Atheists claim that nature is all that exists. If nature made us, then what made nature? After all, the scientific evidence tells us physical reality had a beginning. Things which begin to exist need a cause, so nature needs a cause. That cause must be supernatural (beyond nature) by definition. God is what made nature.
But if God made nature, what made God? Nothing. Unlike nature, God is eternal. Things that are eternal never begin to exist, so they do not need a cause. How do we know God is eternal? Time is a feature of the physical world, so it began to exist when nature began to exist. That which brings time into existence cannot itself be temporal, but must be eternal. God is eternal. Nature is not. That’s why nature needs a cause but God does not.
Thinking to Believe 
February 21, 2017 at 7:40 pm
I will attempt to give Theists a taste of compelling logic with which to empower the seeker and the baker and the candlestick maker; the sage, the page and all the King Makers.
…..Atheists claim that nature is all that exists. I do not claim that. I claim that the “Cosmos”, is all that exists.
…..If nature made us, then what made nature? We do not come from Nature; we come from the Cosmos through Nature. Nature is the processes of the Cosmos.
…..the scientific evidence tells us physical reality had a beginning. Scientific evidence does not tell us any such thing. The evidence does not tell us anything more than the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation(CMBR) What caused it is left to human speculation (Big Bang) in the same way that what caused anything was left to human speculation in ancient days, “The Gods” and “the Gods” was always plural. Even the bible talks about the plurality of the Gods.
……But if God made nature, what made God? Nature is the processes of the Cosmos; man invented the Gods as an explanation that his mind could not fathom.
…..Unlike Nature, God is eternal. The processes of Nature was attributed to “the Gods” but is in fact the processes of the eternal Cosmos.
…..Things that are eternal never begin to exist, so they do not need a cause. The Cosmos is eternal.
……How do we know God is eternal? We do not know God is eternal, qe “believe” that God is eternal as divined by ancient man when he killed his children to appease the Gods of his imagined belief. God is not eternal; God is the invention of man’s speculation.
……Time is a feature of the physical world. Time does not exist outside the mind of man. Time is a construct of Man to cut out and map the world as he sees it. To determine a “sense of agency” (SA) (or sense of control). This is the same reason we say there are 5 Oceans in the world when in fact there is only One Ocean, the Global Ocean. In the same way we divide the land mass into continents, countries, states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, plots of land, the dog house, the fox den and the rabbit hole.
…….so “time” began to exist when nature began to exist. No. Time began when man needed to give himself a sense of agency. When a tree falls in the forest does anyone hear if man does not hear? There is no sound without man to hear, no time without man to calculate the distance of one point to another point and the mobile unit of travel between the two; the first time machine ever invented was the sundial that cast a shadow and that shadow crawled along like a slug without apparent mobility. Man reasoned for thousands of years that it was the sun moving until the cosmic processes of nature matured(evolved) in man’s mind and the Copernican theory was birthed and that not so long ago. It has only been 474 years ago, in 1543 when it was published. (SEE FOOTNOTE BELOW)
……That which brings time into existence cannot itself be temporal, but must be eternal. It was man who divined “time” and made its extension infiltrate the mind.
……..God is eternal. Nature is not. Cosmos is eternal, Nature is the processes of birth and rebirth in the cosmic garden, man was birthed through the processes in the garden similar to the birth and rebirth of the stars propelled by the life forces we are still learning about.
…….That’s why nature needs a cause but God does not. In reality nature’s cause is the Cosmos and God needs man to belief his own sense of agency by attributing his agency to the cosmos but in his infancy man called the Gods, Ra, the sun god and all life subject to it, animals that sustained life that branched out into space Apollo, Thor, Zeus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter and why the planets are named after the Gods of man’s invention and when you see images of the gods they are made in whose image? Man’s image.
And of course as the Good Book says:
PLEASE UNDERSTAND a little recognized concept called Pregenesis:
What God is:
God is a Simply Structured System to Shape and Satisfy the Searching Sage who Asks, Seeks and Knocks.
The Will of God IS the Will of Man because the Will of God was created to be the Will of Man; not about the ordinary will of man, the Will of God was created to be about the BEST Will of Man……. which necessitated caveats.
in other words, the First Seven Assertions of the Will of Man broadly state that at the dawning of intellectual thought of conscious awareness, the question necessarily arose………Why? and then about Self, the answers flowed forth to give man agency, a sense of control:
CHAPTER 1:
THE DAWNING:
[1] MAN created God in his own image and gave Him the Perfect Attributes of Deity.
[2] THESE are those attributes which Man aspires to but the likes of which Man has also determined to be impossible to achieve
[3] MAN sets the highest standards for his God and then pre-ordains those standards to be unreachable by Man using the phrase “God Willing” thus insuring
[4] THE justification for Man as he goes about his business of being just the opposite of the attributes he has given to his God
[5] BEING stupid, unforgiving, greedy, a liar, a cheat, a stealer, a killer, a deceiver and a most hateful and
[6] MURDEROUS character of which even among his own kind many cannot believe
[7] HE IS capable of the worse acts of atrocity on his fellow man, the environment and the life forms which support him
FOOTNOTE:
Few people know when the church changed its opinion on the geocentric worldview.
The answer is, ‘when it had to,’ which turned out to be in 1822. (A mere 195 years ago…just three generations ago if you can imagine that!) For the centuries beforehand, from the year dot since genesis, heliocentrism became a battle ground for different religions and religious factions. As Protestantism and Catholicism battled it out for religious supremacy, whichever religion gave ground on the geocentric model of the universe was accused by the other of turning away from the scriptures. As a result, both stood firm on an immobile Earth defending scriptures for almost three hundred years more after Copernicus published his theory.
In schools, things made a bit more progress. For much of the 1700s, people insisted that both models should be taught to students. (Sound familiar?) Once both models were being taught, with both professional and amateur astronomers proliferating, the geocentric model continuously lost ground. It simply didn’t support the growing body of data that scientists were accumulating. As astronomers stopped believing in geocentrism, schools stopped teaching it, and it was good and dead, academically, by the 1800s.
So when the Catholic church convened a college of cardinals and let people know that the books about the heliocentric model of the universe would now be “permitted,” there was some public amusement. Amazingly, there were still strict Protestant sects that forbade the teaching of the heliocentric model. The dates on which they relented (if they ever did) are unrecorded.
And the Church’s Idea of the God Theory is still being defended by believers, such is the grip of ritual religious on 75% of the world’s population but soon modern theology will become the New Testament of the Old Testament Mythology and will take its prepared place in the last tome of terror, when finally the last pitbull dogma gives up the bone……. “when it had to”……!
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February 21, 2017 at 8:00 pm
Where was God during the six days of creation? If we say He was on His throne in Heaven surrounded by worshiping angels, then it is apparent that time had already begun before He created the natural realm. Time exists wherever events exist, whether those events occur in heaven or in the natural realm below. On the other hand, if we say He was in a transcendent, timeless state in eternity and entered the flow of time simultaneously with His first act of creation then, as Dr. Wm. Craig posits, God would be timeless in eternity and would become temporal at creation. Just some thoughts.
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February 23, 2017 at 6:46 am
Ah yes, the Kalam or Leibniz cosmological argument. It’s been what, six months, a year since you last brought it up for discussion? And a year before that, and a year before that? It’s a wonderful thing, believing in God. You can simply declare that He existed before time began 13.8 billion years ago (or 6000 years ago, depending on one’s Protestant ideology), and no one can prove you wrong. From there you can claim the 98% inerrancy of scripture and the irrelevancy of the errors in the remaining 2% and defer to the absolute authority of the Pentateuch as the initial justification for an eternal God. It’s nothing more than “because I said so” logic, which, as far as I can tell, is the same argument that was made last year and the year before that and the year before that, all the way back to ‘Ilm al-Kalam. Which is more disconcerting, the shallowness of the eternal God logic or the possibility that those damnable, atheistic scientists might someday come up with a viable alternate explanation for the creation of the universe which doesn’t require God’s participation?
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February 23, 2017 at 10:07 am
Paul Mason:
I love the entertaining style of your write; it reminds me of the Parable of the Rooster in my LTG Famous Quotes…you being the Rooster of course to the chagrinic irritation of religious scholars 🙂
Hear the Parable of the Rooster:
Religious Scholars dread the advance of knowledge as vampires do the approach of daylight, scowling at the rooster heralding the fatal end of darkness and the end of the deceptions on which they feed.
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February 23, 2017 at 10:09 am
Sorry
that was “Bob” Mason…..I had “Paul” on the brain from my previous Post on re-baptism.
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February 27, 2017 at 5:27 am
Bob, yes, I speak of it frequently, and will continue to speak of it. No one is simply “declaring” that God exists. We are making rational arguments for His existence, and some of those arguments are based on the existence of the cosmos (cosmological arguments). And the arguments are strong. Things that begin to exist need a cause, and the type of cause necessary to bring the universe into existence matches the properties of a theistic being. Even if the material world were eternal, it would still need an explanation for its existence since material stuff is contingent. Why do you dismiss such arguments?
BTW, science could never, even in principle, explain the universe in any ultimate sense. If the universe were eternal, it would be impossible to empirically verify this. And if the universe is finite, they could never identify the cause of the universe because the cause could not be a natural event since “nature” is the effect (and the purview of science is limited to natural phenomena). These questions can only be answered philosophically. Science can weigh in on the question by showing which way the empirical data points, but it can never fully resolve the question. Science is great at understanding how things work within the universe, but it cannot provide answers to the ultimate questions about origins.
“Because I said so logic”? I can’t take you seriously when you try to reduce all of the arguments and evidence that Christians present with such a hand-waiving response.
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February 27, 2017 at 11:20 am
There’s much to sort through here. Dissecting the concepts of creation, infinity, logic & time will surely lead to uncertainty, confusion & misapprehension in trying to know God. Consider what constitutes the “eternal”. How are we to approach it in application? Are we to think of “eternal” as infinite or unending time, or a state to which time has no application; timelessness? The two concepts present a paradox. On the one hand the first condition offers never-ending, everlasting, forever time while the second state makes time irrelevant for it eradicates the element altogether leaving us stripped bare of any time.
We gain far more traction by examining God in His attributes particularly the seldom even noticed much less pondered Solitariness of God:
https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/attributes_online.html#chapter1
From The Attributes of God by A. W. Pink:
…It is true that God is both honored and dishonored by men, not in His essential being, but in His official character. It is equally true that God has been glorified by creation, by providence, and by redemption. We do not dare dispute this for a moment. But all of this has to do with His manifestative glory and the recognition of it by us. Yet, had God so pleased, He might have continued alone for all eternity, without making known His glory unto creatures. Whether He should do so or not He determined solely by His own will. He was perfectly blessed in Himself before the first creature was called into being. And what are all the creatures of His hands unto Him even now? The Scripture again answers:
Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before Him are as nothing; and they are counted to Him less than nothing, and vanity. To whom, then, will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto him? (Isa. 40:15-18).
That is the God of Scripture; but, He is still “the unknown God” (Acts 17:23) to heedless multitudes. “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are like grasshoppers; that stretch out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: Who bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity” (Isa. 40:22-23). How vastly different is the God of Scripture from the god of the average pulpit!
Nor is the testimony of the New Testament any different from that of the Old. How could it be since both have one and the same Author? There too we read, “Which in his times he shall show, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see; to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen” (1 Tim. 6:15-16). Such a One is to be revered, worshipped, adored. He is solitary in His majesty, unique in His excellency, peerless in His perfections. He sustains all, but is Himself independent of all. He gives to all and is enriched by none.
Such a God cannot be found out by searching. He can be known only as He is revealed to the heart by the Holy Spirit through the Word. It is true that creation demonstrates a Creator, and so plainly that men are “without excuse.” Yet we still have to say with Job, “Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of him? But the thunder of His power, who can understand?” (Job 26:14). The so-called argument from design by well-meaning apologists has, we believe, done much more harm than good. It has attempted to bring the great God down to the level of finite comprehension, and thereby has lost sight of His solitary excellence….
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March 3, 2017 at 5:11 am
SonofMan,
Just wondering how you justify that time is a construct of man?
I would have thought that time exists where an event occurs which produces a before and after whereas a second (the measurement of time) is a man-made concept.
Since an animal would recognise time, it must follow that it cannot be “man-made”, and even though no-one witnesses a tree falling down, nevertheless, there was a “before the tree fell” and an “after the tree fell” therefore time exists regardless of man
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March 3, 2017 at 11:02 am
Scottspeig:
Thanks for your question.
My explanation of time may only be as clear as mud; nevertheless, here are some ideas that have been spontaneously generated as I write.
Time is like a mythical conversation piece for philosophers mulling over beginnings and ends but there aren’t any beginnings and ends. Nuclear annihilation is not even a firecracker in the Cosmos and has no meaning to other animals certainly.
Time is like the Global Ocean; it is a meaningless concept until Man uses it to divide the One Global Ocean into the five main Oceans, seas, inlets and outlets where all waters hurriedly flow to where they all belong, home, into the One Global Ocean; look at an atlas. The China Sea and the Indian ocean are all part of the One Single Global Ocean.
Distance between objects is meaningless until measurements are cast. The twinkling stars are meaningless until man calculates the distance and speed of light and puts distance into a perspective we conveniently call “time” by distance and speed but “time” just “is” with and without the calculations.
Animals are hungry most of the time so animals have no understanding of time they either catch the prey and eat or fail and go hungry.
Before the tree fell and after the tree fell does not prove time anymore than it proves “sound” or “gravity”. Only by your example does that division of time give perspective to an event..as Jason would say..”…it’s the context…”.
Cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) only proves that the radiation exists and is measureable but not that “time” began to exist by a big bang theory; that’s just man trying to put something into a mouse hole that provides s/he comfort with a sense of agency, a sense of control.
Man always looks for beginnings and ends to explain the unexplainable but nothing starts or ends, everything just “is”. The Cosmos is a multiplicity of spontaneous generations “all the time” but man wants to pigeon hole “time” into Big Bangs and Big Gods but “time” is like the terms “forever” and “never” of which: what is the longer time? becomes a nonsensical question.
Time just is; it’s like the equation of a mathematician’s tool to the “rule”. You can write the equation to the rule of a theorem but the theorem rule already “is” before you even take the “time” to write it out. Thoughts and time are like spontaneous generation and that’s about all we know at this period of “time” in our evolution; we try to figure out how to measure a thought in terms of firing neurons for a sense of our own agency but thoughts too are spontaneous generations.
Quantum physics seem to rule in spontaneous generation at the quantum level coming in and going out and being in different places at the same period of time, rendering time a piece in the same puzzle of where, when, who, what and how does it not, nest ce pas?
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March 5, 2017 at 5:11 am
Scott and Leo, if I might interject. The error most people make is treating time as an independent variable when in fact it is not. Time is a fourth dimension of existence. We usually perceive our existence only in three dimensions, essentially our position in the universe, up-down, left-right, forward-back, relative to the matter around us. In our daily lives, we perceive time as starting from some initial point and proceeding forward at a constant rate, one second at a time. In actuality, time is not a constant. It varies depending on how far one is from gravitation bodies and how fast one is moving relative to one’s surroundings. You would age slightly faster living on the moon than on the Earth. That difference is small, a few seconds over a lifetime, but get near a massive star or black hole (or get close to the speed of light) and time slows down considerably. Time is thus interwoven with the space around us which is why physicists use the term space-time when discussing space and time beyond normal, everyday human experience. Which gets us back to when time began.
Because matter and time exist together as space-time, you can’t have one without the other. The First Cause cosmological argument assumes that God is eternal, existing before the beginning of space-time. At some point, as the argument goes, through the power of his thought, the command of his voice or the wave of his hand, he created all of matter in the universe and simultaneously started the universal clock; he created space-time. We can debate all day the validity of the First Cause argument, but it should be noted that, with the possible exception of Aristotle, nearly everyone who advocates for such a case, including Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz and William Craig, to name a few, all start with the assumption that only an all powerful, eternal God can be the First Cause and build their arguments to support that initial assumption.
Things get interesting for the case where the matter in the universe is eternal and not temporally created by God. That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. There is an entire branch of theoretical physics devoted to the study of just such a case which involves the counter intuitive weirdness, at least counter intuitive to everyday human experience, of quantum mechanics and the apparent ability to matter for form spontaneously. In that case, the God of creation becomes irrelevant. There is no First Cause, space-time just is; it has always existed and always will.
It used to be, in the early history of religion in the Indus Valley and northern India, that god or gods were temporal and the universe was eternal. The switch to an eternal god came with the evolution of religious thinking toward monotheism. Modern day theists might argue that ancient religious philosophers finally saw the light and came to understand the true nature of God, but that ignores the context of the times. With the transition from a nomadic existence to city-state governance, the transition to monotheism was more likely a matter of populace control by philosophical one-upmanship. At a time when religion and rule of the populace were one in the same, or at least highly integrated, uniting under and believing one is protected by an eternal god, superior to the god or gods of one’s adversaries, made perfect sense. That doesn’t make it correct. The few remaining believers in Jainism in the world, the followers of some Hindu sects and Buddhists argue that it is the universe which is eternal and deny the existence of a supreme being, eternal or otherwise. Thus, absent any hard evidence, the cosmological argument is a matter of faith, not proof.
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March 5, 2017 at 8:33 am
Bob:
I appreciate your “injection”, figuratively speaking. Your remarks are remarkable.
I still cannot get my mind around one thing however; and that is, time slowing down the faster one goes……….. even to the speed of light.
Now it used to be explained by the clock analogy which, if you travelled away from the clock, the second hand would appear to slow and slow until you reached the same speed as the light from the clock: the speed of light traveling to your eye. At that time you would be traveling at the same speed as the light from the clock by which you perceive the motion of the second hand and for all intents and purposes the clock would appear at a stand still.
Now, taking that one step further if you began traveling faster than the speed of light but could still see the clock, the clock would remain motionless; it would not start going backward and start unwinding as it were. What we are talking about now is not reality but perception.
Now let’s assume you begin slowing down and slowed to less than the speed of light; well, the clock would appear in motion once again but let’s add something to the equation..
On the star speed spaceship (sss) you must be riding, also has a similar clock next to the TV screen on the inside cabin and the TV screen is in receiving its signal from a rear mounted camera focused like a hubble telescope on the receding clock. So as you watch the cabin clock, the TV camera clock would be visible but apparently stopped at the same time, and in the same position as it was when the SSS reached speed of light (SOL).
Now we reverse the speed…… slowing to the SOL speed; and then, slowed to less than SOL speed. Now the cabin clock would still be ticking and would have covered; let’s say, 2 minutes. As you slowed to normal speed and begin hovering what would you perceive the TV clock to appear doing?
I submit that the TV clock second hand would begin speeding faster and faster forward, to catch up the two minutes that the cabin clock would be displaying and when it reached the same time as the cabin clock, it would be perceived then as the normal tick tock of the clock again!
That is why I cannot get my head around accepting that time slowed, and why the clock is not perceived to rewinding but I can understand how the perception would appear to speed up because time on the camera clock had indeed stood still only to our perception but not in reality but would however be perceived as fast forwarding the more we slowed but only in perception we would see the second hand sweeping to the point it would already be at, coinciding with the cabin clock.
And as we returned to the camera clock hovering in space, we would use the Canada Arm, retrieve the clock, bring it on board and all the students in the SSS cabin with you would burst out in unanimous applause and cheers (hooraysss) for the unique experiment!
We would of course be traveling on the SSS Quantum. 🙂 🙂
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July 6, 2019 at 3:42 pm
@Bob Mason
You write:
With respect to Aquinas, that is patently untrue. Aquinas was a disciple, more or less, of Aristotle, which is why Thomism is also called Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics.
Like Aristotle, Thomas argues a posteriori that change is possible via two principles of being—act and potency. These two principles are real principles making all contingent beings composites of the same. And like Aristotle, he reasons from an essentially ordered causal series to a First Cause which by definition must be Pure Act. He then argues that the logical consistency shows that Pure Act must be God. It is an extremely tightly woven metaphysical argument that doesn’t simply build God into it.
You really should try to understand an argument before you critique it.
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