What created God?

Spoiler alert: They keep doing that.

I find it funny that, in the end, we have made so little progress inward, and so much more outward. The outward could easily be a fabrication, and no one wants to come to terms with that.

To clarify, I'm not saying that his argument is wrong. It is definitely necessary to question why a loving god would bring evil into our lives. I was just specifying the terms on which this answer should be sought out.

And for the record, I believe whole-heartedly that life is not complete without evil. A world without conflict is a complacent world, and one that loses touch with very fundamental concepts of ethics, in fact. I would not want to raise my children in a world without evil; it must be present and fought.

While I agree to an extent, I'm not against putting the question to him. Using what you said as an example, if you are the ultimate judge, you should bear the burden of proving that you are just. However, I've never really seen God as a judge. This is probably because my actual views on God lie somewhere between pantheism and deism.

Well, there are better ways to say it, but you are basically right in that regard.

And even then, not all of the commandments are as cut-and-dry as "Thou shalt not kill," unfortunately.

I get where you're coming from, because I've been trying to get it across for ages. I feel like a lot of people don't believe in God because they find him ridiculous, and that's because even religious people sometimes don't put enough thought into what God is exactly. I'm taking analytic philosophy right now, and we came across a very compelling argument that plots this out much better, but the specifics escape me. I'll post it later once Pika has had time to respond.

 

Ah, the infamous free will argument. There are a number of counters to this. Firstly, if one is an all powerful deity, one can change and create the rules of the world. It is fully possible for a god to simply abolish the entire concept of sin, while leaving free will behind. Humanity would still have free will to choose their actions, but would only comprehend the morals of god.

Secondly, god is not flawed. God has free will, but we are told he is all loving. How could one who is perfect in that regard create a flawed being that isn't all loving? We're even specifically told that humanity was made in his image.

Thirdly, scientifically, there is no such thing as free will. If I drop a ball, the ball is affected by the laws of physics, so it falls at a certain speed due to gravity. If the ball is continuously dropped in the same way, the ball will continuously fall in the same place with the same speed. We are just storms of atoms and chemicals, and are bound in the same way. There is nothing to distinguish us from a ball in regard to which laws of physics we follow. Meaning that if I'm placed into a situation, I will make a 'choice', but in reality, that 'choice' is actually the situation affecting my storm of molecules in the same way the ball is affected by its situation. So for example, if I wake up in the morning and choose to have toast for breakfast, it doesn't matter if that morning is repeated a single time or a hundred times. If nothing changes, I will always eat toast. We have no free will; we are captives of our environment. We have but a mere illusion of free will.

Finally, supporting my first point, we have not been given free will in some regards of this world. Sure, you could argue that I can 'choose' not to kill, however I'm bound by other laws of the world, (and by extension, god). For example, I've got absolutely no leeway when it comes to the law of gravity. I can't decide "Well gee, following this whole 'stuff falls' law has been fun, but I think I'd rather not." If I'm bound to fall every time, and stuff falling is god's law, then why am I also not bound to do good? It seems a far more useful law to an all loving being as opposed to something trivial such as "Hurr durr, mercury has a freezing temperature of -38.83 c hurr durr"

He created everything, then backed off, except for working many miracles 2000 years ago, or so his book tells us. Clearly backing off isn't the issue here, yet we haven't seen a true miracle for 2000 years. Is this god like a deity in my video games? 'Must advance to civilization age before 9 plagues godpower can be reused'? After nonchalantly turning water into wine and making some loaves of bread and a fish freed hundreds in order to garner belief, he's decided to back off? What changed?

My previous point still stands. How can one created in his image and still be anything other than all loving? Where does the concept of sin originate? If we're talking strict religion, it still can't be the apple, because the act of eating the apple was sin, showing that sin was there before the apple was eaten, and was what caused the apple to be eaten, proving that god created something with sin.

You don't seem particularly indoctrinated, and you appear to have retained your sense of logic, so I question why you harbour this belief and the nature of your god. How does your idea of a god interact with the world? Does it give the same afterlife as a Christian might believe in? Did it even create the world? Does it interact in any way? If not, then what leads to your belief in it?

You've got a lack of understanding of scientific theory. The definition of a scientific theory is that it can be proven wrong. Take the theory of large objects distorting space and drawing other matter into them, otherwise known as gravity. It's fully possible that this theory will be disproven. We may discover that it's little gremlins who pull apples from trees, and find out that it's fat gremlins who sit on our feet that hold us in place to the earth, and not gravity. However we go with gravity, because it's the most believable. And with every new discovery we make, we find that our theory of gravity slots in perfectly. It was theorised that in a place without wind resistance, things will fall at the same speed. There was no means to check this, but once we did check it, we found that it was true. That's the element of scientific theory. Risk. To try the system that you develop without knowing for certain what will happen, just having a theory. When we discover more, if we've successfully predicted what would happen using our theory, the theory has supporting evidence, but is not fact. It is just a well-supported theory. Science cannot hand you the answers on a platter in the same way religion can. If you follow a deity, you've got answers for everything, and there is nothing unknown. However science has evidence behind it, and there's more reason to believe in the scientific flavour of the month than to believe in a deity, because science is getting closer to the truth each day, while the deity answer is hard pressed to stand up to criticism in modern day times.

Scientific theory is constantly striving to find the truth, and recognising that we don't know the truth. Religion can give you an answer, but there's no proof that it's _the_ answer. It's just like the gremlin theory and gravity.

Wrong. You are not 'proving' it in the truest sense of the word. You believe that, because there is the most evidence in favour of that theory. You've got visual evidence that there are humans operating the machines. However, they could be aliens in disguise, or the other factories could be using aliens, or the humans could just be a front for the aliens underground. It's another Devil's Proof. You cannot prove that none of those other scenarios are taking place, yet you believe in the humanity operating, because there is nothing to suggest that those other scenarios are taking place, and your humanity operating theory has far more evidence weighted up, but you cannot prove my theories wrong. This is why I would then say "Okay, I believe these humans are aliens in disguise. Thus if I pull their hair, the hair should come off." At which point I would test my theory. If the hair comes off, I have successfully predicted what will happen, so my alien theory gains some weight. If the hair doesn't come off, and instead the worker turns around and smashes me in the face, the theory has been proven wrong and your theory of them being humans goes unchallenged by my alien theory.

Correct. However the BB theory has more weight than god, because we have evidence for BB, but not for god. As such, the BB theory becomes the accepted one, and if those suggesting the god theory wish to challenge it scientifically, they need to make some predictions as to what they will discover, then research it. If it turns out to work in the way they thought it would, their theory gains weight. Making theories is about prediction, then checking if you're right, then drawing deductions as to the validity of the theory from the result.

We go all the way back to the matter and anti-matter at the beginning. We can go no further at this point in time, so we decide that god made the atoms, but god is infinite, so we don't need to explain what made him. Occam's Razor is a logic rule that states that you must chop down to the simplest answer. So if we end the chain by making something the exception to the rule that everything needs a creator, we can just end it at the atoms and say that they were always there, because there is no evidence for the god.

Why not stop the chain at the BB, saying that the burst of energy and matter is infinite and doesn't need explaining? Because we have a theory as to what came before it, and we have backed it up with predicted evidence.

Because we have observed evidence that supports their existence.

You're talking about Schrödinger's Cat. If there's a cat in a box, and there's a 50:50 possibility that poison will be released, then is the cat in the box alive or dead? Is it both? We cannot know. It is defined once we open the box. It's a thought-experiment to attack the idea the idea that something only comes into existence at point of observation. This way of looking at is a purely philosophical one, and doesn't have a particularly big part in this debate. If evidence is found of a god existing, then that god would have existed from before we knew about it, even though we didn't know. So you can make the argument that a god exists and we haven't discovered it yet, but on the other hand, no proof of it exists and no predictions are made, so there is no reason to believe in a god over the current established theory, because the supporting evidence is significantly weaker (namely, non-existent).

 

this^ i think god has always been its hard to imagine the concept but that is faith believing in something without any proof that it is possible/exists

 

How could it be that a god has always been? Writings of a god did not appear until humanity advanced quite a bit; prior to that the nomadic people were doing just fine on their own.
Furthermore, if God created and loves all men, why does the Bible condemn homosexuality?

 

because god created eve as a companion for adam if god had intended for guys to be with guys and girls to be with girls he would have made adam and steve

 

So you believe that homosexuality is wrong and those that are should go to Hell?

And fyi God supposedly created Adam and Lilith, but then Lilith wanted to be treated as an equal. She left Eden, became a demoness, and then God made Eve from Adam's rib, so the woman would have to be submissive to the man.

 

Phonetic writings of any sort did not appear for a while, and especially not in a concentration of one place from many languages, places, cultures, and times such as the bible is.

 

Well my religon says it's wrong but it never says anywhere in the Bible that people who are homosexual are instantly condemned to hell. They are still loved by the same god as me and can be forgiven for their sin.

 

So if God doesn't want homosexuality, then why is it naturally programmed into some organisms- organisms other than humans, even? Homosexual activity has been observed among dolphins and other mammals in nature, so why does this all-loving God make us naturally inclined to sin to the point that homosexuals are essentially forced to sin or live life alone? I can see the argument with murder and stealing and whatnot since that's more of a free will issue, but honestly, the argument that homosexuality is a choice is dying very quickly. That being said, why would a God that loves us and wants a world devoid of sin incline certain organisms to sin beyond their free will?

 

But if they are a practicing homosexual, could they ever be fully forgiven? Or would it be more along the lines of "I admit that I was a homosexual, but I will never be again"?
And it's been used to condemn homosexuality for centuries; to be honest, the Christian god seems to be a similar thing to Manifest Destiny - justification to do something.

 

Well from what I've been taught, yes you will be fully forgiven. You can't say that "I admit that I was a homosexual, but I will never be again" because like Advent said, some people are naturally programmed to be homosexual, they can't help it. The sin isn't being gay, the sin is mostly the gay sex.

I don't really get this. Can you go further in depth for me?

 

barg in, but what can make or what can happen to make god you can't have an uncaused thing to happen but in the same case could the uncaused thing that made god just have made the world insted

 

He's got a point. God is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Because he's so infinite, it's completely outside of our understanding to know how he came to be or even if he can be since he's infinite and a being is finite.

 

When Jesus died on the cross, he died for ALL of your sins. Not SOME sins, not "only these" sins, ALL of them. I think homosexuality falls under the category of "all".

 

God is defined by you as endless and beginningless. While there is nothing wrong with that statement in itself, with that in effect, we cannot use a god to logically explain the beginning of the universe, because Occam's Razor means we have to take the simplest solution. So if we're defining a god as infinite in order to explain the world, we may as well skip the entire step of adding in a god and instead define the initial matter/antimatter that made the universe as infinite.

 

What a whole lot of qualities that don't explain the problem. The problem in question is the presence of a chain of events that needs a cause. Nothing suggests that this being needs to be omnipotent. It just needs to be able to create matter and antimatter. Omniscient? How do we draw that quality from the creation? Assuming you are using the creation of the universe as 'evidence' for why a deity needs to exists, you're giving this creator properties we have no reason to believe in. It needs to be able to make matter and antimatter. It needs to be infinite. Even if you were to convince someone with this argument, they would only need to believe in a deity that can make a large amount of matter/antimatter, and only ever once at that.

However as I mentioned to KS, this argument has a massive flaw. I will demonstrate with a diagram.

Universe as it is now (Evidence: We observe a universe existing)
^
Explosion of matter and antimatter (Evidence: Universe is expanding, implying explosion. Other science I haven't researched.)
^
Initial matter/antimatter (Evidence: More science I haven't researched.)
^
God (Evidence: Something must have made the matter/antimatter, so why not our deity of choice?)
x
????? (Evidence: Nothing else exists, because the previous cause is infinite and doesn't need explaining.)
​

Now let's just cut out our deity of choice.

Universe as it is now (Evidence: We observe a universe existing)
^
Explosion of matter and antimatter (Evidence: Universe is expanding, implying explosion. Other science I haven't researched.)
^
Initial matter/antimatter (Evidence: More science I haven't researched.)
x
????? (Evidence: Nothing else exists, because the previous cause is infinite and doesn't need explaining.)
​

It still works, so Occam's Razor demands that we cut it down to its simplest form. So if we make god to make the initial matter, we may as well just make the initial matter the infinite one, as it creates far less confusion.

We've already discovered more than 4 dimensions. It's a prerequisite of String Theory, so there goes that idea.

Energy is eternal. Energy eventually becomes heat. Ergo, your god has suffered heat-death and is trapped in an alternate dimension for all eternity, unable to do anything.

Random side-shots aside, let's return to the main question. Where did this mass of energy come from? What created it? What leads you to believe it exists?

 

Does Occam's Razor entail truth? No. It is a pricipal of that which is THEORETICAL, which states that the simplest answer is USUALLY the correct one. This does not mean that the simplest answer is always the correct one; were this true we could just say that God did it and have it over with.

 

As I've conceded before, I cannot disprove god. I can, however, find flaws in arguments for the existence of god. One such thing is the idea that the atoms need a creator, so it must be god.

We cannot simply say that a god did it and have it over with. At any point someone attempt to add god in as an explanation for something that doesn't have an explanation, then deny that god needs an explanation because he's infinite, I get out my razor, slice the deity off and transfer the infinite trait to whatever it is without an explanation. He could have done so, but logically there is nothing to suggest that he did. Occam's Razor reinforces this idea.

 

But your main problem here is that Occam's Razor was intended to choose among conclusions and hypothesis in a scientific experiment. That was its original purpose, not to go about logically supporting or denying anything. There is little to no outside knowledge of God, and therefore Occam's Razor does not work here; if we know nothing about an entity, how do you expect to use such logic as "It is a simpler deduction to make, therefore it is more likely to be the cause to this effect?"

 

Because the argument creates an entity which has the trait of being infinite in order to explain why something exists. I can say it's simpler because in one, you assign the attribute to a current object. If the other, you create a hypothetical being that has the ability to create the first object, and is infinite. One is more complex than the other, because it is bringing a different being into it.

We don't need outside knowledge of god, because the concept of god is purely hypothetical, as there is no evidence.

Will post more later.