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.

1337irr says

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.

We may just be the same. Consciousness may be an illusion. We MIGHT just be meat robots.

The fundamental problem is there is no way that we can understand ourselves. If we ever made a computer that can understand itself as well as the people that created it, that's the singularity. It can then improve itself, continuously, and exponentially. Before you know it, it's reasoning and thinking would outstrip human's.

But if it can be made, it will be made.

I used to consider this question often. While I came out with some interesting observations after years and years of ruminations, the most valuable was this: the question makes me miserable. There simply isn't enough information either accessible or that I can understand that makes it worthwhile for me to even do more than daydream speculation.

It's a constant state of frustration of probably not even being able to perceive what is necessary to have a totally confident answer. When I began to move on from this "very important question" my mental health improved somewhat. Now, I'll halfheartedly accept whatever answer I'm given purely because it's better than being lost in that labyrinth again. Flying spaghetti monster? Sure! Turtles all the way down? Why not? Sky man with mood problems? I'll take it! Gigantic explosion? Why not all of 'em.

Shaman says

And doesn’t every program or simulation absolutely require a creator?

The computer and underlying software program needs a creator, but from that, you can make an evolutionary algorithm.

Evolutionary algorithms make use of randomness (or pseudo-randomness) to produce solutions to problems that are FAR beyond the ability of a team of people working on the same problem. The routing of a computer chip uses evolutionary algorithms called simulated annealing. What the algorithm does is do different routing of a chip, to minimize the amount of surface area required on a silicon. The smaller you can make the chip, the cheaper the chip is to manufacture, the more profit to be made.

Run the algorithm twice with different random numbers, and you end up with different solutions which are JUST about as good as one another or equivalent (rare).

Now you can write an evolutionary algorithm to produce a chip as well. Even a new assembly. You're just setting terms and conditions for what constitutes a "solution" and you can have many solutions for the same problem. You start out with some pretty simple requirements and the algorithm proposes solution after solution, over many generations until you get something that is "good enough" or simply doesn't get better.

Evolution is a fact. If it was just a mistaken idea, I'm kind of doubtful evolutionary algorithms would work so incredibly well. You can see how well they work, because optical character recognition uses them, speech to text uses them, lots of things use them.

You know thinking about it, I'm rather surprised that an evolutionary algorithm hasn't been created to make a completely new design for a computer chip. It would require massive storage, and a lot of cycles, but it should be possible to make an entirely new chip architecture that is optimized for existing software execution using the least number of gates. Eventually, somebody (or some team more likely) will do this.

DD214 says

What was God doing before he started creating ?

Where was God, if there was nothing before he started creating ?

According to the physicists etc. there was nothing so how did God come out of nothing ?

Obviously beyond our comprehension.

I liken our understanding of our creator to a computer virus understanding the software engineer that created it.

personal

The big nothing open void that the Universe travels through, is even bigger than the Universe. Once the universe has traversed over a vast spans of the Universe, it will never cross that same spot ever again.
Nothing is big enough to hold everything that ever was, while still having room for everything that will ever be. What created nothing? It's bigger than everything!

God exists outside of time. There, I said it, now you figure it out.

rocketjoe79 says

God exists outside of time. There, I said it, now you figure it out.

All fine and good. What is God ? As humans we have attached a label to make this entity human like but is that the case.

DD214 says

rocketjoe79 says

God exists outside of time. There, I said it, now you figure it out.

All fine and good. What is God ? As humans we have attached a label to make this entity human like but is that the case.

God exists from words humans made up. I respect religious people (to an extent), but religion is fiction. There's not a single iota of evidence to state otherwise. There is no god.

Look at it this way. You think Sauron exists from Lord of the Rings and JRR T's brain? It's made up shit. Fantasy. I love LOTR's. It's not real though. The bible and faith is no different. Someone wrote a good book at a certain date and people bought into it. It's not bad if it makes you feel good just as I like LOTR. It's just not real.

If you've been knocked out or put under for surgery, that's death. It's over. You don't wake up though. There's nothing else. There's no memory. It's over. There's no afterlife. You're just a corpse someone has to deal with.

I know this take will upset people but there's ZERO evidence of god, jesus, afterlife, etc. Remember 2 years ago when we wiped a sitting POTUS of our country off the map of our current society? You trust shit from 2,000 years ago? Give me a break. We can't even keep current records in order for the 3-4 existing generations. We're talking 100 years. Half our history is fucking made up and is provably made up. Somehow we got it right 2k years ago... lol.

DD214 says

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

Less absurd than believing a cell membrane/wall, mitochondria, and coded instructions to construct the mitochondria and build the wall plus self-replicate the coded instructions, came about in an act of neo-spontaneous generation.

If it was that easy, we'd be fighting a running battle against the spontaneous emergence of life in every biological/food processing factory.

@Wookie. I don’t see how you can say there is zero evidence God exists. Jesus was a historical figure. There’s more evidence of his existence then most historical figures we accept as having existed. The books of the New Testament were written during the lifetimes of people who new Jesus, by multiple authors. Many of Jesus’s disciples were so convinced he was God that the were martyrs for him. If people who knew Jesus were so convinced he was God that they willingly died for him, well, I’m just saying they must have had an experience to convince them of that and you cannot just dismiss it.

AmericanKulak says

Less absurd than believing a cell membrane/wall, mitochondria, and coded instructions to construct the mitochondria and build the wall plus self-replicate the coded instructions, came about in an act of neo-spontaneous generation.

Nobody has ANY idea how life started, but we have made self replicating spheres. That's the Miller-Urey experiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

That made a lot of assumptions about the Earth, that are now thought to be incorrect, but it did produce a "life-form" that replicated itself. No DNA, just a tropism.

Maybe it was a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance that life could start - but there are so many suns and so many planets and so much time. It's a real mystery how life started and maybe we'll never understand it. Life in all the universe may be entirely unique in our solar system, maybe our planet.

Still, even if god explains it, the next question is, how did god come into existence? Maybe that was a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance? It's possible..

We don't know, and neither do you. I can accept I'm ignorant, we all are. Can you speak in Swahili? Well, you're ignorant then about that, just as I am. We all have infinite ignorance.

richwicks says

Nobody has ANY idea how life started, but we have made self replicating spheres. That's the Miller-Urey experiment.

Miller-Urey experiment assumed an anaerobic reducing atmosphere rich in Methane and Ammonia prior to the space age, the erroneous view of Early Earth atmosphere in 1953 before a quantum leap in geophysics and planetology happened in the 1960s.

The experiment has been repeated many times with the current estimation of a CO2 and N2 rich environment with trace oxygen, and results have been all over the place.

That being said, the amino acids mean nothing, they aren't living organisms. They have to combine in hyperspecific ways with perfect chirality to be a building block of life, and then work together via some kind of system, typically being joined via dehydration synthesis which is the primary way life does it today. Guess what enviornment presents the worst for dehydration synthesis? A warm, wet soup.

Amino acids are to life what iron is to a 314 Stainless Steel Water Tank. A precondition, but far, far, far from the completed object.

pudil says

Wookie. I don’t see how you can say there is zero evidence God exists. Jesus was a historical figure. There’s more evidence of his existence then most historical figures we accept as having existed.

This isn't true.

He is not mentioned at all in Roman history at the time and Jewish history... There's a LOT of bullshit in that. There was no King David, no civilization records his existence, for example. The holocaust, which we are forbidden to discuss, is rife with false history. There were NOT 6 million Jewish people killed, there were NO extermination camps. There WERE plenty of Jewish people killed, there WERE slave labor camps, Jewish SLAVES that could not work WERE put to death. There WAS a holocaust, but nothing like what we accept as fact today. No lampshades made from Jewish skin, no soap bars rendered from Jewish bodies.

Their "history" is mostly myth, and they continue to construct myths today, in which even the Jewish people believe to be absolutely 100% accurate.

Palestine was NOT a land for a people for a people without a land. As a religious faith, they make up a lot of bullshit, an incredible amount of bullshit, that if you question, gets you into scalding hot water. Even questioning it, ANY PART OF IT, gets you labelled as an antisemite, and I know this directly. Ever wonder why the Germans went through such great pains to get rid of the bodies by using scarce resources to cremate the bodies to dust, but kept all the shoes you see in every holocaust museum? I DARE you to ask that to a Jewish person but I absolve myself from any responsibility of the consequences of doing that. You'll be targeted.

The "Palestinian didn't ever exist" - really? David was fighting Goliath wasn't he. What people was Goliath a part of? I guess nobody, the Holy Land of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam was just strangely empty until the Jewish people showed up to make the desert bloom, despite the photographs of the area starting in the mid 1800s...

What was God doing before he started creating ?

Planning.

Where was God, if there was nothing before he started creating ?

In the midst of the great nothingness.

According to the physicists etc. there was nothing so how did God come out of nothing ?

According to the theologians God has always existed. It doesn’t matter what the “physicists etc.” say really. Oh by the way, how do the physicists explain the emergence of all matter in the universe from nothing?