OK then:
Causality for, or enablement properties of, Big Bang - if it/they gotta be somewhere, then where?
Now you’re asking about the rules of the game before the game was invented-no can do. I’m inquiring about the rules of the game once it gets underway.
The author/novel analogy is imperfect but not terrible. If you were to ask a character in a novel “Where is your creator? How did he exist before your universe did? How can he simultaneously exist during every moment of your story? And if he’s not part of your universe, how can he possibly influence it?” they would give some of the same answers that believers give about God.
If I were a believer I would hate that analogy. It strongly implies that we have no free will whatsoever, and that anything and everything we do meets the approval of GodWriter because It Is Writ.
The analogy is admittedly imperfect (most analogies are); but I have heard more than one author talk about how their characters took on a life of their own and did things the author hadn’t expected.
No, I’m not - I’m asking a question about how the game came to be. It’s a question that doesn’t give a good goddamn about the rules of the game, before or after its inception.
Most authors are badly infected with hyperbole. Authors may think up new scenarios and revisions, but they are the author’s alone. Once the words are writ, no character has the ability to rewrite.
Or even had characters appear that the author hadn’t been expecting.
If ‘outside’ has gotta be somewhere, then ‘before’ has gotta be somewhen - so when?
Given all we know about what existed before the BB…we don’t even know enough to give an educated guess, in my opinion.
Do you know what comes before “I don’t know, yet?”
“I don’t even know enough to hazard a guess.”
Translation-the author had to create characters to fill in the gaps created by the author’s change in plot.
Characters do NOT create or change themselves.
Exactly. That’s your best argument - that you don’t know what comes ‘before’ (I use the word with respect to causality rather than time, just to avoid the obvious nitpick) the Big Bang, so you can’t know what exists outside its parameters now. But God can’t be there, because shut up, that’s why.
Actually, the novel/novelist metaphor doesn’t entirely rule out free will.
Many writers have noted the effect of their characters “showing independence.” Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote about this. The characters sometimes seem to stand up on their hind legs and say, “Nope. I won’t do what you just said.”
Now, yes, obviously, what’s really happening is a kind of compartmentalization in the writer’s mind. But that could be extended to theological cosmology. We might “borrow” a little of the creator’s free will. We might have free will, via the writer’s personal self-identification with us.
And as for It Being Writ… Dude, you’ve never re-written a scene? “Okay, Lirp is dead. Impaled. End of his story.” Long pause… “Y’know…that doesn’t have to be the way it goes…” Frantic re-writes. “Lirp almost dies, but is revived with a doctor’s care…”
The metaphor is, to be sure, far from perfect. But I think it provides a kind of graceful insight. It relegates most of us to minor characters. We, as important as we may be in our own minds, are really just “Man in Hat on Park Bench” or “Woman Window Shopping with Parasol.” But the author is so meticulous, he writes scenes, and lines, and drama, even for us schmoes!
(And, no, I’m atheist. I don’t believe the metaphor. I simply admire it.)
Straight up atheist here, but I don’t have a problem with the “outside space and time” explanation. Well, I do, but not for the reasons the OP thinks.
I often imagine the universe as it looks from the “outside”. I picture those Stephen Hawking diagrams where the universe looks like a fat trumpet, with time going in one direction and space expanding in the other two dimensions. I can see some five dimensional creature looking at our universe like we look at a painting, just sitting there.
It’s kind of comforting, really. From our perspective, life is fleeting. From outside the universe, however, we’re persistent. Like a seed in a watermelon, I may not be much, but I’m there, I made my mark, and that mark isn’t going anywhere. I may not always be here, but I will always have been here, forevermore.
Not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that dismissing the question of where God is by saying “He lives outside Space and Time” is bullshit if the person making the claim has no idea what “outside Space and Time” means in the first place. I have personally heard this from people, and for the vast majority of them it means almost the same thing as Heaven.
More than that, Conservation of Information is as bedrock as Conservation of Momentum. We also know that information is conserved in holographic form on a black hole’s skin, and that holograph contains the information for all of its component parts. As we live in a black hole, that strongly suggests that we’re represented holographicaly, too. The real interesting part is that in a holograph, any data point contains every data point. So in a very real sense we’re not only persistent, we’re not bound by our physicality. Or to put it another way, we’re both temporal and limited and timeless and boundless-within-Universe. Just like a photon is a wave and a particle simultaneously.
“God is outside space and time” means (if nothing else) that God does not have a specific location within space and time, and thus, the question “Where is God?” has no meaningful answer, any more than “What color is God?” or “How much does God weigh?” If a question has no meaningful answer, what is one supposed to do with it besides dismissing it?
Is any of this true? I don’t think we live inside a black hole (it’s possible, but I thought the data suggests otherwise), and is information actually conserved?
Hmmm…
I haven’t actually thought about it in that manner before.
Seems to be an obvious corollary when you say it.
The problem is that you say this, as if God has no physical properties at all. “He isn’t anywhere, he doesn’t weigh anything” and yet he “works in mysterious ways” and “walks with his children” and “speaks to you”. Not to mention created the universe and flooded the earth. He’s either physical or not. You can’t have it both ways.
If he has any physical properties, science could find him, measure him and study him. If not, he effectively doesn’t exist.