Who Made God?

No, it is not obvious.AbE: It is also irrelevant. The issue is related to two things in this thread, "Who made God" and the offtrack rabbit hole of "What did the Universe come from?"There is lots of evidence that humans made God but not much evidence yet on the latter question but pretty overwhelming evidence that this universe did have a beginning and that it has changed and evolved over time.But while the first question is relevant to this topic the latter question is simply irrelevant.Edited by jar, : fix sub-title and add AbE:Edited by jar, : fix sub-title No ---> Not

Hi LNA, I am very busy most days but at my age (78) when it is cold like it is now I do not get very far from the inside of the house.But I needed to get information on the subject of your question before I replied. I am not sure what anyone believes other than myself.But there is no scientist that can believe anything existed prior to the Planck epoch because he/she has no scientific data to base any conclusion on.Any scientist that believes anything existed prior to the Planck epoch is basing his belief on faith which I have been told no scientist other than Christian scientist have. There is no theory of anything existing prior to the Planck epoch.
String theory is not a theory as it is a belief that is based on zero scientific data. That makes it a hypothesis. What is confusing about it.All creationist believe the heavens and the earth and everything it them had a beginning to exist. Except maybe me and a few of my friends. We believe the universe and everything in it has always existed in some form just not in the form it is in today. I believe I can prove that by the original text of the Hebrew old Testament.Science cannot prove the existence of any thing prior to the Planck epoch. That means no space, no time, no void, no vacuum, literally an absence of existence. Nothing to support the String hypothesis or the bounce hypothesis.Since there was no existence prior to the Planck epoch, anything that existed at the Planck epoch had to begin to exist from an absence of existence. That would mean everything we see came from nothing which is a scientific impossibility. What would that force be and where would it come from?Who measured the temperature at the Planck epoch? What instrument was used to measure that temjperature? So I just wonder where those numbers came from? Great question. You won't find a scientific answer as to what the very first existence was. There is no scientific data to even support a guess. Everybody wants to require a cause for the existence of God which is the topic of this thread, but none of my foes here wants to hear it if I require a cause for the existence of the universe.I have a cause for the existence of the universe. The eternal all powerful God created it.I do find a statement that the universe had a beginning.

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Stephen Hawking says: "In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology. Yet it is now taken for granted."

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The page you were looking for doesn't exist (404) I typed it you tried to copy and paste it. But they both refer to the same thing, 'morning'.If you want to copy and paste something from a post that is Hebrew or Greek or special number formations you need to click peek mode in the top right hand corner and then copy and paste that information.The Hebrew word הילל is the one translated Lucifer. This Hebrew word appears no other place in the Hebrew text. The meaning is light or light bearer.‘Morning star’ or lucifer in the Latin Vulgate literally referred to Venus, but metaphorically would refer to earthly kings, emperors, and pagan deities. The KJV translators did not translate הילל. They probably used Jerome’s translation as they were very familiar with latin. Lucifer is not a proper name it simply is a Latin translation for morning star.I do not find one Hebrew Scholar who proposes that the devil is lucifer in Isaiah 14:12.
Verse 16 plainly says this lucifer is a man. That should settle any argument on this text. Biblical Hebrew has no vowels. The vowel markings was added in 800 AD by the Masoretes..
In Bible Hebrew the Aleph א He ה Vav ו and yud י consonants serve as vowel letters.God Bless,

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Yes, I have heard that said. But that bromide turns out to be wrong. There are stupid questions.

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Many questions are not true requests for information but are instead thinly veiled attempts to state some position despite having a question mark at the end. The implied statements in those questions may well be stupid. Those are not the kinds of questions your school teacher was talking about, but they are the kind of questions ICANT asks very frequently.

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I think he is asking for a description of the various theories on "what came before the Bang".You seem to think that he is "just trying to score points".He just wants an outline of the current theories then a survey of the evidence.(I might have been a bit better in the past, but I am not sure I can do a good enough job presently)He will have his position on the issue, which is his right.

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I still don't understand how anyone can accept such a concept as a nothingness phase.
Is it not obvious that if at any given point there was nothing...then at any future point there simply must be nothing? Otherwise what you are implying is that something was created.

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Then is it obvious that there was something?(What? Is it space? Empty space I presume? Or is it matter? What matter?)What are the options?You do know that we are talking about something existing eternally in the PAST, right?

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Of course, if an unbeliever conceives of nothing (in the form of No God) and then later becomes a believer, the belief itself becomes the creation. Nothing becomes something. I reject this theory, however, because God is more than a subset of the human mind.

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I'm talking about any anything existing eternally.The ability to conceive of something existing eternally is easily understandable if one takes for granted that something was always here (while always sidestepping any sort of explanation for HOW even if there is a defined WHAT), and then it is a matter of saying that "the existing matter will always be here in some form".But I can't remember any genuine explanations that really went after the real issue.

Hi LNA, I was taught a lot of things from 1949 when I was born again until I studied Hebrew and Greek in the 60's which I majored in while in Bible College. I then continued my studies until today and will continue tomorrow as I learn things every day.After studying Hebrew and Greek I learned that a lot of things that I had been taught did not agree with what the Bible says.I was taught about a canopy around the earth. I was taught that the earth was very young. I was taught that we could not understand most of the Bible. I was taught there was one creation event in Genesis chapter 1 and an explanation in chapter 2.I have found that all those were lies.
The canopy or bubble as some prefer did not exist.
The heavens and the earth is older than mans biggest numbers.Just think a few years back they told us the oil reserves started out with 3 trillion barrels of oil. We have used over a trillion barrels and they still tell us there is 3 trillion barrels left. It takes 98,000 lbs of material to create 1 gallon of gasoline. All the vegetation that is on the earth at present would not even produce the surface coal we have today. I have asked the question many times in different places for someone to explain how all that material got covered up with up to 5 miles of dirt and rock. Nobody even hazards a reply. The oil at 5 miles deep in the earth is under 22,000 psi. You pop a drill in a pocket of oil and it will come out of the ground without a pump. Our little fiasco in the Gulf shows how much oil can flow from a well. Now as to how that material got there. It had to get there when the land mass that contains it was the surface of the earth and was then covered up. We have cities and buildings being uncovered all the time by scientist. Now to produce all the material for the oil in the ground that would have required a long period of time. Since we have rock being formed by molten rock all the time which when tested is brand new rock there is no way to tell how old the earth really is as it has to have changed many times during the time the oil, natural gas, and coal has been formed.So yes the earth is very old.That is the reason I made the comment I did.You are a victim of the same thing. You believe what you believe because it is what you have been taught and if you never question that information you will probably be wrong in most things you think you know. You see everyone has an opinion and they want you to agree with their opinion. I am going to keep putting my opinions out there whether anyone agrees with me or not does not matter. But to those who try to present information to change my opinion to theirs is welcomed because that is how I can learn. There are some posters on the internet that are useless as they never post anything to refute what I say or try to change my mind. Those that do I appreciate your input into my learning process.At 78 I learn something new everyday. If I don't it is a day in my life that is wasted.God Bless

jar said:

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Phat said:
"Is it not obvious that if at any given point there was nothing...then at any future point there simply must be nothing?"

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No, it is not obvious.

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I remember that when I was 7 years old, I wondered how on Earth the universe could have ever had life (yes I very much knew of religion, yes I very much did, but I was somehow able to separate scientific questions and theological beliefs, it now seems amazing that I could compartmentalize the way I seemingly "naturally" did).I didn't understand that a universe itself would also be exceedingly unlikely, as space itself is ALSO a miracle. The more I learn about the issues, the more unlikely it seems. I NOW think that the existence of space itself is way more unlikely than anything biological existing, because the biological matter, again, had the great advantage of existing on a universe that already had matter.I took space for granted as something that "always existed", I didn't know any better.I took the universe "always existing" for granted.Otherwise, I was remarkably non-anthropocentric.(remove the fact that space and matter are fully present, obvious, and 100% tangible realities, then we still must ask why or how anything could physically come about)The fact is that no scientist can explain how any force could even exist - to start with - so as to create space.jar said:

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AbE: It is also irrelevant. The issue is related to two things in this thread, "Who made God" and the offtrack rabbit hole of "What did the Universe come from?"

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Remember how I, just now, said "we still must ask why or how anything could physically come about"?The issue is totally related to theoretical spiritual beings, especially a creator of our universe.The motivation for the question is that creationists (like Sarfati) feel that a God existing for 6000 years (plus some amount of time before the creation) can be the be all and end all answer to questions of origins.There is even audacity thrown in ("This makes God 'eternal' since he existed before the beginning of our known universe").We have every right to ask "Then, where did God come from? ", because there is a creationist attack that goes something like, "you can't have a creation without a creator", and we are all supposed to think that modern-science based astronomical works are a joke, because they propose something (the forces of nature then the resulting universe) to have come from out of nowhere, when the creationist "solution" is just waiting there for us to find so we can see that "all tough questions are actually - very easily - answered".

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There is lots of evidence that humans made God but not much evidence yet on the latter question but pretty overwhelming evidence that this universe did have a beginning and that it has changed and evolved over time.

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But while the first question is relevant to this topic the latter question is simply irrelevant.

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The way you try to limit the discussion to our known universe is as anthropocentric as creationists like Sarfati manage to limit the discussion.This question transcends our known universe.True, it is a monumental wish to hope for an understanding of how exactly our universe came to be, but don't assume that a particle (like the inflaton) or a force (like Dark Matter) being fully understood as it applies to our universe, somehow means that our (once 13.7-13.8 billion years ago)non-space becoming a universe explains EVERYTHING there really is.Infact, Guth says that a multiverse is difficult to avoid with an "inflaton" particle.Listen to him say it here
Detecting the 'Bang' from the Big Bang - Science FridayListen to Roger Penrose say that our Big Bang was nothing more than an event that happened endlessly. Our universe is "eternal" and it just recycles itself. Unlimited existence "in both directions"Roger Penrose: Cosmic Inflation Is 'Fantasy' - Science FridayThe scientific material universe questions meet with the spiritual since both attempt to answer the same questions.But we must ask a question without the goal posts being set up in an unfair "double standard" type of way.God would have needed to come from somewhere too because to say "He was just there, sounds to me like pantheism" (on another universe or perhaps a spiritual plane).Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Hi LNA, According to everything I have been told here there is nothing outside of the universe. Stephen Hawking, Son Goku, and cavediver have said the universe was self-contained.So there was no empty space or matter until after the universe existed. Which did not exist until the Planck epoch. That is the only way there was anything prior to the Planck epoch.
It had to exist eternally in the past. Or you run into the same problem with space, or matter beginning to exist.The only way to solve the nothingness problem is to have an eternal source of power which God is.God Bless,

ICANTI was working about 12 hours today, and still have 5 to go it seems.My response to your last several posts (going back around to post 220 or so) will need to happen later.One BIG issue though.You said:

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The only way to solve the nothingness problem is to have an eternal source of power which God is.

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God would have needed to come from somewhere too because to say "He was just there", sounds to me like pantheism (on another universe or perhaps a spiritual plane).You seem to want to look at this universe alone.It sounds like you see this universe as the only thing that ever could have existed space wise (meaning that there were never any universes in any other "space" AND NOTE that "space" would seemingly have to start out as non-space then become space).It almost sound like you believe in a spiritual pantheism type of FIRST CAUSE to the spirit world.There was this eternal entity that just was always there?Sounds like he came from nothing or you think whatever existed somehow became him or what?Sounds like what you attack. Listen to yourself.

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Since there was no existence prior to the Planck epoch, anything that existed at the Planck epoch had to begin to exist from an absence of existence. That would mean everything we see came from nothing which is a scientific impossibility.

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You won't find a scientific answer as to what the very first existence was. There is no scientific data to even support a guess. Everybody wants to require a cause for the existence of God which is the topic of this thread, but none of my foes here wants to hear it if I require a cause for the existence of the universe.

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I have a cause for the existence of the universe. The eternal all powerful God created it.

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You say that God created all the forces to make all that we see?But you don't say where God came from!So your solution is a non-solution.Based on what little you drop, you (and every other creationist I have heard) are really describing a belief in a type of "collective soul of the universe" always-existing type of RULE MAKER for the forces we see. You have a spiritual pantheism thing going, and don't know it.You "He was always here" is little more than some sort of collective self-organizing force that came about in some unspecified way.Your clues are the "always" and "eternal" parts you drop to describe this God.

Humans are strange creatures. It would be as if i made a robot and gave it a brain and speech and it looked at me and said that I had to come from somewhere...even though for all intents and purposes I pre-existed the bleepin robot! What mechanical hubris! Our brains mimic creation. we attempt to frame an explanation for anything and everything and put it in our mental box. Why is it so difficult to simply say that God was not created therefore needs no cause? Too big for your mental box?Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

That's simply a god of the gaps argument.Inventing gods to fill gaps in our knowledge is evidence of our poverty of understanding, not of the existence of gods.

Although one could argue that logically our knowledge is not infinite nor can it be...thus there will inevitably be gaps along an endless path.

The point is not that there are gaps, it's that filling every gap with a goddidit is silly and a hostage to the future.The fact that all animals and plants were supposed to have been put here exactly as they are today at the point of creation disturbed this god of the gaps so much that religionists are still denying facts today about it. But in the meantime millions of believers lost their fragile faith over it.It pushes god further and further away as we learn more and more. Apparently god is now T=10^-43 seconds away for ICANT now which seems a bit of a shame.

For many reasons.For one, in relation to paleontology, every time you fill in a gap with an intermediate, you immediately create two new gaps. Like Hydra: cut off one head and two will grow in its place.In relation to the God of the Gaps, while we may not be able to completely fill a gap, we can shrink it down to make it far less comfortable for that god to hide in it.For another, goddidit is not an answer. We are asking scientific questions, questions which basically are of the "how does this work?" kind. An answer to a "how does this work?" question is one which tries to figure out how it works. goddidit does absolutely nothing towards answering how anything works. How do we calculate the orbit of this asteroid we just discovered? "Goddidit!" But what's the orbit? goddidit tells us nothing about that.That just shows how useless goddidit is. Take any scientific question and its answer. Lightening should be a good example. We understand a lot of how it works. Does adding goddidit add anything to the explanation of how lightening works? No, it doesn't. Does leaving goddidit out detract from the explanation? Again, no, it doesn't. Clearly, goddidit has no effect on scientific answers and there is no reason to include it. That is regardless of whether any god exists or not, so leaving the gods out of scientific explanations says nothing about their existence, just then mentioning them contributes nothing -- there's also the perennial problem of "which god?", especially when it comes to lightening where the main contenders are Thor and Zeus. We could just as easily try to argue for including all kinds of true statements (eg, 1066, 1848, my dog no longer has fleas, my ancestry is half Scottish, I drive a hybrid) that have nothing to do the question at hand: including them contributes nothing and only serve to turn the entire evolution into an ungodly mess.It becomes harmful when it creates the illusion of having answered a question. When that happens, people stop asking that question and seeking an answer. A state of perpetual ignorance sets in and entrenches itself. This is harmful because we know that ignorance doesn't work because we've already tried it far too many times. And since that state of ignorance acts as "proof of God", if anybody were to try to ask that question and seek the real answer then they would be resisted (and even arrested if a theocracy has been established) -- read the Wakefield quote in my signature; in another article he notes (quoted freely from memory):

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When a scientist sees a problem, he wants to solve it. When a creationist sees a problem, he sees it as proof of God and will do everything he can to keep it from being solved.

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And of course, the only thing that God of the Gaps theology accomplishes is to diminish God and to lead to his eventual elimination. Which would be a good thing if it weren't because of that theology's sheer stubborn stupidity.

In my mind, God is useful not so much for scientific questions as for philosophical ones. Granted I seem stubborn, but that's because I hold on to belief. One cannot simply discard belief easily and search for newer questions unless one does not value belief, to begin with.

Yes, there are indeed different kinds of questions and the kinds of answers offered should be appropriate to the kind of question asked.Theological questions would indeed very much involve beliefs. Philosophical questions would involve more logic (ie, structured thought and reasoning), though beliefs would also be involved, especially in selecting one's premises and axioms. Theology also involves logic, so there is a lot of cross-over between theology and philosophy.Actually, if one were truly a creationist, one would have no need whatsoever of invoking "goddidit", because that would be a given in everything. There would be no reason whatsoever to try to counter naturalistic explanations of anything, even the origin of life through natural processes, if one were to take the creationist view that God was still involved since God had created those natural processes. The faux creationist view that we encounter so much, that something arising from natural processes denies God, just doesn't make any sense.I think that a contributing factor to that false view is the traditional reason for creating gods, which is to try to explain things that we cannot explain (eg, lightening). That is the basis of God of the Gaps and, as has already been discussed, we find that we can discard, or at least disregard, those gods as we discover real explanations for the things they were in charge of. I think that out of that has come attitudes that science disproves God (which it never could do; only creationism has succeeded in disproving God, but only if you accept its false premises) and a feeling among believers that science is at war with religion. Nor does it help matters much when non-believers take at face value believers' pronouncements that scientific explanations disprove God. And the current God of the Gaps is primarily a stop-gap attempt to cling to their impoverished ideas of God in the face of the advance of scientific knowledge.I still maintain that there is no actual conflict between science and religion, except for the conflict that religion may create. There is no contradiction between natural processes and a supernatural Creator. There is no conflict between evolution and Creation, except when they are maldefined in order to create a conflict.What I find missing from the creation/evolution discourse is close examination of what creationists actually think and why. Their persistent adversarial approach (in which they keep trying to proselytize at you or pull stupid sophistry tricks) keeps that from happening.Edited by dwise1, : Actually, if one were ...