Ab,
Well, I can see you've done a lot of thinking Dwilt. However, your belief structure is currently largely pinned to the presuppositionalist structure you grew up with, which in turn is an accident of birth, and violates Occam's Razor. As you know, Occam's Razor states that if you have equal evidence the simplest explanation is probably true. Adding an inexplicable god doesn't make your explaination any simpler.
I notice the word "probably" true. So so how can you violate occam's razor since it states not a hard fast true rule but a probability.
Do you sincerely believe that god is partial and exclusive? Because if you'd been born a Hindu, I think you'd still be a Hindu.
I thinkyou are getting off track and into another unrelated subject.
Do you sincerely believe that you have succesfully doged the question of the origin of god? You seem to be putting the explaination into a special class of knowledge, just because you can't come up with an answer ("Time having a begining, could be used to explain it.", "I hope to understand it one day but not here inside time and space."), which is kind of convenient. Please realise that things happened before time, otherwise time could not have started, and thus your hope of doging the endless chain of designers required to validate your theory is just not on.
I'm only stating my opinion which like yours has its pro's and con's. I don't think you, I ,or any other human knows enough about time, to make such a conclusive statement as you have done in your last sentence.
Alan,
The notion that God exists outside time is convenient, but introduces serious philosophical problems. If past, present and future are all the same to God, then they must all exist 'simultaneously' in a higher order dimension. God must then be able to view all of time as a static structure, which means that all events were immutably fixed at the moment of the structure's creation. Thus, what we perceive as events are not events at all, but are merely the moving intersection of what we perceive as "the present" with the static structure of "time". Thus there is no free will since everything is static in a higher order dimension. But one of the foundations of Judeo-Christian philosophy is that free will exist. Thus the notion that God exists outside time contradicts strongly entrenched Biblical philosophy.
I think the Bible has little say about the nature of God to insinuate that he therefore could not exist outside time. The Bible uses metaphors, and speaks of God in the masculine, he has arms, eyes and not knowing something. I don't think these things are literal, but metaphors, the Bible has lots of these, it is rich in this type of language. One has to keep this in mind before making a supposed Bible doctrine. This is where fundy's and JW make their bigest blunders.
Corollary to the above is that God must perceive his own sort of "time", since our "present" is "moving" in some sense at a certain pace, and by definition such movement must take "time". If one then claims that God had no beginning in our spacetime, since he exists outside of it, the problem of God's beginning still exists since the referent is not our spacetime but God's own "time". I.e., in this special "time", just how did God come into existence? Again, putting this problem off as a mystery completely justifies putting off the problem of the naturalistic beginning of our spacetime as a mystery. In other words, the argument that "design requires a designer" is self-defeating.
I don't see it as self defeating. I see it as plausible, due to what we are now discovering about time. I don't ever suppose to be able to explain time (completely), all I know is it is not what it appears to be, Albert E. theorys make that plain and provable. Quantum physics, the subatomic world is nothing like the world at our scale, so why should God be tied down to the world at our scale or the universe for that matter.
