Where did god come from?

On this blog we make no claims that we know more than the rest, no, that isn’t how we do it here. On this blog we try to sift through a lot of material just to give you an inspirational post and we also know you are pressed for time to check out all the god stuff so we do it as a way to contribute to the knowledge base that the human race has been gathering till this point in time.

Today we came to this a post that we thought would be very promising but left us a tad disappointed. It is all the same story, but told differently. The author starts

it takes more faith to not believe in the existence of God then it does to believe that God does exist.

and here we ask ourselves did the meaning of faith change over night? We lack a belief in gods because there has been insufficient evidence to warrant a belief and the word god is so ambiguous that it’s almost if not impossible to have a debate about it.

So when we read

where did God come from?

we thought for a moment that we will get a difference answer from the one we have in mind. Shock on us. We are told

I believe that God has always existed. He did not come from anywhere (He wasn’t created).

And we were like which god was this for we are certain if it is the christian one, he wasn’t known to the Sumerians, the Chinese till some Hebrew herdsmen concocted him from among the pantheon of deities they worshiped. However, our bigger question is how does he know this?

The author admits and we agree that

this may seem like a copout answer, and it kind of is

and we could have ended our post here had he not gone beyond this point. But he proceeds to tell us

My faith starts and ends (in this argument) on two pillars:

1)      God exists
2)      He created the universe

Premise one is the question we are need of an answer to. To say the universe was created and by the particular deity is to float in sea of ignorance from where one can’t be rescued. There are several problems here. One has to demonstrate the universe was in need of a creator, why the named creator created the universe, how and from what and besides we would like to be told how one moves from a creator of the universe to a personal god. We are patient so we will wait for the answer.

The author tells us

I am sure that there is not simply one doctrine that all those who do not believe in the existence of God accept

but we are in no need of doctrine. Is there a code book for non stamp collectors?

My friends now we get to the one doctrine that you and me believe or follow

For the sake of this post, I am choosing one example of why it takes more faith to believe the universe exists without God creating it. Whereas a Christian believes that God exists outside of time and space and therefore He can have always existed without having a physical world; an atheist would have to believe that matter (in some form) has always existed.

I would want to know anyone who believes matter can be created or destroyed. If on the other hand all of us are in agreement that matter can neither be destroyed nor created, we arrive at a single conclusion that it has always existed. My understanding is limited and as such I would want help with understanding existence out of space and time.

I honestly do not and cannot tell how we get to

If matter has always existed, then there would have to be an infinite number of days in the past; the clock would have always been running, in which case we would never have arrived at today (there would always be one more day to get through before today).

and I ask for help in understanding why this should be so. It does not follow that if matter has been eternal we should be a day behind today- if this isn’t an oxymoron then I need a refund from my teacher of English plus interest.

And if we grant this

This would take faith because we have never observed the world without time being in the equation.

as true for the purpose of argument. The question we must ask here is who has observed god out of time and space. I will wait for the answer, am not in a hurry on this one I promise.

We are given two conditions. That either we accept

1)      God exists
2)      He created the universe

or

1)      There is no God
2)      There is a universe

then we are told

the latter takes more faith because my mind is always trying to figure things out, so “just because” is seldom an acceptable conclusion.

Please tell me how the second set of arguments require faith?

To make this a little bit easy for our christian, I have a set of questions

1. which god exists? If you dismiss Apollo or Isis what criteria did you use to invalidate the belief of the countless people who believed and worshiped them?
2. what evidence leads you to the belief that the universe was created?
3. and granting for a moment the universe was created, how do you know it was by your particular god?
4. how can you tell the difference between an always existing universe and a created one?

The author tells us in conclusion we have to

We are left with the choice to believe, by faith, one way or the other (or we could sit on the fence and be agnostic)

which is not true. We don’t have to have faith that matter has always existed. We don’t need faith that there, has been to the present, no evidence for god[s] other than the claims of priests, charlatans and mystics. There is no faith required in knowing the universe exists. There is no contradiction in the second premises and they don’t require faith.

But he is correct when he says

we exist and exist on a planet that works for us

and whereas the question of

How did we get here?

is important, god did it is not an answer to the problem and we are better of looking for answers from nature instead of creating phantoms in an attempt to answer such an existential question.

We are disappointed for we expected to be told where gods originated but that was not to be the case. In order then to offer a plausible answer to the question, we proffer an explanation that gods were created by our ancestors when they were ignorant of causes and were fearful of things that everywhere around them threatened to devour them whether disease or other calamities as earthquakes, famine and so on. They populated their world with spirits, good and bad, in constant warfare with each other.

I end this post here by answering our questioner that gods came from ignorance and that is why as man grows in intelligence in the same proportion does gods relevance and influence become smaller. I am however aware of those smarts who hold onto to a belief in gods and spirits. These I must say are a fringe group and it is the work of social scientists to explain how such a phenomena is possible.

Have a nice weekend everyone.

where did god come from?