Something came from nothing? Is God eternal?

Arts & Sciences Religion & Spirituality
1

How do you propose getting out of that quandary? If you believe in an eternal god entity then you also believe something came from nothing.

2

According to the first law of thermodynamics, matter and energy cannot be destroyed or created, only transferred. Thus everything that is here has always been here, only in different form. This dovetails neatly with Buddhism and Taoism, but with Christianity? I don’t know, honestly.

And there is no Jesus birth certificate because 99% of Roman records have been lost, most certainly census records and criminal rap sheets. Jesus’ existence was recorded by Tacitus, Pliny, and a dozen other Roman historians writing within a century of his death. If that’s not good enough for you then you have to accept that The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire is a work of Caligula fanfiction.

3

Well, my eternal salvation etc. isn’t based on that. It seems likely enough to me that a historical Jesus existed, but there’s very little to go on besides statements from people already in the religion. It’s not a problem for me, and not a problem AFAIC if you treat it as a matter of faith, but if anyone is saying it’s an outright fact it’s a problem for them.

I can’t explain how anything could always have been here, and I don’t expect to ever be able to.

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4

This didn’t ring any bells, so did some googling, and it doesn’t seem to be the case with the quick googlefu - Pliny wrote about early Christians, but not about Jesus; can you point to what you’re referring to?

5

If God is eternal then he never had a beginning. He has always existed. A difficult concept to grasp when everything in our dimension has a beginning.

6

If things can not have a beginning, then maybe the cosmos never had a beginning.

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7

I think it’s well established that everything in our observable universe had a beginning at some point in time. That’s what makes the concept of eternal very difficult to comprehend.

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8

It seems that way on the surface, but a little deeper examination shows that “everything” is composed of matter which may take on new forms but doesn’t come out of nowhere. So it’s not that alien, for us now anyway.

Anyway, I’m making more of a logical argument. If it’s possible for God to be here with no beginning, then I don’t see why it’s not possible for other things, i.e. the cosmos.

9

It’s a difficult concept to grasp…

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10

But it’s probably off-topic for this thread. Shouldn’t this be in its own thread “Is God Eternal”. This thread is primarily discussing whether or not the Bible is historically accurate.

11

It was kind of randomly started, I’m not sure it matters, but would you like me to?

12

Sure. It might be interesting.

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13

The atheist/agnostic/scientific position is pretty simple, really

Any argument you make about your god at the beginning of whatever, can also be made about the cosmos.

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14

That seems hard to deny. You have to try to establish why God would be different, but in the absence of any evidence to that (and I am not aware of any), it ends up being easy to categorize as special pleading.

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15

You can prove it with logic if you approach it philosophically.

Time came into existence when the universe began. This is the mainstream view.

if there is a god beyond or “before” our universe that isn’t governed by time, it would effectively be eternal.

Anything that existed before time would be eternal. It’s just a weird thing to wrap your mind around. Something that is timeless.

So yes: if you assume God exists, then the logic of time beginning with the universe implies God must be eternal (timeless).

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16

In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move

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17

The world was created by Odin and his brothers, it’s a well known fact

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18

The universe. The universe is basically as far as any evidence of anything goes, it seems to just have popped up, but we really have no idea of what kind of larger context it might be within. I used “the cosmos” deliberately for that reason.

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19

If you start with the assumption that god exists, you can’t logically use that to prove that god exists

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20

Gods will ‘exist’ for as long as humans exist. We’ve come up with thousands of them so far.

This time period will be finite.

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