Does God require a creator?

[IndigoChild5559]

Does God require a creator?.

If God does not require a creator, then does that logically imply that the universe does not either? Something can come out of nothing.

If one assumes that something can't come out of nothing, and this is a reasoning for their belief in God, then don't they have to question where God came from?

"God exists outside of time"
Time is relative... right? In the original Planet of the Apes (spoiler alert) them astronauts time traveled due to their speed and time's relativity, right? So, if time isn't concrete and static throughout the universe, I guess it's reasonable to assume a deity could be outside of time.

"God exists outside of existence." maybe?

I dunno

The monotheistic God by definition is eternal and uncreated.

 

[Copernicus]

You were the one that made the "mansplaining" necessary. It looks as if you still have not learned from your mistakes.

Sorry about that. I can understand why the word offended you. Perhaps the only mistake I made was to try too hard to correct your misinterpretation of what I said. We seem to be in violent agreement on some things, but not whether you understood what I actually said.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Does God require a creator?

No. That does away with a lot of questions. The other questions too can be disposed in this way. Only my book carries the truth, the whole truth.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

They seem perfectly consistent with the way people use the terms, as far as I can see. I didn't go looking for definitions that suited, they were literally the first I found.


Pointless, defensive desperation. There is simply no comparison between the way science deals with objective evidence and theories like quantum mechanics, that is, quite literally, being tested billions of times a day in everybody's electronic devices and religious faith. Trying to link the two together is bizarre and reeks of insecurity.

Here is some science from sociology that covers us all as humans if we have a functioning enough brain and you are not outside that and neither am I:
Thomas Theorem: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Now if you analyze your behavior, mine and all the other posters, you will find that we all do that as subjective.
You define the situation of being a human as real according to your subjective understanding. The problem is that in the limited sense of subjectivity I can act differently and your subjective answer is that it doesn't make sense to you, therefore it doesn't make sense to anybody.
The falsification of that is that I can still think/feel/act differently for subjectivity.

 

[ratiocinator]

Would you say the multiverse idea is perfectly consistent with what we know from science?

Sorry, been away for a few days. Yes the various ideas of a multiverse are consistent with what we known, as are various notions of god(s) for that matter.

 

[nPeace]

Sorry, been away for a few days. Yes the various ideas of a multiverse are consistent with what we known, as are various notions of god(s) for that matter.

So you are okay with pseudo science.
Was that not what I was saying from the beginning?

 

[wellwisher]

By definition, God inhabits a realm of being that transcends the question of origin.

How can this be so? By conceptual necessity, I suppose.

Space and time are two reference variables. We live in space-time where these two reference variables always appear to act together. Photons of energy have wavelength and frequency, that are connected; space-time. If we know the frequency we know the wavelength since all photons, multiply these two connected variables, to the same number; speed of light. This is like a three legged race, with space and time tethered together.

Picture if we took a bunch of photons and carefully separated the wavelengths from the frequency so the two references variables are no longer connected. We would no longer have photons of energy, since energy requires these two variables remain connected. Disconnecting wavelength and frequency, by getting rid of energy, lowers potential; zero energy state. Instead we would have wavelength without frequency and frequency without wavelength.

This zero energy state; separated space and separated time, appear to violate energy conservation, since energy was destroyed or was it? The energy would be transformed into entropy; endothermic. There are now more options; complexity. Once you are untied from a three legged race, you have more freedom and speed.

These two separated reference variables; wavelength and frequency, even though they are zero energy, can still be useful, since they can give us standards of distance and time that we need to calibrate meter sticks and clocks; two tools. We can measure lengths using a standard wavelength to calibrate our ruler. We do not need to know the frequency. We can give those to the clock people. They can use one of the frequencies, such as the second, to calibrate clocks. The wavelength is of no concern to them, so we will give that to the ruler people.

These two tools work based on human using the imagination to separate space and time; two different purposes. We use these two separated reference variables tools, to investigate space-time, one variable at a time. Reference has to do with mind and imagination, where space and time are not exactly connected. We can imagine what does not yet exist in space-time.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says we can measure the position or momentum of a particle; electron, but not both at the same time. Position is connected to space, while momentum needs time. Without time momentum becomes uncertain. Take a snap shot picture of a moving object and tell us the momentum with time stopped=0 in the photo. You cannot. The uncertainty principle tells us particles, like electrons in orbitals, are not exactly in connected space-time, but appear more like two separate variables we can measure, but which are not fully connected;; uncertainty.. Independent space and time is real, as unintentionally proven by Heisenberg. Physics needed to evolve to reach this new simplification point.

When Science thinks of the origin of the universe, it thinks in terms when space-time/energy appears. The theory does not assume separated space and separated time are even possible. Therefore, it does consider uncertainty in position and/or momentum being part of the primordial atom or the expansion. It assumes space-time is connected from the BB, onward.

 

[RestlessSoul]

No. By nature of what the laws of nature are. Descriptive of how things work.
Descriptive laws aren't "authored". Prescriptive laws are.

So Newton’s Law of Gravitation has no author?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

So Newton’s Law of Gravitation has no author?

I think it's fairly obvious that in this context, "author" would mean "the one who created gravity", not the one who came up with a fairly accurate description of how gravity works.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I think it's fairly obvious that in this context, "author" would mean "the one who created gravity", not the one who came up with a fairly accurate description of how gravity works.

Do you think laws of nature exist independently of human authorship?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Do you think laws of nature exist independently of human authorship?

I think it's a slap in the face of the education system that you even feel the need to ask that question.

Did people just float off into space before newton?

 

[RestlessSoul]

I think it's a slap in the face of the education system that you even feel the need to ask that question.

Did people just float off into space before newton?

So you don’t recognise the distinction between a naturally occurring phenomenon, and a law of nature? Maybe you need to revisit your own education.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

So you don’t recognise the distinction between a naturally occurring phenomenon, and a law of nature? Maybe you need to revisit your own education.

Once again, in this context when we talk about the laws of nature, we are referring to the workings of nature. ALL the workings of nature - including those we haven't figured out yet.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

If God does not require a creator, then does that logically imply that the universe does not either? Something can come out of nothing.

We don't know if something can come from nothing. If so, perhaps the original substance - our universe of that is all of existence, or its source if there is one - came into being uncaused. Or, if that didn't happen, then that original substance must have always existed without beginning. It seems to me that one of these is necessarily correct - something has always existed or something came into existence uncaused - and we presently (and perhaps eternally) can rule neither possibility in or out.

But the take home here is that that original substance, whether it had a beginning or not, need not be the conscious intelligent designer that so many have assumed necessarily exists to account for observed reality, and then proceeded to make any unsupported claim they like about it including internally contradictory claims.

"God exists outside of time"

Not your claim as I understand it, which is why you put it in quotes, but it is the pronouncement of many theists, and a great example of an internally contradictory claim.

What is existence?

This is the question that needs a clear answer (definition of existence). We must ask ourselves what are the qualities of things that exist that distinguish them from things that don't exist. Assuming that werewolves don't exist but that wolves do exist, what's true about wolves that's not true about werewolves because of this difference? It's pretty straightforward. Wolves are in space and time and are capable of interacting with other things existing in space and time. If you go to the right place at the right time, you might interact with a wolf if only to have light reflect from it onto your retina. But this never happens with werewolves. You never see one anywhere at any time.

Existence implies existence in time. The wolf occupies a string of consecutive instants somewhere in contiguous pieces of space and interacts with the physical reality surrounding it. Take any of those away and you take them all away. There is no middle ground between having all three qualities and having none, and everything that exists has all three whereas things that don't exist have none.

Theists speculating about other kinds of existence are contradicting themselves, as when they speak of gods outside of time creating universes or creating time, never realizing that existing, thinking, and acting all require the passage of time from prior states to present states, from before states to after states.

The only solution I think to this problem is to say that there are multiple existences. One where God is in, and one where man is in. But then is God existing in our temporal world too? Depends who you ask I guess.

If these two are causally connected, they are one existence, a single nature. Here's where the freely speculating theists go wrong again when they describe agents and realms that are undetectable but are said to be able to modify reality, as with miracles or leaving scripture. Modifying reality is how we detect the things that actually exist. It's why we search for dark matter and dark energy. And that occurs in space and time.

Which science exactly... real science, or pseudo science.

Are you qualified to determine which is which? I saw your cited definitions, but do you understand them enough to point to and correctly identify examples of each? For example, of the intelligent design movement and evolution, are they both science, both pseudoscience, or do we have ne of each, and how do you decide those answers?

The material universe we live in including time was created.

Here's another of those incoherent (self-contradictory) claims - creating time. Creation, which features a before and after state, implies time already existing.

A serious person will look into religion, and employ reason to decide on a creed.

Serious? Did you mean interested in being demonstrably correct and holding no false beliefs? Such a person would accept no god or religion.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Does God require a creator?.

If God does not require a creator, then does that logically imply that the universe does not either? Something can come out of nothing.

If one assumes that something can't come out of nothing, and this is a reasoning for their belief in God, then don't they have to question where God came from?

"God exists outside of time"
Time is relative... right? In the original Planet of the Apes (spoiler alert) them astronauts time traveled due to their speed and time's relativity, right? So, if time isn't concrete and static throughout the universe, I guess it's reasonable to assume a deity could be outside of time.

"God exists outside of existence." maybe?

I dunno

No. God as defined the Abrahamic religions exists apart from the material universe (although He acts upon it and infuses it with His grace), is infinite and beyond space and time. God never "came from" anything. He has always existed. He's in His own category of being.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You seem to want to keep setting yourself up as the decider of what is evidence and what is reasonable according to your own biased ideology.

The academic community has collectively made those decisions, and its bias is in favor of skepticism and empiricism over belief by faith, one of the most powerful and productive biases ever conceived by man.

Like many other theists, YOU want your ways of deciding what is true to be respected. You want to call how YOU evaluate evidence just as valid as this academic method. You want to call how YOU connect evidence to conclusion reasoning whatever its rules or non-rules might be - exactly what you accuse others of doing: setting yourself up as decider of these things. But rogue ways of thinking are not respected unless they produce desired results.

you don't get to define what is and isn't evidence, or what is and isn't reasonable for everyone else.

Sure we do. The critical thinking community defines what is reasonable and what is fallacy. Others don't have to agree or even understand, but make an unreasonable argument and see how quickly it is rebutted and rejected by those standards. It's not negotiable. These other ways of seeing are sterile. The creationists, like the astrologers, have contributed nothing to man's fund of knowledge, and are unwelcome to publish is respected scientific journals for that reason. And they object, calling it conspiracy and turf protecting, but they and their rogue ways are still rejected and excluded from the academic community however much they plead for respect and acceptance.

You're trying to insist that faith is unreasonable by definition, and that is just a silly bias. Because reasoning covers a huge array of thought processes and criteria regardless of your or anyone else's approval.

You can call that reasoning, but if it doesn't conform to academic standards, I don't, at least not without a qualifier like "invalid" or "fallacious." Reasoning is not a subjective process. Arithmetic is reasoning. One either learn the rules of inference in addition and applies them to addends to arrive at correct sums, or he brings his own subjective "rules" to the process and generates wrong sums.

Here's how faith derails reason.

“If somewhere in the Bible I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I am reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and do my best to work it out and understand it."- Pastor Peter laRuffa

By definition, God inhabits a realm of being that transcends the question of origin.

That's not my definition. Nor does the definition define such a thing into existence.

Physical matter does not determine existence. Ideas about existence also exist.

As far as we know, ideas are epiphenomena of physical processes, and only physical reality exists.

the God character and story has emerged in every culture and time that humans have been on Earth. Dearth Vader cleary did not.

Irrelevant and incorrect. There is no "God character." There's a spectrum of unfalsifiable claims about an imagined and unseen reality sometimes rendered as a person or persons and sometimes in other terms.

Darth Vader - the manifestation of the dark side and evil - also appears in most of these stories under different names such as Satan in Christianity.

So if you're trying to imply a equivalent signifigance between them I would disagree with that.

He wrote, "If you want to say that god exists in the same way that Darth Vader or ideas exist, then I agree." The equivalence is in the areas where the two overlap, not where they are different. God and Darth Vader have in common that they are fictional characters that exist only as ideas in some heads. Their relative importance in human cultural history doesn't change that or negate its relevance, just as the relative lack of impact on human history of the idea of Santa Claus compared to gods does not mean that they aren't analogous and very comparable ideas.

I'm simply talking about the fact that we humans have to trust in the unknowable outcomes of our chosen course of action no matter what that course of action is based on: hope, whim, experience, divine revelation, reasoned probability, or whatever.

You conflate belief based in experience and reason (justified belief) with belief based in whim and alleged divine revelation (unjustified belief). That's your fundamental error, and others have already noted your equivocation there. On this basis, you claim we all think by faith.

Faith is not just hope, but the decision to act on that hope.

Faith is neither hope nor a decision to act. It's nothing more or less that unjustified belief, or belief of a guess. You can attempt to glorify it like those that call it a virtue that pleases "God," but there is no virtue there. From Pat Condell:

"The truth is that faith is nothing more than the deliberate suspension of disbelief. It's an act of will. It's not a state of grace. It's a state of choice, because without evidence, you've got no reason to believe, apart from your willingness to believe. So why is that worthy of respect, any more than your willingness to poke yourself in the eye with a pencil? And why is faith considered some kind of virtue? Is it because it implies a certain depth of contemplation and insight? I don't think so. Faith, by definition, is unexamined. So in that sense it has to be among the shallowest of experiences. Yet, if it could, it would regulate every action, word and thought of every single person on this planet, because, let's not forget, even an impure thought is a sin."

Applying knowledge of the past to our expectations of the future is an act of faith.

But it is not irrational like belief NOT based in experience properly understood. You create endless confusion by insisting on calling both justified and unjustified belief by the same name and thinking that that makes them the same thing. It doesn't any more than naming both of your daughters Faith makes them the same person.

Other actions require a great deal of faith; like buying a lotto ticket

Buying a lotto ticket requires nothing more than a ticket be for sale and the money to buy it. Faith is unjustified belief, such as that God will cause you to win the lottery. If one has the justified belief that he has a very small chance of winning a large amount of money, he is not acting like the faith-based thinker who believes what feels comfortable by gut feeling - guessing, but forgetting that it's only a guess and considering it fact. You've seen the TV "prosperity" preachers milking their flocks telling them to visualize their reward before sending in a shovel full of money, and that if their faith is strong enough, it will make it come to pass. It's still guessing.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Here's another of those incoherent (self-contradictory) claims - creating time. Creation, which features a before and after state, implies time already existing.

No, it isn't contradictory.
Time, as we measure it, is relative to space[motion].

That does not mean that another universe cannot exist, and have it's own measure of time.
You merely play on the word "time", and imply it is universal, when it is not.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

No, it isn't contradictory.

It is, and he explained why.

Time, as we measure it, is relative to space[motion].

And it doesn't exist if the universe doesn't exist.
But "to create" is a temporal action with a before and after state.

That does not mean that another universe cannot exist, and have it's own measure of time.

True. But that's just kicking the ball down the field.
If "this" space-time requires a creation event, then that "other" space-time would be no different.
So if your god exists in that "other" space-time, then that space-time, as well as your god, would require a creator as well.

So you are not solving anything. Instead, you are just pushing the same question further back.
You end up with an infinite regress of space-times and gods each requiring a previous space-time and god.

But, I'm sure that you "solve" that with some kind of special pleading argument.

You merely play on the word "time", and imply it is universal, when it is not.

There's no playing. Time is an inherent part of the universe. It doesn't exist if the universe doesn't exist.

 

[muhammad_isa]

True. But that's just kicking the ball down the field.
If "this" space-time requires a creation event, then that "other" space-time would be no different.

So what?
Why is it impossible that another universe was not created before or after our universe?
The time we measure is relative to our own universe.

There's no playing. Time is an inherent part of the universe. It doesn't exist if the universe doesn't exist.

Rubbish!

 

[Copernicus]

So what?
Why is it impossible that another universe was not created before or after our universe?
The time we measure is relative to our own universe.

I certainly agree with you that we can only measure time in the universe that we can see, and it is possible to imagine universes preceding the Big Bang and having an orthogonal perspective on time--their own measurable temporal framework. Maybe that's what black holes are doing inside of themselves--spawning new realities with separate temporal frameworks. It's all speculation, but one thing is clear. There is no reason to believe that a deity created any of it.

TagliatelliMonster: There's no playing. Time is an inherent part of the universe. It doesn't exist if the universe doesn't exist.

Rubbish!

We don't know it's rubbish, because we don't know whether it makes sense to say that there are other universes. What is relevant here is that we know so much about the universe now that wasn't known back when people wrote the creation stories found in the scripture of the world's major religions. The people who authored those stories had a completely different understanding of what they were looking at when they looked at stars. They know nothing about solar systems, galaxies, or the Big Bang. They had no idea about time dilation or quantum fields. They could not measure time accurately. They could only make sense of anything by positing the existence of gods--superior versions of themselves--to explain what caused nature to behave the way it did.