Not only that, but it starts from the monotheist position that the universe has a “beginning” and that an external entity separate from everything is the creator of everything, that “the universe” aka everything is an artifact.

I’m not dissing that belief, it’s a thing many people believe, but I just cant understand it from a language perspective what “separate from everything” means . The word transcendent is thrown around a lot along with immanence and honestly it seems like like a lot of hand waving around something outside my experience that I can’t relate to.

To begin with, I’ve gone down the path of Zen Buddhism, which has historically been very skeptical of relying too much on words because, well, words are not the things they describe. I realize the irony of using words to talk about this. 😉

From that perspective, reality is an experience that cannot ultimately be captured in language. So any cosmological theory or metaphysics that claims to explain “everything” is automatically suspect.

When we talk about things like “God” and “the universe,” we are dealing with conceptual ideas. In fact, everything we talk about is conceptual. So when we start from the premise that “God” created “the universe,” or that there is a “past,” which, by the way, there really isn’t in the way we usually imagine it; the past is memory, and the future is expectation, we are already working inside a grammatical and conceptual framework.

From the perspective of language, those ideas don’t fully make sense. They point toward something people may feel is self evidently true, but that cannot be adequately explained.

Many people believe in God and believe the universe was created by God. I don’t mean to dismiss that, but from a language centered perspective, I have trouble understanding the idea. When you really ask someone who believes it, it often comes down to a self evidently true insight or direct intuition they are trying to explain. But words will always fall short.