If God created the world - who created God?

[LucyEllensmummy]

This must be a question that lots of people must think about. I am a lapsed catholic and not REALLY sure if i 100% believe in all this twaddle about God creating the world in seven days. Not when the evidence so solidly points towards Darwin and his theory of evolution. But then, when you look at how complex even the simplist organisms are, how complex a single protein is, even a strand of DNA is complex and that is supposed to be the "starting point" of a human being/fuit fly/mouse etc. All those chemicals just forming together to create life to me, defies the laws of physics. One of the laws of thermodynamics states that "The entropy of the universe (or any system for that matter) moves towards maximum disorder". I think that is also known as chaos theory. This basically means, that molecules, particles, etc will within a defined system will just drift etc until there is maximum chaos or disorder. I like to think of my DDs bedroom along those lines. Unless energy is applied to a system then no order will occur, no atomic, molecular bonds will be created, let alone come together to form an organism - and then to think of human life and my mind is spaghetti. There has to be energy input but, the second law of thermodynamics states "energy can neither be created or destroyed" meaning that energy can only be transfered from one form to another. Ie potential or stored energy, into kenetic (movement) energy into heat, noise etc. But where did the original energy come from.

Even if you believe that we are the result of some Big bang, which i don't, where did the "stuff" come from that created the conditions for a big bang and how can it all be a fecking coincidence anyway. It just can't be, there has to be a greater force - there has to be a God surely. But it goes back to the same - Who or what created God. What is the real evidence that there is some benevolent being subtly guiding our progress?

I want to believe in God, in fact it upsets me that i struggle with it. I want to raise my daughter as a catholic but what i tried to convey above, not very clearly plays on my mind. If i were God, would i make things so complicated? Its fallable, which i thought God wasn't meant to be. Cancer is a result of when our bodies fail to decipher our genetic code, ok this can be caused by external influence which you might argue is man made, but not always,sometimes, spontaneous mutations occur in the wrong bit of DNA, its not picked up by the cells proof reading machinery and bang, your fucked. Viruses - they are primitive forms of life, they hijack us to replicate themselves and we get sick, they are clearly an abberation - in all of the things that people argue against a god, Disease, war etc, the argument i have always heard is that we are given free choice and as a world we have made some pretty bad choices and reap what we sow so to speak, but viruses are too random for that HIV is not some punishment from god, any more than the flu is.

I know very little about religeon, but i imagine that those of you who make it your business to know, who have studied theology must have some thoughts on this, you must do??

I would really like to be able to reason this out - love to hear some thoughts on this, if i have made any sense AT ALL??

Thank you in advance
xx

Hi, I would like to respond to this - but it deserves a considered response, so if its OK I'll have a think and get back to you?

Think away - Thankyou for your reply

Nobody created God. He was there right from the start of time.

I cant answer this but i had to come on to congratulate you for being able to articulate it so well. I have these thoughts all the time but its like the more i think, the further away the thoughts drift. I could never have conveyed it so well, I always feel like "God" must be factor soemthing in my brain, scrambling my thoughts about the subject as ours is not to reason why! Gonna watch this with interest

Ditto ScienceTeacher - Nobody created God, He is God.

I love John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it

Very interesting post LucyEllensmum! I too think that life is too amazing for it to have been an accident.

God is one thing, Jesus (Immanuel - God With Us) is another. The key thing about Christianity is whether you believe that Jesus lived, he was the son of God and that he died to save our sins. I believe it.

The rest is just too complex to think about!

BTW, I don't believe God created the world in seven days, but I believe that the story of creation is a story that can be widely understood, and it does follow the process of evolution eg first there was light and darkness, then land and sea and then animals then humans. That was how the world was made, just not in seven days. If Genesis described how the world actually was made it would be pretty confusing stuff!

I think I also agree with scienceteacher - God has been here since the beginning of time.

It is really difficult to get your head around something always having been here (well it is for me) but then so much of theology is anyway. I am not sure you are able or even meant to make sense of it all. That is where the faith bit, the bit I struggle with, comes into it.

I agree with you about the creation of the world. I think that is where I started with a belief in God. The thought that all of this happened by happy accident just doesn't add up.

I don't believe that the world was created in 7 days but I do find it fascinating that the path of evolution and development of the world has followed the path laid down in Genesis despite Genesis being written thousands of years before we knew about evolution and the Big Bang and all that malarky. How did the authors know what had happened?

I agree also that Darwin is theory but I do think it holds water if you think that what God did was set the process in motion (via the Big Bang) and that the world and the universe have developed from what He started.

Oh dear,dear dear dear
You would think that supposed Christians
could actually read their own bible.

NEENTWINTZ: believe that the story of creation is a story that can be widely understood, and it does follow the process of evolution eg first there was light and darkness, then land and sea and then animals then humans. That was how the world was made, just not in seven days.

NIECIE:but I do find it fascinating that the path of evolution and development of the world has followed the path laid down in Genesis despite Genesis being written thousands of years before we knew about evolution and the Big Bang and all that malarky. How did the authors know what had happened?

GENESIS I In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
^the universe is around 13.7billion years old
the earth around 4.5billon years^

GENESIS1:11God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
^flowering plants before the sun was created-
yeah that fits^
GENESIS 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

^is the moon a light?

And so on, birds and whales created before
reptiles and insects- WRONG
Flowering plants before animals- WRONG

Not to mention the other creation fable in GENESIS 2 when humans were created before
other animals.

To answer your question Lucy Ellen Mum
No one knows or can possibly know the conditions that existed before the Big bang.
despite science teachers confident assertion to the contrary. IF the idea that there is some kind of force that you want to call GOD
responsible for the creation of the universe
that is a traditional Deist position which is quite tenable,

The problem is making this "GOD" somehow relevant to your life.
In a universe with trillions of suns each with several planets. our existence could mean no more to "god" than the existence of the bacteria at the bottom of my coffee cup
means to me. We could be a science project
run by some junior god , who can possibly know.

Religions thrived in the absence of knowledge,if you did not know better the idea that a GOD created us is infinitely more plausible than all life forms including us came from lower life forms.. and then if GOD created us he would be more likely to be intested in us, the God of the Old Testament Ffor instance was always talking to people seting them tests, wanting sacrifices.

My advice , beleive in something that makes sense to you, tell your daughter you love her
every day, and let her make up her own mind
about god(or the lack of them) when she is
old enough.

If God is simply always there right from the start, it/he/she must have germinated from hermaphrodite sources... seeing as there was no 'Mother' and 'Father'

As for it being an accident... alot of life is created from accidents or mutations within species.

Also can be seen as, God(s) is a form of energy that we as humans associate in a variety of forms. What begins within, dwells within. Thoughts start somewhere, as do emotions and experiences within those thoughts and emotions, hence God started as a thought and feeling. It does not need parents or evolutionary adaptations to Be a God.

Think about it though - if someone or something created God, then that someone or something would be God. There has to be an endpoint....well, actually, a starting point. Whatever you start with, you still have to go back further..."who made the thing I started with".

If science is your ultimate 'end point' (ie, you believe everything that science can prove, and nothing it can't), then science is your 'god'. Everyone has faith in something, although many atheists don't want to admit it. All I'm saying is, Christianity is as plausible as any other explaination of creation. There are many, many intelligent, scientific folk who belive the Bible, and a whole branch of scientific thinking called Intellegent Design on this very subject.

OP, if you are attracted to the Bible/Christianity, then don't be put off by people who dismiss it. Of course they are entitled to do that, but theirs is not the only intellegent and well thought out response. Read the Bible for yourself, get along to a chuch that is running a 'Christianity Expolred' course or simnilar, with a Vicar who is willing to really talk to you about your questions.

Interregnum - I totally agree that it is almost impossible to believe that God has a relevance to our lives. It does sound completely implausible...as you say, we are one small planet in a solar system, in a universe of millions of other solar systems. And yet, the Bible (historically, anyway, an exceptionally accurate source), claims that God wants to be in relationship with His creatures - us, because He is a relational being. Amazing. Totally Amazing.

I don't deny that Religions have in the past (and present) play on and encoyrage ignorance. I think you will find that Bible based Christian churches today no longer encourage or accept ignorance, but encourage debate, intellectual rigour and exploration.

This might make your brains hurt, but there's not really any such thing as time that starts in one point and continues to another point in the future. No, really, that's the scientific thinking at the moment. No, don't ask me why.

God is, and has always been, and will always be, because time doesn't have to apply to Him at all. He's didn't 'begin' because that would need 'time'. And He's more powerful than time.

We're used to living in a universe with time, length, breadth, depth - the familiar four dimensions. God is entirely outside of those. We have no way of knowing anything about him other than what writers have tried their best to describe.

Since 2000-3000 years ago they hadn't a clue about the precise order you'd need to create something in, they probably got some of the orders wrong in Genesis. But I think "seven days" meant "seven of God's days", which since he doesn't have to be influenced by time can be any length of our time He likes.

I was thinking like this about 5 or 6 years ago. It lead to my becoming an athiest. There is no place for God once you really start to try and understand the univernse and our place in it and life starts to make a lot more sense.

im in a rush and just skimmed this - I think this thread is going to make my brain hurt .

Two things: Amber, that is a good point and i was considering something along those lines before i went to sleep last night. That we are so programmed to think of things linearly (sp), that there HAS to be a begining, middle and an end. But if you look at life mathematically at a cellular level, there are some very good arguments against that - and the same as you - don't ask me what/why!

Those who have mentioned the 7 day thing - ive wondered about this too, and other stuff from the bible that i was taught at school. If God didn't invent the world in 7 days, and i think we can safely assume that he didn't create it in 7 of our modern days then what we were taught in genesis is a metaphor (probably not the right word) but more a representation of what happened?? Yes? I suppose - but you see, if were wanting to be difficult, and im not but the nagging little voice in my head is - if genesis was taught as a metaphor - what about the REST of the bible?? now THAT makes my brain ache!

It is quite easy with hindsight to say that genesis outlines evolution now. But why then, when Darwin was putting forward his hypotheses were the church hopping mad? i saw on a program recently that Darwin fell out with some guy who's name i can't remember who founded the natural history museum over this and that he really had a massive problem with the church.

I am/was a scientist and i have to say that rather than it make my "faith" weaker it has strengthened it. Sometimes you absolutely have to believe the evidence that is put in front of you, that is simply there. A good scientist will spend a great deal of their time trying to disprove their theories, so it is not a case of just blithely accepting what the scientific evidence says. I absolutely believe in evolution, it happened, there is evidence for that all around us, its in our genes, waiting to be read out and evolutionary biology will have lots to offer in the near future i think. I think there have been some drastic clallenges to alot of Darwin's theory. I find the whole natural selection theory a bit of a big pill to swallow but the reason for that is because i cannot conceptualise (sp) the time frame - millions of years for things to evolve due to spontaneous mutations that gave species evolutionary advantages.

Maybe amber, thats the route of the problem - time! Perhaps we are all hung up on the process of time.

I am not sure that this discussion will send me rushing to church on Sunday to throw myself at the alter, but there have been some interesting points that will no doubt keep me awake over the next few days . To be fair, its not about me questioning my faith - I guess as a catholic you always have that - but as a scientist, sometimes, it all seems a little fanciful - especially as i do think (the catholic religeon at least) likes to pretty up the picture for sunday digestion. I think i might enjoy mass a little more if they didnt omit the fire and brimstone - ah, heaven and hell - another concept that blows my mind - oh, now i have a headache

liath - thanks for posting that, ive just read it and you know - what you said made me think, OK, so the evidence points to no God. But the one thing that has always ALWAYS maintained my faith is the fact that i love my partner, i love my children, i love my parents and i love my friends. Love, i know that sounds a bit namby pamby and niave - is the reason i feel God.

LEM, I've struggled with that aspect to faith. When I feel full of love for my family or am looking at a beautiful view etc it does give me a spiritual kind of feeling. I believe it's all due to which parts of the brain are being activated, certain neurotransmitters released etc.

If you really want to belive in God then I'm sure you'll find a way through this. Good luck!

Interregum - I think you are taking it a little bit too literally which Neenztwinz and I are obviously not. We've already said that it didn't happen in 7 days but it is the order that is interesting. The detail is not going to be accurate since Genesis was written thousands of years ago before modern science understood anything about how the world was made. You can't expect perfection from something that old, translated many times over. The order is there though.

Besides that-

God made heaven and earth - if he made (universe) heaven 13.7bn years ago and then earth 4.5bn years ago - how is that wrong exactly? Genesis is an allegory.

Light was created in Gen 1.3 so how are flowers created before the sun?

Animals, birds, fishes reptiles all made on day 5 Gen 1.21-25, humans made on day 6 Gen 1.26 so no man before animals.

Flowering plants were not made before animals? I've not heard that before. This is a detail - as I have said, Genesis is an allegory. It is not a science textbook. If you accept the world was not created in 7 days then it isn't surprising there are going to be other minor inconsistencies

As for the moon being a (lesser) light - it isn't a bright light but to a more primitive people many many years ago it probably looked like a light. Not a bright one granted but still a light. Have you not been out on a clear night in a full moon? It isn't pitch black out there.

Genesis 2 isn't clear but it doesn't actually say that animals were created after man, merely that the animals that were created were presented to man for naming. Well my version anyway. There is no mention of chronology. It is a question of interpretation but Gen 1 already says that man was created after animals.

LEM - there are metaphors/allegories all through the bible I think, although I am no expert but the ones that spring to mind are the parables in the Nt. They weren't told as true stories (were they? I stand to be corrected on that as I don't really know) - they were told as illustrations. There is no reason why Genesis can't be told in the same way but the fact that it is older has lost some of the clarity in the intervening years maybe makes the detail less accurate.

I believe in God, but I also think that the universe started with a Big Bang, and that the life developed through evolution by natural selection.

I don't think I can answer the really big one - what was there before the Big Bang and/or how was God already there. I don't think either religion or science can really explain those, because however much we study or imagine, we can't get back beyond the Big Bang.

But I'd like to answer some of your smaller points - I don't think the idea of entropy automatically means that systems will get simpler and more chaotic, certainly not over the timescales that you are looking at. Things do become more complex if there is an "advantage" to them in being complex. In terms of molecules, you don't have to apply energy to chemicals to get them to form naturally into molecules (not the common ones anyway) because they have an innate tendency to join together in certain patterns - it actually "suits them" to join together. You'd have to get a chemist or physicist to explain better why that should be!

In terms of life, and the chemicals needed for it, DNA is not the starting point, except in terms of the definition of life.

If you picture a "chemical soup" with lots of chemicals forming and breaking up, some forms will tend to be more stable than others - ones which are stable will tend to become more common, as they break up less. Ones which have a tendency to join together, and are more stable joined together than separately will tend to form chains. Some chains have a basic nature of being a double chain, with matching pieces on either side of the chain. Those ones are both stable, and able to replicate themselves - if the two sides "unzip" a little, they will "attract" the matching pieces - if those pieces are there in the soup, they will stick on and stay there - other chemicals won't stick on. So the double chain unzips and becomes two copies ot itself. So you can work from simpler chemicals towards the complexity of DNA.

All of that can happen as a result of random processes, which do not require planning or intervention. It's just a natural consequence of some molecules being more stable than others, plus the double-helix automatic ability to reproduce itself.

From there, you can imagine a similar process where clumps of chemicals get lumped together inside an outer layer, becoming a very simple cell which also has the ability to reproduce itself. And from there, all the complexity of life.

Personally, I can reconcile all of that with the idea that there is a God, who wants the universe to develop, who wants life to happen and become more complex, to the stage where it is self-aware and can have a relationship with God. But I don't think that each living thing is the way it is because God made it so, only that God created a universe in which these things were possible, and allowed it to develop and "create" itself.

Therefore the bad things are not there either because God made them that way, or because the Devil or original sin caused it to all go wrong, they are the random effects of the way the world has evolved.

But we, as self-aware beings, have the opportunity to go beyond the randomness of nature, and develop a relationship with God. We are different from the rest of life, but only because we have developed to a stage where we can perceive things differently and in more abstract terms.

You put a good argument there amuminscotland - I should say though that the double helix, will not automatically replicate itself, other proteins are actually required to help the process to happen and to indeed, provide the energy required for the bonds to be broken and reformed. I do take onboard your argument about certain molecules and elments forming natural bonds but (and im not sure) I still think there has to be energy involved, even if the total energy used/created equals each other out. But thats all a question of physics and i can't be doing with that . Can't you tell im just a dumb biologist!!

So if your argument is true, completely true - and i don't think anyone has come up with the complete truth yet - but if it were, and it has credence, because actually its very similar to what i believe - Perhaps my original question should have been, if God has no influence over the universe - if you are to take your argument literally that it is all random - then what actually is the POINT of God?

All these philosophical musings before breakfast are making me hypoglyceamic - im off to make a cup of tea and actually do some work!!

Some really interesting points here - Thing is, its almost too scary to ask these questions becuase i feel that unless i go down the whole road of theology etc, im never gonig to be able to make my mind up about it all and i quite simply don't have the time. I should just go to church, get my blessing and be grateful!

Ah well, I'm another biologist which is probably why the chemical reaction bits of the above are a bit vague But I believe that the chemists and physicists think it makes sense, and I've always just accepted their word for it...

As to the point of God - it's not for me that God has no influence, it's that God doesn't choose to directly interfere by making things happen or making people believe. But I do believe that God is there and does influence things by influencing the people who believe and are in a relationship with God. Which is more "vague" I suppose than the traditional view, but I think more "respecting" of our autonomy.

I've been reading a lot on Wikipedia recently and I think that a concept called Panentheism is closest to what I believe - I don't think that the universe is separate from God, I think it is sort of "within" God, so there simply could be no existence without God continuing to exist. It's not a "set it up and leave it alone" sort of creation, but a creation where God is all through everything.

Oh and I don't think that grappling with these questions has to be an "all or nothing" thing, in all honesty I don't think even a lifetime of study would mean we undersatood everything, we just have to attack an odd corner now and then when we get the chance, and if that helps us to understand even a little bit of one aspect, then that's a good thing.

Actually, the translation in the bible about God creating the world is incorrect. The aramaic word that was translated to create actually means reorganised. God reorganised matter.

First law of thermodynmaics states that matter cannot be created or destroyed but it can be reorganised. This happens every day when one form of energy is converted to another (e.g. kinetic energy into potential energy, electric energy into light energy etc).

Second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (disorder) tends to a maximum so the universe is continually expanding.

As for the earth being created in 6 days. In Peter (can't remember which one) it states that 1 year to God is like a thousand years to man. The bible did not say that God create the Earth in 6 x 24 hour periods. The word Aramaic word for "day" actally means an unspecified length of time. The way we measure time now is vastly different from the way it was measured 1000 years ago let alone millions of years ago. You cannot ascribe our current concept of time to the time of the Bible.

IMO, as a scientist, I actually don't think there is a lot of discrepency between what is in the Bible and scientific evidence. What I do know, is that with Einstein's Law of Relativity, even the most eminent of physicists, still cannot comprehend or explain the magnitude of E=MC2. Even Einstein was unable to come up with a solution to the unified field theory which would explain how things on a macro level influence those on the micro level. So how on Earth can mankind even hope to understand the Essence of the Omnipotent and Ominiscient God?

Only our arrogance makes us believe that there is a simple explanation to explain a complex universe.

E=mc2? Yup, guy on the tele the other day held up a £5 note and explained that there was enough energy inside the atoms that even that one note was made to blow the planet apart.

They know that they can get particles to copy each other, so if you put on tiny bit of an atom on one side of the room, and its 'twin' on the other side/somewhere else completely, whatever one does, the other does too. Yet there's apparently nothing connecting them, no way for them to 'know' what the other one is doing. They're just bits of atoms! Clearly there's things we just can't properly explain about how the world and universe fits together, not with the best scientific minds we have.

Why is the universe here? We don't know. But I'm glad it is.

For me, being a catholic has always been about trying to be an OK person. To treat others as i would like to be treated etc. To be tolerant and understanding of other faiths. I am sending my DD to a catholic school because i want her to grow up surrounded by those values. Its when i question the theory behind it all that i think, blimey - am i doing the right thing?

Just like to add that some of the missing energy needed for those processes to start comes from the sun.

While it may be true that "The entropy of the universe moves towards maximum disorder" you need only plant a seed and watch a plant grow to see that the law only makes sense on average over the whole universe. Locally a plant or a human can grow and become more complex at the expense say of the sun losing energy.

"If i were God, would i make things so complicated? Its fallable, which i thought God wasn't meant to be"

He isn't so that demolishes the "intelligent design" which always was flimsy.

It's fair enough to say that "2000-3000 years ago they hadn't a clue about the precise order you'd need to create something in, they probably got some of the orders wrong in Genesis"

I agree that there is no reason to expect those writers to know anything about the creation of the world.

However you can't then say "the path of evolution and development of the world has followed the path laid down in Genesis" since you don't actually have a match between the bible and evolution.

"even the most eminent of physicists, still cannot comprehend or explain the magnitude of E=MC2".

It may have been very difficult to discover/deduce, but it's a pretty straightforword equation now we have it. I'm sure it's routine to all (physical) scientists.

It does tend to produce large numbers with lots of zeros, but scientists don't have any trouble with those normally. I doubt anyone can get a good mental picture of 6 billion either, but that's how many people there are on earth.