As God Sees It - the "G" Meme

By Wayne Brown
This a special version of the "3rd person" view - one that imagines that everything can be known for all time, past and future, including the inner thoughts and motives of every living thing in the Universe.

It is natural enough to employ this meme, especially when conversing with people who cherish the related meme, that there is an entity called "God" who, almost by definition, takes this perspective. In fact, the "Western" idea of God is almost indistinguishable from the idea that the "G" perspective is possible in principle.

Traditional geometry takes this perspective (the observer is not mentioned in Euclid's axioms) and this perspective is adopted in Newton's laws, the template for "classical" mechanics. Only with the advent of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity did it become necessary to challenge the G perspective in principle.

Story telling has usually adopted the G perspective, revealing all the "facts" relevant to the story without finding it necessary to identify the story teller. This is the way most of the stories in the Bible are told, resulting in the naive belief among "fundamentalists" that the Bible was written by God or at least told from the G perspective. That's easy to swallow if you already believe in the Biblical God. To believers, the G perspective is the mind of God.

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