Besides concluding your opinion on religion, is there any way to explain what “preceded” God?
He was created with GodMix from Betty Crocker.
Ok let me rephrase the question…
If God preceded ALL things and nothing else existed except him, where’d he come from?
I think the general proposition is the God was always here - he is timeless and eternal.
This question doesn’t offer much for or against the existence of God, as far as I can see. After all, I can ask, “What created the universe?” Either it was always here, in some form, or something create it. And out of what was it created?
Logic cannot take us to an uncaused First Cause.
Of course, you might argue that Occam’s Razor suggests there is no God – since, after all, we must assume SOMETHING has “always been here” - why add an ad hoc assumption that God came first? To illustrate this, we don’t, for example, conclude that God10 created God9, who created God8, and so forth down to God0, who then created the universe… so why add a God step at all?
I have my reasons, but they are not subject to proof, since they are experiential and subjective, not objective.
In any event, the basic point remains: something had to “come first.”
- Rick
So…then how do you explain the idea of “God” in the first place? Did someone decide to create a “higher being” to explain the creation of the world as is the basis for most other beliefs and religions? Why then does one say that because of God there was Him and Him alone?
(This thread is similar to the Science vs. Relgion, right?)
You might argue that faith is a part of a religion…
The OP is without merit. Those that believe in God will tell you he has always been and those that don’t will stare blankly.
Obviously, God had a mother. (He didn’t need a father because God’s Mother was capable of parthenogenesis.)
And God’s mother had a mother. And God’s mother’s mother had a mother. And so on, ad infinitum into the past.
The explanation assumes that God is timeless and eternal. This attributes an infinite aspect to God and thereby begins to quickly erode any possibility of scientific explanation. Enter faith and potentially exit further analytical thought. This is not always the case, but it too often is.
This is one of the principal reasons I am an agnostic.
Easy.
God was created when Man developed language.
Specifically, God was created when one person turned to another and said “I wonder where ‘thunder’ comes from.” The the other replies, “Here’s what I think…”
And millenia later, when Man developed writing, God became Eternal and Unchanging. (Except when translated and/or edited.)
Reeder has hit the nail on the head; either God is eternal, or he’s not God, it’s part of the definition.
I think it’s funny that certain fundamentalists will attack the Big Bang theory by asking where the monobloc came from, but will shrug off questions as to where their god came from.
Seems to me that this is mixing apples and oranges, though.
“Where it came from” is a property of the monobloc (is that a word?), as indeed it is of any form of matter or energy; it’s a necessary consequence of their being finite in space and time. So to ask where the monobloc came from is not necessarily to attack the Big Bang theory (though to be sure, some of those who pose the question do have that purpose in mind).
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(A perfectly valid response is that the monobloc itself was created by G-d as the raw material for the universe. Indeed, this is how classical Jewish writings explain the Genesis account of creation - as a moment of creatio ex nihilo followed by six days in which G-d shaped the matter He created.)
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On the other hand, anybody who “shrugs off” the question about where G-d came from evidently accepts the definition of G-d as infinite in space and time (as Reeder and Mangetout pointed out), making it a meaningless question: given that definition, “comes from” is no more applicable to Him than color is to radio waves. (The correctness of definition itself can be a matter of debate, but that has to be resolved before there can be any meaningful debate about G-d’s attributes.)
RedNaxela
Good point. This Christian sees no theological dilemma with the idea that the Creator kicked everything off with a pre-Big-Bang “monobloc”.
Exactly. Thank you.
The same arguments apply to the existence of the universe as do to the existence of God.
The simplest but least satisfying explanation is that their is no first cause, nor does there have to be.
As humans we have observed that things follow each other and are caused. Just because this is the way we’ve observed them doesn’t mean that that’s the way it always is, or was.
The conceit that things like the Universe or God need a cause may simply be a prejudice of out viewpoint, the human condition.
We can look at it two ways.
If we presume that everything must be caused, we inevitably hit the logical conundrum of “what caused the first cause?” The answer to which, of course, is an impossibility.
Either we’re asking the question wrong, or our assumptions are invalid.
We have really no good reason to assume that causality is all pervasive, and since assuming that it does leads to impossibilities and inherent contradictions, this is pretty good evidence that the assumption is false.
Asking what the first cause seems to be as unreasonable as asking where a circle stops or starts.
The only logical and reasonable conclusions are:
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It is a meaningless question as asked.
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Not everything requires a cause.
There’s an apocryphal story that after Thomas Aquinas published his Summa Theologica, a wisecracking student asked him at the end of a lecture what God was doing before he created the heavens and the earth.
Aquinas responded, “Creating Hell, for people who ask questions like that!” 
Red Naxela has, I think, the straight goods on contemporary theistic cosmology.
Zenster gave an accurate answer, with which I concur. Except for the last sentence! 
The existence or nonexistence of God (or the usefulness or uselessness of the term “God”) has no bearing on the fact that, before there was anything, spacetime didn’t exist either so there was no “before”.
The theory of the Big Bang does not state that the universe burst forth into an empty container-universe that had been sitting there unused for octillions of millennia. It says that space and time came into existence along with matter.
The Biblical book of Genesis does not say “In the beginning there was nothing and then one day, by the following process <insert theory of God’s origins here>, there was God, who created the heavens and the earth”. It says “In the beginning God…” (there WAS no “before”)
Philosophically, logically, this makes sense. Imagine, if you will, an empty universe. Now compare your imaginary empty universe to a hypothetical REAL empty universe. List the ways in which they differ. Do you see why, until you put something INTO it, making it no longer empty, there ARE no differences?
Along those lines, I conceptualize a hypothetical god as the primordial, sentient entity that is exempt from the law of causality and from whom all future effects emanate.
Therefore, if we are to believe in a god, we must then be prepared to accept that no cause can precede (and lead to) his existence. Our faith has to reside in this assumption rather than on logic.
a) People are curious regarding their origins; they need to justify their own existance.
b) People are weak and subject to external harm; they need to feel protected.
c) Some people have found that certain concepts (and an associated mythology) can be used to exploit a and b (as well as ignorance) in order to satisfy their own personal agendas.
Enter god.
Q1: OP asks How god was created.
Answer: By human cortex. The concept of god is just like an abstract painting, a piece of music, or a mathematical axiom created by a humanoid with developed cortex. Not having a human cortex, other species pose no such questions nor create such concepts.
Q2: OP also asks What preceded god?
Answer: Before a human cortex is developed (after birth), there was nothing there. Therefore, by corollary to the answer to Q1, there was nothing preceding god.
Q3: A question that OP did not ask: What is there beyond god?
Answer: The day your cortex ceases to function (generally the day you die) you go beyond god, which is again nothingness – just like prior to being born.
In between the two nothingness, however, there is a lot of life to be done. When it comes to the man-made concept of god, I’ve heard that tune, have seen the picture, have analyzed the axiom. Time to move on to other things as the arrival of nothingness is imminent.