Your "Likewise:" points are good but your original challange is a false dichotomy. You begin with the existence of Life and then tie it to the second question of a living or dead designer. This is a sleight of hand trick in semantics and has no real bearing on the real existential question you are talking about. The standard distinction a philosopher from Christian theology would make is that the "life" of the Creator is inherently distinct from the "life" of the created. This class distinction prevents the internal contradiction you conclude with and your final deduction is rendered moot.

It was a good exercise though.

@herzog3000 - 

@musterion99 - 

@WindOnReed2 - I honestly appreciate sincere inquiries like this. Give me a moment...

"Is purpose, if/wherever it does exist, merely existent and itself without purpose?" THIS is a good question. This is the heart of *real* theistic investigation. The standard monotheistic definitions of "god" include his necessary attribute of being "uncreated." However you get your head around that concept (and I am not being facetious; it is not an easy thing to define) will determine to a large extent whether deism is something you can accept.

"Does everyone conclude that such terms as "design," "meaning," "purpose," "reason" are only relative to certain contexts/scenarios/perspectives, inapplicable to the entirety?"

Now I must speak as a post modern and say all language is constructed within social contexts and therefore has no absolute objective meaning. All meaning is personally interpreted.

"What is distinct about God's kind of life?"

Most standard monotheistic religions would say God's life is not bound by any physical limitations of reality (spacetime, laws of physics, etc.). According to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. reality is dependent on Him, not the other way around. His existence is beyond human conprehension. Therefore any human attempt to define God's life will necessarily be incomplete. Our lives on the other hand exist with distinct limitations of time and place and potential.

The reason I called the logical sequence invalid is because of this false dichotomy:

"was it designed by something (A) living or (B) non-living?"

That is an either or choice which is easy to make in our experience. However we are speaking of a Being whose existence possesses NONE of the characteristics we are familiar with then we cannot be bound to those two choices. There must be at least a third choice C to address an all powerful Deisty and also the necessary loss of confidence that we can even know how many choices to give. How can you number an unknown quantity?

Once you have made a single logical misstep, the remaining deductive steps become meaningless.

See what I mean?

Typo city! For some reason I cannot edit.

... characteristics we are familiar with THEREFORE we cannot be bound ....

Deisty => Deity

@WindOnReed2 - 

1 I think it's undesigned and that humans just like to see patterns that make it appear designed.
2 if something is going to design something else then it would have to be living in order to move/create.
"Must life ultimately be merely self-existent expression, with no design or reason behind it?"  I think each person finds a different reason for living or existing.
"(B) If non-living, then it is dead, right?"  No because a rock is not living but since it never lived it is not dead. Only something once alive can be considered dead.

As for the existing outside of time in the comments.  Time is something humans use to explain changes.

My first guess and personal opinion is that all life is it's own designer. Evolution would be the perpetual process of said life constantly designing itself. New situations, new environments, new needs... new organisms. Gradually becoming more and more perfect for whatever circumstances it finds itself in.
Granted that may seem inapplicable to "lower" life forms like single-celled species or totally inanimate objects that by scientific standards aren't alive at all (mountains, minerals, et al) but then you get to factor in that whole crazy quantum physics point of view where everything is pretty much alive and constantly shifting by the millisecond and that would encompass all non-life as well. \

i think the "creator" is the creation. Constantly growing and changing and evolving through all of existence.

Therefor not at all separate from the life of it's creations and totally dependant on the continuous growth of all life and matter for it's own eternal progression.

But then i'm a hippy pagan who smokes too much pot so i could be optimistically biased. i tried the Existentialist/Nihilism point of view for a good while and i just couldn't comletely buy it.

Either way i enjoy your 'nature-of-the-Universe' posts very much. Keep it up.

@dane_8802 - 

@FalconBridge - 

@herzog3000 - 

@herzog3000 - 

@herzog3000 - 

@herzog3000 - 

@herzog3000 - 

@FalconBridge - 

@musterion99 - 

@WindOnReed2 - </p[M99 - "No, time must have a beginning, otherwise we could not arrive at the present if it's eternal. "

I disagree. "Eternity" would not be "eternity" if it did not include the present.]

Then you need to explain how if the past is infinite that we could logically arrive at the present. Your answer - "No, I don't really "need to answer" that question. At this point, it doesn't even exist in my mind as a legitimate question."

Ok, and this is where we disagree. In my mind, it is a legitimate question.

[Why are you imagining a past that is infinite in one direction only, as if the past is somehow magically unconnected to the present?]

That still misses the point I'm making. If the past is infinite, how can we logically arrive at the present? We couldn't. You then say - "Every single moment of that "past" you posit was also a "present." "Past" and "present" are relative terms. Space-time is a continuum."

Again, that does not solve the problem.


[I ask because I do have such a concept. To me that is what the word "universe" should mean, although even some scientists do not use it that way and for such people I have to use the term "multiverse."]

If the multiverses are infinitely regressive, you run into the same problem.

[So, now I've given you several examples of concepts of the all-inclusive.
Do you have anything like this concept?]

My concept is that God eternally existed and then created the universe.


S1. Are you talking about God?

Yes

S2. If God were "outside" of our universe, would that not imply a spatial relationship with us? Would that not mean that God would not then be omni-present, since God would be "outside"?

By outside, I mean that he existed prior to our universe. Now that he's created it, yes, he also exists inside our universe.

S3. If God existed "outside space-time," how could one thought precede or follow another? How could one thought be distinct from another? Does not distinction require space? Does not thought, being sequential, require or at least include space-time?

Time needs a beginning and two or more moving objects. God was the only one that existed and he had no beginning. How long has God existed? It's a meaningless and unanswerable question.

S4. Our model for “thinking” comes from our own experience, in which we work with what we experience through our senses. What would this eternally-existent God have been thinking about before the earth and galaxies and such were around?

lol - you well know that you're asking a question that no one but God himself could answer.

[Did God exist within a larger world so that It had stimuli to ponder?]

Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Larger than what? The universe we live in? What does the IT refer to? God or the larger world?

[In other words, what could have been the source of God's "thoughts" if God had no external world, nothing to ponder except Itself?]

Again, how would I or anyone know? Imo, these are not relevant questions. The only answer I can speculate is that the bible speaks of the mysterious tri-unity of God.

[Would we say that God thought about God because there was nothing else to think about?]

He knew he would create the universe and knew about everything that would happen and knew that he would spend eternity with the saints.

[Would we say that all God's thoughts came from God because there was no other source?]

Yes

[Could God ever have a thought that was a "non-God" thought?]

Not sure exactly what you mean but I would say yes because he knows all our thoughts.

[Doesn't thinking require internal movement and internal parts and change over time?]

Not necessarily. We don't know that to be a fact. The bible says God is Spirit. We have no idea what that is or how it operates.

[Would you say God had a personality or none?]

He has a personality.

[Was God male? Did "He" have a penis? If so, what was it for? If not, would you say God was an It and not a "He"?]

God is Spirit. We don't comprehend what that is.

[If it's convenient, you can use the same numbers when answering these questions. It helps me keep track.]

Sorry, I didn't do that. I don't want to go back and add them all in.

[True. Hawking assigns a beginning to the universe, but does he not also say it was un-caused? There is no need for a creator in Hawking's model.]

The un-caused part is not relevant to the main part of my statement that there needs to be a beginning of time for us to arrive at the present. But his acknowlegement that there was a beginning actually confirms it.

[Do you think the "big bang" is the best theory in physics right now? Plenty do.]

Yes, that seems to have the most evidence. We know that the universe is expanding, so logic dictates that at some time in the past, everything met together at a singular point.


[I have no problem with the idea of a big bang, but I must point out that there would be no way to establish the "ultimateness" of such a "beginning;" i.e. it would not necessarily be a point before which no time ever existed; such a "beginning" would not necessarily be "the only or ultimate beginning."]

That's true, but logically it makes more sense to say that was the beginning than to come up with some different explanation. As for the different explanations you gave, expansion and contraction, multiveres, and string theory, the book -"I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" goes into the problems with these theories. I don't have enough time to try and type all that out. If you're interested, I suggest just buying the book.

[The "designer" idea is eventually useless anyway. Even if there were a "designer," it would only explain this part of the Whole, not the Whole itself, which includes the designer. So the next search would be to understand how the designer itself evolved.]

God would not have evolved. He would have eternally existed.

@musterion99 -