All religions

[KyivAndrew]

Science is irrelevant to this kind of question - valuable as it is for many other questions; but here, it has nothing to say, because only some kinds of truth are accessible to science. Questions about God’s Eternity - which is what you’re asking about - are valid questions, but not scientific questions.​

God has not “always been” - “always” is a loaded word; it implies that time is relevant to eternity. But it is not: eternity is not a “bigger and better” time - it is not time at all. God is not “time-bound” - we are, so our thinking is, and our words, & our ideas; if fish thought about God, they might think of Him as surrounded by water What we are - human beings, with all that this implies - influences how we think. As we are limited, no full answer to your question is possible; at most, we can have true but very incomplete ideas about God - “we see in part, and we know in part” (1 Corinthians 13).

One idea I find helpful - if you don’t, just ignore it - is to think of God as a bit like an author, and us as like the characters in the author’s story. An author’s time in his real life is not necessarily connected with the time experienced by his characters: the fact that a story may cover 50 or 5,000 years, is no reason to think that the author takes 50 or 5,000 years to write it. A book may take 10 years of the author’s life to write - this does not tell us anything about the length of time covered by the story: it may be 10 or 100 years, or a million years or just one day. “Finnegan’s Wake” takes in the action of a single day in Dublin - it does not follow that it was written in a single day, or in Dublin.

IOW, there is no continuity between the length of time spanned in the story, and the length of time lived by its author from starting it to finishing it. And to complicate things even more, the author will do other things than write: he has to get up in the morning - for the characters, what their author does when not writing about them may leave no trace in the story at all: that he gets up in reality, does not mean that he gets up in the story; because the reality he lives in, is not the reality of the world of his story. He may sleep for eight hours in the Primary World, the so-called “real world” - it does not follow that his eight-hour sleep is an event in his book, which is a Secondary World.

All created things are in a sort of Divinely-invented Secondary World - God is the only Real Reality; compared with God, all else is fiction We are in the very odd position of having a foot in both worlds - we are fictions who are conscious of our unreality, who can be in conscious contact with our Author. We meant to become like our Author - & this is possible, because the Author is the Hero of the story, & has become one of us.

Any use ?

I’ve read a lot of your posts Michael but this is certainly one of the best yet, even though we may use science at times to show that belief in God is a reasonable view.

 

[KyivAndrew]

We don’t currently know what happened before the Big Bang.

No, but no atheist can say there was no Creator “before” the Big Bang. In fact recent science leans towards a Creator in certain respects as I mentioned in another thread in quoting an article from CNA:

Fr. Spitzer explained that, since science is based on a empirical model, it can change at any time. Nevertheless, as science develops and the so called “Big Bang” theory of the origin and existence of the universe becomes more refined, “it becomes less and less possible for other explanations (of the universe) to be scientifically viable.”

The theory, developed by the Belgian Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître, proposes that the Universe has expanded from a primordial dense initial condition at some time in the past (currently estimated to have been approximately 13.7 billion years ago), and continues to expand to this day.

The model, according to Fr. Spitzer, has been revised, refined and scientifically established to a point that any other theory of the origin and existence of the universe has become harder and harder to defend.

Fr. Spitzer explained that, what we know from the most recent scientific evidence is that “the universe is not the universe of Mr. Newton anymore, it is not infinite, it is finite, it started at some point, and is in constant expansion.”

He then explained the complexity of the universe, saying it is based on “an incredibly delicate balance of 17 cosmological constants. If any of them would be off by one part of a tenth at a forty potency, we would be dead and the universe would not be what it is.”

“Every single Big Bang model shows the existence of what scientists call a ‘singularity,’ and the existence of each singularity demands the existence of an external ‘element’ to the universe,” Fr. Spitzer said.

The priest physicist then proceeded to explain the different, complex versions of the various Bing Bang theories.

He quoted Roger Penrose, the world-famous English mathematician and physicist, who corrected some of the theories of his friend and colleague Stephen Hawkins to conclude that every Big Bang theory, including the one known as Quantum theory, confirms the existence of singularities. Therefore, said Spitzer, the need to find an explanation to the universe’s existence drives us to seek “a force that is previous and independent from the universe.”

Fr. Spitzer also quoted the 2003 experiments by three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, who were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.

“The concept at this point is clear: nothing is nothing, and from nothing, nothing comes, since nothing is… nothing!” Fr. Spitzer said, to explain the fact that contemporary astrophysics demands “something with sufficient power to bring the universe into existence.”

“It sounds like a theological argument, but is really a scientific conclusion.

“There is no way to ignore the fact that it demands the existence of a singularity and therefore of a Creator outside space and time,” he added.

catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=17267

 

[AntiTheist]

If anything I think your subjective point of view is demonstrative of an Atheism of the Gaps.

Huh?

Atheism is the rejection of the claim that gods exist. It’s not necessarily the same as materialism, though I’d wager that most atheists are materialists.

I’m only a “materialist” in the sense that I think that the material world obviously exists and that I’ve never been presented with evidence of a non-material world that is independent from the material. Of course, I’m willing to change my mind if I’m presented with evidence.

Could you please explain in your own words how my position fills in any “gaps” in our knowledge?

 

[Newbie2]

Whether or not you think that man has a “soul,” it’s unquestionable that our large brains, which are responsible for consciousness and higher thought, are the result of a process of natural selection.

And that’s not completely at odds with Catholic theology of creation, difference being that we accept the possibility of evolution of mankind, but at some point man was instilled with a human soul.

I get the feeling you’re conflating two things.

Theists use their god of the gaps to explain things that humans don’t currently understand. As human knowledge expands, the power of the gods correspondingly shrinks.

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Not if one considers that those “gods” (we believe The God) are responsible for those things that we both understand and do not understand.

 

[KyivAndrew]

Huh?

Atheism is the rejection of the claim that gods exist. It’s not necessarily the same as materialism, though I’d wager that most atheists are materialists.

I’m only a “materialist” in the sense that I think that the material world obviously exists and that I’ve never been presented with evidence of a non-material world that is independent from the material. Of course, I’m willing to change my mind if I’m presented with evidence.

Could you please explain in your own words how my position fills in any “gaps” in our knowledge?

Huh? I thought you posted on here a week or so ago that it would be your last post in a while on CAF but I notice your # of postings increasing exponentially by day.

You’re right in that “atheism of the gaps” may be a misnomer. I used it because it was the title of the article I quoted. More correct would be to describe the belief common to many atheists (as you aver) of relying solely on materialism, a monistic view, to explain Everything, including the gaps in our knowledge of things such as Human Consciousness. I realize you say you leave yourself open to proof but you won’t even give philosophical metaphysics a hearing (comparing it to alchemy) so I doubt you’d ever be convinced of the “spiritual” or “God” unless it came in the form of an empirically tested and peer-reviewed position. That is not going to happen.

In any event, it is Thanksgiving in the Great White North. We celebrate the date properly (on this weekend) not in November like the Yanks do I think, so I don’t want to get over-involved debating atheists on matters they will surely not believe while I’m supposed to be thanking the Big Guy Upstairs with my family.

 

[lemondiesel]

You guys actually gave me good things to think about. I did like the author example

thanks guys time to go explore this forum haha :bowdown:

 

[AntiTheist]

More correct would be to describe the belief common to many atheists (as you aver) of relying solely on materialism, a monistic view, to explain Everything, including the gaps in our knowledge of things such as Human Consciousness.

Well, I don’t think that very many atheists would claim absolutely that materialism necessarily explains all gaps in our knowledge – just that, judging on the basis of things we’ve discovered already, the chances are pretty good that future discoveries will also point to material facts.

You seem pretty sure that there will never be actual evidence of your spiritual claims (“That is not going to happen,” you write), which means that you admit that future scientific discoveries, including ones that fill in gaps in our knowledge, will indeed point to material facts.

In any event, it is Thanksgiving in the Great White North.

Oh, I was unaware that 1) Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend and that 2) you are Canadian.

Happy Thanksgiving, and I’ll talk to you soon.