My One Issue
To quote Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons -- "Hi, everybody!"
I'm one issue away from "honest to goodness" Deism. It's been giving me a headache for the last few years and it's my only major roadblock causing doubt about Deism.
It's the old ditty:
If God made the Universe, who or what made God? And if God wasn't created, why does the (allegedly less complex) Universe need a creator?
I can except that such questions are ultimately beyond definitive answers. What I'm looking for is something intellectually satisfying.
One scenario I've considered is God and Universe somehow coming into existence at the same time.
Another is God evolving within the Universe and creating from within it.
I really appreciate your ideas. If I can just get over this hurdle, I'll have a lot less headaches and much less doubt about Deism being the right path for me.
There was a creation some 13.7 billion years ago. What was around before then? A proto-universe, perhaps? Could God have come to be in that proto-universe and given order to the rest? Just one idea.
Only God knows, I suppose -- for now.
Hi John this is Omniwise . I have a Q. for you. Why do you believe in a god? I thought you looked for evidence. There is a lot of evidence that there is no need for a first cause. I would like you to look up Cyclic Universe and then go to Ted.com and watch Murray Gell-Mann on emergence. I love you man keep up the great work.
I thought scientists abandoned the "Closed Universe" theory.
Yes, I also thought most scientists gave up on the cyclic universe hypothesis so popular before Einstein. There are still a few diehards, but most now see evidence for a Big Bang.
I completely accept the evidence for the Big Bang. However, it isn't simply the case that you can either choose "big bang" or "cyclic universe." I saw a similar implied dichotomy in another thread, and that assumes that our universe is the totality of existence. Granted, when the term "universe" was coined it was meant to encompass all that exist. However, we've come a bit further conceptually since then, so why have I not seen entertained the idea of a multiverse? Sure, our universe began at a certain time, but does that mean Existence (all that does actually exist, capitalized to emphasize this meaning) began at a certain time? Could there not be a myriad of universes just as there is a myriad of galaxies within our universe?
In such a case, would not the Big Bang only represent the beginning of our universe, and not the beginning of Existence? In that case, the Big Bang wouldn't really be THE beginning in any sense of the word, only a transition from what it sprang from to its current form.
Perhaps this is what Brooklyn meant when asking "how do we know there was a Beginning" (capital "B" I notice, perhaps to imply an ultimate beginning). The Big Bang certainly doesn't require a beginning of everything, only a beginning of our universe in the form we now see.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turok07/turok07_index.html
Watch the video on cyclic universe By Neil Turok
...I don't understand the need to have a god in the first place. If you can accept God evolving in the universe and THEN creating within it, I fail to see why it would be difficult to accept that the universe evolved in general without intervention from a god at all. The same with God coming into existence simultaneously with the universe: isn't that horribly superfluous compared to a universe without a god? What need is there for a god in either scenario (or any scenario, for that matter)?
You're right. God is stinky. I fart in his general direction.
Goddess is okay though.
Is that the Boeing 747 argument?
You should see Alvin Platinga's response to Dawkins.
Basically - god is not complex-God is infinitely simple.
The basic god of theism is like a disembodied immaterial mind. God has no parts -so he cannot be complex.
And as to the explaination of god's existence.
There are 2 kinds of things that exist-things that exist because of something else (like stars, galaxies..).And things that exist like a kind of brute fact (like mathematical concepts and such) I am inclined to put god in the latter.
"When a bunch of screwballs think I'm a screwball, I must be doing something right"
-John Armstrong upon receiving his screwball award on TheologyWeb