RickD wrote:Ok, I see what you're saying. I was hoping I wouldn't make it more confusing, but I did. I apologize.
So I looked back to page 1, to see what lead me to say that. And this is what I said before:
I don't know if it's just me, but that doesn't make any sense. If something could exist eternally(without beginning or end), then it wouldn't be created, right?
I'm basically trying to figure out how something(the universe) which is made up of physical things, could be eternal/without beginning. As I understand God, His existence, nature, however you want to word it, God and only God is without beginning. And literally everything which is not God, was created. Everything in the universe is physically existing, so it needs to be contingent on something else, right?
How can anything physical be without a beginning? Do you see what I'm asking?
Basically, I don't/cannot understand how something besides God, can be without beginning/eternal.
Genesis 1:1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
In the beginning of creation, God created the universe.
Or, the universe had no beginning, and God as we believe Him to be, doesn't exist. But don't fret, we've got pantheism.
This is what I see.
The only other possibility that I could see(if the universe is eternal), would be that the universe is part of God, but it wasn't made up of physical things at some point.
It feels lime you are confusing essentially ordered chains (EOCs) and accidentally ordered causal chains (AOCs). AOCs are "horizontal" chains. They go "back" in time. Think of dominoes.
A domino falls and knocks over the next one, which knocks over the next one, which knocks over the next one, and so on. The important point for our purposes about AOCs is that once an effect has happened, you can take it away and the effect doesn't stop happening. Take one of the fallen dominoes off the table, and does that stop later dominoes from falling? Nope! They'll just keep falling.
EOCs are "vertical" chains. They go "up" to something causing their movement. Think of a fisherman drawing in a fish.
The fish is being pulled up by the wire that is being drawn up by the reel that is being turned by the fisherman. The important point for our purposes about EOCs is that if you take away an effect, the effect stops happening immediately. If the line breaks or if the fisherman stops turning the reel, then the fish stops being pulled up.
I think you are familiar with that distinction, but I'm afraid you aren't applying it here. The argument for God's existence based on the beginning of the universe looks at the universe as an AOC (which is fine; we can do that). It goes back in time to the moment it all started, the Big Bang or whatever. It then asks what caused THAT. So in our analogy, we might ask what knocked over the first domino. The problem, though, is if the universe doesn't have a beginning then we cannot say that the universe has a cause. Let me restate for clarity: if the universe doesn't have a beginning, then arguments for God's existence that conceive of the universe in AOC terms fail, because the AOC has no temporal beginning (in God or otherwise).
BUT, suppose that the universe is beginningless an therefore the AOC arguments fail. Does that count against theism? No. Because the universe is still an EOC, and as an EOC, it still needs a Prime Mover, and that is, of course God. In other words, the whole EOC we call the universe needs an explanation, not in terms of temporal origin, but in terms of why it exists at all.
That would not be pantheism. On that view, you have a universe that has always existed separate and distinct from God and always contingent upon God, always being caused by Him. Here, God as "creator" would mean something like, "being caused by." God would be the universe's Creator insofar as He is the principle reason for its existence. And that, by the way, is not an odd usage. My five year old believes that God made the trees in our front yard. Is she wrong? Just because we can talk about germination and the growth cycle of a tree, just because it wasn't specially created, does it follow that the tree wasn't created by God? Of course not. Still less does it mean that the tree is God.
It's almost like you are suggesting that if there is no special, miraculous creation
in time, then God is not Creator. That just strikes me as an odd view.
Anyway, my real point in bringing all that up is to point out that something without a beginning is not independent. That is, a beginningless universe is still contingent on God, and being contingent on Him, it is not identical to Him. We show that contingency via EOCs rather than AOCs. And, again, I think AOCs make for good arguments for God's existence, too. I just think that they are secondary arguments, and when we make them primary, we give atheists an easy (and stupid) "out." They can just deny the second premise of the KCA in a science-of-the-gaps sort of fashion and we've nowhere to go.
And as an aside, there are actually a LOT of theologians who would deny your claim that only God is beginningless. I'm not one of them. I think that only God is beginningless. But I know that after the fact, not just from looking at God's nature (I know that only God is eternal from looking at His nature). To use only two examples, Augustine and William Lane Craig would argue that lots of things are beginningless, not eternal. Alvin Plantinga, in fact, things that God Himself is dependent on some of these beginningless things. That's a stupid claim in my opinion. I'm just pointing it out because I think you should know that the basic idea you are working with isn't as obvious as you might think otherwise.
