
“God is a Verb” by R. Buckminster Fuller (1968) - MilnerRoute
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/194/god.is.a.verb
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bonesss
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism)

~~~
blowski
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
Curious: what is the Father, then?

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klez
In the context of the post I think that by God GP meant the Father.

EDIT: I re-read the post and no, they didn't seem to mean that.

~~~
blowski
I just thought about it... and I'm not really sure. I'll cop-out and say
something like "God is unknowable, undefinable, and constrainable".

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jkingsbery
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.

~~~
danielam
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](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351477703)
[1] [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300092998/god-and-
philos...](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300092998/god-and-philosophy)

~~~
psyc
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am)

------
plainOldText
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house)

~~~
wu-ikkyu
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

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zigzag448
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.

~~~
panic
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_Goldman
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.

~~~
pc2g4d
If one's understanding of _part_ of a system increases to enable manipulation
of that part of the system, but one's ignorance of the effects of that change
in the broader system remains, meaning that the increase in understanding has
led to an increase in unexpected effects in the broader system, has one's
overall understanding increased, or decreased?

Not sure if that's too abstract, but your statement that "the world has been
significantly less predictable since the Enlightenment" made me wonder,
because you'd think "less predictable" means that understanding has gone down.

~~~
Emma_Goldman
I would draw a sharp distinction between 'understanding' and 'predictability'.
Understanding is about our knowledge of and ability to manipulate the world.
Predictability is our ability to reliably forecast the future of the social
world.

Of course our understanding has increased. But that has generated rapid and
accelerating changes in society and a monumental increase in its complexity,
which together, make it significantly harder to predict the future of the
social world.

I am not saying that we don't have a better predictive grasp of the natural
world. We obviously do.

------
warent
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
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.

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kleer001
God is a direction.

~~~
beders
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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

~~~
beders
You can use science to verify ethical statements.

That said: The definition of 'tribe' already implies shared values (more often
than not centered around a primitive version of the golden rule)

~~~
dragonwriter
> You can use science to verify ethical statements

No, you can't. (And not just in the sense that science falsifies rather than
verifies.)

Ethical/moral statements always have a value component that is empirically
unfalsifiable. They sometimes also have a falsifiable factual premise that,
along with a set of value premises, supports a conclusion. Science can falsify
the fact component, and sufficient failute to falsify can justify belief in
the false component, but cannot falsify or (by failing to falsify) justify the
value component, and therefore cannot justify the statement as a whole.

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wizardforhire
Trim tab

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab)

