Who created God?

[jamesmorrow]

Please resist the urge to say "man". That is not what this thread is about.

I have always wondered about the assertion that God has always existed.

If God has always existed in his present form, with all of his specific characteristics and attributes, it only stands to reason that at no point did God choose his good, merciful, forgiving, loving etc nature, since he always was that way. God did not create himself at one point because he always existed. God did not choose to be good or evil, because he was always good and anti evil. God had no choice, no say, no imput, no control over his own existence because he always was the way he was for as long as he could remember(which is forever).

So, if god had no control over his own existence, who or what did? who or what chose his specific existence, his characteristics, his attributes and abilities for him? could it have been another being?? surely not, because god always existed, leaving no room for another being to exist before him. The only possible explanation is that random chance and nothingness allowed for this infinitely complex being's existence, in all its splendor, glory and intelligence.

Question for those who believe in intelligent design because they reason that our observable universe is just too complex, specific, and detailed not to have been created and designed by a mastermind:

What logic or reason do you follow when you assert that it is unreasonable to believe that random chance and nothingness are the cause of our complex universe, yet deem it reasonable to believe that random chance and nothingness are the cause of the infinitely more complex mastermind that created our universe?

 

[Daviso452]

Please resist the urge to say "man". That is not what this thread is about.

I have always wondered about the assertion that God has always existed.

If God has always existed in his present form, with all of his specific characteristics and attributes, it only stands to reason that at no point did God choose his good, merciful, forgiving, loving etc nature, since he always was that way. God did not create himself at one point because he always existed. God did not choose to be good or evil, because he was always good and anti evil. God had no choice, no say, no imput, no control over his own existence because he always was the way he was for as long as he could remember(which is forever).

So, if god had no control over his own existence, who or what did? who or what chose his specific existence, his characteristics, his attributes and abilities for him? could it have been another being?? surely not, because god always existed, leaving no room for another being to exist before him. The only possible explanation is that random chance and nothingness allowed for this infinitely complex being's existence, in all its splendor, glory and intelligence.

Question for those who believe in intelligent design because they reason that our observable universe is just too complex, specific, and detailed not to have been created and designed by a mastermind:

What logic or reason do you follow when you assert that it is unreasonable to believe that random chance and nothingness are the cause of our complex universe, yet deem it reasonable to believe that random chance and nothingness are the cause of the infinitely more complex mastermind that created our universe?

Welcome to the site!

I realize that you are looking for theistic answers, but I still wish to put my two cents in:

A common theistic view is that the universe is limited because of time. God, however, is above time, and is not bound by it, and thus is able to be eternal. I usually attempt to make the argument that they are holding a false concept of time which has caused a delusion. I say attempt because they rarely listen.

But I shall allow the true theists to make their own claims. And again, welcome!

 

[Madhuri]

If God always existed, then it wasn't random chance or nothingness that 'allowed' for God's existed. Especially if God is infinite, then there is no such thing as nothingness. Nothing allowed this existence, it simple IS.

I personally do not think it is more or less likely that God exist or that no God exists. I think the argument that God must exist because the universe couldn't exist without a maker is a weak argument.

 

[1137]

If God has always existed in his present form, with all of his specific characteristics and attributes, it only stands to reason that at no point did God choose his good, merciful, forgiving, loving etc nature, since he always was that way.

I am not sure what god you are speaking of here. No god that I know of is only good, merciful, forgiving, and loving. Balance causes perfection, and being "all-" anything is not perfection. To believe that god is only good and loving is to say that the god you believe in is in the minor leagues, as they are not perfect in any way. Also, to believe that we can have a clear idea of something infinitely greater than us is silly, as it is logically impossible.

A large problem is people both claim to understand god and also claim that his existence makes everything spiritual infinite. If that is true (I believe it is), then Spirit is always infinitely away. You can never reach pure Spirit as there has been far too much division. It is a single point impossible to reach. We know that with a finite mind we cannot truly imagine true infinity, yet we try to anyways. What silly animals we are.


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[jamesmorrow]

If God always existed, then it wasn't random chance or nothingness that 'allowed' for God's existed. Especially if God is infinite, then there is no such thing as nothingness. Nothing allowed this existence, it simple IS.

I personally do not think it is more or less likely that God exist or that no God exists. I think the argument that God must exist because the universe couldn't exist without a maker is a weak argument.

nothingness refers to NOTHING... it is not something, but rather the lack of something. to say that nothingness created god is to say that nothing created god, which means that god was not created.

so my question is, how does it make sense to creationists to reason that it is silly to claim that nothing created the complex universe, yet intelligent to claim that nothing created the more complex creator of the universe?

 

[jamesmorrow]

I am not sure what god you are speaking of here. No god that I know of is only good, merciful, forgiving, and loving. Balance causes perfection, and being "all-" anything is not perfection. To believe that god is only good and loving is to say that the god you believe in is in the minor leagues, as they are not perfect in any way. Also, to believe that we can have a clear idea of something infinitely greater than us is silly, as it is logically impossible.

A large problem is people both claim to understand god and also claim that his existence makes everything spiritual infinite. If that is true (I believe it is), then Spirit is always infinitely away. You can never reach pure Spirit as there has been far too much division. It is a single point impossible to reach. We know that with a finite mind we cannot truly imagine true infinity, yet we try to anyways. What silly animals we are.

[/quote]

i guess im addressing mostly the god as defined by christianity and islam...infinitely just/merciful, loving, anti evil etc.

 

[jamesmorrow]

Welcome to the site!

I realize that you are looking for theistic answers, but I still wish to put my two cents in:

A common theistic view is that the universe is limited because of time. God, however, is above time, and is not bound by it, and thus is able to be eternal. I usually attempt to make the argument that they are holding a false concept of time which has caused a delusion. I say attempt because they rarely listen.

But I shall allow the true theists to make their own claims. And again, welcome!

the whole "above time" argument doesnt explain God's lack of control over his own complex/specific/ and detailed existence/being. if nothing created him the way he is because he is above time, then nothingness and random chance allowed for his existence. which is the very thing that creationists claim to be a ridiculous belief when applied to our universe..

 

[K.Venugopal]

so my question is, how does it make sense to creationists to reason that it is silly to claim that nothing created the complex universe, yet intelligent to claim that nothing created the more complex creator of the universe?

You've hit on a very simple yet profound question. The idea of God as creator is humbug. However we name our experience, our quest is not ended with any naming. We would always wonder at the nature of our capacity to experience and our ultimate answer is probably hidden therein.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I have always wondered about the assertion that God has always existed.

I can't really speak to most of this as I don't know about the existence of "God" and whatever that existence, if real, might entail. However, I do know something about the problem with thinking about such thing in terms of time. The same problem, quite apart from theology, exists in cosmology. How do you imagine what was around before the universe, when time itself began when the universe, and thus "before the universe" is an pardoxical? Human cognitive capacities are quite advanced (relative to other species), but they are still quite limited in several ways. One of these is that while our conceptual abilities allow us to imagine and describe things as they could have been, might have been, should have been, will be, etc., there is a limit to this ability. Everything we do, including cognition itself (e.g., considering the question about god always existing) occurs through time. We live, eat, breathe, and thing in a temporal realm and spatial realm. How then can we conceptualize and speak about a reality that exist without space or time? Yet such, according to cosmology, was the state of affairs (to borrow from functional linguistics) "before" the big bang. So to describe the nature, conduct, etc., of an entity who exists atemporally is difficult. Not only do languages, in general, lack the necessary grammatical devices (lexemes included), but even conceptualization becomes challenging here.

 

[jamesmorrow]

I can't really speak to most of this as I don't know about the existence of "God" and whatever that existence, if real, might entail. However, I do know something about the problem with thinking about such thing in terms of time. The same problem, quite apart from theology, exists in cosmology. How do you imagine what was around before the universe, when time itself began when the universe, and thus "before the universe" is an pardoxical? Human cognitive capacities are quite advanced (relative to other species), but they are still quite limited in several ways. One of these is that while our conceptual abilities allow us to imagine and describe things as they could have been, might have been, should have been, will be, etc., there is a limit to this ability. Everything we do, including cognition itself (e.g., considering the question about god always existing) occurs through time. We live, eat, breathe, and thing in a temporal realm and spatial realm. How then can we conceptualize and speak about a reality that exist without space or time? Yet such, according to cosmology, was the state of affairs (to borrow from functional linguistics) "before" the big bang. So to describe the nature, conduct, etc., of an entity who exists atemporally is difficult. Not only do languages, in general, lack the necessary grammatical devices (lexemes included), but even conceptualization becomes challenging here.

i personally doubt there exists a reality without space or time. nothing can exist without time. no action can be taken. even the assertion "god created time" implies an action bound by time itself. every action comes with a timestamp...there was a time before that action, and there is a time after that action. it begs the question: at what point in time did god create time? to say that god created time before time existed is to automatically imply time because if no time existed then no action to create time ever existed.

if time did not always exist then creationists couldnt claim that GOD always existed because "always" is a description of the very thing they claim god created at one point in time.

edit: same goes for your cosmological problem. time did not start with our universe, but rather at some point in time our universe started. there was time before our universe, there is time during our universe and there will be time after our universe. time keeps record of history. without time there is no history. if our universe did not start at one point in time then our universe never started and therefore would not exist.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

i personally doubt there exists a reality without space or time. nothing can exist without time.

You might want to take that up with the majority of cosmologists/astrophysicists then. Even those who reject the "big bang theory" don't reject the notion of the universe beginning out of an existence without time or space. Luckily I recently discussed before, so I can be lazy here:

From Professsor Michael Woolfson's Time, Space, Stars, and Man: The Story of the Big Bang (Imperial College Press, 2009): "This observationally-based conclusion has led to the current theory that most, but not all, astronomers accept for the origin of the Universe- that at some point in the past all the energy in the Universe was concentrated at a point, a point with no volume that scientists refer to as a singuilarity. That is a challenging idea. The implication of it is that, at the instant the Universe came into being, space did not exist and time did not exist! Once again we are in the position that we cannot imagine or understand what this means. Try the following experiement- close your eyes and try to think of nothing- absolutely nothing. You can no more do this than we can properly understand- really understand- a Universe of zero volume in which time did not exists. This theory, called the Big Bang thoery, postulates that starting from the singularity the Universe expanded so creating space and time. Like any sensible person you will ask the question, "What was the state of affairs before the Big Bang?", to which you will receive the answer, "There is no such thing as before the Big Bang because time did not exist until the Big Bang occured." You might try again with the question, "Into what did the Universe expand?", to which the answer is, "There was no space for the Universe to expand into since the only space that existed was what it created as it expanded...Remember, once the Universe came into being and began to expand, then it is possible to talk about time" [italics in original, emphases added]. p.66


From The Nature of Space and Time By Hawking and Penrose (Princeton University Press, 1996): "Indeed, almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang."

The "something" which expanded, this singularity, was nothing. As Paul Lurquin puts it in his book Origins of Life and the Universe (Columbia University Press, 2003), this we are talking about "a universe beginning with a singularity characterized by zero space" So a point of zero space which isn't in space and neither space nor time exist. Norman Glennding titled the first chapter of his book Our Place in the Universe (World Scientific, 2007) "A Day without Yesterday" for a reason: "In an instant of creation about 14 billion years ago the universe burst forth, creating space where there was no space, and time when there was no time."

 

[jamesmorrow]

i find it hilarious how they use descriptions based on the notion of time for an occurance before time. like i said, if it did not happen at one point in time, it did not happen at all.

funny also how they claim that at one point in the UNIVERSE something happened which created the UNIVERSE.

"space did not exist and time did not exist!" but the universe that caused the universe at one point existed??

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

i find it hilarious how they use descriptions based on the notion of time for an occurance before time. like i said, if it did not happen at one point in time, it did not happen at all.

funny also how they claim that at one point in the UNIVERSE something happened which created the UNIVERSE.

"space did not exist and time did not exist!" but the universe that caused the universe at one point existed??

I think you misunderstand the term "point" here. It's used mathematically, as in a point in n-dimensional space. I can talk of points in 100 or 2,000 dimensional space, depending the dimensions of the data I'm describing (e.g., the stock market, voters, pixels, etc.). The "point" referred to occurs in 0-dimensional space.

And as I said:

Not only do languages, in general, lack the necessary grammatical devices (lexemes included), but even conceptualization becomes challenging here.

How, linguistically speaking, might one talk about a "before" the universe without reference to time, even though according to scientific theory, time began with the universe, some 14-15 billion years ago.?

 

[PolyHedral]

How, linguistically speaking, might one talk about a "before" the universe without reference to time, even though according to scientific theory, time began with the universe, some 14-15 billion years ago.?

You don't. A moment before time would require that points "outside" of the universe (assuming that they exist at all) can be ordered in the same way that points inside the universe can. As any topologist will tell you, this isn't necessarily true.

 

[1137]

Jamesmorrow:

i guess im addressing mostly the god as defined by christianity and islam...infinitely just/merciful, loving, anti evil etc.

Such a deity cannot exist, as they would exist against all logic which is simply not possible. Could pure Spirit be outside logic? Perhaps, as it is already admittedly beyond what we can currently understand. But a god who directly interacts with mankind is 100% bound to logic, and therefore gods such as the Christian god (of this nature) cannot exist. A god who lies about their nature for control can exist 100% within logic, as well as common sense....

 

[Sleeppy]

Your comparison is off..

Randomness and chance can't have part in explaining something that always existed. But, I think that is how they explain the birth of the universe - big bang etc.

 

[jamesmorrow]

I think you misunderstand the term "point" here. It's used mathematically, as in a point in n-dimensional space. I can talk of points in 100 or 2,000 dimensional space, depending the dimensions of the data I'm describing (e.g., the stock market, voters, pixels, etc.). The "point" referred to occurs in 0-dimensional space.

And as I said:


How, linguistically speaking, might one talk about a "before" the universe without reference to time, even though according to scientific theory, time began with the universe, some 14-15 billion years ago.?

i actually understand what they are trying to convey. i only find it amusing how they are forced to use some sort of description of time and space to describe a lack of time and space. even in your above post where you further explained the message they are trying to convey, you used the term "space" (be it 0-dimensional) to describe a lack of space.

as for the second part of your post. this is exactly the reason why i believe time and space always existed in some form. it cant otherwise be. anything and everything is bound by time.... even when we assume that at some point in the past all the energy in the Universe was concentrated at a point, the question becomes, when, at what point, what happened before that point, what during and what after? how long did it take for all the energy in the universe to concentrate at one point? did it take a duration of time known as a few minutes? a longer duration of a few hours? maybe a few months? or instantly? even if it happened so quickly that the human mind couldnt possibly comprehend it it is still measured/bound by/ recorded by time.....

but anyway. this is not the topic of this thread. i hope that at some point some christians, muslims and other theists will address the topic at hand.

 

[jamesmorrow]

Your comparison is off..

Randomness and chance can't have part in explaining something that always existed. But, I think that is how they explain the birth of the universe - big bang etc.

why cant nothingness and random chance have part in explaining something that always existed? if something always existed then it was not created, correct? meaning that nothing created that certain something(in this case a complex god being) by random chance. you have to factor in random chance when you claim that a highly intelligent something came from nothing by nothing out of nothing. it is by random chance.... god could have existed as an evil unforgiving hateful being , or as a good, loving merciful being, or even as a just being balancing good and evil. these are all chances. nothingness and random chance were always there.

 

[Sleeppy]

why cant nothingness and random chance have part in explaining something that always existed? if something always existed then it was not created, correct? meaning that nothing created that certain something(in this case a complex god being) by random chance. you have to factor in random chance when you claim that a highly intelligent something came from nothing by nothing out of nothing. it is by random chance.... god could have existed as an evil unforgiving hateful being , or as a good, loving merciful being, or even as a just being balancing good and evil. these are all chances. nothingness and random chance were always there.

No. You're saying something that always existed was created by something else. That doesn't make sense.

 

[jamesmorrow]

No. You're saying something that always existed was created by something else. That doesn't make sense.

Not at all. Nothing is not something. To say that nothing created god is not to say something created god. It is to say god was not created. You also have to consider that god could have always existed in a multitude of shapes, sizes, characteristics, natures attributes or lack thereof. These are the chances of gods existence. Out of this infinite multitude of chances god existed at one random chance created by nothing. So we have nothingness and random chance.