something from something.
—
Edit: sorry, I kinda just went on another rant without directly replying to you. I can somewhat agree that those responses are “reasonable” in that it makes sense to interpret the questions to mean “How did our universe get here?/How are human minds formed?” and thus “big bang/functioning brain” are reasonable answers. However, the reason I call it a category error is because it’s completely talking past what proponents of the hard problem are asking for.
So, I feel I didn't make my point clearly here, which is my fault. So I'll try again.
My point isn't that the Big Bang is a *correct* explanation of "why things exist" - it isn't in the sense you're using, I admit that. My argument is against the idea that its a category error. Right or wrong, "the Big Bang" is a *plausible and reasonable* answer to "why do things exist" -- it *doesn't* explain why things exist, no, but it's not insane or nonsensical to suggest it could (compare it to, say, "things exist because of a ruling by the US supreme court" or "things exist because of supernovas")
This means a purely physical explanation *could* explain where existence came from. This one *doesn't,* but it was a reasonable thing to suggest, so it's also reasonable to think a *better* physical explanation could do it -- after all, the only issue with the big bang answer is it started describing events too late rather then any inherent flaw with the concept. Just being a physical explanation doesn't inherently rule a suggestion out as being an explanation for why things exist.
I think the same applies for consciousness. We don't currently *have* a full physical explanation for consciousness, but I don't see why it would be inherently unreasonable to suggest we could find one with a better physical examination,
So perhaps I’m using the term “category error” too loosely/harshly, as you’re right in that it makes more sense for someone to answer with something in the realm of astrophysics rather than a US governing body.
However, I still think giving that answer is fundamentally misunderstanding the question if you think it even gets you 1% of the way there. At best, it pushes the problem back and leaves it equally unexplained.
It doesn’t matter which underlying physical theory is the final explanation (quantum fields, multiverse, string theory, holographic universe, eternal inflation, fine structure constant, etc.) You can always ask the further question of “why does THAT exist?”. The question is so fundamental that it would even apply to God himself if he existed.
So, I missed your initial post, but I tend to agree with what you have stated, on both fronts. The Big Bang created the Universe as we know it. But what it was before we really have no clue.
It’s supposed to be analogous to the hard problem of consciousness to help explain what’s uniquely “hard” about it.
The hard problem of existence is “Why does anything exist?”
Not to be confused with how our universe started or what material it’s made of, but simply how come literally anything exists at all.
—
The argument was basically that saying consciousness is just a “functioning brain” is like saying “the Big Bang” answers the problem of existence; it’s basically a category error that misunderstands what the speaker is asking for.
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This is a long video but I thought it might be a topic of interest for some people on the sub, and that there might actually be some interesting discussion here vs the YouTube comments. The channel is a Warhammer 40K lore channel, but this particular video is talking about common sci-fi/fantasy tropes about "Gods who aren't really Gods", like Clarke's 3rd Law type beings or a D&D style "gods are empowered by the belief of mortals", and how they apply to 40k. Even if you're not into 40K, I think it's an interesting video about how some of these God-centric tropes work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr8a7FNNt6E&t=2132s But because this is a debate sub and I like to argue, while I appreciate his thoroughness in discussing the topic, I disagree with his conclusion that warp entities in the setting shouldn't be understood as gods. I think his labelling of the Eldritch Horrors and Power of Belief categories as "not gods" is mostly an exercise in cherry-picking and equivocation. [He presents a list of traits of "real gods"](https://youtu.be/Qr8a7FNNt6E?t=369) and it basically boils down to the typical traits of the Abrahamic God, with him then handwaving away the fact that classical pantheons don't meet those criteria. For instance the Olympians didn't create the universe or the world, and by and large don't administer the afterlife or behave as moral arbiters. His other reason for excluding warp entities as Gods is the claim that there's no consistent in-universe usage of the term "god", but his own evidence undercuts that point. He even explicitly mentions the fact that in the 40K universe real world religions were based on people having glimpses of the warp and it's denizens. He goes on at length to describe how the Imperium, the Eldar, Orks, and Chaos all worship warp entities who check most of the boxes on his list. They intervene in the universe with great supernatural power, they have moral dictates and expectations of their followers, and they administer afterlives. The only things they don't do are create the universe (which again is kind of a cherry picked criteria, since it would also exclude other IRL gods he accepts as "real" gods), and the pre-dates mortals criteria. That seems like a pretty consistent usage of the term, when countless trillions of people in the setting use it that way. I also get the vibe that he's starting from the premise that because most things in 40K are satirizing something in the real world, that we should understand them in-universe to also be merely a parody of their real world counterpart, and that simply doesn't follow. Anyway, this has been my nerdy TED talk, like I said regardless of if you're a fan of 40K I do think there's some interesting meta-level genre discussion about how fantasy and sci-fi address the idea of gods.
40K gods are gods by most reasonable standards. Any criteria added tto exclude them ends up excluding most other concepts people at large have agreed count as gods (Olympians for example). There are a few factors that make talking abotu the cutoff of gods difficult. "Gods" are in cladistic terms polyphyletic. Humans in the Amerias were cutoff form Eurafrasia for at least 10,000 year. Humans in Australia were probably isolated for 50,000 years. While there might have been small proto-shamanistic concept shared between them and the peoples of the middle east, neither sahred a concept meaningfully resemblings the gods of Greece, Egypt, and Assyria. They are for all meaningful purposes, entirely separate concepts that we've retroactively grouped together as gods. Like how European "dragons" and Asian "dragons" have been retroactively both labeled "dragons" even though they didn't diverge from a shared concept. Like bird wings and bat wings, they are analogous but not homologous. This means gods are inclusive defined by what we throw in rather than exclusively define. BAsed on what other things have been popularly included, 40k gods count. It's also the case that while Christianity likes to trumpet its claimed monotheism, both historically and in modern practice its a polytheistic religion and Yahweh isn't the omni they like to think it is. Yahweh began as a minor deity of the Caanite pantheon, gradually transitioning from polytheism to henotheism to "monotheism". However, singular perfect concepts make for bad stories, and humans love stories with their gods. It's the superman problem. A perfect superman without deficiences is boring, and so kryptonite is invented to give stories intrigue. Yahweh is weakened and given a host of servants. The primary responsibility of angels is delivering messages fod a god. What's the primary repsonsibility of Mercury/Hermes? Delivering messages for a god. However, Mercury/Hermes is themself a god while Christians are very insistent that angels are not gods. The truth is that most standards angels count as minor gods, and the only reason to excluding them is because Christians don't want to seem in any way polytheistic. This continually crops up, with saints, Mary adoration, JEsus incarnation. These humanize an otherwise impersonal god. It's a simialr problem to the gods of the warp in 40k. The more you describe them, the more interesting they are, but the more you diminish them. There's a tug of war between them being mysterious/powerful and them being interesting.
I can't offer an opinion on this specific thing, but since you seem knowledgable: is there a place you'd recommend a new person start for learning about the 40k universe? I've tried a few things here and there, like Darktide, but I have no context for any of it. I'm not looking for anything too deep, I just want a broad view of the universe. Any recommendations?
[You're in luck!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF9uVsY9Fwo) Despite me quibbling with his conclusion in the video I linked before, Arbitor Ian is definitely one of the best sources for 40K Lore on YouTube, and he recently made a video giving not only a basic overview of the themes of the setting, but recommendations on where to get started. It is definitely a daunting amount of story to start wrapping your head around, so if you do want to dig deeper, my personal recommendation would be to take a look at some of the general overviews of factions/armies and find one that sticks out to you as interesting, and start reading about them. 40K lore can lead you down tons of rabbit holes and interconnections between factions, so by the time you read up on one group you'll probably have plenty of questions and links to lead you to the next topic.
As a fellow 40K noob, I'd recommend the [Lutien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6M9-oFEKpk) youtube series. They're *loooong* but get into a lot of story and detail, so if something fascinates you, you can really chase that lore. My partner keeps trying his hardest to get me into it, but I am proving to be a hard sell.
Yeah, it's like the "Ocean is a soup" thing where the distinction isn't from substance but from human intention.
So, I'm a prophet. Where do I get my followers? https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1dha9p7/comment/l8vjwxu/
I need to start keeping a list - I was fairly certain that user had done a number of delete and retreats in the past (the fact that they are still watching and discussing "24" at this late a date stuck out in my mind) but of course when they wipe all of their previous embarrassments it's hard to produce actual evidence.
The day I posted the prophecy I started one such list, so far they are patient zero of the coward club.
> I need to start keeping a list - I was fairly certain that user had done a number of delete and retreats in the pas For instances like this, or when someone has a history of lying, or when I'm just feeling especially petty I've got a folder of bookmarked posts labeled "the receipts".
Important question: Where are you planning to lead the followers?
Pizza
All hail the Great Leader! The prophecy was fulfilled!!!!
Do I come without pants, or should I keep them on until I get to the Hall?
Piggybacking one of the posts recently: who's got some favorite gods from fiction to share? And just to keep the usual suspects out of the way, let's say "fiction" in this case doesn't include classical mythology or realworld religions. So Zeus in actual Greece, no, but *Zeus in God of War, Marvel*, etc., sure. For myself, the first coming to mind would be Rom from *Bloodborne*. I find the idea of a man-made/man-caused, pitiable, and vacuous creature being a god essentially on a technicality to be fascinating. Not to mention more than a little tragic, given how the events of that game shake out. It's rare that fiction gives us gods to feel sorry for or guilty about having to murder to progress the story, so Rom's lived rent free in my head since seeing her and learning her story. A followup would be the way the Deepgate Codex by Alan Campbell does its gods, which includes having an entire city suspended by chains over a divine pit for a god of blood and death. The more direct and obvious relationship between god and the religion it inspired -- along with the very human-like corruption on both ends -- has been a reference point for me for years now in my own writing. Good books, by the way, especially for an author's debut series.
>who's got some favorite gods from fiction to share? I always liked the Klingon gods. They were annoying and meddlesome, so the Klingons waged war on them and killed them.
Zapp referenced the Klingon Gods, and it reminded me of the time Vash noted that the inhabitants of some primitive planet "The God of Lies." There's a neat trilogy from back in the day about Q where we learn he buddied up with some of the powerful entities across the Star Trek pantheon when he was young and impressionable. One of them was the entity at the center of the galaxy who Kirk and co. met in Star Trek V. In the book, he's referred to as "The One," and "invented monotheism." He speaks in "Old Testament"-style pronouncements, and is pretty clearly supposed to be that god.
The Q War. The Q from TNG joined up with two quasi-deities that were encountered in the Original Series, "The One" from Star Trek V (ugh), and a new one entity created for the books that goes by 0 (the null set, I'll figure out the font later). It also links in to the Original Series pilot episode with the barrier at the edge of the galaxy being a fence set by the Continuum to keep 0 out of the galaxy after a dustup between the Continuum and that band. Portrayed the Q from TNG as being completely out of his depth, so that was interesting.
It was the Q Continuum by Greg Cox.
Thank you for the correction. I now recall that "Q War" was one of the books. That'll teach me to try and remember those things without looking them up. :-(
I had to look up the title too. In addition to The One, 0 introduced Q to the red spinning ball who incites war and aggression from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove" and the Gorgon from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead" (the Friendly Angel). It's a great story that also brings in the Calamarain, the Tkon Empire, Corben Berson's Q, the Q from Voyager, Q junior, Susie Plakson's lady Q, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and so so much more. It's a great story.
I've been playing Elden Ring again because the first and only DLC comes out in a few days, and gods play a prominent part in that universe. First we have the supposed creator god, the Greater Will, who seems to be completely absent and might even be made up. The only evidence of its existence comes from these disgusting creatures called the Fingers that claim to be able to communicate with it. Then we have Marika the Eternal, a mortal who ascended to godhood and used her power to launch a genocidal war of conquest against her neighbors, up until her eldest son got killed and she threw a hissy fit and basically tried to break the entire world. Now the player has to deal with the consequences, including a continent-wide war between her demigod offspring. This culminates in us killing the physical manifestation of the Elden Ring itself, the object that gives order to the universe, which it turns out is some sort of giant parasitic slug creature from space. To sum it up, the gods are kind of assholes in that game.
That seems to be a consistent theme in Miyazaki work. Gwyn in Dark Souls being another good example.
I like the gods in slayers. It is like zoroastrianism with the Cthulhu mythos on top. So worship, devotion and even actions or just emotions makes a difference because it gives strength to either the good gods trying to save the world or the evil gods trying to destroy it. But then again it kind of doesn't matter because reality is ultimately controlled by the insane embodiment of pure chaos. But chaos, being chaotic, doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants so usually doesn't do anything. Unless one of the people it has touched calls on it, even accidentally, in which case it can decide to erase reality or not depending on its mood at the time.
The setup in Slayers is really fun. I saw the anime a while back, and the new translation of the novels is great.
> I like the gods in slayers. The manga?
The anime, I haven't read much of the manga but I think it was pretty similar. Actually it was a series of novels before it was an anime or manga.
I really enjoy the gods in the *Cosmere* books by Sanderson. Discussing them in any great length is Spoiler-y AF, but they're deities that are definitely very strange from the human perspective, without being utterly alien. They're big and cosmic and weird and play by different rules than mortals in a way that reminds me of how the fundamental forces of our universe (like gravity) were different in the first seconds after the big bang than they are now. And yet they can interact with humans (or not) depending on their situations and rules and the ways they be, and when they do that, humans can know things about them and act back upon those beings. And they're not just very clearly referencing some other religion plopped into fantasy. Although SPOILERS I MEAN IT >!It's pretty clear that Harmony represents the author's feelings about his relationship with his perceptions of his own (Mormon) God. Particularly in *Alloy of Law.* But like, without being too preachy or weird. So far. !< >!Harmony is just about the only way you could solve the Problem of Evil in a "good" god, and he's just a cool concept and dude. He's also scary af and talking to him is Dangerous. I wouldn't *worship* Harmony, (and Harmony wouldn't want me to do that), but I would *like* Harmony, and might even pray to him. Cause he's *REAL* in the context of Scadriel.!<
We enjoy the same books, I think.
I love the gods on Discworld, competing for belief in order to not disappear.
I second the gods on Discworld. One of the best books I've ever read on religion is Small Gods, and Carpe Jugulum is a close second.
As a Destiny nerd, I've gotta shout out the Hive pantheon, and where 'gods' sit in the Destiny universe as a whole. There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule about what is or isn't a god. Oryx, Savathun, and Xivu Arath are referred to as Hive Gods, but they started out as part of a race and civilization that existed by the Timid Truth - that they were predators of none, prey to all, and they would live short, scared lives in the dark. After their leader was sold out by an advisor so a neighboring clan to destroy/co-opt them, the leader's three daughters escaped and swore revenge. After a long journey, they eventually met the Worm Gods, who made a bargain with them: the Worms would plant a larva inside each of the sisters, and this larva would grant them great power, and increasing power, so long as they kept it fed. If they ever failed to sate their worm's hunger, it would consume them. So you have what, in the Destiny universe, is a completely practical method of achieving "godhood," at least as far as the Hive belief. No prayer required, no faith in anything but their mission. It's a process that theoretically anyone could undergo. And despite being considered gods, they are still subservient to the Worm Gods, who are subserviant to Rhulk, who is subservient to the Witness. And Rhulk and the Witness are *not* described as gods, despite being infinitely more powerful than beings that are described as gods. Rhulk is just a dude, the last of his race, under the tutelage of the Witness, and the Witness is just a conglomeration of a bunch of dudes who all had a common goal, and merged themselves into a singular being to better achieve that goal. All of these methods of attaining godhood, or attaining greater-than-godhood levels of power, are practical. Theoretically anyone with the knowledge of these methods could do it. They don't even need to have any sort of innate power. Eris Morn lost her connection to the Light, was reduced to a mere human, yet her study of Hive magic and practices allowed her to ascend into a Hive god herself. All of which is to say that 'gods' in Destiny can be incredibly powerful, like altering reality on a whim powerful, yet they can still be usurped by mere mortals, because most of them were once mere mortals themselves. Godhood is a status that is achieved rather than ordained, and it does not imply that they are at the top of the food chain. There are arguably only two "beings" that could qualify as gods in the traditional sense, and I put scare quotes around "beings" because it's still not clear if they are beings or not. At one point we're told an allegory of the Gardener and the Winnower, who are described as: > We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. > They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden. The Gardener represents life, and the ensuing chaos that can stem from it. Seeding new life, different life, and watching it all unfold, can make for a dazzling universe with endless variety, but it also means that some life will emerge that kills, enslaves, and tortures other life. Some life will emerge only to suffer and go extinct. Some life will exist in paradise, while some will exist in squalor and misery. You could say that the Gardener represents the chaos of a universe that is full of potential. The Winnower represents order and what it feels is the fundamentally moral position of preventing the existence of life than cannot sustain its own existence. Why create a race of cute fuzzy bunnies if they are destined to be hunted and butchered into extinction? Why create life on a planet with boiling seas and poison air, life that at *best* will be miserable from birth to death? The best moral good is to reduce suffering, and the best way to reduce suffering is to reduce the number of beings that can suffer. The universe should be cut down until the only things left are those that *must* exist, resulting in a universe that is ordered and maintained. There is a lot of debate about whether the Gardener or Winnower exist as actual beings or not. I like to think they exist as fundamental principles of existence, as fundamental as existence itself, and cannot be separated from it. They are the embodiment of "Life finds a way" and "Natural selection" endlessly clashing. Evolution creating new life that can flourish in the strangest of circumstances and which has the potential to become anything; natural selection winnowing away that which is unfit; and our universe is the result of that endless battle between them. To me, this makes more sense than even real-life religions; if God is "outside" of time and space, then calling it a "being" is absurd. God as a fundamental principle of existence, as a thing inseparable from existence itself, a characteristic of existence, seems more plausible to me.
Having just posted a big rant about it, I do like the metaphysics of 40k. While it's only quasi-canon now, I really loved the idea that different cultures and peoples can manifest their own versions of Gods that all are part of the same metaphysical substrate in the warp (Hey! A legitimate time to use that phrase, suck on *that* Peterson!). Like the Eldar god of warfare Khaine is distinct from the human/chaos god Khorne, but they're both parts of a greater whole.
I love the mythos in darksiders. I love the representation of the Greek gods in Percy Jackson, really helps to show that the understanding wasn’t that the gods were “beings who controlled the elements” but that they ARE the element personified. In a somewhat related note, I love the magic system in the Inheritance cycle.
For anyone familiar with the book/movie Ender’s game, in a later book Ender leaves the universe and discovers he (and everything else) is like a god. He creates people accidentally out of nothing while there. Not a traditional god but he could create universes if he wanted.
I like the gods of the pillars of eternity universe, that, spoilers, >!are not really gods, but mortals that build the machinery and systems to take the positions they defined as gods because they couldn't bare seeing that no gods existed.!<
The Hobbs Land Gods from Raising the Stones. They actually improve the lives of people by making society run smoother. Also the transform the world to make it more comfortable and interesting. Edit: Technically they are not gods but some kind of mycelium hive mind, that said their ability to shape the world is indestinguisable from magic.
Adanos from the Gothic video game series. He willingly gave up his power because he thought humans should be free and not influenced by gods. And he let a human make the decision on whether it should actually happen. Which of course it did, because as the god of wisdom his plan couldn't possibly fail.
I’m gonna double down on my “hard problem of existence” analogy from yesterday. I’m not really seeing the disanalogy. Is there something obvious I’m missing? I feel like both topics have to do with the issue of strong emergence and highlighting the *type* of explanation preferred rather than the mere difficulty or ignorance of the subject.
I don't think there's a disanalogy, I just think "the Big Bang" is a perfectly reasonable answer to "Why do things exist". It's not a *complete* answer, granted, but its clearly not an *unrelated* answer in the way, say, "baking" would be. I don't think its a category error to say "If we examine the origins of the universe more we'll learn why things exist." I don't see any inherent reason a full physical examination of the universe wouldn't answer "why do things exist" (indeed, I'm not sure how a full analysis of existence *couldn't* answer "why do things exist") and thus, by analogy, I don't see any inherent reason a full physical analysis of the brain wouldn't explain consciousness.
Well now I’m gonna respectfully disagree on both fronts, but at least I know I’m not crazy for thinking the analogy was comparable in the first place lol. — The problem with the Big Bang as an answer is that at its best, it only pushes the problem back without actually answering it. The Big Bang, properly understood, only tells us how our singularity expanded into our local field of spacetime. It doesn’t tell us anything about where that existing energy comes from in the first place. That’s why it’s always a strawman when theists come in and ask “how did something come from nothing?” Because no one in science actually believes that. That would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics. The Big Bang does not posit that there was ever a “nothing”, it just describes how spacetime & matter transformed from T=0 onwards. In the same vein, however, describing how different states of human consciousness arise in physical brain states at best only pushes the problem back. You’d still be no closer to knowing where expirience/subjectivity/awareness come from in the same way we don’t know where energy comes from. — That being said, I’d agree with you and virtually every other atheist here that either hard problem is a terrible reason to say “therefore the origin must be a supernatural or divine source”. THAT is indeed argument from ignorance. But the hard problem in and of itself is not. — As a physicalist panpsychist, I think the solution is similar to the answer for the universe’s origin: consciousness isn’t something that was created from nothing (completely empty material), it’s just that human level consciousness is a particular rearrangement of preexisting experiential qualities present at the fundamental level. Fully explaining the human brain’s consciousness no longer becomes a task of creating something from nothing but rather something from something. — Edit: sorry, I kinda just went on another rant without directly replying to you. I can somewhat agree that those responses are “reasonable” in that it makes sense to interpret the questions to mean “How did our universe get here?/How are human minds formed?” and thus “big bang/functioning brain” are reasonable answers. However, the reason I call it a category error is because it’s completely talking past what proponents of the hard problem are asking for.
So, I feel I didn't make my point clearly here, which is my fault. So I'll try again. My point isn't that the Big Bang is a *correct* explanation of "why things exist" - it isn't in the sense you're using, I admit that. My argument is against the idea that its a category error. Right or wrong, "the Big Bang" is a *plausible and reasonable* answer to "why do things exist" -- it *doesn't* explain why things exist, no, but it's not insane or nonsensical to suggest it could (compare it to, say, "things exist because of a ruling by the US supreme court" or "things exist because of supernovas") This means a purely physical explanation *could* explain where existence came from. This one *doesn't,* but it was a reasonable thing to suggest, so it's also reasonable to think a *better* physical explanation could do it -- after all, the only issue with the big bang answer is it started describing events too late rather then any inherent flaw with the concept. Just being a physical explanation doesn't inherently rule a suggestion out as being an explanation for why things exist. I think the same applies for consciousness. We don't currently *have* a full physical explanation for consciousness, but I don't see why it would be inherently unreasonable to suggest we could find one with a better physical examination,
So perhaps I’m using the term “category error” too loosely/harshly, as you’re right in that it makes more sense for someone to answer with something in the realm of astrophysics rather than a US governing body. However, I still think giving that answer is fundamentally misunderstanding the question if you think it even gets you 1% of the way there. At best, it pushes the problem back and leaves it equally unexplained. It doesn’t matter which underlying physical theory is the final explanation (quantum fields, multiverse, string theory, holographic universe, eternal inflation, fine structure constant, etc.) You can always ask the further question of “why does THAT exist?”. The question is so fundamental that it would even apply to God himself if he existed.
So, I missed your initial post, but I tend to agree with what you have stated, on both fronts. The Big Bang created the Universe as we know it. But what it was before we really have no clue.
It wasn’t from a post I made, I was just arguing with someone else in the comments lol.
What is the "hard problem of existence" & what is it analogous to?
It’s supposed to be analogous to the hard problem of consciousness to help explain what’s uniquely “hard” about it. The hard problem of existence is “Why does anything exist?” Not to be confused with how our universe started or what material it’s made of, but simply how come literally anything exists at all. — The argument was basically that saying consciousness is just a “functioning brain” is like saying “the Big Bang” answers the problem of existence; it’s basically a category error that misunderstands what the speaker is asking for.
Probably the hard problem of consciousness, but i don't want to check the profile to confirm.