BHSU_Student
Member
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...
But who created God?
But who created God?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Linear Causality and Infinite Regress
- Thread starter BHSU_Student
- Start date
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Hyper-God.
Yeah, the believers in the one-god pretty much specify that their god, by definition, is eternal and therefore uncaused with no beginning or end. You either accept that concept of god or not, but it's not a valid question to ask if you accept that concept. 
Tumah
Veteran Member
Since G-d is the creator of all dimensions including the of time, asking what happened before G-d created time is tantamount to asking "What banana hippopotamus pink?" Before time exists there is no sequence of events, no change. There is only one "moment" that stretches out to infinity.
apophenia
Well-Known Member
No. No there isn't. You can be absolutely certain of that.Well, maybe you can't, but you certainly would be if you could. Maybe you just don't have sufficient faith.
And, just as an aside, moments stretching out to infinity is just stringing words together. Words like banana hippopotamus pink. Y' know ?
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
This is actually a relatively deep question that so many give flip "answers" to that they have been led to believe.
I assume that no one here was at the BB that can remember what happened, therefore there's really no way to link God or Gods to that event. Secondly, since we weren't there to witness that event, how can one supposedly know that God (or Gods) were "before time" and was/were "uncaused"?
There's more, but I'll stop at this point.
Tumah
Veteran Member
I don't completely understand what you were saying in the first point.
I am saying that if G-d created time, then before that first moment, nothing can happen because for something to happen there needs to be a sequence and without a dimensional background to measure the progression of those sequences, there can't be a before or after. Without time, there is just one infinitely existing, unchanging existence.
Stovepipe_Hat
One who will die.
It's deep enough that scriptures don't take it up directly. There are matters of definition, such as what a beginning is, and questions about the nature of causality. Related philosophical discussion in modern times comes long after biblical documents were written, using terminology that didn't exist back then. Biblical authors either never thought about such questions, or didn't think they had much impact on their faith.
The question "who created God" itself makes assumptions of infinite regress that need not be warranted as "there's always a first time for everything." It's not really a sound objection to existence of a deity. Most people arguing against existence of deity use Occam's Razor, saying that no god is required to account for what is known about cosmology or human origins. Even were these origins a total mystery, it still wouldn't make invoking a deity necessary. Lots of things don't have known causes. These arguers then lay the burden of proof on those who propose a deity or a supernatural phenomenon for creation.
Occam's Razor isn't watertight. It just says the simplest explanation consistent with facts is best. It is a guide. Usually it's reliable - if you find a letter in your box, you assume the mail deliverer came along, not a more complex theory where President Hollande flew out from Paris to bring the letter. In this example, purpose is involved in both cases. Those who don't accept a creator god mostly reject notions of purpose or teleology of any kind in cosmology, again using Occam's Razor to justify.
I haven't seen the issue hurt religions, which flourish anyway no matter what happens.
Last edited:
The Sum of Awe
Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
No matter what you belief, it all comes down to something from nothing, or else an always existing something.
s2a
Heretic and part-time (skinny) Santa impersonator
The Sum of Awe
Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
Stovepipe_Hat
One who will die.
With a bias to pre-existing somethings. Most ancient creation accounts don't dance the ex-nihilo. In this way they seem to anticipate the spirit of physics, which also abhors "something from nothing." James P. Allen notes of the Egyptian myth that "Before the world was created the universe was a limitless ocean, whose waters stretched to infinity in all directions" (p. 130, Middle Egyptian: Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 2nd ed, Cambridge 2010). Allen also says that the Egyptian and Hebrew myths were similar enough to have a high probability of common source. Hence bible passages like
"And God said, 'Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.' So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault sky" (Gen. 1: 6-8).
The sky is really a blue ocean overhead. For Egyptians, the sun god Ri'a sailed in his day boat across this ocean, every day. The Hebrew account calls the sun and moon "lights," discouraging them from deification. But otherwise the scheme is the same. What's unclear is whether "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters" (Gen. 1:2) implies a pre-creation status. Because that famous sentence "In the beginning..." precedes it, Christian theologians assume creation from nothing, at least from no matter and no time.
Is this interpretation correct? The first sentence can be read "In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth." In the present tense, as a section heading within the text. It's possible, because Hebrew doesn't mark tense as English does, and texts of that period ran everything together, just sticking titles and headings, when these occur, in line with the text, not separated out on their own line as we do today. There is no way to tell which is meant by looking at a Hebrew scroll. Allen thinks the Hebrews didn't believe in creation from nothing - for one thing, they never use that phrase.
This leaves commands like יְהִי אוֹר "Let there be light," i.e. light from nothing, but Allen's smart about that. In both the Egyptian and Hebrew languages, a sentence like that reads literally, "cause light to happen (or come into being)." When Egyptian kings say such things on their monuments, they don't mean whatever they were ordering happened out of nothing. The existence of servants to carry the instructions through is implied. I admit I'm not too expert here, and don't know whether this assumed agent extends to Genesis. Allen's idea was that Semitic gods, like their Egyptian counterparts, didn't exist separately from the universe, and that this may have been true for the earliest conceptions of Yahweh.
But there you go. A little later, as the story got finalized, Yahweh did get set apart from the world as sole cause. The creation story may preserve earlier ideas, however.
But if it's just God, then is God nothing? If he's the agent, then he's part of the process of his own creating, which therefore doesn't occur from nothing. A cause is something.
Last edited:
Skwim
Veteran Member
Skimmed it and didn't find anything resembling a scientific explanation of the birth of god. What scientific explanation are you talking about?
God exists outside of time so time so the question doesn't make sense.
It's like asking why is there anything? Beats me.