If the universe is so complex, that it could only be the creation of an intelligent designer, like God. . .?

Question

Who, or what, made God?

Interesting response. A lot of people who seem to buy in to ID seem to rationalize by dazzling us with b*** ****.

Michael_Dorfman, and a couple of others, gets it, and I lke his answer.

The ID crowd does not seam to realise that if you want to provide "scientific" evidence of creationism, the evidence needs to follow the same rules of logic as the conclusion.

BTW.

It's elephants all the way down (or at least that is the way I heard it)

Answer 1

Welcome to the infinite regress. It's turtles all the way down.

Answer 2

Complex... perhaps, intelligence is a human concept and judging by the human track record the creation of the earth does not seem to be the action of an intelligent entity.
It is only seems complex to human minds, who are now only just beginning to fathom anything of any significance regarding the nature of the universe.
The obvious rhetorical answer is what kind of "intelligence" would screw up so badly. Why wouldn't an omniscient entity make a perfect creation.
Other answers here have touched on the logic of the matter. At the big bang time started. Time is another human concept that consists of comparing the motion of at least two things. for example an atomic clock works by counting the number of times a certain crystal vibrates (moves). When it has moved a certain number of times, what has transpired is called a second.
So even if there is a God (whatever God is) there was no time before the beginning so nothing preceeded God.
I therefore question the premises of the question... the complexity, the intelligence and the designer.

Answer 3

Easy:

God of God made God. And God of God of God made God of God. And so on.

Seriously, understanding timelessness is beyond our ken. How can anything be always there and then suddenly decide to make something (the Earth and all its creatures)?

Well, we don't know, do we?

So why not accept that we don't know - as in, from personal knowledge or experience - and just help everyone and be happy? It's a heck of a good way to be and if heaven is better than this I can't wait to get there. Meanwhile this life ain't really bad at all.

Once I go it may be the end. Finis. No more Deepak Morris.

Or it may be a portal to a new life, something I can't imagine (can a foetus imagine what lies outside the womb?).

Or I may stand before a Heavenly Jury to answer for my sins.

HECK! Whichever way I dice it, I can't KNOW!

So I'll stick to what makes me happy, which is answering questions.

Answer 4

That really depends on what you mean by "God"? There is a school of thought that deals with the origins of God but, unfortunately for monotheists, there is no way to postulate and explanation for the existence of a single God.

It involved a meta-god, an essence higher, stronger, and more all-encompassing than God. God, as defined by monotheists, has only a limited divinity. God is defined, and therefore, limited by His own definitions.

Ex.--God is good. Therefore, God is not evil. While, God may possess the necessary components to perform evil acts, God, by his nature as benevolent, will not. Therefore, the monotheistic ideal of God being good, limits his actions. God is good, and therefore not evil.

The meta-god is both good and evil, so much so, that it can only be considered nuetral. It is the zenith of both absolute goodness and absolute evil and, because it is both, it, must also be neither.

Ex.--One can pray to God to perform a miracle an help them. That prayer would be wasted on the meta-god, however, because it will affect only neutrality. If it were to perform even a single act of charity, it's nature (and thus NATURE itself, the essence of the Universe) would be unbalanced. The one thing we know about the Universe is that it is a system of precise balances. (Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; every action has a corresponding reaction, etc.)

Therefore, the rise of God (or more precisely, the Gods) is attributed to the interplay of physical matter in the Universe interacting with the spiritual essenses of creatures. The Universe itself created the God(s) the way a seed will "create" a tree or the weathering of a rock will "create" sand. The Gods are a natural occurance in Nature.

hope that helps.

One more thing, the meta-god (nature) did not consciously create the physical universe. The meta-god is a force that is constantly creating, exploring the possibilities of every single outcome possible for any given concept. It is holy because it alone, has the ability to transform abstract concepts into reality. (It created love and the mechanism for its expression, and the universe in which to express it). Creating the Gods was just possibility number 1,244,534,894,765,910,493,204,391,665...etc.

Cliche though it may be, one of the best explanations came from the movie The Craft.

"Imagine God and the Devil playing football. The [meta-god] would be the air they breathed, the sun shining down on them, the grass under their feet." That's the meta-god. Everything. Total.

Answer 5

God was always there
John 1:1-3
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.

God created man in His own image and gave them a free will. After this sin came into the world by the fallen angel Satan. Because of sin man was made imperfect and could not dwell with God. God sent His own Son Jesus to take upon Himself the sins of the world and die (Romans 5:8) and rise again so that man could once again have access to God. Now all we have to do is ask God for forgiveness.

1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Our minds are not great enough to understand God or how He was always there. It takes faith.

Ephesians 2:8
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves;it is the gift of God.

Answer 6

God as described in Judeo-Christian terms exists as an entity outside of time (the Aplha and Omega). God isn't a creation in this view, he is the constant.

To assume that only complex entities HAVE TO be created by God is a Hasty Generalization fallacy at best.

Answer 7

I always assumed that such a god would be beyond our powers of human comprehension and thus outside any laws of causation that we have learned/inferred from our own subjective experience. We can't even grasp the idea of an infinite, omnipotent being; how could we explain from where he comes, if causation even applies at all?

Read Book XII of Aristotle's Metaphysics; his bit on the 'unmoved mover' is something you might find interesting.

Answer 8

I believe the most common answer is that God "has always existed and will always exist". Substitute the term "the universe" for the term "God", and you have the answer that obviates the need to explain the origin of the universe with the god myth. No beginning and no end. Just an eternal cycle of big bang / big crunch. Explainable with the ekpyrotic and cyclic models that feature a feasible "pre-universe" universe.

Answer 9

A good question, some would argue that God has always been there. Others may say He is beyond our understanding and we couldn't possibly comprehend how He came into being. It could also be argued that the universe wasn't actually created and is just there (Bertrand Russell). Although these all seem like poor arguments to me, I don't think its something that I could personally ever answer.

Answer 10

What makes God unique is that he existed when nothing else existed. He is the original substance from which all other substances have been created. His being, his energy, his thought, permeates everything and all the space between everything in the universe. He is the possibility that caused all other possibilities in the universe.

Answer 11

That is one large assumption. The creation of the universe or its maintenace requires no supernatural being.The appearance of design is merely the absence of the failures. The environment destroys that which does not conform to the requirements of its demands. In other words it tailors life to fit as a natural consequence of what it is. So your question is moot.