Ab,
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.
I disagree. Your whole argument seems to be based on the presupposition that the general faith structure of the land you happened to be born in is the correct one.
The subject is Fully Gifted Creation. Persons of many different religious ideas than mine can beleive that is the way God did it. To get off on the exclusivistic tangent is a "straw man".
You are not saying 'a supernatural being may have had the capacity to instigate the Universe in such a way that it would develop as we see it now without any further supernatural intervention' as an isolated statement, you are combining that with residual belief in the veracity and importance of the Bible in comparison to other textual religious works. Whilst the first statement is possibly true (although untestable), the second linkage is unsound as you have no basis for it other than chance and presuppostion.
Let me say this about the Bible it does not teach FGC(Fully Gifted Creation). The Genesis account of creation is not a "scientificly written account",it is 'theologically written" for the purpose of teaching the Isrealites that all these nature gods are not real gods and that Yahwey is the only true God. This BTW, was a hard battle to win in the hearts of the Isrealites for as "science" has shown us the Isrealites can not trace their family line to some "first man Adam". The Genesis account was written in a style that a primative people with culture vastly different than ours would understand. We (I, you, and so many other) make the mistake of "not taking into account" the culture, and concepts that existed at the "time" of the writting.
Thus questions about whether god is exclusivistic, and what you think you would believe if you came from a non-Christian culture might help you analyse your attitude to the subject. The two questions go together. As someone who is a Hindu (or whatever) is likely to remain that even if Christianity IS the one way, it would seem god cannot be exclusivistic without also being unfair, unless you posit some post-life experience when it all gets sorted out, which of course is introducing another thing there is no proof for.
I don't think God has laid all his cards on the table for us to see (metaphor). I'm not worried about how God is going to work thing out to be fair to everyone. I'm not in some mad dash rush to convert evryone to Christianity so they can be saved, that is not my theology. For people who reject the idea that God exists or have a different faith than me, I have no judgement, far too complicated for me to spend my time on fruitfully. I say simply "I don't know God plan well enough to comment intelligently.
I hate to break it to you, but things DID happen before time as we know it (all time is is a dimension which stops everything that has ever been in a set of coordinates exisisting at those coordinates all at once). WE are talking well-exotic physics though, and I'm no expert. And, no matter what, whether time existed or not, your positied designers existence needs an explaination.
"Before" is such an inapropriate word when speaking of the absense of time.
They have pretty good theories for how the big bang occured. The theories you are advancing for a god out of time have not and cannot develop upon the speculative theories regarding god's existence that have been knocking around for centuries. The knowledge of physics and cosmology has advanced in the past hundred years. The science of explaining where god comes from is still stuck in the first millenium AD, or at the very very best, the late Middle Ages.
Natural science can not tell us squat about the existance or nonexistance of God period. Evolution can not tell us either. They can tell us a great deal about what happened say up to 10 to the -43 power(micro-secound) of the Big Bang, but they can go no further because all the laws of physics breaks down and become meaningless. They can not explain where the universe came from, not what it is like out of the dimensions of spacetime. They would have to climb out of the universe to do that, and we know that is impossible, at present and perhaps forever unless God takes them out and shows them.
