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I Met God — God Without Religion, Scripture, or Faith
A Book by J. Neil Schulman
Chapter 12: Supernatural Law


J. NEIL SCHULMAN: I think that God, in His original state — I talked about the original state and then the developed state – God in His original state was the one being who violated the first axiom of Korzybskian epistemology. When God was both the only Consciousness and the only Existent, the map was the territory.

At the point where God allowed Himself to think fantasy, in other words to think thoughts which He did not put into effect — for Him to contemplate without taking action — those became in essence, images, maps, those became unreality. I do see a distinction. And that, in essence becomes the beginning of the development.

In other words, where God starts thinking free from His own body, starts thinking of possibilities other than His reality, in essence He becomes non-mundane.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Okay.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: So that would be a crucial dividing line between before and after, in God’s time-line, in His own individual personal time-line.

Now after that, however, the idea being that when He fissions off other souls from Himself — or fissions them off and allows them to develop independent from Himself — we’re real. I do not believe that you can have a living intelligence which is not real. I do not believe that you can have an intelligence which is only virtual. There has to be some physical reality to it.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Well, once you give birth to a child, you can’t just suddenly recall it. And you’re saying, in a way, if we’re all God’s children, we’re all real once we exist. You can’t just suddenly recall your children — well maybe God could but He doesn’t — because you also believe God operates under natural law.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Yes. And let me explicate on that, since we’re bringing that out.

While I agree with the traditional view of God as the Creator — that God creates natural law, that God is the author of natural law — He is not the author of all natural law.

I can see Him when He, perhaps, goes into the primal atom — or whatever the current scientific paradigm is — before the Big Bang, and in essence designs into it what’s going to happen when the fireworks go off. What the chemical compounds are going to be, whether you’re going to have atoms and electrons and molecules and physics and gravity and space and time and all these sorts of things within a particular closed space-time continuum — or another sort of continuum which may not even have time or space as part of it. Now I can’t conceive of that. Maybe God can. But nonetheless, when God creates a closed continuum, God is the author of the natural laws of that universe and if those natural laws have as part of the primal mathematics within it that it will reach a point where life will evolve, then God is the author of life within that continuum.

I can see a universe in which all of the development of life is in the seed, that God, in essence, puts the DNA for us in the very DNA of the universe itself. I can see that as a possibility.

But where I differ from most theologians — it may even be all theologians I don’t know any other –

Again we have to keep in mind that I’m not a religious scholar. I’m simply a guy who thinks, and who says that God talked with him. So there are vast areas of ignorance in me, dealing with some of the technicalities of other viewpoints, of traditional religions or theologies.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: You have less to unlearn.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: I have a lot of Zen going for me in that sense.

But what I’m saying is, where I think that I disagree with most others who conceive of God, is that I see God being subject to the Law of Identity, because He exists.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Which means there’s a meta-natural law that even God subscribes to?

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right. And we could call that, perhaps, a supernatural law because it is above the natural laws which God creates.

So therefore, the supernatural law is, perhaps starting with some of the laws which Aristotle identified — the Law of Existence, the Law of Non-contradiction, the Law of Identity — these would be laws that God, being an existent, would be subject to, and would not be able to violate.

And I think C.S. Lewis accepted that. When Lewis says that not every sentence that starts with “God can” is a possible real sentence, Lewis himself is putting forward the idea that God can’t do something which is self-contradictory.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Yes, that’s right. He’s at least suggesting it very strongly.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Yes. So again, this is why all sorts of theology which as we have discussed — not necessarily in these recordings but which we have discussed — are not necessarily even scriptural, making claims of God of being Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent —

BRAD LINAWEAVER: — which you’re not the first to point out —

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: I say He was in His primal state, but not now.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Yes, you’re not the first to point out those three things can not coexist, in terms of the universe we know.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: And when I say that the concept of creation out of nothingness — creation ex nihilo — is ridiculous, that it violates the Laws of Existence and the Laws of Identity to which even God is subject, I say that God can create out of very little. He may be able to create out of quantum probabilities — in other words, something that would look to us like practically nothing, like waves or dust or even subatomic something — but nonetheless, He would be starting with something and imposing pattern on it, imposing form on it, and the void would not be totally void — it would just be formless.

So the creation is taking the formless and imposing a new form on it or taking an existing form and reforming it.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Well, as a matter of fact, the opening line of Genesis describes God “re-creating” the Earth. There is no Biblical scholar worth his salt — Lot’s wife not withstanding — who does not admit that the opening lines of Genesis — “The Earth was without form and void” — it is describing the re-creation of the Earth. There is no doubt.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily have to use the word re-creation, in the sense of, would you say that a painter who starts with a blank canvas is re-creating a painting?

BRAD LINAWEAVER: It’s not a blank canvas, “The Earth was formless” suggests that material of Earth is already there.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right, the material. In other words, in the same sense that a sculptor comes to a block of marble —

BRAD LINAWEAVER: If you paint a painting on top of an older painting, isn’t that the use of the materials that are there?

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Absolutely! But it is also true that if God were starting with a tabula rasa — if He were starting with a blank slate that —

BRAD LINAWEAVER: It’s works just as well for a re-creation of Earth.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: It works either way. It’s not a distinction that we find it necessary to concern ourselves with.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: It doesn’t tell us whether this Earth was the only Earth God has created.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right. Now, again, I believe that this is possibly His earliest creation of this sort. That He had never done something like this before. And the reason I think that is that His learning curve is so steep.


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Next in I Met God — God Without Religion, Scripture, or Faith is Chapter XIII: Heaven

I Met God — God Without Religion, Scripture, or Faith is
Copyright © 2010 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


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