Who Made God?

Bishop Sims of Atlanta circulated a Pastoral letter back in 1981 when there was an extremely strong push to insert "Creation Science" into the public school curriculum and in addition to clearly opposing and absolutely condemning "Creation Science" he touched on the relationship of Religion and Science.

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Religion and science are therefore distinguishable, but in some sense inseparable, because each is an enterprise, more or less, of every human being who asks why and how in dealing with existence. Religion and science interrelate as land and water, which are clearly not the same but need each other, since the land is the basin for all the waters of the earth and yet without the waters the land would be barren of the life inherent to its soil.

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In the Bible the intermingling of why and how is evident, especially in the opening chapters of Genesis. There the majestic statements of God's action, its value and the place of humanity in it, use an orderly and sequential statement of method. The why of the divine work is carried in a primitive description of how the work was done.

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But even here the distinction between religion and science is clear. In Genesis there is not one creation statement but two. They agree as to why and who, but are quite different as to how and when. The statements are set forth in tandem, chapter one of Genesis using one description of method and chapter two another. According to the first, humanity was created, male and female, after the creation of plants and animals. According to the second, man was created first, then the trees, the animals and finally the woman and not from the earth as in the first account, but from the rib of the man. Textual research shows that these two accounts are from two distinct eras, the first later in history, the second earlier.

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From this evidence, internal to the very text of the Bible, we draw two conclusions.

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First, God's revelation of purpose is the overarching constant. The creation is not accidental, aimless, devoid of feeling. Creation is the work of an orderly, purposeful Goodness. Beneath and around the cosmos are the everlasting arms. Touching the cosmos at every point of its advance, in depth and height, is a sovereign beauty and tenderness. Humanity is brooded over by an invincible Love that values the whole of the world as very good; that is the first deduction: God is constant.

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Second, creation itself and the human factors are inconstant. Creation moves and changes. Human understanding moves and changes. Evolution as a contemporary description of the how of creation is anticipated in its newness by the very fluidity of the biblical text by the Bible's use of two distinct statements of human comprehension at the time of writing. As a theoretical deduction from the most careful and massive observation of the creation, the layers and deposits and undulations of this everchanging old earth, evolution is itself a fluid perception. It raises as many questions as it answers. Evolution represents the best formulation of the knowledge that creation has disclosed to us, but it is the latest word from science, not the last.

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If the world is not God's, the most eloquent or belligerent arguments will not make it so. If it is God's world, and this is the first declaration of our creed, then faith has no fear of anything the world itself reveals to the searching eye of science.

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Insistence upon dated and partially contradictory statements of how as conditions for true belief in the why of creation cannot qualify either as faithful religion or as intelligent science. Neither evolution over an immensity of time nor the work done in a sixday week are articles of the creeds. It is a symptom of fearful and unsound religion to contend with one another as if they were. Historic creedal Christianity joyfully insists on God as sovereign and frees the human spirit to trust and seek that sovereignty in a world full of surprises.

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Because it's nonsense.

Hi LNA, Whatever caused the universe to begin to exist would have to have all power, all knowledge, and the ability to be everywhere.I choose to believe an eternal being who has all power, all knowledge, and the ability to be everywhere called God is the cause.Stephen Hawking believes that power was an instanton which was capable of producing the universe we have today and everything in it. The problem is that instanton would have to have a vacuum to pop into existence in, to then expand and create the universe. But he makes no provisions for space to contain a vacuum for the instanton to pop into existence in.In fact, James Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn't have any boundaries or edges. I have been round the world, and I didn't fall off.

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If space and imaginary time are indeed like the surface of the Earth, there wouldn't be any singularities in the imaginary time direction, at which the laws of physics would break down. And there wouldn't be any boundaries, to the imaginary time space-time, just as there aren't any boundaries to the surface of the Earth. This absence of boundaries means that the laws of physics would determine the state of the universe uniquely, in imaginary time. But if one knows the state of the universe in imaginary time, one can calculate the state of the universe in real time. One would still expect some sort of Big Bang singularity in real time. So real time would still have a beginning. But one wouldn't have to appeal to something outside the universe, to determine how the universe began. Instead, the way the universe started out at the Big Bang would be determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time. Thus, the universe would be a completely self-contained system. It would not be determined by anything outside the physical universe, that we observe.

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The page you were looking for doesn't exist (404)This is where the so-called space/time came from.There is no scientific data to support such a conclusion, or at least I have never seen any it is just accepted as fact at EvC.The web site I presented is Steven Hawking's web site with a lecture called "The Beginning of Time". As far as what science can address it can only go back to the Planck epoch for information nothing can be known past that point as General Relativity breaks down and produces no data. So it would be limited to the present universe.But I would not put any such limitations on an all powerful God. He could have as many universes as He desired to have created. He may have thousands of universes that even have an earth like planet with life forms on them.Although He may have only created this one. But if He could be limited to one universe He would not be an all powerful God. If He had to begin to exist He would not be God. Because whatever caused Him to begin to exist would be God. No, I say that God created all that there is. He even made all the laws that governs the universe. In fact He is the energy that holds it all together according to His claims.

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Colossians 1:17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

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Sure I have said where He came from. He is the eternal God as He claimed when Moses ask Him who he was going to tell the children of Israel had sent him. The Hebrew word היה Which is 1ps translated I AM means to be, become, exist...God in that verse as He talked with Moses claimed to be I EXIST THAT I EXIST.That is where He came from. If something created Him then that whatever it was would be God.A person that does not have a personal relationship with God has a real problem with my above statements.I don't just believe in God, I know He exists as we have a personal relationship. I have asked Him for specific things and received them instantly. I have also asked Him for things and He said No Way Son. Later I found out He knew best. Nope.My God has a physical body just like I have. He put it on and came down to earth and lived here for 33.5 years and the religious establishment of His days here on earth rejected Him as Messiah and killed Him. Well actually He gave His life that I and anyone who would receive His offer of a free full pardon could spend the balance of eternity with Him in a new heaven and earth that He will create after this one melts with fervent heat. Always, and eternal is not a description of God. It is just how long He has existed. We could sit and talk for months and I could not give you the complete description of God.God Bless,

Scripture issues.

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The Hebrew word היה Which is 1ps translated I AM means to be, become, exist...

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God in that verse as He talked with Moses claimed to be I EXIST THAT I EXIST.

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That is where He came from. If something created Him then that whatever it was would be God.

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Yahweh actually can only really mean I AM or I WILL BE.NOT IN PAST (probably not though Hebrew is tricky with tenses as there are none in the Bible, mostly)Your comment fits in with Gnostic Demiurge theology.But on to Colossians 1:17-19You quoted from part of it and said this:

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No, I say that God created all that there is. He even made all the laws that governs the universe. In fact He is the energy that holds it all together according to His claims.

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The text.

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17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,

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Here is an evangelical commentary.The Greek font isn't workingbody is "soma" (used in text without definition in a few places)"pleroma" is fullness"arche" is beginning

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Interpreter's Bible
Volume 11

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p.169

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The head of the body: This phrase is not found in earlier Pauline letters. Paul does indeed employ the analogy of the body (Rom. 12:5; and especially I Cor. 12:12ff.) in relation to the church, but it is to illustrate the diversity of functions in a single organism;
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Here in Colossians, however, he thinks not of the several members with their variety of functions and dignities, but of the organism as a whole, deriving its vital powers from the head. To us the idea of the head suggests primarily the powers of intelligence and will - the figure prompts us to think of Christ as the mind which directs and the will which governs all the life of the church; but this would probably not fully represent the thought of the apostle. For him Christ as the head is the unifying principle and the source of life, not only guiding and governing but also vivifying (see also on 2:19).

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The term body () as used here is not an independent development of the analogy that Paul had used in I Corinthians, but a new approach to the whole concept of the church. In all probability the apostle takes over in a technical term of the Colossian "philosophy," as he certainly does with ("fullness") in the next verse. We cannot tell precisely how the Colossian Gnostics used in the framework of their cosmic theory; whatever it meant to them, Paul affirms that it is realized in the church. ....

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It remains a question whether by "the church" in this context he means the empirical institution, the visible society which exists within time and history; or whether he is thinking in transcendental terms, as of an eternal, heavenly "body," which would include ideally not only the redeemed from among mankind, but all "in heaven and in earth" that is or shall be subject to God

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The second predicate ...[arche in Greek font] - beginning, is closely related in thought to the first. In Hebrew and other Semitic languages the words for "head" and for "beginning" have the same root...

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Greek font issues messed up several words belowton holon is OF ALLta panta is ALLSTOICHEIA means "elements"TES THEOTETOS is "of the Godhead" or "of deity"

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Interpreter's Bible
Volume 11

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p.171

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The word pleorma is undoubtedly a technical term of the Colossian "philosophy"; it is one of the key words in all the Gnostic systems.
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In the Hermetic writings pleroma is used of God in a context of pantheistic immanence; he is "the Lord and Maker of all [ὸ ὅ] being both All [ ὰ ] and One, ... for the Pleroma of all things is One and in One" (Corpus Hermeticum XVI.3). The sense here is certainly not active ("that which fills all things"), but passive ("the totality of things"). In the great Gnostic schools of the second century the pleroma is the whole body of emanations. It would seem that the Colossian teachers used it of the whole array of the , the "elemental spirits of the cosmos," and imagined the various attributes of God to be distributed among them; or they may have conceived the as the attributes themselves, hypostatically existent. It is scarcely worth while to inquire into the particulars of such a fanciful system.

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Taking the term ready-framed from the current philosophy of religion, Paul nowhere explains the sense which it holds for him. In some degree, then, he must assume that it has a fairly well-defined theological content which his readers will at once appreciate. In 2:9 he adds to it the phrase ῆ - all the pleroma "of the Godhead," or "of deity"; and the same phrase is to be understood in this first occurrence. He rejects the doctrine that the powers of divinity are distributed among a throng of mediating spirits of any kind - "thrones, dominions, principalities, powers"; and claims for Christ that the entire complement, "the aggregate of the Dive attributes, virtues, energies" (Lightfoot), resides in him alone. We find ourselves here moving in a world of ideas that is utterly strange to us, in which we can never feel entirely at home: but we can at least recognize the conclusion: that "God was in Christ," not in a limited or partial manifestation (that might be claimed of the great teachers of mankind), but in his plentitude.

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Back to you Yahweh tense issue in Hebrew grammar.It actually backs up the Gnostic theology.

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The American Religion
Harold Bloom

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p.50
the Gnostic myth: a vast cosmological emptiness, the nenoma, where we wander and weep, tyrannized by the Archons, who are lords of misrule, headed by the Demiurge, a deity who created the cosmos, ...in one blundering act that was also a Fall. An act of creation that in itself constituted a catastrophic fall ... Sun and earth, Adam and Eve, all began as a disaster in some versions of Gnostic myth, which has nothing good to say about nature...no hope for anything confined within the limits of space and time. Yet Gnosticism, if we are to consider it a religion, or at least a spiritual stance, is anything but nihilistic or hopeless, which may be why it is now, and always has been, the hidden religion of the United States, the American Religion proper.

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p.51

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Gnosticism takes its origins in a strong reaction against or creative misreading of an overwhelming precursor, the Hebrew Bible. The arch villain for the Gnostics was the Demiurge, a creator god whose name parodied the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus, where he is portrayed as an artisan, "world-maker," who does the best he can at imitating the true Forms of Eternity. But for the Gnostics, the Demiurge is Yahweh (and Elohim), the Hebraic vision of the creator god in Genesis, a god taken by the Gnostics to be at best a botcher or ignoramus, or at worst a spirit of malevolence. The high god of the Hebrews is not the alien or true God of the Gnostics, who indeed was identified by many Gnostics with the primordial Abyss, the void and deep from which the Hebrew god or Demiurge stole or displaced the stuff for his false creation.

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p.57

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Fundamentalists, as unwitting Gnostics, do not believe anyway that God made them. Their deepest knowledge is that they were no part of the Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and so are as old as God himself. To be told that they evolved from a common ancestor both of themselves and of apes is no better or worse for them than to be assured that they all descended from a single African woman. What wounds them unforgivingly is not the idea of evolution (in whatever version) but the demonstration that they were never God, or part of God. Their sense of freedom depends ultimately upon being free not only of time and of nature but, more secretively,, being free of the very Creationism they urge upon the rest of us.

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Yahweh, according to Hebrew grammar, backs this cosmology up!Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

It seems to me that you simply think that any unevidenced belief is nonsense.I think I have figured out the Science Of Miracles thread discussion.Percy claims no belief, but allows that some do believe and have every right to claim whatever they want as miraculous. Perhaps he is trying to understand why believers think the way they do.You, on the other hand, wave away any belief as nonsense precisely because it is unevidenced and you wont allow the term miracle to be part of your vocabulary. You would wait your whole life for evidence without believing in anything.

I can't speak for Ringo but that is not how I see what he says. The "Uncaused first cause" explanation is nonsense. So is the Trinity. Even if someone believes such things they remain nonsensical and pretty much meaningless.Trying to describe or define or explain GOD just doesn't work.A very good friend of mine who died on Christmas Eve was a Native American. He told about gatherings where different tribes would get together to trade resources, exchange knowledge and of course, swap genes.One of the common traditions was that the elders of each tribe would instruct the youth of the other tribe in their traditions and myths; their tales of Gods and Creation and the Heavens and Morality and Customs. It was a sharing. It was not "Here is what YOU should do or believe" but rather "Here is what WE do and believe".The modern counterpart might be the Ecumenical Movement where Protestant and Roman Catholic and Orthodox and Jew and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu and Taoist and Confucian even those who practice Shinto gather together, not to proselytize but only share and educate.There is no issue with someone holding nonsensical beliefs or even explaining why you believe such things. But there is an issue with expecting others to agree or adopt your beliefs.

Well, to "make sense" logically, an idea has to start with true premises, doesn't it? How can you tell whether or not something is true without evidence? The word "miracle" certainly is part of my vocabulary. So are "God" and "Santa Claus" and "Bigfoot". You say that as if it was a bad thing.Which is worse? To wait your whole life without knowing or to spend your whole life being wrong?

They are roughly the same. The time you spend dead is a lot longer than the time you will spend alive.Plus I always liked the idea of Pascals WagerEdited by Phat, : No reason given.

The ttrouble with pascals wager is that it looks at the Christian God in that wager, and doesn't take into account that Vishnu, Brahma , and Shiva are particularly discriminatory against people who believe in Jesus.

Hi LNA, I don't know where you come from with the I AM other than from the translation of the KJV or one of the other versions.You sure did not get it from the definition of היה, which is 1.to be, become, come to pass, exist, happen, fall out.You are right about Biblical Hebrew tenses. They don't exist period, there is no mostly to it.
Verbs are either perfect, completed action or imperfect, ongoing action.σϋνίστήμι
This is the Greek word that is translated consist in Col. 1:17.
The word means: 1.to place together, to set in the same place,to bring or band together. I don't know where you got your translation from.
If you click the circle beside the peek button you can see how I made the Greek letters appear in the post instead of a mess. They will not copy and paste, neither will Hebrew. HTML code is required. The meaning of 'soma' is: 1.the body both of men or animals.
So in the text body would be referring to the people who made up the church.'pleroma' means 1.that which is (has been) filled'arche' means: 1.beginning, originSo what is all that about and where did it come from?It came from the United Methodist Church which used the NIV Bible which I refer to as the Non Inspired Version Bible. It is so full of mistakes and left out text it is a shame that it is referred to as a Bible.If you want to discuss the Greek Bible use the Textus Receptus or
Morphological Greek New Testament both are available online.I don't care to discuss someone else's commentary but I would discuss your commentary. I don't know what you draw that conclusion from.
Could you give me the Hebrew text that supports your conclusion?As far as Harold Bloom is concerned I would pay as much attention to his writings on religion as I would to jar.God Bless,

Hi ringo, Where is the true premise (evidence) for the universe and everything in it existing at the Planck epoch, the size of a pin point before it began to expand?God Bless,

I was curious about these questions so I googled a bit. Here is what I found: The Universe Adventure
Reading further, I found a fascinating claim: Just that statement is enough to blow my mind. If a paperclip could do that, what could my own body itself do?

It doesn't need a vacuum, the instanton is an entire four-dimensional history, an entire universe and it explicitly does not exist "in" anything else. Anyway this is like at the limits of unproven hyper advanced theoretical physics, it wouldn't really make much sense unless one knew quantum mechanics well enough*. Which leads to: It's just a proposal of Hawking's, not a scientifically accepted consensus.

so what about the paperclip? I have always respected your insights and wondered if UC Berkley is on track with that statement?

Yeah, what they're saying is right. Not too difficult to show.Energy to run light bulb:
100 Watts means it needs 100 Joules of Energy per second.That's:
100 x 60 (minute) x 60 (hour) x 24 (day) x 365.25 (year) x 28479 (quoted number of years) ~ 90,000,000,000,000 Joules.Energy in paper clip:
m = 0.001 kg
c (speed of light) ~ 300,000,000 m/s
c^2 ~ 90,000,000,000,000,000 m^2/s^2E = mc^2 = (0.001) * (90,000,000,000,000,000) = 90,000,000,000,000 JoulesSame as the figure above.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.