Assuming you believe in a creator, do you believe this creator is still around, or is the creator dead? By “dead”, I mean there is zero chance of us seeing God show up in the future, so this is different than transmogrifying into something different… I suppose I mean “ceasing to exist”.
It seems like God made his presence known all the time in the Old Testament. Where did he go? Did he abandon us? If so, when did this happen and why?
Yes and we we couldn’t believe how little he was!
It’s an interesting wrinkle to the cosmological argument: even assuming that there was a first cause being, what if it destroyed itself in the very making of the universe? What if that was its sacrifice to create the universe, and hence it is no longer around?
I thought Dostoyevsky killed God and that we’ve replaced him with iPods. I think Google.com was actually created as a short term memory adjunct for himself.
What I would like to know is if God is hanging around in Heaven, does direct intervention by God in our daily affairs mess with the thermodynamic principles that appear to govern our universe? I always got the impression that heaven was outside this universe since we couldn’t just get in a car or a spaceship and go there. Conservation of energy and all that . . .
But, to follow the thermodynamics theme, if energy in our universe is truly conserved, would that mean that the universe is made out of god, god being the source of energy of the big bang? If that were so, then I would say that god is still around, but that we would have to very carefully define what ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ were before considering God’s status.
CJ
Actually, a lot of people ***claimed ** * God made his presence known all the time in the Old Testament.
If you look around, today (what are we now, post New-Testament?), there’s still lots of people claiming God is making his presence known.
Lesee, there’s Sung Myung Moon, Osama Bin Laden, G. W. Bush, and there’s 4-12 cable channels full of other guys.
We just stopped believing everyone.
In fact, after the recent tsunami, there were a whole slew of “prophets” saying that the God of Judeo-Christianity smote the mostly Muslim countries around the Indian Ocean the day after His son’s birthday in punishment for something the Muslims have done recently… see?
Ev
EvanS you have it wrong. Moon doesn’t just claim that the Lord is making his presence known: he IS the Lord making his presence known.
As I see it, since God’s existence is necessary, He cannot be dead.
“God is dead” - Nietsche
“Nietsche is dead” - God
In the words of Dirk Gently, “Which god, and why?” 
I know that you prefer the Ontological argument for the why. But what about the which?
I hope he’s dead. Many of the times that he spoke directly to people or displayed his “glory”, lots of people ended up dead. I’d rather not hear from him anymore, thanks.
Some are born posthumously.
First off, who’s God? And why is its existence necessary? My creators (mother and father) will pass someday, is their existence necessary?
Well, for you to have existed, their existence was necessary. 
Really, don’t we have to prove whether there is or is not a supreme being before we ask whether he is dead or not? I like my questions answered in chronological order.
Was necessary, was. He is somehow stating that “Gods” existence is still necessary. 
I meant ‘whos God’, not who is. :smack:
The ontological argument, as I understand it, shows that since we can think about a higher being, it necessarily exists. I don’t know enough about philosophy to express it properly, nor refute it logically, but it seems to me to be a form of special pleading.
wow, i have an interesting variation to that very idea.
i always thought that the act of creation would lead to a pure concentration, a Buddhist non-existence if you will
compared simply to a creation here on earth (a song on the guitar for instance) will lead to the bliss of non-existence for a short time
God, doesn’t belong to the temporal world ----> creates -----> an all pure conciousness, for all time
hey?
Let’s try “whose,” does that work? (As in “whose shoes are there?”)
In order for God to be dead, doesn’t God have to be alive first?
What’s our definition of alive? Like a biological organism functioning in our plane of existence.
God may be just disembodied (or preembodied or nonembodied) consciousness, which requires no “living” tissue or biological life (which is the only kind of life we know of, I think), so therefore God can’t die (since God is not alive in the first place) so how can God be dead?
I vote no.
EvanSagain
I’ve used this as a refresher, on occasion.
Ontological arguments basically seek to argue the existence of God from “being” using pure logical reasoning.
As of 1992, the last time I studied such things formally, it was my understanding that no ontological argument (be it Anselm’s or anyone else’s) stands up to close scrutiny as irrefutable. Some are harder to refute than others, but mostly because those are the hardest to pin down (especially true of Gödel’s, IMO). It seems with all these arguments the philosphers establish premises which themselves are not self-evident, and hence are always arguable. From there, of course, everything usually follows with perfect logic, but if the premise is false, the conclusion isn’t valid. If you simply choose not to accept the premise, then there’s really nothing more to say. Mathematical relationships, for instance, no matter how perfect, are not the same thing as physical objects. They exist in the mind, but what does that mean about existence of things, like you, or me, or the Universe? If you insist conceptual being is coequal to material being (a standard metaphysical ploy, if you ask me), then maybe a certain argument can hold together; but if you don’t accept that premise (and there’s no self-evident reason one should), then the entire argument that necessary perfect being follows logically from these relationships is unconvincing. I can’t think of a single logically unimpeachable reason to accept any of the premises of the ontological arguments I’ve ever heard of. It’s often like you have to believe in God to prove he exists, which is silly.
Welp, I guess Nietzsche was wrong.