Why do I always click these religion links when they're under recent topics?
God doesnt need a cause because he always was and always is and always will be. What I am asking you is what is it that "always was" from your point of view or at least what is the generally accepted scientific take on it?
Anyway here's my view on this as well. Religions and science* could agree that there was something "in the beginning" that didn't require a cause. According to science it was an event (the Big Bang), whereas according to some of the religions (yours included, so let's stick to that) it was a life form (God).
(*Science doesn't exclude certain other possibilities... and all religions probably don't subscribe to this either.)
So why would we feel the Big Bang makes more sense as the absolute beginning? Note that the Universe, with all of its complexities, could have arisen from a set of simple rules where you begin with a matrix of random values... (See Conway's game of life for an example of complexity arising from simplicity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life ) Zillions and zillions of chemical compounds are made possible through combinations of a hundred or so atoms, that are all built with around five types of basic particles, which themselves may only be different vibrations on the same type of superstrings.
All that was required for the Universe to be the way it is a set of rules. Now one might look at the "God" concept and describe his/her/its thought patterns (= its existence) completely as a set of rules. Then we could say that God started the Universe. This is the concept of "scientific god" and yes, science doesn't mind.
However, the gods found in contemporary religious books don't fit that bill. They're too complex - and let me explain just what I mean by that. They're not too complex for it to be
impossible for them to have emerged by chance, though it does make one think of a bunch of monkeys typing Shakespeare. And that's just it: if we're attributing the rules at the beginning of everything to random chance (Which
we are - I'll get to that right away.) then it's simply much more likely that those rules would be very simple. The flying spaghetti monster is not impossible, we're just dismissing it along with the monkeys' careers as writers.
Why do we believe those rules would be the way they are due to random chance? Because it's the simplest explanation,
as well as the only one that can possibly make sense. So lets look at your alternative. You claim that God is, complexity and all, exactly as it is he/she/it is (I'm answering for all similar religions as well
) because it is the epitome of pure perfection and could not possibly exist in any other form. We have a simple counter for that: your god is only perfect by its own definition. Let's imagine a series of powerful evil entities, each of them creating its own world and then claiming to be perfect. All of them can be very different, yet all of them can lay the claim to being perfect. So which one of them is perfect? They created the Universe, so they get to define "perfect", right? Oh wait, that would be circular logic. In other words a god can not be the "only true perfect thing" in the "beginning of the Universe"-sense just because he/she/it says so. A god like that would have to be perfect
in an objective manner, and in my opinion: a) objective perfection doesn't exist, and b) if it did, then it wouldn't involve the killings and skulduggery of the gods of contemporary holy books. (Of course from a philosophical point of view I may well be wrong and that's what perfection's all about. Ain't philosophy grand?
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