Where did god come from? I understand, well as much as we can, that god created man. But who or what created god? If he was always there then why did he wait so long to finally create us? What was he doing before the big bang? I understand that this all stems on the fact that you belive that god did create us, but for the sake of debate lets assume he did.
Bad spellers of the world… UNTIE
Wow. This one has “Great Debates” written all over it. 
Ok… I thought about it for three hours. I still think David is correct.
[Note: This message has been edited by Nickrz]
Maybe he created another universe before the creation of our own? Isn’t it kind of egotistical to think that this universe and its inhabitants are the only creation of God?
::points at the original question:: This…is what leads me to be oh-so-confused about theological folk who all they do is just…preach on an’ on about God an’ all. Scientists donno varied things, theologists donno where their God appeared (different religions, different Gods)…well, ‘cept some religions say how their God appeared, but it’s still…all hogwash, in a sense. I’m neither atheist nor theist, I figger I’ll find out when I die what happens. I prefer to think that well, I’d get reincarnated however I want…masters of our own destiny an’ all. Nobody knows how their particular deity/deities came into existence, they’ll never know until they come up with another li’l story to tell why. Just like the rest of most religion…started with stories.
Snappy: please define “an’ all.”
Ah, the eternal question. If we assume that everything that exists needs a creator, then we need a creator for the universe. Then we need a creator for that creator, and so on, and so on.
Theists assume God “just is”, and was not created by something else. Atheists assume the universe “just is”, and was not created by something else. Personally, if I’m going to believe anything could just be, I’ll believe the thing I can see and touch. ::Gaudere slaps desk::
He was creating hell for people who ask questions like that. 
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Man did.
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peas on earth
“an’ all” is just my way of…trying to expound on things I’m stuck on trying to think about. Apparently my brain is full. I think I was meaning like, God, and the ark, and Bible/Torah/Koran/etc. stories…I think. I’m sorry.
And bantmof, good point. Man did create God. Or is in the process of creating…it’s like Dogbert said in some Dilbert cartoon…gonna paraphrase here.
You have little bitty cells…they join up and become some large things, humans and animals and whatnot. Ants form huge colonies and devour animals in front of them like in the rainforest (army ants - oy, scary). Little things make big things. Maybe the Internet is going to be like, our God eventually. Little bitty information is stored, eventually it’ll…be all there, and form into something great. Righty-o, or am I again forgetting how to think?
Snappy, The Crazy Toddite - Friend of Skippy
There was no time before God created it, so He didn’t have to do anything before that.
I don’t really believe that, but that explanation might please more literal-minded people than me.
Only humans do inhuman things.
God is appointed by the Immortal Master of Time, Space, and Dimension, who is in turn appointed by the executive council of They and ratified by the membership.
It is a little-known fact that the position of God rotates every 30 days–you can fill out an application if you’d like to be God some month, but the interview process is a real killer. Every once in awhile the God dies in office, thus giving rise to rumors that God is dead. There are proposals to appoint a Vice God to cover this contingency, but they’ve been stuck in committee hearings for slightly in excess of 8,000 years.
I hope this has answered your questions.
Rich Barr
massivemaple@hotmail.com
AOL Instant Messenger: Hrttannl
The issue of how God came to be is a crucial one. People arguing for the existence of God often point to the improbability of a universe existing with physical laws that permit the formation of stars, or the improbability of a reproducing molecule that could get evolution started. How about the improbability of an intelligent being existing without a creator? Especially a super-intelligent super-powerful being!
While intelligence might seem commonplace to people who have always lived surrounded by humans (and who have never tried to write a computer program to behave like an intelligent being), intelligence is far more complex than specific physical laws or reproducing molecules. Explaining the universe by means of a god is explaining the improbable with something far less probable.
It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he knows that ain’t so.
God just is. He is uncaused, unmade. He is, by definition, without origin. Any creature that HAS a cause or beginning, is by definition, not God. Recall what God said when Moses asked for his name: “I AM.”
The same question exists aside from God, when you ask, what caused ____? You keep going back and back, and you know that each thing needed something previous (the one atom before the big bang…but where was the atom from?) Eventually, you need to have a First Cause. Whatever that First Cause is, is God.
“It all started with marbles in school…”
It’s somewhat akin to the old question, “why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”. Aside from the anthropic principle (we wouldn’t be around asking the question if it did not), there doesn’t seem to be any real compelling reason for it to.
One idea somebody had is that, similar to virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, the net energy of the universe might very well be precisely zero, when gravitational potential energy is counted as negative. That doesn’t explain what caused it, but it does sort of explain how it could be allowed to happen. Presumably making something that has a net energy content of zero is not very hard to do and just happens randomly from time to time like the particle pairs.
Or, paraphased from HHGTTG, “In the beginning, god created the universe. This was widely regarded as a bad move, and made a lot of people very angry.”
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peas on earth
Furt has a cool, if unsatisfying, answer. “God is the first, uncaused Cause.” (paraphrase) It’s the only possible answer unless you like “sorry, it’s turtles all the way down!”
Now, investing this First Cause (which I think even the atheist crew could give intellectual acceptance to, because all It is, going into the far turn, is the ontological basis for everything else) with personality, characteristics such as goodness and love, an active interest in humanity (why?), etc. is what we’ve been hashing around for the past several weeks here.
One quick comment: What was God doing “before” the Big Bang? may be a meaningless question. According to traditional theology (give me this for the sake of argument for the moment), God exists in eternity. Eternity is not perpetuity; it is a timelessness in which all times are equally present. Time only started with the Big Bang.
If you travel north or south, you can arrive at a point (the pole) at which you are the furthest north/south and any continuation makes you going south/north. But that is not true for east/west. If you keep going east, you do not reach a point at which you begin going west. If you go back to the Big Bang, there is no “before” to go to, because there was no matter/energy present “before” the Big Bang to define space and time.
Snippy…if you like science fiction, a couple of stories that explore your concept: “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov (a little dated at the beginning from having been written in the 1940s/50s when mainframes were all there was), and the Spider Robinson series which includes three books:
My take on it has always been that G-d came from nowhere. The law of conservation, which says that all things come from some previously existing thing, is a law of physics…and by the Jewish definition, G-d transcends physics. Hence, that law never applied to G-d, and he could very well have come into existence from nowhere.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@schicktech.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
The Anthropic Principle is a philosophical wasteland. It answers no questions, and worse, it doesn’t ask any. We’re here because we’re here. If we weren’t here, we wouldn’t be here to ask why we aren’t here. But we are here. If we weren’t here, where would we be? Not here, that’s for sure.
Oh,oh. This is starting to make sense. Man, this shit is good. Hardly any seeds…
You are unique - Just like everone else.
If you claim that God didn’t need a creator, you’re saying that it is possible for something extremely complex (God) to exist without the need for a creator.
And if “something” extremely complex can exist without a creator, why couldn’t that “something” just be the universe?
I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.
tracer:
Actually, in Jewish belief, G-d is not complex, but is the ultimate in simplicity. G-d is a single, indivisible unit.
Even laying aside my previous statement, the answer to this one is: the universe is made of physical matter, which we’ve pretty well analyzed, and have determined cannot come from nothing (unless there is some other force outside the realm of physics). G-d, in Jewish belief, is entirely non-physical.
Chaim Mattis Keller
The idea that the law of conservation of matter and energy proves that the universe could not have come from nothing isn’t valid. The law is only derived from repeated human observations that the quantity of matter and energy is constant for our measurements. From this it seems reasonable to expect that the law has held true since the beginning of the universe and will probably hold true into the future, but it does not seem reasonable to expect it to have held true before the universe began. In fact, time itself may not have existed before the big bang, so it could still be said that there never was a time when the quantity of matter and energy was different.
The idea that God could violate this law because he is not physical is just an assumption by those who believe in God and not anything that has ever been observed. The observations that matter and energy stay constant were made in this universe that God is assumed to influence, and so any conclusion that it does not change would apply just as much to the universe including God’s influence as to the universe without it.
The situation is a little like that of a bird walking along a telephone wire. The bird might correctly observe that the wire has a constant diameter, because wherever she goes the diameter stays the same. Although this is a good rule for the wire, it does not prove the wire cannot have an end. The idea that the universe started with a big, uncaused bang and from then on had constant energy is entirely consistant with the observations made by physicists. There is no logical problem here.
It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he knows that ain’t so.