Iacchus32 said:
Well, if God didn't create everything, then it just begs the question. Who created God? ... At what point does God begin or, end?
Yes, infinite regress and lack of a first cause are big problems, but not only for the God concept . . . for any creation theory, even a scientific one.
I don't know if you've seen my "monism" thread over in metaphysics, but it is the idea that some sort of uncreated substance makes up everything there is. If you are interested, I'll offer a little essay on how I would rely on monism to answer your question. You'll have to be patient since it takes setting up a bit of groundwork before I can answer.
I believe infinite regress, the lack of a first cause, and a slew of other modeling issues can be resolved by adding an absolute uncaused foundational substance that exists in basic foundational conditions; the foundational substance is generally unevolved, but has the potential to be made to spontaneously evolve by the basic foundational conditions.
“Absolute” in the foundational context refers to the most deep-seated level of existence possible, the bottom line, that from which all things arise and return, and of which all existence is composed; and “uncaused” simply means it was never created, has always existed, and forever will exist. Necessary too is that this most foundational level of existence is some kind of “stuff,” a substance.
An important aspect of the ground state substance is that it must exist as an infinite ocean; we might call it the
Ground State Ocean or GS Ocean. It must also be
homogeneous. Homogeneity means there are no spaces (not anywhere) because to avoid duality the ground state substance has to exist uninterrupted in every possible direction, from the infinite smallest to the infinite largest measurement in its oceanic abode (the GS Ocean).
Some people find the simplicity of a ground state substance difficult to envision because creation seems so complex. How can everything come from and be the same substance? To try to make sense of the counterintuitive idea that a huge variety of things could all, without exception, start out as and still most essentially be exactly the same stuff, try this analogy.
Imagine our universe exists in an ocean of fluid called
wawa. It’s sort of like water but it is a very finely translucent fluid and far more pliable than water. Just like if you were a fish in a water ocean, everywhere you go is wawa. There aren’t any spaces or gaps or holes in the ocean, it’s just wawa wawa everywhere. But the wawa ocean is different from a water ocean in several important ways.
The planet over there spinning around in the wawa ocean? Well that planet is made out of wawa, and so is the sun the planet is orbiting, and so are the life forms on the planet plus whatever consciousness/awareness is associated with life forms; and when any of the “forms” of wawa fully disintegrate, they become wawa again.
If you start traveling in the wawa ocean, you can rest assured you will never reach an end, it goes infinitely on and on beyond our finite universe no matter what direction you try. If you invent a shrinking machine and attempt to shrink yourself so tiny you will see some kind of structure in wawa, and maybe space between the structure, you won’t find either structure or space. It is absolutely homogeneous as infinely large as you look and as infinitely small as you look.
Anyone smart enough to invent a shrinking machine could invent a time machine too (you’d have to be really smart since wawa is timeless), so when yours is ready, and you travel back in time, no matter how far you go there is wawa in its infinite ocean. It’s eternal and uncaused. You can’t destroy it because it is existence and cannot not exist, and you can’t create it because there is no room for it (since it already exists everywhere). It just is.
Now, the tricky part is understanding how everything we see is made out of wawa. Let’s say we lived in a wholly wawa world so that the atmosphere was pure wawa vapor, solid ground was wawa ice, and the oceans were liquid wawa; you yourself are a complex ice sculpture breathing wawa vapor and with wawa flowing through your icy veins. In this case, the “forms” wawa have taken are dependent on two key things.
First, wawa must be flexible/pliable/malleable/mutable enough to exist in an assortment of states; and second, there must be a variety of conditions present which can cause the different states. In our analogy, a main condition is temperature which determines the state of the wawa, and there must also be conditions such as pressure, movement, ordering potential, etc. which can lead to complex structure.
Yet if wawa couldn’t become ice or a vapor or shaped into complex strutures, then the potentials for conditions to create a diversity of forms would be restricted; following that concept, we can see that the more flexible/pliable/malleable/mutable the ground state stuff is, the greater the range of shapes and states it will be able to assume. That, in fact, is a huge clue for modeling because if we assume there is a single substance at the foundation of creation, and since we know for certain that a vast array of things exist, then that tells us the ground state substance must be amazingly supple.
As important as suppleness is, for our understanding of a ground state substance it is GS Ocean conditions that tell us the most, because they must be such that they can cause the ground state substance to appear as an atom, or gravity, or consciousness, or . . . God?
Let's say we define God as consciousness, period. Then let's say that like eveything else, the consciousness which was to become God somehow spontaneously and naturally developed in the GS Ocean. That means, some set of natural conditions must prevail there which can form consciousness.
Of course, since we don't really know what consciousness is (even our own), it is difficult to imagine what sort of conditions exist in the GS Ocean which would produce consciousness. But let's just say that a trait of consciousness is that it is inherently
evolutive. Sinc we know the ground state substance is uncreated, indestructible (eternally existent), and that if consciousness originated and began evolving in the GS Ocean it has an infinite amount of room to grow, we have the basis for this "God" consciousness to evolve to a vast degree.
And really, what sort of NATURAL skills and abilities might consciousness develop if it had eternity in which to evolve? Look at what a human consciousness can learn in a few decades, but imagine if you had zillions of eons of evolution under your belt. You might be able to concentrate, for example, so powerfully that you could compress a bunch of ground state substance to the point of a Big Bang, and then participate in the development a solar system, help shape a big blue planet, guide the formation of life, and maybe even cause a little bit of yourself to emerge through a nervous system as an "individual" little consciousness.
I do believe, however, that someone can be religious and also make sense. One could be a follower of Jesus for example, put one's faith totally in him and that's it. One needn't "believe" anything at all to do that. With total faith, questions about heaven, hell, omipotence, etc., or if Jesus rose from the dead or did miracles . . . all that is irrelevant because one's aim is to wholly trust the inner experience Jesus has to offer as sufficient.
