If God is the creator....
Posted on: March 11, 2010 - 5:02pm
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If God is the creator....
I've noticed that theists love to invoke the argument that the universe couldn't have been created from nothing, therefore there must be a creator.
But if everything must have a beginning and a creator,then who created god,and when.
So my question to any theist and atheist is, how can people say that the universe must have a creator and still believe in a god that apparently has been around forever?
"I don't believe in afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."
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Turtles all the way down.
The theist response is that God exists outside of time, just as outside of space. The atheist response is that the theist is full of shit.
I like one quote from Iron Chariots (http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=First_cause)
"Even if there is an infinite regress of causes, so what? The human mind is uncomfortable with the concept of infinity, but reality has no obligation to make us comfortable"
I really am not that familiar with the average theist argument, but what you are saying they say doesn't make much sense to me. You can't apply logical rules to something you know very little about. It seems a typical logical fallacy, similar to Dawkin's observations of the Blind Watchmaker.
First, a savage picks up a watch and looks it over. It is like nothing else he's ever seen in nature, so he decides it is an artifact.
Write that on the chalkboard: watch /= nature.
Not only that but us trying to look at how the savage would see it is about as potentially accurate as trying to imagine God looking down on the savage and wondering what God is thinking about the savage, and then the savage looks up and we sit back and imagine all kinds of shit while we are trying to piece this puzzle together. And that is fine. It is when we apply our limited and uninformed speculations into quasi facts and start to formulate paradigms around those when it really starts getting fucked up.
The savage might see the watch and think "Oh! I bet it would be cool if I wiped my ass with this thing and tangled it up in my beard." He might think its a rock, he might think he would rather have a digital one like he used to have on his home planet. He might think it is a god, or he might think he is its God.
When you find some broken teeth and fragments of a jaw and you start constructing small communities stooped over camp fires in your head you have overstepped the bounds of probability even if everyone at that time says "Oh, yeah! That's the way it went down." The same goes for trying to fit together the pieces of primitive superstition.
The theory that the universe couldn't have come from nothing so there must have been a creator, seems to me, a careless assumption. Eventually, though, your own logic fails as well. Who created the creator that created the creator etc. It all had to have a beginning unless, that which is beyond our own imagination could be true, which is that the creator, Jehovah God was without a creator. Without a beginning. And so far, there isn't a more reliable explanation.
hey dude eat this:
SHUTTFU
quantum fluctuations created the universe
have you ever heard of virtual particles ?
The logic doesn't fail if you acknowledge (as noted above) that an infinite regression may indeed exist. It would seem pretty careless indeed to assume a creator at any step along the way in such a regression. What's to say that the final creator, regardless of religion, was 6 creations down the line... or 20000 creations down the line? In such an infinite span of creations, it would seem that pin-pointing the iteration which actually started everything would be taking a stab in the dark, so to speak.
It's a pedantic approach to the issue, but makes a simple point - It is no more illogical to assume this infinite regression than it is to assume the existence of any creator being at any point along it's path. Carl Sagan put it quite simply in his Cosmos series, "Why not save a step, and assume the universe always existed." By inserting a middle-man in the form of a supernatural creator, what are we really achieving? Perhaps comfort to ease our minds? Perhaps a justification to cease attempts at greater understanding?
It's a cop-out in any form, IMO.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins
If what you say is true, than humans are just savages that are desperately tying to find an explanation for something that is difficult to explain. But instead of trying to solve the mystery, they call it a divine act and start talking to people who live on clouds, which is also qualifies as overstepping the bounds of probability. So next time when you tell an atheist he's deluded when he's imagining people around campfires, try to think about your assumptions about an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent man in the sky.
"I don't believe in afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."
Correct, it boils down to a god of the gaps argument.
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. - William S. Burroughs
How do you do that? How do you go from saying something reasonable and then at the very end do a complete turn-around and contradict even yourself? Can't you feel your brain crying out in pain from all the knots, twists and turns?
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
I like your name.
Robb
"The general opinion is not always the perfect truth..."
- Giordano Bruno
the gods were created out of fire and ice.
So some sort of Hydrogen-rich, Oxygen-rich plasma?
I got it, the gods were obviously a result of diamagnetic drift!
Questions for Theists:
http://silverskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/consistent-standards.html
I'm a bit of a lurker. Every now and then I will come out of my cave with a flurry of activity. Then the Ph.D. program calls and I must fall back to the shadows.
That was one of things that got me kicked out of my half sister's dad's Sunday "school" at the Southern Baptist church he went to. Another was talking about a book on evolution I had been reading at home in an Easter Sunday "class", but that's a different story entirely.
It was one of those "indoctrinate the kids into thinking some magical sky daddy made the universe" days, i.e. EVERY day, and the Sunday "school" lady was going on about how everything in the universe had to have a beginning (about 6000 years ago, OF COURSE) and it was called god. That's when my lifelong inability to keep my mouth shut in the face of bullshit popped up, and I asked her if everything needs a beginning, then when did god begin and what created god. She was so shocked that any of us kids would say anything other then the official "BAA'S" that she got flustered. She tried to tell me that god was outside of everything so he didn't need a beginning. That's when I brought up that she had already said that god was everywhere in the universe (omnipresence) and watching and listening in on everything (omniscience), so how could he not be apart of it all. She then quickly changed the subject with all the other kids looking at me wearing these scared expressions on their faces and the beginning of the end of my church going days were upon me.
It always made me sad, since she got that flustered over the questions of a 5 or 6 year old and was never able to answer them. My mom just told me it was because she was an idiot, but I felt sad about it because I realized even then that it was because she had gone to a Sunday "school" just like that one, but hadn't questioned any of it.
Fucking childhood indoctrination... it does nothing but create lifelong children.
"This may shock you, but not everything in the bible is true." The only true statement ever to be uttered by Jean Chauvinism, sociopathic emotional terrorist.
"A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished." Mikhail Bakunin
"The means in which you take,
dictate the ends in which you find yourself."
"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme leadership derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
No Gods, No Masters!
to this point of Thom's. It's not surprising we see the pre-universe in the context of our perceptions of the little bits of this universe our 5 terrestrial senses serve up to us but it's nevertheless an assumption to do so, just as Thom insists it is. There's also something about the scientific method - yes, I know, saying this is a sin - that seems to get out of shape when we approach the limits of objectivism and romp out into the fact-less zone. I'm uncomfortable with pressure to accept prime mover arguments on the basis of what we see around us when the exo-universe is less than a blur - especially when Dave's case states: "That which is beyond our imagination could be true". Messily, I think that which is beyond our imagination is certainly true but I don't think this truth is vanishingly likely to be jehovah god, who has existed forever.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
But I don't have any assumptions about an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent man in the sky and neither did the writers of the Bible. All of that came much later in an attempt either to make others accept a distorted version of the Bible's teachings or an adoption of outside influences to attract more followers. Let me give you an example of how what you probably think of as the way religion works is a gross underestimation.
Here in the small town where I live a preacher who teaches that all sinners go to hell to suffer eternal damnation was approached by some Jehovah's Witnesses who told him that the Bible doesn't teach hell. Much to their surprise he said he was well aware of that. They asked, then, why teach it? To frighten the congregation into submission and attendance? He laughed and said it was a fear on his behalf of losing his job. If he taught the truth about hell the congregation would throw him out on his ass. Why is that, do you think?
What exactly are you objecting to? Where did I get it right and where did I get it wrong?