“God is a Verb” by R. Buckminster Fuller (1968)

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/194/god.is.a.verb

by MilnerRoute • 8 years ago

94 107 8 years ago

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wizardforhire• 8 years ago

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plainOldText• 8 years ago

Buckminster Fuller was the architect who envisioned a new kind of house, called the Dymaxion House. Fortunately it didn’t pick up. It was a great engineering exercise, as the house was quite simple and efficient, but on the other hand it had no soul. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house

officialchicken• 8 years ago

He popularized the geodesic dome.

While no doubt an eccentric genius and early advocate of systems theory, I can't really give him a pass after coining the term "synergetics" [0]. The common form of the word used today is - synergy. He also coined the terms "cloud nine", "tensegrity", and "dymaxion".

"Experience with synergetics encourages a new way of approaching and solving problems." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Reader beware: much of his writings are either math heavy or word salad. Or both.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergetics_(Fuller) Edit: corrected spelling of his name

wu-ikkyu2• 8 years ago

Not having a "soul" seems like a poor reason to rejoice in the failure of such an affordable and efficient home, especially considering how many people live in "cookie cutter" houses, bland apartments, not to mention outrageous prices, and the effect on the environment of building such inefficient homes.

"The severest blow of all was that both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws."

-Fuller

bonesss2• 8 years ago

Not too far removed (philosophically), from 'theological noncognitivism ' [0]: the idea that 'god' is more of a concept like 'hope' or 'love', not a thing like 'milk', and a poorly understood & undefined one at that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism

blowski3• 8 years ago

I’m a regular Church-going Christian, and could definitely go along with that theory. As a gross over-simplification Jesus is a noun, the Holy Sprit is a verb, God is an entire language.

kendallpark• 8 years ago

Curious: what is the Father, then?

pasta• 8 years ago

The Bible has a lot of different names for God to teach people about who and what he is.

So you could say all those names explain the concept of God.

This link provides some examples: https://www.gotquestions.org/names-of-God.html

Edit: maybe more interesting is the Wikipedia articles listing the names of different kinds of religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God

stult• 8 years ago

Well, at a minimum we certainly know Jesus was a word. In the beginning, at least.

coliveira6• 8 years ago

It is funny that god is a language, but he lived alone for the eternity. Was he communicating with himself alone?... Just another "mystery" that believers will sweep under the rug.

jkingsbery2• 8 years ago

For whatever it's worth, at least as that wiki page described it, 'god' isn't cognitively meaningful. Most Christian philosophers I've read fall into a camp that would say that "hope" and "love" are real and cognitively meaningful, but also metaphysical and therefore something that we can know partially but not completely (and, as you say, understood poorly as a result of the incomplete knowledge).

jimmy13• 8 years ago

yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is

It corresponds with God's name of himself in the OT as well as Jesus's name of Himself as well:

“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”.

“Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’"

then in John's Gospel, Jesus says, "before Abraham was, I AM"

09bjb11• 8 years ago

"Theological noncognitivism" is not too far removed from "ignosticism", according to your link. Ignosticism states: the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term "god" has no coherent and unambiguous definition. Totally valid, to the extent that saying that something that we can't bottle and stopper must be irrelevant helps anyone sleep at night.

I suppose my one point of disagreement is that the poem is philosophically aligned with Questions of God-ness being pointless...the poem doesn't strike me that way (totally subjective of course). And Buckminster Fuller was well known to have undergone a pretty profound mystical experience (whatever that means) that shaped the rest of his life.

jasonkostempski• 8 years ago

"God" has so many definitions it's completely useless as word to be used for conversation, even between 2 people of the same faith, maybe even for a single person to have internal thoughts about. It's amazing how much conflict arises just because everyone wants to use the same word for an intangible thing.

Maybe we can start a database and every person creates a unique id for their current definition of intangible things. Even if they copy the exact definition for an intangible thing from someone elses intangible thing, it gets a new id. If they want to modify a definition of their own intangible thing, new id. Then every recorded use of the word requires a link to the definition that individual was using at the time of the conversation. In the case of "God", I don't think UUIDs will be big enough. The db will, of course, have to be decentralized and blockchain based.

zigzag4482• 8 years ago

God is a point in an uncertain future. The more uncertain the future the bigger God wil be. This also explains the friction between science and religion,because science makes the future less uncertain and thus god smaller.

sametmax• 8 years ago

Given that God is omnipotent, you can always build a narrative where God is responsible for science and whatever future. You can't make the concept of God smaller. At best you can make a religious narrative irrelevant.

But you also don't need a religion to play with the concept of God. And you certainly don't even need God to have a religion.

beders11• 8 years ago

If he(?!?) is omnipotent, he's a massive douche. Or as Epicurus put it:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

panic• 8 years ago

I'd say science makes the future more uncertain, not less, by giving us more tools to change it. It's easier to figure out how to change things than to understand the impact of those changes.

Emma_Goldman2• 8 years ago

I think this must be true. The greater our understanding of the world, and the greater our ability to manipulate the world, the greater the options available to humans and the more complex their interaction. The world has been significantly less predictable since the Enlightenment, and the rejection of the fixed socio-theological order that preceded it. Life in pre-modern Europe was very predictable - almost everyone was a peasant who followed the same seasonal cycle, and stood in deference to the same feudal and religious system.

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

You can then say that, with science, God is the destination.

amelius• 8 years ago

Well, some people are pretty certain that if there's one thing that will eventually destroy this planet, it must be science.

zigzag4482• 8 years ago

Fundamental research or purely scientific research is not intended to solve a predetermined practical problem, but in the long run fundamental research eventually also results in practical applications. Like for example the internet and the weather report.

OtterCoder6• 8 years ago

I despise the idea of the God of the gaps. I don't believe in a supernatural God, but in one who presides over nature. Not one who defies science, but even allows himself to be known by personal experiment. Why should a miracle be wrought by magic, when physics would suffice?

My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks in reality.

09bjb11• 8 years ago

Yeah, to me the miraculous existence of anything at all, the ability to enjoy pure wonder, and a fully "unitive" experience once in a while...is more than enough for me. That God certainly lives up to its name.

Daniel32• 8 years ago

AH! I immediately googled "My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks of reality" because it sounds so much like something Bonhoeffer would say. Well done. Also, excellent point, I might disagree with your disbelieving in a supernatural God, especially in terms of design and origin, but yes, physics is an incredible canvas. "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." Romans 1:20

sofal2• 8 years ago

That sounds like Mormonism for sure. I also used to believe it. But I later realized how unreliable this "personal experiment" is.

cicero• 8 years ago

God of the gaps is rejected by most well-educated theologians, especially in the Catholic Thomist tradition. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, God is the foundation of existence, like a substrate underlying reality, but distinct from all other things. God maintains the existence of all things, including the laws of physics. Although God does not have to operate the universe in a consistent manner, he does so for at least two reasons. 1) a well ordered universe operating according to consistent laws has a beauty that reflects the nature of God, who is not arbitrary, but faithfully keeps his word. 2) It provides a predictable and stable place in which life can develop and thrive.

However, since God operates physics, he certainly could "violate" it, but we believe he has done so only in very rare cases to get peoples' attention.

jkingsbery2• 8 years ago

Aquinas wrote that God is "ipsum esse subsistens," translated by Bishop Robert Barron as "the shear act of 'to be' itself." So the idea of God not simply as a noun but as an action (i.e., verb) can be found at least as early as the 13th century.

_xnmw2• 8 years ago

Ghazali and Ibn al-Arabi asserted a related concept known as "wahdat al-Wujud" in Sufi literature. Often translated as "unity of Being" and confused with pantheism (which it is not), it could encompass what Aquinas said, "the sheer act of 'to be' itself", but with the additional restrictive clause that "nothing else 'is' itself". Which is a significantly more precise predicate than "God is a verb".

danharaj2• 8 years ago

There is a similar thought in the Dao De Jing

danielam• 8 years ago

I'm glad you brought this up. The so-called existential Thomists are strong on this point. Frederick Wilhelmsen's "The Paradoxical Structure of Existence" [0] was my first encounter with this understanding of God. I strongly recommend this book for those whose interest was piqued by God-as-verb (in place of the God-as-teapot canard). The book offers a great interpretation of Parmenides and Heraclitus as having been closer to one another than the way in which they are typically presented in philosophical texts. For example, Parmenides correctly intuited Be-ing but failed as soon as he attempted to conceptualize and crystalize it into a noun (and also accounts for this curious silence on the plurality of beings in this regard). It is only then that he and Heraclitus part ways. The book continues with Avicenna's discovery of existence as something distinct from essence, then onto Averroes' error of demoting existence to the accidental order (understandable once to understand that the epistemic order is the reverse of the metaphysical order). Ultimately, we come to the understanding of God as the very act of existence, an act that precedes the essential order of things and cannot itself be conceptualized because it is not a thing, but precedes all things and causes them to be at every instant. That is a far more satisfying account of God than the caricaturish and anemic view of some ghastly thing floating about the universe performing magic tricks. It also makes God impossible to ignore as an unnecessary being-among-many.

Another book that touches on this subject is Etienne Gilson's "God and Philosophy"[1]. One of the most interesting bits for me is where he draws attention to the Old Testament where God reveals himself to Moses as "I am He who is". I always thought that was a rather curiously mysterious way of revealing oneself. But on this understanding of God as the act of existence, it makes perfect sense. God is, or God is Is, so to speak. So really, we trace this understanding of God -- albeit not a philosophical one -- to at least the second millenium BC.

[0] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351477703 [1] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300092998/god-and-philos...

psyc3• 8 years ago

Wikipedia has a bunch of interesting notes about the interpretation of the ‘being verb’ name of God:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am

warent• 8 years ago

The line breaks on this make it hard to read. Is there a rhyming mechanism in play here that my amateur poetic brain isn't picking up on?

bordercases• 8 years ago

It's acting as a universal delimiter, like commas. Even though it would be technically correct to put commas everywhere for creating emphasis, it would be ugly, and wouldn't cover all the cases for emphasis that Fuller is trying to create. My guess is that he's trying to communicate how he would pace the poem in his own speech.

kleer0013• 8 years ago

God is a direction.

beders11• 8 years ago

More of a misdirection, really.

I cry over the thousands of years of wasted time where humanity has tried to figure out the demands of an entity that simply doesn't exist.

Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.

It's a frigging disaster.

Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early. Where we didn't destroy libraries, but gradually improved their wisdom. All those years down the drain. Sigh.

vumgl2• 8 years ago

Not only wasted time, but also wasted intellectual energy. Many theologians and apologetics are often smart people that could use their intellect to more useful (i.e. right direction) domains.

dragonwriter7• 8 years ago

Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early.

Having seen the history of tribalism fused with areligious and antireligious ideologies and empowered by applied science in the modern era, I can't see it as particularly better than the results of tribalism fused with religious ideology but without systematic science earlier in history.

Science is a powerful multiplier, but inherently value-free; the values to which it is applied necessarily come from elsewhere

nvahalik2• 8 years ago

Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.

Actually, the biggest and dirtiest wars of at least our recent history were actually driven by men who were atheists (or at least non-theists). Hitler, Pol-pot, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... all atheists with body counts in the tens (hundreds?) of millions.

Furthermore, Some of the biggest advances in the sciences (take for example the scientific method as described by Sir Francis Bacon assumed that the universe itself was ordered by God and therefore science was actually possible) and the institutions of higher learning were started as ways to train people for purposes of theology (thinking here of places like Oxford and Princeton).

Religion has actually been a huge driver in our ability to teach and understand the world.

kleer0013• 8 years ago

I'm an atheist and I believe in God. I also believe in Up and North and Clockwise rotation.

Let me clarify. In my view what we have now with these religions and dogma is a big centuries long game of telephone across generations and languages.

If you've done something good you've done something in the spirit of god. There's no reward, it's just a direction. But see that there, the missing "o"? God, Good, same word. See? No mystery, just a linguistic error.

IMHO God is not an object or actor or creature or person, none of that. God doesn't want anything, takes no action, has no dreams. God is the moral direction of most good. A direction, you know, just like the direction North. North doesn't want you to be more North, North doesn't hate south or East.

kleer0013• 8 years ago

And of course I have no controversial opinions about historical and contemporary religious history, the good and the bad.

“God is a Verb” by R. Buckminster Fuller (1968)

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