If Man Created God ...

[Voronwë the Faithful]

... then who created the universe?

If God is simply a creation of mankind, a construct developed to help understand that which was not understood, then who created the universe? It had to come from somewhere, no? If it was an accident, who created the accident? There had to be some first principle, no? I'm very curious to know what people's thoughts about this are, particularly those who consider themselves atheists, or heathens.

Conversely, if God created the universe, who created God?

[yovargas]

Why assume a creation? Why no room for the idea that it all just IS and WAS and WILL BE? Existence exists.

[axordil]

.It had to come from somewhere, no?

Well, actually, no, it didn't. There doesn't have to be a "before" zero time or "outside" space anymore than a circle has to have 361 degrees or a globe a 91 degrees N.

Only things within the universe, within time and space, can have meaningful causality.

[Primula Baggins]

"Why does anything exist?" is one of those problems with no testable answer that physics seems to have handed off to metaphysics.

[halplm]

As for the question, if God created the Universe, who created God...

It's a valid question . One I've often pondered... but it also implies bounding God within constraints that we havein in the Universe... that of having a begining and and an end... or of even having an "existance"

By definition (invented by us, or given to us), God has no such boundaries.

We have no way of understanding what is outside our universe... it makes no sense to try and fit things from outside, into our understanding...

[Frelga]

I think this is the first time that I am in complete agreement with Hal on subject of religion.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Well, that's something.

[Erunáme]

This sounds a lot like "which came first: the chicken or the egg?"

[truehobbit]

Yes, I think once you start thinking about it, it turns into the question Eru mentions.

Basically, I'd also say that if the universe just began without God, just like that, then there must have been something before that, because nothing can come out of nothing. But if there was something before, than what did that come from? And then that, etc, etc?

On the other hand, if God is the first cause of the universe, do we ask what did God come from? I think not, because it's the definition of God that He just IS - the first cause with nothing going before Him.

Of course this idea of infinity is just about impossible to grasp for humans.

So, I think what we are left with is either to think that the universe just IS without needing anything to have gone before, or God, as the creator of the universe just IS, without needing anything to have gone before.

Both seem equally impossible to our finite minds, but either of them is necessary unless we want to go crazy.

With all that uncertainty, though, it's amazing how similar the two concepts are, don't you think?

I'm rather fascinated with what Ax said, though:

There doesn't have to be a "before" zero time or "outside" space anymore than a circle has to have 361 degrees or a globe a 91 degrees N.

But the reason a circle doesn't have a 361st degree is because that's the same as the 1st degree - the circle will have closed and begin again.
Does that mean you think the universe is circular?

And come to think of it, maybe our problems with imagining the beginning of the universe only derive from our thinking of it as linear. Might it not just as well be circular?

Only things within the universe, within time and space, can have meaningful causality.

Maybe I just don't understand that correctly, but the way I understand it, I don't think this is true.
I'd rather say (with hal) that we have no way of determining the causalities or really anything about things outside the universe - it's literally beyond us. There may be all kinds of meaningful causalities, but we are in no position to recognise them. But in such a case it would be foolish, I think, to conclude from a lack of observation that the thing we can't observe with our means can't exist.

[Primula Baggins]

hobby, think of the universe as a self-contained bubble of spacetime. There's no "outside" to it because it contains all space within it; there's no "before" it or "after" it because it contains all time. In that sense it is a little like a circle; "361 degrees" is a meaningless term.

I think by "meaningful causality," Ax meant causality we could discover within the universe, using our own senses. That's not to say nothing exists that is not part of our universe; but nothing we can perceive or measure scientifically exists that is not part of our universe.

The question is whether or not one believes that the only things that can exist are those that can be perceived or measured scientifically. For me, that would be the big "no."

[truehobbit]

The problem is, the term "spacetime" doesn't mean a thing to me, Prim.
Also, how can there be an inside without an outside? The concept of "within" needs the concept of "without" to make sense at all, I think.

If the universe is circular, that indeed means that it comprises its beginning within itself, but it also means that the end and the beginning are the same.

And a circle still needs something to set itself off from, something that is not the circle, so you can speak of a circle in the first place. The way I see it, nothing can be anything (i.e. defined as something) if there is not something that is different from it.

I'd be interested to hear how you picture this "spacetime" when in your image of it there is nothing that is not "spacetime" - this "bubble" you see (as I think that must be a picture you use to imagine the concept), how can it exist when there is nothing that is not the bubble?
A bubble, to my mind, requires a space around it from which it is distinct as a bubble.

I think by "meaningful causality," Ax meant causality we could discover within the universe, using our own senses.

Yes, I also think he must have meant that. But, if so, isn't it a bit bold (to say the least) to assume that something we can't discover with our own senses isn't meaningful? Or that something that, for that reason, isn't meaningful to us, is not meaningful in general? Because it seems to me that this is what Ax is saying.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, it gets all self-referential pretty fast, hobby. You can't define the universe by pointing at something that is not part of it, because we can't perceive (meaning measure, or experience with our five senses) anything that is not part of the universe. You can't talk about "outside" the universe because it contains all the spacetime there is. You can't have more than everything there is.

It's not literally a circle or a "bubble"; it is all of a piece and self-contained.

There may be, I of course think there is, something that is not part of this universe, but we literally can't know or even guess what it is, or understand how it is present (there is no border around our universe that this Something can be "outside"). If it exists it is equally near to (or far from) every point inside our universe.

"Spacetime" is Einstein's concept, that time is the fourth dimension in addition to the three dimensions of space. For something to exist, it has to have length, breadth, width, and duration.

[Whistler]

Too deep for me.

I still haven't figured out professional wrestling, Chicken McNuggets, karaoke or those little plastic things at the ends of shoelaces. Do those things even have a name?

[Primula Baggins]

Aiglets.

Anything else?

[halplm]

yes, they do, they're aglets

[Whistler]

[MithLuin]

...and can be created by wrapping a piece of scotch tape around a string, and then cutting it in half. Their purpose is to prevent the string from unravelling at the cut end.

The idea of a first cause of 'uncaused cause' does get into what we understand about how our world works. As soon as you speak of a 'beginning' the rules don't seem to work.

So, either the universe has always existed (there is no beginning), or something happened without being caused the way everything else is caused. We can't really observe that, so at this point, it is not a matter of astronomy.

There are boundaries to the visible universe, and even the physical universe. If you go with the Big Bang, all matter had a starting point a finite time ago (roughly 5 billion years), and it all has been moving away from that point (at the fastest) at the speed of light. Ergo, if you draw a sphere with a radius of 5 billion light-years around the point of origin, you have set the boundary to the physical universe. Anything outside that boundary is nothingness - it simply doesn't exist . The boundary is expanding, though, as time goes on....

But to answer Voronwë's initial question - if Man made up the concept of God as an explanation (and he isn't real), then of course he could not create or start anything, and the existence of the universe must be explained in some other way. But if men are clever enough to think up the concept of God, the uncaused cause, then surely they are clever enough to think up a solution to that puzzle?

I know that Aquinas (who was much cleverer than I) considered that argument to be very powerful - God is required to make sense of the first things. But then, Aquinas believed in God. He was charitable to the beliefs of atheists and heathens, but he did not share them.

[Primula Baggins]

MithLuin, your Big Bang explanation is not quite right. It's easy to think of it as an explosion with everything rushing away from a given point; but in fact that point, right at the Big Bang, WAS the entire universe. Every point in space that exists in our universe now existed then, and all in that one point.

The expansion that's been happening is not matter rushing away from an explosion; it's space itself getting bigger. There is no "center" to the Big Bang, because at the instant it happened it was everything. Since then space has been getting larger and larger, which means the matter in space (what we can see of that is galaxies) is getting more and more widely separaated. From our point of view everything is rushing away from us, but that's just an artifact of the fact that space itself is expanding.

Certainly we can't see anything farther away than about 12 billion lightyears, because 12 billion years ago was the Big Bang. That doesn't mean there is nothing out there; it just means the light from it hasn't had time to travel to us.

I haasten to add that I see nothing in any of this that is incompatible wiith the existence of God, but I don't see any proof there either. Because there can't be; it's not physically provable.

[MithLuin]

Sorry for the over-simplification. I understand the distinction between space and matter. I know that the visible universe (what we can see or observe) is smaller than the actual universe - the radius is set from where we are.

But if space has been expanding, that means the universe has dimensions. I know that nothing exists outside of the universe, but the idea of 'expanding' is meaningless without a boundary. And if it has a boundary....if it is a bubble... then what I said still holds, even if it would be harder to pinpoint where to put the 'center' of the bubble. I know it is a meaningless boundary, but it isn't a non-existant one, if that clarifies at all.

[vison]

I thought it was spelled "aiglet"?

And, Whistler, you DON'T want to figure out Chicken McNuggets. Trust me on this one.

As for "wrasslin'", I guess I guess that if you think it ought to have an explanation or meaning, you are too far removed from it. Like, in another universe.