Blue

A friend of mine made a great point about God. Though I'm not sure it's exactly fitting with the thread, I thought it was worth mentioning.


How could God exist (in the Christian sense) if he created souls to be damned?

Kamikazi Kat

Replace God with _____, then the whole arguement makes complete sense.

Then you fill it in with whatever the hell you want, everybody wins.

Freebase Dali

Let me put it in a way that makes a little more sense:

GI-JOOOOEEEEEEEEE.


No seriously though. Christians argue that the dude upstairs created people with free will, so it's their choice whether they believe and go to heaven or disbelieve and go to hell...
But since God supposedly knows everything, he would have created people and already know what would become of all their decisions. Even the ones that brought them to hell.
Thus, creating souls that were, in his eyes, destined for damnation.

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Freebase Dali

I love subs, but you don't see me damning them to hell. (except subway)

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Bane of your existence

This doesn't explain where God came from. If he exists, what's the explination of his existence.

Guybrush

Pft, why would anyone take such arguments seriously at all? To those who criticized this for being based on very simple assumptions, I agree.

Must be nice, though. I'm impressed that these people on our planet, a tiny speck in a universe that's estimated to contain hundreds of billions of galaxies (quick source), have stumbled over the explanation for it all so easily.

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Something Completely Different

lucifer_sam

and at the center of it all is me.

right?

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Freebase Dali

Exactly.
For something to exist, it must first be created. It's logic that's not merely confined to our own dimension of understanding. It's probably the only truth that we can know. If it's there, it has been created, regardless of the forces behind the creation.

So if god was created, then the explanation of his existence would have to be so far out of our realm of understanding that we will never know. But to assume that god was created is to assume that the explanation of his existence is the result of a creation before that as well... in which case, the cycle does not end and stretches into infinity.

The only possible way to validate an argument against a creator down to a finite point is to say that somewhere along the line, stuff came from nowhere and just appeared for no reason.

And that is what divides us. The school that reasons against matter existing without a cause, and the school that reasons matter must exist as a result of cause.

The biggest thing I see is that if everything is the result of an ultimate creator, then the creator does not exist because it, itself, was not created.

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SATCHMO

And yet what do we do about ex nihilo? We needn't necessary confine the impetus for the creation of the universe to something so anthropomorphic as the Judeo-Christian concept of god, but just as Einstein said "nothing happens until something moves". Well, something had to have moved.

Guybrush

Actually, the cause and effect thinking doesn't always apply - at least not as far as we think we know today. (Something exists so it must have been created is a classical cause and effect way of thinking). If you look at quantum physics, there's a lot of stuff that seems to just happen. You can do your best to try and predict it, but you still have to deal with probabilities rather than certanties. At a small enough level, stuff just happens .. Stuff that seem to defy cause and the way things at a macro level relate to space and time.

If at the start of it all, the universe really was compressed supersmall, maybe such weird quantum things happening for no particular reason could be an important trigger in the creation of our universe as it is today.

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Something Completely Different