Hacker News Reader

Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

> who created god

That is why whatever that "thing" is, that's full-stop. That's why we refer to it as god.

It requires no explanation, it must be. It's sort of like asking "why do we have something instead of nothing?".

Because apparently that's the way it must be.

That sounds crazy to scientifically-minded people, myself included, because we want answers to everything. But the turtles will go all the way down until you just decide that there is a "god", whatever that is, and it is necessary.

And here we are.

View on HN

Who created God? Good question. I did some digging and found this article, that reasons using references from a Christian point of view:

https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20140801/who-made-...

Is is clear in the Bible that God does not exist in physical form. In the heavens, according to the Bible, he does not even exist in the same form as angels. At one time, Jesus was described in his human form, as "a little lesser than angels". Just a little? I guess it doesn't make sense for Angels to be in God's same plane of existence, then.

I think that 'time' is a part of this universe and that God is an observer that exists outside of it all. This makes sense, because of his ability to accurately tell the future in specific detail. But in the Bible, we see that Angels are restricted and bound by time. God is not. Probably God created time. Therefore to ask 'Who made God?' in his plane of existence, would require us to understand what existence is like without time.

How do you feel about this?

I can imagine a block universe with time as just an axis. Then our universe can be just an object sitting on god’s table. But ultimately this still does not provide any answers.

To get more answers (not necessarily 'any' though - I think you may have overgeneralized there), we would need to understand this mode of existence. I am thinking like this: what does existence look like without time? For example, a table is of no use to someone who has no timescale to do anything at that table. The word "created", is even more curious, as it has no meaning. Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.

Perhaps this is why God would make a universe with time.

> Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.

Correct, that's my initial comment said things are this way because it "has to be".

Our minds can not grasp the concept of what being "outside time" even means.

Again it fundamentally boils down to "why something rather than nothing". Clearly, it is because it "has to be". Because we have something, and that by definition can't come from nothing.

Pondering about these thoughts of the whole concept of "has to be" admittedly has kept me up some nights.

That's why I say it is unsatisfying and the universe is ultimately unexplainable because either there is this final "god" and we are incapable of understanding it or there is not and there is infinite levels and we are incapable of understanding it also.

Cf. apex (e.g., YHWH) versus non-apex (e.g., the Tao) conceptions of the numinous.

Could you elaborate?

>Because apparently that's the way it must be.

Bullshit, please. Prove it or GFTO with that nonsense. Science is found on evidence, not on "what if...s" .

If you told me that an ARM Cortex A9 is faster than a current i7, and then you put the excuse of "God made it" argument over the table you would look like a lunatic.

With the Universe origins is the same. Replace "God" with "Santa" and the argument gets equally ridiculous.

Had a little too much of human religion? Me too.

I went through this same phase, at one point I declared myself an atheist, mostly because it was an easy way to give the middle finger to my Catholic childhood indoctrination.

But then I decided to dig a little deeper, and there is more to it than thinking "god" is the same as "the Easter bunny".

Good luck trying to figure out why something exists and not nothing (and we're not talking about quantum particles popping into existence in a vacuum, those are "things" ... that's not nothing).

Yeah, the universe is weird, still no god needed, because gods' existence is almost as weird as particles popping in and out.

Also, not particles, but fields, actually.

> Also, not particles, but fields, actually.

Why are there fields?

It's turtles all the way down, and it fundamentally comes down to "why something rather than nothing"?

Nothing has no potential to create anything because it's literally nothing. It can not have potential.

So where do these crazy forces, fields, the quantum observer effect come from, out of nothing?

We will never find an answer to that question because it is literally unanswerable.

>We will never find an answer to that question because it is literally unanswerable.

Then putting the "god" argument over the table seems either lazy or antropocentric.

The correct answer (as from today), it's "we don't know". You don't need to put any god, "energy" or whatever myth you know over ignorance.

> Good luck trying to figure out why something exists and not nothing

I don’t see how assigning a (culturally loaded) label to an unprovable hypotheses could possibly be useful for figuring out anything objectively true.

> It requires no explanation, it must be. It's sort of like asking "why do we have something instead of nothing?".

You can substitute "universe" for "god" and still get the same level of meaning (or lack thereof). Why do we have a universe instead of no universe?

Sometimes the more accurate, if less precise, answer is simply "I don't know" rather than "therefore it must've always been and always will be".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com