Who created God?

[Tantum_ergo]

Admit it. You liked it

I had to leave quickly before finishing this.

The next post would have been:

But that does not mean the Abrahamic concept of God is impossible.

Your ‘either-or’ is a neither-nor.

 

[Tim_D]

And my respect for Sagan has dropped. All logically and systematically answered objections. And ones answered centuries if not millenia ago. It just shows a lack of any philosophical learning, as good of a scientist as he may have been.

Well said. This objections are nothing new. I’ve always wondered why the so called “brilliant” men of our time have so willingly ignored the brilliant men of the past.

 

[Bradski]

Well said. This objections are nothing new. I’ve always wondered why the so called “brilliant” men of our time (who don’t agree with my position) have so willingly ignored the brilliant men of the past (who did).

Don’t you think that’s more accurate?

 

[Tim_D]

Don’t you think that’s more accurate?

No sir, I don’t. I’ve yet to find a self-proclaimed atheist who was more clever than those he so effortlessly wishes to ignore. The Carl Sagan quote is nothing but a cop out. There is little wonder why the current crop of pop atheists refuse to engage with credentialed theologians and philosophers.

 

[Bradski]

I’ve yet to find a self-proclaimed atheist who was more clever than those he so effortlessly wishes to ignore.

Then the revised quote is accurate.

 

[rose_kelly]

If everything came out of something then who created God?

Who Created God- catholicquestionsinasecularworld.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/starting-to-believe.html

 

[omgriley]

If heaven is a sequence of finite events that go on forever, then God cannot timelessly know all physical events at once because there is no definite end to them. His knowledge would be progressive and not necessary in some respect. This would mean that either the Abrahamic conception of God is impossible or heaven is not a sequence of finite events that go on forever.

What say ye?

Gladly.

Brother, there’s a false presupposition in your logic, namely, that Heaven is a finite sequence of events continuing on forever. Firstly, that concept is a contradiction in terms. For something to be finite it necessarily means that it will end at some point.

Moreover, Heaven is not some eternal picnic that God invented to keep us happy for eternity. Heaven is total and immediate contemplation of the divine essence. Those in Heaven see God as He is and without any mediation of any kind. This doesn’t neccesarily involve a time progression of sorts. And to be perfectly honest, humans are not entirely sure about how exactly time will work in the next life. Nor has the Church spoken definitively about it. We are temporal creatures for sure, and so we make sense of things through the progression of time. So arguably there could be something similar to how time works in this life in the next. But thats simply something we must leave up to God.

In any event, how we perceive reality does not speak at all to how God’s nature works or how He perceives things. God is eternal and all moments and possible events are available to Him at once. So, yes, God even knows every single “could have been” He knows things that not only haven’t happened yet, but things that will never happen (e.g., how things would have played out had Satan never rebelled).

You say that God cannot know all physical events because they will not end. Yet, we know by revelation that the physical world will end. Even if it didn’t though, God is the eternal one. If something progresses forever, it’s because He is the one causing it to do so. The only reason anything will last for eternity is because God himself is eternal and he continually keeps it in existence at each moment.

 

[mkoopman]

Gladly.

…

The only reason anything will last for eternity is because God himself is eternal and he continually keeps it in existence at each moment.

You did fine until the last where you enter temporal nuance onto eternal qualities. The last word as “moment” is like one of those “fail” videos after you were bicycling on the fence the whole length.

Try learning some chaos and information theory, but skip most of the finite automata theories. Evaluating sums of finite sets within plausibility theory with color, place and genera might win you the big close that tags eternity with a well ordered collection. That collection is the same as that old kit bag that packs, ring familiar?

 

[omgriley]

You did fine until the last where you enter temporal nuance onto eternal qualities. The last word as “moment” is like one of those “fail” videos after you were bicycling on the fence the whole length.

Haha perhaps you’re right. I appreciate the criticism, but I did not mean “moment” in the sense which we understand. I should have qualified my statement with the fact that we are never going to be able to accurately talk about God with our limited intellect. We’ll only ever come so close, and that was my stab at it.

 

[Wesrock]

Don’t you think that’s more accurate?

It’s not simply a matter of agreement. Those philosophers of the 1600s and later largely interpreted the Schoolmen out of context and without actually learning their arguments. Their easy “refutations” were really not refutations at all, but mostly arguments against strawmen. That’s not to say that they’d inevitably agree, but they’d perhaps not have been so mockingly dismissive. And the famouse Hume’s Fork, for example, was also nothing new. Aquinas formally refuted it over four hundred years prior. Now, perhaps Aquinas was wrong, but Hume never bothered addressing it, and everyone seemed to think it was ingenius and the bee’s knees for quite awhile.

Again, maybe they wouldn’t agree with Aquinas, but by the seventeenth century, most never really understood his arguments or the Aristotlean context, either (though the Aristotlean context would have been much more intuitively understood in Aquinas’ time, as that way of thinking had permeated popular culture such that it seemed normal and not something foreign). Yet there’s this perception that modern philosophers trampled it into the dirt.

And Sagan’s quote shows a basic lack of philosophy understanding, given that each objection he raised has been formally addressed by great philosophers in multiple different ways for the past 2,000 years, not even just speaking of Aquinas or other Aristotleans.

 

[Bradski]

And Sagan’s quote shows a basic lack of philosophy understanding, given that each objection he raised has been formally addressed by great philosophers in multiple different ways for the past 2,000 years, not even just speaking of Aquinas or other Aristotleans.

Sagan’s quote simply asks the questions that present day cosmology raises. And he felt that the universe could be explained without postulating God. As he said in 1989:

“Do you understand how – assuming either of us ever did say ‘The universe can be explained without postulating God’ – this could be understood as dogmatic? I often talk about the ‘God hypothesis’ as something I’d be fully willing to accept if there were compelling evidence; unfortunately, there is nothing approaching compelling evidence. That attitude, it seems to me, is undogmatic.” washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2014/07/10/carl-sagan-denied-being-an-atheist-so-what-did-he-believe-part-1/

If you consider the evidence to be compelling, then you believe. If not, you don’t. It really is that simple.

 

[Tim_D]

If you consider the evidence to be compelling, then you believe. If not, you don’t. It really is that simple.

A foolish man who makes an uniformed decision based on his own opinion and not the evidence does nothing to forward the discussion. As previously stated, Sagan’s objections had been asked and answered centuries ago. Just because he did not bother to examine the evidence does not make his conclusion any more compelling.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

If we imagine a universe which is shrinking as opposed to expanding, then any sentient life in that universe might surmise that everything will end up in a singularity and that it would be nonsensical to ask what happens after that point as time would cease to exist.

Then it expands again (the bounce) and any sentient life in that universe might surmise that everything started with a singularity and that it would be nonsensical to ask what happened before that point as time before that point did not exist.

There seems to be a logical flaw in your exposition.
If time ceased to exist then on what basis do you speak of something happening “then”, “again” let alone be called a “bounce” rather than a “rise” .

 

[rossum]

Catholic teaching is that God is eternal and uncreated, but that God’s creation is out of nothing (ex nihlo).

I have always found that badly phrased. Creation did not arise ex nihilo, it arose ex deo. God did not start with absolutely nothing, He started with Himself (and His co-cause), not nothing.

Co-cause? Yes. God alone is not a sufficient cause for creation, otherwise creation would be as old as God and the universe a lot more than 13.5 billion years old. The co-cause is something that was not present 200 billion years ago, but was present 13.5 billion years ago.

God may be a necessary cause, but He is not a sufficient cause. If He were, then everything He caused would be eternal.

rossum

 

[Tim_D]

I have always found that badly phrased. Creation did not arise ex nihilo, it arose ex deo. God did not start with absolutely nothing, He started with Himself (and His co-cause), not nothing.

Co-cause? Yes. God alone is not a sufficient cause for creation, otherwise creation would be as old as God and the universe a lot more than 13.5 billion years old. The co-cause is something that was not present 200 billion years ago, but was present 13.5 billion years ago.

God may be a necessary cause, but He is not a sufficient cause. If He were, then everything He caused would be eternal.

rossum

Try again.

 

[Vico]

I have always found that badly phrased. Creation did not arise ex nihilo, it arose ex deo. God did not start with absolutely nothing, He started with Himself (and His co-cause), not nothing.

Co-cause? Yes. God alone is not a sufficient cause for creation, otherwise creation would be as old as God and the universe a lot more than 13.5 billion years old. The co-cause is something that was not present 200 billion years ago, but was present 13.5 billion years ago.

God may be a necessary cause, but He is not a sufficient cause. If He were, then everything He caused would be eternal.

rossum

There are some that believe that there is no creator. However for Christianity that is not the case. Theophilus of Antioch, in the second century, wrote of creatio ex nililo and about other beliefs:

” . . . but then they (the Platonists) maintain that matter as well as God is uncreated, and aver that it is coeval with God. But if God is uncreated and matter uncreated, God is no longer, according to the Platonists, the Creator of all things, nor, so far as their opinions hold, is the monarchy of God established. And further, as God, because He is uncreated, is also unalterable; so if matter, too, were uncreated, it also would be unalterable, and equal to God; for that which is created is mutable and alterable, but that which is uncreated is immutable and unalterable. And what great thing is it if God made the world out of existent materials? For even a human artist, when he gets material from some one, makes of it what he pleases. But the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases.” Theophilus of Antioch, Letter to Autolycus

 

[rossum]

Try again.

Certainly.

1: God is eternal, so He existed 200 billion years ago.

2: God is a sufficient cause of the universe.

3: Hence the universe is 200 billion years old because the sufficient cause of the universe existed 200 billion years ago.

Point out the logical flaw(s) in my syllogism please.

rossum

 

[rossum]

There are some that believe that there is no creator. However for Christianity that is not the case. Theophilus of Antioch, in the second century, wrote of creatio ex nililo and about other beliefs:

” . . . but then they (the Platonists) maintain that matter as well as God is uncreated, and aver that it is coeval with God. But if God is uncreated and matter uncreated, God is no longer, according to the Platonists, the Creator of all things, nor, so far as their opinions hold, is the monarchy of God established. And further, as God, because He is uncreated, is also unalterable; so if matter, too, were uncreated, it also would be unalterable, and equal to God; for that which is created is mutable and alterable, but that which is uncreated is immutable and unalterable. And what great thing is it if God made the world out of existent materials? For even a human artist, when he gets material from some one, makes of it what he pleases. But the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases.” Theophilus of Antioch, Letter to Autolycus

God is not, and cannot be, the creator of “all things”. He did not create Himself, obviously. Similarly He did not create anything which applies to Himself. He is a “living God” so He did not create life. He is (presumably) intelligent, so He did not create intelligence. Similarly for a range of properties of God, which cannot have been created by God.

rossum

 

[Vico]

God is not, and cannot be, the creator of “all things”. He did not create Himself, obviously. Similarly He did not create anything which applies to Himself. He is a “living God” so He did not create life. He is (presumably) intelligent, so He did not create intelligence. Similarly for a range of properties of God, which cannot have been created by God.

rossum

God is not a thing.

 

[Tim_D]

1: God is eternal, so He existed 200 billion years ago.

Wrong. If God is eternal and is outside of time, then He exists, He has not existed. Besides, it is nonsensical to even say such a thing as “He existed 200 billion years ago.” Seeing that the universe, our measure of “existence,” is roughly 14 billion years old, it is a meaningless statement to say that God or anything existed 200 billion years ago because there was no concept of time before the existence of the universe.

2: God is a sufficient cause of the universe.

Sufficient? I suppose but it is more proper to say that God is the cause of the universe. Saying sufficient implies that there are things in which He may be insufficient.

3: Hence the universe is 200 billion years old because the sufficient cause of the universe existed 200 billion years ago.

Massive failure. Quite simply, the universe is not 200 billion years old. Why not 400 billion or 400 trillion billion quintillion? God is eternal but that doesn’t make the universe eternal. I am 51 years old. There is no clay jar on the table next to me. If I go out and get some clay and make a jar, does that mean the jar is 51 years old even though I just made it today? No.

Point out the logical flaw(s) in my syllogism please.

You would do better by pointing out the logic!