patrick.net

To think of God ("The creator", "the almighty") in human terms or to ascribe literal meaning to a allegorical tale is a fools errand.

Gensis talks of creation, meaning the creation of matter... the material world. The matter that over the eons became the stars ("the hevans") planets ("the earth") the air we beneath, water we drink, food we eat, even you and I. It was the first of sever attempt to awnser that age old question. How did I get here?

Nowadays, here is what we think we know.

Energy and mass are interrelated (E=mc2). What we think of as time is actually a fabric known as "space-time". It tells us where a given object is located and how it's location varries.

If you belive the big bang theory, it states that all matter that has ever existed was squeezed into an infinitely dense space. The problem is the concept of space itself breaks down as you try to compact matter into such a small area. The math dosen't work. Just like with a black hole, we get a singularity. One cannot divide by zero.

Just as faith cannot definitely awnser what came before "the beginning" physics still cannot say definitely how the universe came to be. The idea of a big bang is fairly accepted the mainstream, but thoes first few billionth of a second are still a mystery.

For the universe as we know it to be set in motion thre must have been vast amount of energy (dare I say infinite) which somehow became matter. ("The Word made flesh", so to speak.)

What happened before then is unknowable nor is it important. We exist. Creation happened. Before this the energy still existed; how else could matter come to be?

What was it doing? Nothing. For there was no place for it to be. Space as we know it had not come to exist, for matter had not yet been created.

There is almost a zen like quality one needs to wrap one's mind around the great mysteries of the universe.

What was the catalysis that got this all in motion? Who knows. Perhaps we are in one of an infinite cycles of "big bangs" followed by "big crunches", with all that's in the universe expanding, contracting and reinstating, in an endless loop.

Perhaps future generations will add clarity.

600 years ago mamy thought the earth was flat. (Some still do)

400 years ago most thought the center of the universe... until it wasn't.

100 years ago the big bang theory was just being formulated. Einstines seminal papers on relativity were only published in 1905 and 1915.

Who knows how much more we will know in another 100 or even 200 years?

God has a vantage point that is not bound by our concept of the dimension of time which is why the question of what happened before creation is absurd. He has no beginning and time is one of His creations (There was evening and morning the first day). From His perspective everything He said will happen, has already happened! He exists on the level of eternity which we cannot fathom as we are bound by the dimension of time while we live in these mortal bodies. But everyone has an eternal soul that even time cannot diminish. The only question for everyone to answer is will they choose eternity with God, or eternal separation from God?

To answer your questions indirectly, about how can God exist outside of the universe and time… let’s pretend that the universe as we know it is a simulation on an indescribably sophisticated computer. God, as the programmer, absolutely exists outside the simulation he has created. What’s so hard about imagining that? Now, scale it up. If reality as we know it is as fungible to God as software is to a computer programmer, how would our universe be much different than a simulation?
And doesn’t every program or simulation absolutely require a creator?

How do you explain your consciousness? It's created by God.

DD214 says

Anyone on here have something better than word salad for an answer ?

If we live in a computer simulation then God can easily be defined as one who created it.

Chatting with https://beta.character.ai/ makes me wonder whether it possibly has some kind of consciousness.

Patrick says

Chatting with https://beta.character.ai/ makes me wonder whether it possibly has some kind of consciousness.

It’s just code and stats.