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To: betty boop
"How contradicted? Are you saying that God cannot cause anything if he is himself eternal, unlimited, and uncreated? Do you think only finite created things can create anything? Or are you saying that you think God is coextensive with the universe? E.g., the universe is similarly eternal, unlimited, and uncreated? Forgive me: I'm not sure I'm following you here, aNYCguy. Please help me understand you? (Are you a Buddhist?)

You placed God outside our physical realm. How do you justify God's ability to affect the physical realm if he/she/it is not a physical being. You also created this non-physical world where you claim no physical rules apply. According to the way you justify this 'void' (or world) outside our physical world, your only requirement for its existence is that we can imagine it. From there we can also postulate another world external to both ours and God's that could contain God's creator.

"The creator is not "in" the universe. We know that the things "in" the universe -- physical things -- have physical causes. But you cannot infinitely regress the chain of causation. It must begin somewhere, or nothing could be anything at all.

The fact that the creator is not in this universe is not a fact at all but simply a jump in logic based on our current inability to explain the origin of the universe. The God void is an artificial default.

"There would be only a random accidental development that has no reason to become anything; and there would be no answer to Leibntz's two great questions: (1) Why is there something, why not nothing? and (2) Why are things the way they are and not some other way?"

Leibniz may have had many good questions; none of which impact on the reality of existence. Before the BB nothing existed, not time, not space, not logical interaction, not 'laws' of physics. The BB occurred and with it came interactions between matter and energy that are consistent and predictable and result without input from some designer guy. We do not need to assume things need a 'reason' to be, nor that those interactions are random.

"I won't even say that God is sui-generis, self-caused. All one can really say about God is, as Parmenides put it, "Is!" Or as the God of Sinai said to Moses, "I Am That Am."

As does Popeye.

"God as creator, being outside spacetime, is not subject to the "rules" of spacetime reality. There is nothing that says God must have a cause. To insist that he must have a cause is simply to apply the information we have about what goes on in the physico-temporal category of reality to a "category" -- God -- where they do not at all apply.

There is nothing to say that the BB need have a cause since the laws of physics as we know them did not exist before.

"To put it bluntly, you want God to "play by your rules," but the point is, he doesn't need to in any way, shape, or form; and I gather he doesn't. :^)

No we want you to play by the rules you expect us to abide by. If you can place God in some imaginary non-physical void, we can imagine a God creator. If you can discern God through purely rational means rather than through physical means we can use the same technique to discern God's God.

587 posted on 12/08/2005 5:15:46 PM PST by b_sharp (Science adjusts theories to fit evidence, creationism distorts evidence to fit the Bible.)
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To: b_sharp
Got your last. Much good stuff to chew on. But it'll have to wait till tomorrow; for it's late, and it's time for bed.

So, good night b_sharp! See you tomorrow. Thanks for writing!

620 posted on 12/08/2005 8:03:42 PM PST by betty boop (Dominus illuminatio mea.)
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