How does God have no beginning?

[@ricl5266]

Beautiful. Very well put. Thanks. Please post more Aaron Higashi.

[@tysfalsehood]

Aaron Higashi?!? I love that guy!

[@maskedsaiyan1738]

My opinion is that the ancient Biblical writers didn’t care whether or not God had an origin, but that He has been here since the origin of existence.

[@ElegantMovement]

As a Christian, I absolutely agree. Christianity, and many world religions for that matter, have borrowed from other philosophies, sciences, and even other religions in order to make more sense of their own. That's why for me, it's difficult (maybe impossible?) to speak about theology without connecting many philosophies that help provide the lens through which we understand theology in any meaningful, existential way.

[@davidholman48]

Maybe it isn't complicated. Maybe the universe, in one form or another, has always existed. As human beings, we see things beginning and ending all the time. So thinking of that which has no beginning nor ending is too far outside of our frames of reference to grasp or accept. If God DID have a beginning, then who or what caused that? It boggles the mind.

[@johnz8843]

How did the one become many? We really don't know. Logic won't get you there and science not yet either. It's not even close.. Biblical text is no proof at all. We simply don't know.

[@knj0hn20]

In my eyes seeing the nature of the universe, I believe we live in an infinite cycle and when the heat death of the universe happens all the material and energy comes back together and condenses into one singularity and kicks off the cycle again We’ve lived our lives an infinite amount of times and will live it infinitely more

[@jayortiz6188]

I feel like you are onto something. Somehow the end of the cycle kick starts everything again. Almost like a movie that ends and then starts playing again from the beginning just as the credits stop.

[@generichuman_]

God actually makes a very poor necessary thing because despite checking all the boxes you mentioned, it does it in the same way that my magical, invisible pet dragon can do my taxes, fold my laundry, and transport me to work. A magical entity can do anything! The biggest question is, why are we allowed to postulate this thing to begin with? A creative mind is something that we have an intuition for because we are creative minds. We introspect on our own cognition, and the subjective experience is that our minds feel different than our bodies. We feel like passengers in our bodies. Furthermore, we don't need to expend effort to be a mind. It's effortless. It makes sense then, that people using arm chair logic would come to the conclusion that a mind could be separate from a body, and exist without being contingent on anything else. The problem is, our intuitions about the mind are wrong and our subjective experience is lying to us. The brain determines states of mind, and mental processes are insanely complex. We know this from neurobiology and from computer science and machine learning where we are able to create algorithms that mimic mental processes. We simply know too much about what causes mental states and the prerequisites of mind, to hold the belief that a mind can exist without a brain, let alone outside of space and time. It would be like believing that I can rip all the components out of my computer and still expect photoshop to run, simply because I could imagine it in my mind's eye. What we can imagine being the case, and what actually is, are two completely different things. Living in the age of modern physics, we are well aware that as we peel back the layers of reality, our intuitions diverge from what we are discovering to be true. Special relativity violates our intuitions that time and space are constant. Quantum mechanics violates our intuitions that things can be in one place at a time. What apologists expect us to believe, is that intuitions get poorer and poorer the deeper we delve into the fabric of reality, but as we peel back the last layer, things immediately become intuitive again, and there's just a guy there... with a mind, with jealousy, with a dislike of mixed fabrics and shrimp. It took the greatest minds the last hundred years to painstakingly produce theories about the fundamental workings of the universe, but the layer beneath that was known by scientifically illiterate goat herders that lived 2000 years ago. It's absurd...

[@byrondickens]

What's absurd is thinking that "scientifically illiterate goat herders that lived 2000 years ago" were trying to write a science textbook. Almost as absurd as thinking they were "scientifically illiterate" when the scientific method had yet to be developed, or that the writers were "goat herders" and not the urbanite elites.