Who Made God?

to jar, Phat writes:If I understand what you have written previously, you would say that you believe yet do not know, which is honest but which limits the commitment of your belief.

Phat writes:If what you say is true, you do not really believe in a God who exists outside of your imagination.

Phat writes:If I understand what you have written previously, you would say that you believe yet do not know, which is honest but which limits the commitment of your belief.

Thuzy, replying to jar writes:If what you say is true, you do not really believe in a God who exists outside of your imagination.

Belief is always limited to what we don't know.

Thugzy, to jar writes:If I understand what you have written previously, you would say that you believe yet do not know...

It's been obvious for almost two decades that you do not understand what I have written or even most of what you have posted.

Thugzy, earlier responding to jar writes:If I were to say, for example, that I believe in God but that there is a high probability that I am wrong, I am simply reducing my belief to a finite mathematical possibility---a chance, as it were.

I do not believe in a God or god that anyone can or has imagined. How many Gods are described in the Bible stories themselves? When two entirely different and mutually exclusive gods are described as God in the very first book of the Bible can there be any other reasonable conclusion than that both descriptions are simply the creation of the authors and editors and redactors?

RC Sproul Lecture(edited) writes:The great Augustine in the fourth century made the comment, carefully now, think carefully, that God ordains, at least in some sense, everything that comes to pass. It may be in a passive sense, what some people call God's will of permission.
It's a little bit misleading, that term as if He gives His endorsement or sanction on your sin.He permits your sin in the sense that He doesn't stop you from doing it.

RC writes:He doesn’t sanction it, but any time that you commit a sin, God at that moment always had the power to prevent you from doing it. He could have squashed you like a bug, taken the breath out of your lungs at that minute...and stopped you from doing it, and the fact that He didn't intervene, that He didn't intrude, the fact that He decided to let you do it, not with His blessing, but to give you the ability to do it without preventing you from doing it, in a certain sense, you see, He chose that it should come to pass, because He is absolutely sovereign over everything that happens. And I said, "Do you realize that if there's one maverick molecule running loose in this cosmos beyond the pale, beyond the scope of God's sovereign control and authority, you have no reason as a Christian to believe a single promise of the future that God has made?

RC writes: One maverick molecule could destroy all of the plans, not only of mice and men but of Almighty God if God does not ordain whatsoever comes to pass.
Remember when you were children, you learned a little story:
"For want of the nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of the horse, the rider was lost.
For want of the rider, the battle was lost.
For want of the battle, the war was lost, all because of one nail."
When I was a boy, one of my heroes was a race driver by the name of Bill Vukovich, who was
killed in the Indianapolis 500. When that super expensive piece of machinery, a prototype, costing tens of thousands of dollars to build and construct, failed in a turn because a 10 cent cotter pin broke.
A grain of sand in the kidney of Oliver Cromwell changed the course of history.
A piece of lead in the brain of John F. Kennedy changed the course of American history.The battle of Fort Duquesne, the French and Indian war, a young lieutenant had five horses shot out from under him and one bullet from an enemy rifle went through his shirt as it flapped in the breeze and it went in one side of his shirt and out the other side of the shirt without even creasing the skin on his back, and he survived that battle, and George Washington became the first president of the United States. You know, a tenth of an inch and he wouldn't have survived that battle of Fort Duquesne.
But by chance he made it, through the fortunes of circumstances.
Kennedy was in the wrong place at the wrong time . I don't know.
One maverick molecule outside the authority of God's sovereign control could thwart His plans and prevent the return of Christ, could prevent the vindication of faith that you hold dear. Beloved, there is no such thing as chance.

RC Sproul writes: I was in a discussion once with a professor at Harvard University.
He taught in the graduate school at Harvard in the field of philosophy of science.
And we were talking about the origin of the cosmos, and he didn't believe in God.
And I said, "Well, where do you think the universe came from?" And he said, "Well, the universe was created by chance."
And I said, you know, "The universe was created by chance? I'm not sure I understand what you mean." I said, "Are you telling me that the power supply for everything that is... the Big Bang...of the entire universe, that it was ultimately caused by chance?"And he said, "Yes." I said, "That's amazing!" I said, "Don't you realize that chance can't do anything?" He said, "What do you mean?"
And I said, "Well, let me show you what I mean." And I took a coin out of my hand, out of my pocket and I said, "I'll say to you here,
if I took a 50 cent piece and balanced it on my thumb, and I said to you, I'm gonna flip this coin up in the air, what are the chances that it comes up head or tails?
What're the chances?"
Hmm? Go ahead. One in two. What's the percentage?
50-50. "No, no, no, no, no, 50-50."
Now listen to what I said. I said if I flip the coin what are the chances that it comes up heads or tails? A 100%, unless it stands on its head somehow. You know, I fooled you, didn’t I?
Ha, ha .
Okay what we mean though, is I said, "Okay if I flip that coin, what are the chances
that it will come up heads?" 50-50, you know 50% chance, because there are only two options and only two sides of the coin. And so we say the odds are, the chances are that it will come up heads 50% of the time.
Now what I asked this gentleman from Harvard was, "How much influence does chance exert
on the flip of the coin? What causes that coin to come up heads?
Does it have anything to do with where I start, whether it's heads up or tails up?
How much pressure I exert with my thumb, the density of the atmosphere, how many revolutions it makes, whether I catch it here, here or here, and after I catch it, whether I turn
it over or don't turn it over." There are all those variables.
We could add to those variables, so many complexities that would drive us nuts, trying to predict how it's gonna turn out. But we can cut the Gordian knot, we can reduce the options to the simple options that are there mathematically. The mathematical possibilities are there could be one in two, and so I say, the chances are 50-50 that it's going to come up heads.
But how much power, how much force does chance exert? Absolutely none.
And I said to that professor, "Chance cannot do anything, because chance isn't anything."

RC writes:He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "The word chance is a word that we use, a cipher, a symbol to describe mathematical
possibilities. You're now giving to chance not just an empty word to describe possibilities, you're giving it being, power, ability to do work."
I said, "Chance can do nothing because chance is not a thing. It's not an entity. It is no thing."
Let me say it again, "It is no thing." Faster, "It is no thing." Even faster, "It is nothing! Do you see that?Chance has no being, and if it has no being, it has no power. For something to do something, it first must be."
And when I said that, that good professor went like this, "Yes, of course, what could
be more obvious. I can't believe I made that mistake."
Isn't it interesting that some of the most foolish mistakes are the kinds of mistakes
made by the most learned and brilliant of people?

Phat writes:I would argue that God only created the possibility of evil which became actualized once Lucifer chose it--a dogmatic hypothetical argument yet in my mind a good one!

jar writes:Humans created the God of Genesis 2&3 and much later humans created the God of Genesis 1. Even earlier humans created Ganesha and Ra and Nut and Horus and Saturn and Hypnos and Eros. Later humans created Allah.

Tanypteryx writes:Fiction