The Origin Of God?

[carrdero]

[quote]Aloysius writes: I don't believe your god exists. Why should I believe that such a being exists?[/quote]

You do not have to believe that GOD exists. There are no penalties or rewards for doing so. It is one of the freedoms that comes with believing.

[quote]Aloysius writes: It's arbitrary superstition, no logical reason for it to exist.[/quote]

I’m not surprised, some people have speculated this about their own physical existences and arrived to conclusions that are equally meaningless, superstitious or arbitrary.

[quote]Aloysius writes:There might as well be no god, because your god is not necessitated by an ontological system.[/quote]

There may be no God as necessitated by the way that some religions have purposed Him for but again, I have to ask? Does this concern you? Would this be a reason not to continue a REALationship with GOD?

[quote]Aloysius writes:Your god is subject to time, and as such, no longer the necessary ontological cause of time.[/quote]

There are many references in the Bible where [b][i]a[/i][/b] God is subject to abide and follow time,

[color="#000080"]Genesis 2:2-3
"And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made."

Daniel 9:24
"Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy."

Ezekiel 39:9
"And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handstaves, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years:"

Matthew 24:36
36 “Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.

2 Peter 3:8
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

Revelation 20:4
"And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and [I saw] the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received [his] mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years."[/color]

[quote]Aloysius writes: But I would challenge your atheistic system by asking what the cause of time is. Your god cannot be the cause of time, because he is subject to time.[/quote]

The only time one is subject to time is when they need to categorize it or to keep an appointment. In GOD’s beginnings, I don’t think that the GOD I am describing needed to categorize, conceptualize, rely or follow time. What awareness or concerns of time would a BEing have or need before first becoming aware of Self? What deadlines did GOD have to meet? Why would GOD need to watch a clock in order to rest? If GOD was indeed the first entity to exist and was alone, what appointments with other entities did He have to keep? Where did GOD have to go that He needed to arrive at a certain moment?

Edited July 23, 2007 by carrdero

[carrdero]

[quote]SirKlawd writes: God is the originator of all that we know. To theorize a god having a beginning means there was once a before for that "god" and therefore something that caused it to be - making it not all-powerful, all-knowing, making it notgod.[/quote]

One could speculate that there was but that this BEing was never creative or careful enough to create anyone to document or read about their existence. I would liken the experience of an entity coming into existence and starting a forum board and after realizing that no one was ever going to show up, use it or log on, this “deity” after realizing it may remain alone for eternity, discontinued their existence. Maybe this GOD decided to stick around longer.

[quote]SirKlawd writes: The TRUE God is the the sole independant. He needs nothing. He is his own existence.[/quote]
I can probably go along with most of this but I would add that the TRUE GOD was the [b][i]first[/i][/b] existence but are you prepared to consider that other entities may have come into their own existence in the same way after GOD? Does this make the first TRUE GOD any less meaningful or special?

[quote]SirKlawd writes: Everything in this universe exists because of something else, is dependant on something else. Follow this train of thought backwards. The start can only be God.[/quote]
Yes but if we use the scenario above and consider that after moments GOD was no longer alone, could these other entities have helped GOD in the process of creation? Is it safe to assume that GOD did not have any assisitance in the creation of everything?

Edited July 23, 2007 by carrdero

[carrdero]

[quote]Adt6247 writes: If that is the case, why did you start the thread? Why are you even on Phatmass? You asked a question, it was answered, quite well, and you basically said "well, you're wrong, and I'm right, and because I'm right, I don't need to defend my position, I just started the topic to get some silly Catholics riled up."[/quote]

You’re absolutely right, entering a debate board to discuss and compare my beliefs with others, what was I thinking? I should have just surrenderd myself to faith.

Edited July 23, 2007 by carrdero

[carrdero]

[quote]everything else that is only has existence because it is caused by Him. He does not change,[/quote]Aloysius or anyone,
I have been doing a lot of thinking about the never-changing God theory that has been proposed and it had occurred to me that if God always was, where did we come from? If God was alone and he created other spiritual entities/angels or if you believe that God created humans, would that not constitiute change from BEing a God that was once alone to a God that has included others in His existence? Would not any creative endeavor induce change in a BEing that was once without?

Edited July 24, 2007 by carrdero

[Aloysius]

Isn't that just the same question? God is an ontollogical principal, the very nature of existence which by nature must exist outside of time and space; therefore, it is eternal and didn't 'come from anywhere', because that entire statement implies both time and space applying. whilst we often use anthropomorphisms and such referring to God to better understand Him, and thus often speak about Him in terms of time, space, and human charecteristics, these are just our ways of coming to understand Him from our own perspective.

He created time itself, outside of Himself. But the nature between eternity and time is not linear; you must expand your mind outside of your own experience to come to understand. It really is quite a mind-boggling idea. Imagine that we compressed all points in time into one single point and placed that one single point on a three dimensional plane. That would be an analogy to time's place in eternity, but not entirely accurate.

There was not a point in time when He had not created the universe and then a point in time when He had created the universe. That's linear thinking. Outside of the creation of the universe and of time, there is no linear, there is no this then that, there is no first second and third. 'then' is a temporal word... 'before' is a temporal word. For God, there is no "before" he created man, there is no "before" he created me, or you. To God, all points past present and future are one point in his three dimensional plane, all points are as if "the present"

I often use the inaccurate but useful wording that God must have existed "before" time in order to create time, but what is more accurate is to say that God must have existed "outside" of time in order to create time. Both are mere human linguistic analogies to the actual reality, though.

Our human language fails here, but this is not jibberish. I do not know how well I am conveying the idea, but I invite you to think and/or meditate further on the matter because all human minds have the capability of grasping such concepts.

[carrdero]

These are question to see if I am understanding this correctly, if there is no before or after (or if past,present future are the same) is it safe to assume that other spiritual entities existed always as God did or with God?

How does the Genesis human creation account fit into this theory?

Was the apostle Paul presumptious in making this remark?
[color="#000080"]2 Peter 3:8
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."[/color]

Edited July 24, 2007 by carrdero

[aalpha1989]

God created mankind inside of time. we are not denying that there IS time, only that God is subject to it. How could God be subject to something he created?

yes there are spiritual beings which are not subject to time. Angels and demons were created outside of it and at their creation chose good or evil.

[carrdero]

It will take me awhile to consider this information but for the sake of convenience it almost seems as if God has been theorized to receive chronological immunity.

[Aloysius]

[quote name='carrdero' post='1339285' date='Jul 24 2007, 12:25 AM']These are question to see if I am understanding this correctly, if there is no before or after (or if past,present future are the same) is it safe to assume that other spiritual entities existed always as God did or with God?

How does the Genesis human creation account fit into this theory?

Was the apostle Paul presumptious in making this remark?
[color="#000080"]2 Peter 3:8
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."[/color][/quote]
I explained how we approach this stuff about eternity from human analogies; but look how he compresses a thousand years into one day, that's an attempt at describing how all moments are as one. a thousand is a biblical number for, basically, the biggest possible number; like if a little kid says 'a million' he doesn't mean a finite million, he's picking the biggest number he can think of to describe something huge. that's what the biblical idiom of 1000 was... it also has a parallel in some teenage lingo going "like a thousand years ya know"...

human creation is within time, that point in God's 3-d plane.
the creation of angels is within time, that point in God's 3-d plane.

there are three persons in one God who have always existed. there is a reason there must be more than one person within that being, and there is a reason that there must be only one being that takes this place. it is all clear when you look at God as an ontollogical principal, taking away our anthropomorphisms (though since we have an anthropocentric worldview as Christians, we believe many of these anthropomorphisms to actually reflect a reality of how humanity was actually theomorphized, ie made in the image and likeness of God). The ontological principal: the cause of all existence. There can only be one principal cause of all existence to make a consistent ontological model which accounts for the regularity and constancy of the universe.

as a principal which is the cause-of-all-existence, it must have an attribute within itself and existing within eternity which causes another to exist within itself. this is why "before all ages" the Son is "eternally begotten" from the Principal source of God the Father. God by nature causes something to exist, thus God the Father eternally causes the existence of God the Son. And that causation of existence is the very Spirit of God. Their consubstantial nature is seen in the oneness of the universe caused by them.

[Aloysius]

[quote name='carrdero' post='1339307' date='Jul 24 2007, 12:40 AM']It will take me awhile to consider this information but for the sake of convenience it almost seems as if God has been theorized to receive chronological immunity.[/quote]
God has been theorized to have been the cause of time itself.

Step back and look at the system you would support if God did change: it is a system in which time is a principal higher than God. You have extended time as a constant with no justification. It would seem to me to make more sense that you have extended your experience into your philosophical system, unable to see outside of your own existence. Like people before we understood the nature of space would have thought of things only in relation to the Earth; you think of God in relation to time because you live within time and thus project time onto all things you conceptualize; whereas experience teaches us this is true of all things within the universe, there is no reason to believe this necessarily extends over things outside the universe.

That's the fundamental difference, and it's one of the fundamental concepts of the 'radical monotheistic revolution' that has inverted the way our society views God away from the way pagans viewed gods... it removes all humanly-projected limitations from God, making Him completely and totally transcendent (thus making way for science to study that which God is transcendent of, the universe, because it can have regular laws not governed by the whims of supernatural beings)

The only difference between the system you originally proposed and the system we espouse is this:

Yours:

TIME
GOD

OURS:

GOD
TIME

[aalpha1989]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1339312' date='Jul 23 2007, 11:45 PM']human creation is within time, that point in God's 3-d plane.
the creation of angels is within time, that point in God's 3-d plane.[/quote]


ok wait. angels were created in time...but aren't they 'supernatural' (not of our nature)? and if they were created in time...do they experience it as we do? but they are in heaven...does that not mean that they don't experience time? however, demons were cast from heaven to earth so they do experience time. right?

[Aloysius]

they are "preternatural" meaning "above human nature"

"supernatural" means "above nature". humanity receiving the beatific vision is receiving something "supernatural" because it's above human nature... but angelic power is natural to angels, preternatural insofar as it is above human nature.

the creation of angels occurred within time. everything that reaches heaven and the beatific vision comes out of time, breaks out of that point, and reaches eternity. everything that has gone to hell, likewise has reached eternity. but their entrance into eternity, a great mystery which is hard to comprehend, does not mean that they always existed, they have their origin in that point of time and then extend into eternity. human language fails to explain it, because "thens" have no place in a description of eternity, but in a very very imperfect analogy they are like rays, wherein their origin point is the entire duration of time that they once experienced, and the ray line is their eternity.

[carrdero]

[quote]Aloysius writes; That's the fundamental difference, and it's one of the fundamental concepts of the 'radical monotheistic revolution' that has inverted the way our society views God away from the way pagans viewed gods... it removes all humanly-projected limitations from God, making Him completely and totally transcendent (thus making way for science to study that which God is transcendent of, the universe, because it can have regular laws not governed by the whims of supernatural beings).[/quote]

Well this certainly explains His human relation to time but not his behavior which I have known many religions to be guilty of. How would you account for this?

[carrdero]

[quote]Aalpha writes: ok wait. angels were created in time...but aren't they 'supernatural' (not of our nature)?[/quote]
Not to mix threads but this is what I was trying to say; that I believe angels are us. I do not believe that any entity begins their existence in the physical.

[Aloysius]

If you don't mind, we shall save discussion of angels for another time. suffice it to say, if you think that humans have an origin as spiritual beings, there is no reason to label them as "angels"; you ought to simply say "there are no angels, human beings have their origins as spirits and are incarnated"... but that's a whole other discussion.

As to His actions within time: all points in time are, what we temporal beings would deem "the present" to Him. Every point in time is completely the present to Him. Everything He has done in the world has been, then, like one action; He created the world the same "time" He gave Moses the ten commandments which is the same "time" He heard the last prayer I prayed to Him.

Every aspect of that "one-time-act" was done with full knowledge of the state the people within time were, God acted towards them in ways they would understand.