As A.J.Ayers once said “It may very well happen that even when people’s beliefs are false they are as fully convinced of their truth as they are of the truth of what they know… from the fact that someone is convinced something is true, however firm his convictions may be, it never follows logically that it is true.”
What if the Creator God is not ‘a’ being, who knows all things etc., but existence itself? No god like the Abrahamic God or others? What if God is the totality of all that exists? There are many definations for the word God. Many religions and few in agreement. The fact is no human knows or has known.
A “god is in the details” deity would be far easier for me to accept than one that chooses specific people to translate its message and spread it around. Those type of gods make me feel very excluded! And the ones that care a jot about what we eat and wear, are just too pathetic for my comprehension of a deity.
This is a subtle goalpost move though.
Czarcasm’s objection was against the argument from personal experience, which Stratocaster used.
Here it is quite revelant that people differ about what kind of god they experience, and his instructions (and also, I may add: it’s relevant that millions have not had any religious experience at all).
Occam’s Razor is a guideline, not a Law. But anyway, adding a step which requires no extra entities is exactly the opposite of postulating an eternal entity as option 1, which means Occam’s on my side in this one, actually…
I almost didn’t post what I did because of my near certainty that no matter how I explained it, some would prefer to respond to a point not being made at all.
I didn’t offer it as evidence; in fact, I specifically noted it wasn’t. But to answer you directly, why couldn’t this be suggestive of thousands (if not millions) of people misunderstanding and misinterpreting the one divine revelation, a revelation that is subtle by all accounts (unless you’re Paul on the road to Damascus, I guess)?
Again, I’m not suggesting that’s the only explanation. But our own experience with human communication makes this plausible to me. Two people hear the same thing, but they describe seemingly contradictory situations, and that’s for some simple stuff.
And, again, it’s beside the point of this thread, IMO, which is that a prime mover seems a logical explanation for our universe, but any attempt to assign specific attributes or intentions to that prime mover seems to defy a logical argument. That doesn’t mean it cannot be accurate, only that one can’t offer “natural” evidence for the essence of a being that exists outside the boundaries of nature.
When millions of people experience millions of different things, we usually assume that they are having millions of different experiences…unless, of course they are experiencing their diety, in which case all the rules are thrown out the window, and we assume that most of them are getting it wrong and they are really having the same experience?
Using this “logic”, I put forth that all ice cream tastes the same, and that most peoples’ tastebuds are defective.
So, when eyewitness accounts differ, we assume that the two witnesses must have been seeing different events? “Must have been two different robberies, since the accounts differ.” That’s the inviolable rule you’re referring to?
ETA: And do we conveniently ignore the commonality–e.g., “God is caring, he wants us to love one another, etc.”?
True, but it doesn’t imply anything except a very weak sort of deism. If there was any evidence.
I added the last paragraph a about God/gods because of the OP’s closing sentence:
God doesn’t equal creator and doesn’t equal ultimate cause.
Well, it also depends on how complex each agent is. I would prefer an explanation involving 2 mindless forces over one that stipulates an intelligent intentional being.
We don’t know that. If the hypothesis that black holes create new universes “at the other end” is true (and I have no idea how plausible the idea is), then we humans could theoretically create new universes all we want with far less than “ultimate power”. That would put us in the position of intelligent intentional creators. We still wouldn’t be able to interact with whatever is “inside” that universe, though.
No, that just shows that personal experience is a very bad indicator of what’s actually happening.
Those are not commonalities.
But we’re not talking about two differnt witnesses at a single event at the same time, are we? Your analogy doesn’t hold.
Not a universal commonality at all.
So you want to suggest it, but not actually suggest it?
No, I want to point out that your suggestion that there has been “no indication” is false. There has been at least an inconclusive indication. That was the only point.
Here, try this analogy. Suppose in a given town there were widespread reports of people seeing a UFO. There are on the same night countless panicked calls regarding the sighting of an alien spaceship. The reports seem unrelated–different parts of town, unrelated people. The descriptions are inconsistent. Some seem to have commonalities, but some seem to contradict each other, in the ways that eyewitness accounts often do.
If you were to respond by saying this does not prove an alien spaceship was actually in the vicinity, that some other circumstance could explain it, I’d agree. If you were to say, “there’s absolutely no indication that an alien spaceship was here,” I’d respond that this is demonstrably false.
Since I have already offered as a given that the specific nature of the prime creator is unprovable, I’m not sure where we otherwise disagree. And I’ll say again, there’s more than a couple of instances in this very thread where the straw man “God must exist with the attributes and intentions I have discerned” has been enthusiastically knocked down in response to a post that said no such thing. It’s irresistible, it would seem.
Only if you beg the question in assuming that the experience isn’t really one and the same, experienced over and over again, just misinterpreted. Again, I’m not suggesting you accept that the experience is true in any specific instance, or in ANY specific experience; only that you not assert that since the reactions are different, by definition there can be no basis in truth for any experience. That’s inarguable. You needn’t give up your atheist membership card in conceding this.
Common enough, ISTM. No one said universal. Enough with the straw men.
The Big Bang theory makes no comment about what’s outside the universe, just that at some point umpteen billion years ago everything was one and then it dissociated.
We have no information about what was before the Big Bang. That doesn’t mean that there was nothing.
Sure, “love each other” and messages like that are common. Not universal, but pretty common. Funnily enough, you get exactly the same kind of messages from aliens. One might suspect that that’s because it’s a pretty simple message that anyone could think up. It’s never anything that’s actually useful.
Yep ,it probably does. But if you are silly enough to claim god was there and created it all, you have to tell us where god came from. The idea of what came first is an endless one, without a definitive answer. Making one up and saying it was god is completely inadequate.
What is more logical, I don’t know what started the big bang, or I know and it was an invisible creature called god,who I have absolutely no proof of, did it?
In this case, though, people aren’t reporting what they personally saw - they’re reporting what their parents said, who are reporting what their parents said. The witnesses aren’t independently coming up with accounts of lights in the sky; rather they’re reporting traditions that there were once lights in the sky, long ago.
A possible test would be to find someone who is entirely untouched by these traditions and ask him if he ever saw lights in the sky.
That’s a very very generous application of “demonstrably” on your part. By that standard, the lights in the sky could be a mass hallucination, time-travelers, steroid-taking fireflies… literally no explanation could be ruled out, so my question would be why assume an alien spaceship when any number of alternates exist, many of which are more plausible? In fact, before the modern era, a common explanation might be dancing faeries. If the only difference is a hundred years or so of human technological progress, why are faeries less plausible?
Nevertheless, belief in such a God continues, despite its lack of foundation. Its existence, let alone connection to whatever mechanism may have created the universe, remains elusive.
The huge structural problem with the argument you have formed here is that you are trying to have your cake and eat it too with regards to time. You do this both with the rather dodgy phrase “always existed” in your option 1, which means to have had infinite prior existence in the current timeline, but more importantly you do it by quietly ignoring the fact that for this god of yours to have created the universe, it itself must exist in some sort of timeline, which even if it’s not our timeline still requires a first cause of its own!
Theists speak of being “outside of time” like it’s some kind of get out of jail free card, but the simple fact is that actions, all actions, require time to be passing to happen. This is because an action is a change in things, a difference between the way things were before, and the way things are now. For this to be happening time must be passing. For a god to do anything, it must be experiencing time passing. For it to think anything, it must be experiencing time passing - without the passage of time, nothing ever happens and nothing is ever done, nothing at all.
So, God has to be experiencing time. It needn’t be the same sort of time we experience - I could get into this more, but all that we need to be clear on for this discussion is, if causes are required to happen in a timeline, then God’s timeline needs a first cause too.
So, can God be the first cause in its own timeline? By the rules of the argument you’ve presented, no - being your own cause is equivalent to being uncaused, from the perspective of the argument. So the “Goddidit” option is option 2. And in fact by your own standards it’s less likely than the big bang version, because it requires an “additional event”:
- The timeline is infinite and something always existed, which eventually got around to starting it all at time infinity+1.
2a. The big bang is a spontaneous uncaused explosive event of simple raw energy, that instigated the chain of events leading to our universe.
2G. God sprung into spontaneous uncaused existence as a fully formed complex sentient entity, who then touched off an explosive event of simple raw energy, that instigated the chain of events leading to our universe.
As you note, there are both observational and logical arguments ruling out option 1. Which leaves option 2a the obvious victor on the front of simplicity, if one wants to argue from such a position.