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.

PeopleUnited says

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.

No - it is not absurd. Thinking the universe, humans etc. were created in 6 days as we know them (24 hours) is absurd.

Other than the Flintstones ,which is not reality television, why is there no evidence of humans during the reign of dinosaurs despite there being no shortage of dinosaur skeletons and footprints etc. ?

That being so, why the continued denial in evolution, since humans did not appear until after the dinosaurs died out.

Why do we constantly refer to "god" in a human term such as he - for all we this entity, should it exist, is merely an algorithm or as 1337rr has stated a form on consciousness from an even higher developed species of being or even worse a female.

Before we choose which god, when will believers stop arguing and hating each other about which denomination, synod or sect will reap the benefits of their belief? Then is comes down to which god and which religion since most religions believe in an afterlife.

Yes, every program needs a creator however as we know the world, copies can be made with or without license.

That being said are we merely in a parallel universe of some fashion ?

And if "god" was the creator of a computer simulation, who or what is "god" ?

Comment two is a continuum of the word salad I get from clergy when I posed this to them. More typically I have gotten "god simply is"

DD214 says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth per Genesis 1.1

The questions I have posed to numerous clergy of all denominations are as follows:

What was God doing before he started creating ?

I think he did the Dagobah System before Earth.

Bueller?

1337irr says

It’s just code and stats.

Kind of getting more on board with this than most other things - hell, we all just be an experiment in something's lab.

If one is lazy enough not to use logic, s/he drown into non-existing god fantasy.