[size=150]O[/size]ne day a man set off on a journey.
He departed from a state of unselfconscious brute-hood and arrived in the new world of sentient reflective being.
Immediately upon his arrival he was stricken with awe and wonderment.
He soon began to ask ultimate questions.
Unable to explain or make sense of existence he created god.
And it has been going on ever since.
And so the man went around talking about god. And wise men when they heard him understood what god was. They knew it was an idea, a concept, and that god existed only in the inner realm of theory but not in actuality.
But there were many fools who were easily deceived and they believed in god quite literally and saw him as an old man with a long grey beard who lived above the clouds.
And there was war between the wise men and the fools.
Nice short story, Epictetus. I adhere to your idea that god is a metaphor, and that no man really has met or see him/her/it (if a person met him, how can he be really sure he/she is facing the true and only god?). In addition to it, the concept turning into something concrete is sadly almost inevitable, because there are more fools then wise on the world. And in a lot of cases the ideas of the majority is considered to be true.
well the universe had a beginning just like god did. Just because it had a beginning doesn’t mean it needed a cause for the “beginning”.
you think it does, and for you I ask (like I’ve asked before) what was god’s beginning. He couldn’t “always be” because nothing in the universe exists in a state of non-change.
Just curious, but what if the constant cycle of becoming, being, and returning to nothingness is that which we call creator? Could it be that “God” is that cycle of never-ending change, and wouldn’t that allow “God” to “always be”?
At this time, there are any number of explanations of the universe, with the ‘big bang’ theory predominant. This theory, like all other explanations, implies a beginning and (possibly) an end of the universe. They are just theories at the moment and so we don’t know. All that we can observe comes into being from nothingness and then returns to nothingness. Keep in mind that the word nothingness is just a word and isn’t that which is nothingness. With our most powerful instruments that allow us to look back in ‘time’ several billion years, this is the birth/death cycle we see. There is nothing in the known universe that contravenes this cycle. I am suggesting that this cycle of nothingness>being>nothingness could be that which we call “god”, and that without proof of a ‘beginning’ just might “always be”. See any possibilities?
every discovery science makes is an answer to a question. that question is “what caused that to happen?” usually it is a matter of somebody inventing a more accurate machine or method, and then identifying new things that work together in a way that they can describe what creates the effect that the initial question was asking about.
this will never lead us to an answer for the question “what CREATED this”. that question is different from “what caused this to happen” because the answer to the latter uses things that already exist in the universe to determine the effect that we observe.
in order to answer the creation question, we would have to see something that creates a universe, which seems to me like its something that cant possibly exist as a part of the universe that we can fully observe. if it does exist in the universe, then where was it before the universe was created and why isnt it still there?
when god created the universe, he made it cycle around forever, so that there is no arbitrary point of genesis to discover. he also invented a thing called time so that objects can do things and remember that they did them and use that knowledge in their cycles or sentient decison making.
just because time is here, and things like cause and effect exist here does not mean they exist outside the universe. whatever created the universe also created those things.
