Kid asked me who made God last night

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FriscoKid
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I've been really really good with all of the little questions up to this point, but this one stumped me. I couldn't find a good way to explain it. Any ideas? Well, God has always been here wasn't good enough.




For your troubles, I did this with him over the weekend and it was pretty cool. If you are looking for a neat way to explain sin and baptism I did this... I took a dry erase board and wrote "sin" on it with water soluble markers. Then I said what is sin? I then wrote things like hitting, getting mad, stealing, disobeying, taking things that are yours, etc, etc. Then we went outside with the board and I got the water hose. I asked him if he remembered the baptism from earlier in the day. He said yes. And I said, you remember what happens in baptism? He said yes, go forgives me. Then I said feel this water. Now watch what happens to these sins. They were washed off the board and it became clean again. I said, that's what God sees when he looks at you. He said "cool" and went back inside.
Dad-O-Lot
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Hard to explain the concept of being "outside of time" to a child.

I'm not sure most adults can really understand it either.
People of integrity expect to be believed, when they're not, they let time prove them right.
Star Wars Memes Only
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FriscoKid said:


I've been really really good with all of the little questions up to this point, but this one stumped me. I couldn't find a good way to explain it. Any ideas? Well, God has always been here wasn't good enough.



Smart kid, he just debunked the cosmological argument.
Aggie4Life02
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dargscisyhp said:

FriscoKid said:


I've been really really good with all of the little questions up to this point, but this one stumped me. I couldn't find a good way to explain it. Any ideas? Well, God has always been here wasn't good enough.



Smart kid, he just debunked the cosmological argument.


Wrong.

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.

Thus

3) The universe has a cause.

God didn't begin to exist.
Star Wars Memes Only
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Aggie4Life02 said:

dargscisyhp said:

FriscoKid said:


I've been really really good with all of the little questions up to this point, but this one stumped me. I couldn't find a good way to explain it. Any ideas? Well, God has always been here wasn't good enough.



Smart kid, he just debunked the cosmological argument.


Wrong.

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.

Thus

3) The universe began to exist.

God didn't begin to exist.


Ah yes, the logical brilliance that is having the conclusion as a premise. You literally can't be wrong!
kurt vonnegut
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Dad-O-Lot said:

Hard to explain the concept of being "outside of time" to a child.

I'm not sure most adults can really understand it either.


I'm not sure anyone understands it.
Win At Life
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I think you meant

3) Thus the universe had a cause
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Aggie4Life02
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Win At Life said:

I think you meant

3) Thus the universe had a cause


Yes. Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it.
94chem
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Just glad you didn't use a Sharpie.
Frok
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Something has to have always existed.
ramblin_ag02
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To answer your kid, God made Himself. At least thats the easiest way to explain it to a kid. Technically God is eternal existing since before time, but that might be a bit much.

And the idea of a God outside of time interacting with temporal beings makes sense in a lot of ways. Under a deist view God could created time and the universe and then sit back. There's also the idea that God was timeless until He created time, but then He is bound by it as long as it exists. If you're a theist and determinist, then God determines every outcome at the moment of creation and can therefore interact with any instant of creation at the moment of creation. The same basic idea applies for any omniscient creator. God knows everything that will happen at the moment of creation and can structure creation in such a way as to give the appearance of temporal interaction at any moment.

You could also imagine reality as a movie or video game, and God has pause, rewind, fast-forward to any moment and either observe or edit reality at any point. God would be outside time the way an editor is outside the movie but
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Athanasius
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Won't help with kids, but...

God IS existence.

Existence itself (Himself) doesn't need a cause.

When speaking to Moses, God said "I am who am." Clearly He is pure being. Pure existence.


Then, Jesus said in John 8:

56Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad. 57So the Jews said to him, "You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?" 58 Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM."
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Sapper Redux
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Aggie4Life02 said:

dargscisyhp said:

FriscoKid said:


I've been really really good with all of the little questions up to this point, but this one stumped me. I couldn't find a good way to explain it. Any ideas? Well, God has always been here wasn't good enough.



Smart kid, he just debunked the cosmological argument.


Wrong.

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.

Thus

3) The universe has a cause.

God didn't begin to exist.


I like how you stick on your point about God at the end as if that takes care of the issues you yourself just raised.
GQaggie
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Is it possible none of the possible explanations will make great sense to us? Here are the options as I see them with comments regarding how they defy logic. Let me know if there are other options I am missing.

1. Something from nothing. Either the universe or it's creator came to exist from a state of absolute nothingness. I think believers and non-believers alike agree this is illogical.

2. The universe, or at the very least, some sort of matter and energy, or it's creator have always existed in an eternal past. Time extends infinitely into the past. This defies logic in that it would be impossible to explain how we ever reach the present time. If time has no beginning, how can it traverse the infinite to reach what we call now?

3. Matter and energy or it's creator once existed outside of time. At the moment of our universe's birth, time began to exist. This would either involve the creator deciding to leave timelessness or a spontaneous event occurring with the matter and energy that resulted in the beginning of time. How do you possibly make any sense of how such a transition would occur? How can something go from timelessness to being in time?

Any other scenarios I can imagine would be a sort of derivative of one of these three. It doesn't seem terribly surprising to me that this would all seem illogical. As beings bound in time, the thought of anything else is difficult to comprehend. Most of what we can know and understand is based on empiricism, and empiricism is necessarily confined to the observable universe. It is not shocking that when we leave the comfortable confines of the observable universe and empiricism to try and learn what happened before there was a universe that we will find the possibilities to be illogical or nonsensical to us.
GQaggie
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Yeah, probably a little heavy for kids, but I really like how scripture speaks of God in these terms. One variation of the cosmological argument argues for a "sufficient reason" instead of a first cause. It simply states that for any set of circumstances, there must be a sufficient reason for that set of circumstances to exist rather than a different set of circumstances.

When it comes to the universe, the question could be asked what is the sufficient reason that anything at all exists, rather than nothing. In the end, it seems there must be something that exists, of which, part of it's essence is existence itself. This hardly seems to apply to the universe, as there are many theories in which the universe ceases to exist. The language scripture uses to describe God indicates that existence is one of His essential properties, that He has always existed and will always exist, and that the existence of all contigent beings (everything other than God) derive their existence from Him. Philosophically, this makes a lot of sense to me.
Frok
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AstroAg17 said:

Frok said:

Something has to have always existed.
The universal point of agreement.

Pretty weird right? It would make lots more sense if nothing existed.


Kind of messes with your mind when you really think about it. That's why I don't have trouble believing in God. The fact that we are where we are is pretty miraculous.
Marco Esquandolas
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Love to see people talk about the cosmological argument like it wasn't demolished like 250 years ago.
Athanasius
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Marco Esquandolas said:

Love to see people talk about the cosmological argument like it wasn't demolished like 250 years ago.
Citation?
BusterAg
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Dad-O-Lot said:

Hard to explain the concept of being "outside of time" to a child.

I'm not sure most adults can really understand it either.


Kierkegaard would agree.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense -George Orwell, 1984, Part 1, Chapter 7
BusterAg
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kurt vonnegut said:

Dad-O-Lot said:

Hard to explain the concept of being "outside of time" to a child.

I'm not sure most adults can really understand it either.


I'm not sure anyone understands it.


In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense -George Orwell, 1984, Part 1, Chapter 7
BusterAg
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AstroAg17 said:

Does something existing "outside of time" that interacts with things that are "in time" actually make sense?

Not to me. I don't think it's an understanding problem, I think it's just actually nonsensical.


Way better than string theory, or multiple universe theories.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense -George Orwell, 1984, Part 1, Chapter 7
GQaggie
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Athanasius said:

Marco Esquandolas said:

Love to see people talk about the cosmological argument like it wasn't demolished like 250 years ago.
Citation?
Based on the time frame he gave, I suspect he is referring to Hume's arguments against the validity of inductive reasoning as it applies to causal relationships. If so, I think it a huge stretch bordering on ridiculous to say the argument was demolished.
Marco Esquandolas
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Hume did some work but Kant killed it to death.

Even theists mostly admit it is unsound in any form. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/
Zobel
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It depends on why you're invoking it. If you're saying "God is a logical necessity" I think you've got issues as Kant noted. But the mistake here is a cataphatic one. Namely, that logic and necessity can be used to infer or describe God. I think that's a non-starter.

However, the universe does seem to exist, so the question becomes can it exist in another way? Or not at all? Am doing even if both of those are negative, we still do not have any way to examine the question - but why does it exist? And Kant provides no relief for this, I think.
Marco Esquandolas
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k2aggie07 said:

It depends on why you're invoking it. If you're saying "God is a logical necessity" I think you've got issues as Kant noted. But the mistake here is a cataphatic one. Namely, that logic and necessity can be used to infer or describe God. I think that's a non-starter.

However, the universe does seem to exist, so the question becomes can it exist in another way? Or not at all? Am doing even if both of those are negative, we still do not have any way to examine the question - but why does it exist? And Kant provides no relief for this, I think.


True but IMO all there is left is cultural myths to provide metaphysical answers.

Kant of course still believed in God in some sense. Point is the cosmological argument is pretty useless for thinking theists. As you point out, you have to go somewhere else to answer the "why anything" question.
FriscoKid
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FWIW, he asked again tonight and I went down the path of exhaustion with him. Maybe another god made God, but where did he come from? And who made him, and him, and him, and him etc.

He seemed to get that there had to be something always, and that must have been God.

And you pencil necked atheists that were so quick to jump on this thread. Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?
Athanasius
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FriscoKid said:

FWIW, he asked again tonight and I went down the path of exhaustion with him. Maybe another god made God, but where did he come from? And who made him, and him, and him, and him etc.

He seemed to get that there had to be something always, and that must have been God.

And you pencil necked atheists that were so quick to jump on this thread. Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?
Don't take him down an infinite regression. Look at my post above. He is existence itself.
Sapper Redux
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FriscoKid said:

FWIW, he asked again tonight and I went down the path of exhaustion with him. Maybe another god made God, but where did he come from? And who made him, and him, and him, and him etc.

He seemed to get that there had to be something always, and that must have been God.

And you pencil necked atheists that were so quick to jump on this thread. Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?


Lovely. How many things can you get wrong about the Big Bang in one sentence?
Star Wars Memes Only
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FriscoKid said:

Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?

Have you stopped beating your wife?
FriscoKid
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Dr. Watson said:

FriscoKid said:

FWIW, he asked again tonight and I went down the path of exhaustion with him. Maybe another god made God, but where did he come from? And who made him, and him, and him, and him etc.

He seemed to get that there had to be something always, and that must have been God.

And you pencil necked atheists that were so quick to jump on this thread. Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?


Lovely. How many things can you get wrong about the Big Bang in one sentence?

Hey Sapper.
FriscoKid
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Athanasius said:

Won't help with kids, but...

God IS existence.

Existence itself (Himself) doesn't need a cause.

When speaking to Moses, God said "I am who am." Clearly He is pure being. Pure existence.


Then, Jesus said in John 8:

56Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad. 57So the Jews said to him, "You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?" 58 Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM."


Yep, you are right. It's a hard concept though for a kid (like you said).

I could write a freaking novel about this, but I will just give the crib notes.

Funny that my kid would ask that question this week as we started a new home group bible study "believe". Yada yada yada, adults have the same problems.
kurt vonnegut
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FriscoKid said:

Who made the matter that exploded in the Big Bang?
If you do not have any problem accepting that God has always existed, why should it be so hard to consider the possibility that some amount of matter has always existed. I do not know the answer to the question above. Nor do I know if the question even makes sense or if the answer is knowable.

So, serious question - What is wrong with telling your child that you don't know where God came from or how God came to be or how its even possible for God to exist outside of time. Whats wrong with 'I don't know.'?
Frok
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"I don't know" is an answer we don't use enough. Sometimes things are just too complex for us to grasp.

IMO at some point there has to be something that is uncaused. Whether that is God or some form of matter is really just a faith issue as we will never know for sure.

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