Who are intellectuals who believe in God and explain him well?

No it isn't. God is a logical necessity as that which is without limit. See Anslem and Gödel's proofs for example.

Claiming our world is a "brute fact" is to accept there no epistemic justification for your belief in its necessity. This is arbitrary. And it runs into problems, see the Fine Tuning Problem. Look up Penrose on the total volume in phase space that our universe's entropy makes up. The universe being capable of life is analogous to seeing a coin come up heads 2,000 times in a row and claiming "the coin must be fair, it's just coincidence."

>Again that's your definition. It's arbitrary.
you are wrong

No you can't. People frame the universe as contingent on a first cause. To claim that the universe is simply because it is runs into several problems. For instance, let's say that God, as we understand him, is contingent on the universe. What is this universe contingent on? Another one? It's turtles all the way down until we eventually arrive at a first cause.
You can try to argue that this first cause was no necessarily divine, but others have already made pretty compelling arguments towards a conscience agent, at least in some sense.

No? What part of Saint Thomas? And why did you not answer my question directly?

Also, strictly speaking, you have no grounds to say anything in regards to outside of our universe, since even our most basic laws of logic are rooted firmly in the physical universe. You use contingency as if it's a law that exists before the universe exists, even before God exists, since nothing can supposedly violate your conception of contingency. I don't see why this has to be accepted. Perhaps the ultimate principle of divinity is a spiral of mutually contingent eternal beings whose coupling conjurers forth our reality. If you open the door to wild speculation, you could come up with absolutely anything and have no more or less grounds to assert it than anyone else.

>cont'd

Science can't prove nothing existed before reality, this is idiotic epistemology. The scientific method is about educing hypotheseis on the basis of repeatable observation within varying degrees of controllable environment through induction and subsequently subjecting them to scrutiny through falsification, which engenders post hoc rationalization that modify the initial hypothesis for the purpose of salvaging its explanatory and predictive power; it cannot provide any insight into any supernatural and transcendental forces since they by definition supervene the created order, and thus supernatural occurrances or miracles are suspensions of the natural order that cannot be subject to repeatable observation. God is the creator and fashioner of all laws in the cosmos, and it is through His omnipotence that they subsist; He can temporary annul if He so pleases. Science is circumscribed within the natural order and cannot exceed it. That is why we turn to other means for transcendental truths.

[...]
>And asking what created the universe isn't?
Indeed, it's a perfectly rational inquiry to make.

>You can't just define him as such then claim you can't define the universe the same way and make God superfluous.
God is never defined; He is merely delineated. He transcends all things so that we can never have access to Him. We merely describe the realities around Him, hopelessly attempt to circumscribe Him, but fail and fail each and every time. We call Him timeless and eternal since He transcends time; we call Him omnipresent since He is beyond space; we are composed, so He is composite; consequently, we call Him immutable since time and composition engender potentiality by being the metaphysical prerequisites for it, and He transcends both, being pure actuality; we call Him infinite since He is qualitatively eminently above all things in this world, circumscribable and finite; consequently, He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenelovent: but all we gain from Him are notions, for we define Him in relation to ourselves through negation, whether privation or eminence, but we never define Him or comprehend Him, since by conceptualizing Him in contradistinction to ourselves, we fail to elucidate Him on His own terms. His essence is truly beyond us; it is far eminently above the attributes predicated of Him. The divine attributes or names are comprehensibly incomprehensible, for through empirical experience we have notions of infinity through finitude that allows us to comprehend our limitude; but the essence of God is incomprehensibly incomprehensible, since it is infinitely greater than infinite, behind it, above it, necessarily engendering it.

It is because the universe is circumscribable that we know God cannot be.

Ok so now I read your second post too. Nicely written and compelling. Still, the concept of god must be further defined. The Abrahamic religions believe that god created man in his own image as written in Genesis. So while there may be a trove of theology and metaphysical thought from Christian mysticism, gnosticism (and surely from within the other faiths as well) I would say it's dishonest to claim your description of god as "the infinite and unknowable..." is an accurate representation of the god-idea in these religions. Your thought seem more in line with general Western agnostics or Vipasanna or Buddhist thought.

God bless

Well of course, but a Christian would deny that we can gain knowledge of the perfect and divine through pure rationality, with no empirical experience of our own; the Platonists and Peripatetics of centuries past produced many intellectually edifying and compelling systems of metaphysics and metaethics, but often they are but pure speculation. Christianity offers us direct Revelation from the higher realms; the knowledge attained through Scripture is superior to that from natural revelation, ie. the knowledge we get from observation of the created world, the first and greatest theophany of all alongside the Incarnation, for both are activities proper solely to God.

We may distinguish two criteria through which we can apprehend the nature of God's activities: whether or not they are proper solely to God, and whether or not they reveal exhaustively the nature of God. As previously mentioned in [...], the essential activity of God's perpending Himself is inaccessible to us; it shall forever remain a mystery. But that is His internal activity, within God Himself; its extensions, the external activities that are consequent to and derivative of it yet only contingently so, the ones that relate to creation, are the ones through which we come to know God. They cannot and never do reveal God fully to us. God's creating the world is what leads us to contemplate the cause of all that is, as well as begin to conceptualize His attributes; His theophanies ammend and elaborate upon said knowledge. But many of His activities God can conduct through His intermediaries. He can contingently imbue them with aspects and exiguous amounts of His power (as with Moses parting the sea), but He can never contingently confer onto a creature the fullness of the breadth and expanse of His power, for His power is proper to His essence, His nature. There are certain activities that He can conduct, even if they do not fully communicate the extent of His essence: such are the creation of the world and the Incarnation, a most salubrious munificence from God. Only God can exist outside of time and possesses the omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenelovence prerequisite to engender it, but that does not communicate His essence; with His life, death and resurrection, Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the most perfect image of God the Father Almighty, His Word and Wisdom Who in the beginning was with Him and through Whom all things were made and in Whom me live, allowed human nature to participate in His divine nature, bequeathed to Him by His Father, by imitating to its most metaphysically possible extent its attributes: for in imitating His simplicity and eternity, we become immortal and indestructible, and in imitating His infinity, we strive eternally to reach Him. Only God can make others gods. He became man so that we might become gods, sons of the Most High.

Thus, God's act of creation and His act of healing human nature are the only two acts that are fully proper to God but do not communicate His essence; no wonder since the latter is an extension of the former. It is what proves that the Son and the Spirit are God: for it is in the latter and through the former that we may know God the Father by becoming gods in imitation of His glory.

God bless

Holy based

Christ is risen, brother.

>qualitatively infinite, timelessly eternal, perfectly simple, immutable, fully exhausts any causal chain
>gets BTFOd by pagan deities and iron chariots
>has sex with virgins
>gets stumped by blood circles
You're not making a good case here.

>>gets BTFOd by pagan deities and iron chariots
>muh New Atheist memes from 2006
You're illiterate

>Science can't prove nothing existed before reality, this is idiotic epistemology.
Then how the frick can it prove reality had a beginning? The singularity that caused the big bang could have been just sitting around for eternity.

It can utilize probability to make reasonable conjectures, but if the singularity was eternal you'd still need to explain what caused it burst suddenly, making it likely that it came into being the moment it fissiparated into the universe.

You have to pick israeli mythology or Hellenistic philosophy, so which is it?

You're assuming all causes are necessarily temporal which is not true

Causation has no temporal implications on its own. The idea that causal chains necessarily imply temporal distinction is unsupported by anything. Nor does your argument demonstrate how a finite, circumscribable metaphysical entity can possess aseity.

>There is no circumstances when causation DOES NOT imply a temporal relationship.
All you're doing is adducing the common experience of causation, which is an infantile argument because we're temporal creatures who cannot not think in terms of temporal matters. You must actually demonstrate the logical inconsistency in presuming atemporal, eternal causation, as opposed to avering your position insistantly and with indignation.

>even after doing so you still admit it contradicts logic as we know it
I never did that and no it doesn't. All I'm saying is that we cannot perceive non-temporal causation because we exist within time and that whenever we describe such atemporal causation we utilize temporal analogies we can delineate what said atemporal causation entails but never exhaustively grasp the content of it. You have not shown at all that atemporal causation is logically impossible, you have merely appealed to mankind's limited faculties to comprehensively comprehend it.

>Explain how an atemporal entity could possibly interact with a temporal reality at a specific time.
The atemporal entity is the ontological foundation for temporal reality and subsistences within it, so it trivially easy for He, who perceives all time simultaneously (the closest manner in which we can articulate His perception of temporality), to interact with His creatures. His ability to create the temporal world entails His ability to ponder temporaly, for it is an inferior form of thought to His own Thought.

All causation that we are aware of is temporal. You have to invent, out of whole cloth, an entirely arbitrary reality where causality does not imply a temporal relationship. I decline to accept this type of schizo philosophy.

>It's integral to plenty of ontologies. I even gave you as varied philosophers as Aristotle and Hume.
Nta but showing up in someones made up philosophy doesn't count. All causation that we are aware of in physical reality is temporal.

>Who's we?
The human race. If you have an example of atemporal causation that doesn't amount to trust me bro bring it out.

>The universe appears to be contingent
Says who? This is another part you're just asserting like it's an obvious fact.

>Without a coherent ontology the view of causality you propose could validly suggest the universe could just stop existing
The universe is necessary. Problem solved.

>That which exists of necessity would be immutable. Something immutable cannot be temporal, otherwise is age and therefore change.
So a necessary God can not have changed from not creating the universe to creating the universe.

>Causality is also hierarchical.
Says who? It must be nice to be able to just make shit up and then be convinced it is true. You're never wrong in your own mind.

>Nothing changed in God essentially by that act and since God stands outside of time God could not have changed by relation to time.
So just say nothing is changing in the universe ESSENTIALLY. If a God outside time can interact with the universe just say the universe is outside time and still interacts with itself. All the special privileges you give to God I can easily turn around and give to the universe.
>I didn't just make anything up. I explained to you an ontology.
A made up ontology. Someones philosophy is not evidence.
>You're the one saying change is only linear and just assuming it has to be true without evidence.
All of the evidence of change we have is temporal. You're the one coming up with some imaginary atemporal change without evidence.

>This is a completely insane statement by a religious zealot that can't even conceive of anything but his well conditioned religious dogma

>Who's we?
The human race. If you have an example of atemporal causation that doesn't amount to trust me bro bring it out.

>If you have an example of atemporal causation that doesn't amount to trust me bro bring it out.

>Yeah you can say those things but they would be absurd.
As absurd as atemporal causality and an unchanging God reacting to events on earth

>There was a change in essence when the acorn turned into a tree and hence an observable change of nature.
Just like there was a change in his essence when God decided to create universe.

>You're acting like we deny these traits to the universe arbitrarily when they're all empirical observations.
Just like the empirical observation that there is no atemporal causality.

This from the guy who insists atemporal causality is real along with "hierarchical" causality and also conflates causation with logical implication. Better hope it's not a philosophy final tomorrow because if it is you gonna fail bro.

>You have to invent, out of whole cloth, an entirely arbitrary reality
It's not arbitrary, it's the realm of pure logic as expressed in both temporal causal relationships and purely logical relationships like we can represent in brains and computers.
>All causation that we are aware of in physical reality is temporal.
If physical reality is defined as temporal but then the claim is circular. According to Feynman in QED the physical world is full of events with causal chains not following our arrow of time. An event in our future can cause a reaction in the past.

>The universe appears to be contingent
Says who? This is another part you're just asserting like it's an obvious fact.

>Without a coherent ontology the view of causality you propose could validly suggest the universe could just stop existing
The universe is necessary. Problem solved.

>That which exists of necessity would be immutable. Something immutable cannot be temporal, otherwise is age and therefore change.
So a necessary God can not have changed from not creating the universe to creating the universe.

>Causality is also hierarchical.
Says who? It must be nice to be able to just make shit up and then be convinced it is true. You're never wrong in your own mind.

>says who
Basic logic. The most basic logic there is. Any logical description is contingent and hierarchal, if x then y.
God is beyond time, there's no temporal event separating a before and after so God never changes. The logical causality aka the rules/Law were always contained immutably within God.

Depends on the example. If x then y is not the same statement/description as if y then x.
Any model rests on axioms not within that model and any description approaching a logically coherent model has the same limitations as the formal one, just hidden behind confusion. Any description of the world will always rest on axioms not contained in the description. Any "natural" model must rest on "supernatural" axioms.
>just taking the universe's existence as an axiom
I'm already doing that but then I'm separating what is describable about the universe from what is not. The world as we know it with the consistent arrow of time apparently emerged 14 billion years ago. All that is contained within a larger system beyond time that's still describable and beyond that there's the unknowable fundamental source of everything, pretty much as imagined by the guys that first thought of formal logic.

>Axioms are very much a part of the model.
Why do you just say things? You could pause and read a bit about these subjects, try even a little bit to understand anything being said.

>This is a completely insane statement by a religious zealot that can't even conceive of anything but his well conditioned religious dogma
[...]
>If you have an example of atemporal causation that doesn't amount to trust me bro bring it out.

Logical causation is not something anybody in this thread just made up and I gave you physical examples. Look up QED and feynman diagrams.

>uninformed people
It's very ironic that you keep saying everyone else is refering to a made up philosophy when you just ass pulled another philosophy, which is funnily far more contentious than any other one posted itt

You're actively trying to avoid understanding anything said to you, to defend your religious dogma.
>Axioms are the basic starting point of a logical deduction
>starting point
You're describing a causal relationship. The deduction arises from the axiom. The model rests on the axioms. X leads to Y which is not the same thing as Y leads to X or a statement about non causal relationship like the non-answer in that thread you focused on while ignoring actual answers.
>this circle has circumference Pi because its diameter is 1
This is a false but logical statement claiming a causal relationship where there isn't in fact one.

>a relationship between different propositions where the second proposition is a logical consequence of the first.
What's your point? What do you think this semantic autism accomplish? If everyone in the thread only talked about logical "consequential" relationships instead of causal ones would that somehow help you?

This from the guy who insists atemporal causality is real along with "hierarchical" causality and also conflates causation with logical implication. Better hope it's not a philosophy final tomorrow because if it is you gonna fail bro.

You don't even believe in simple logical structures or physics? Le atheism has really gone this far?

>"Because I assume x is 1 therefore x is 1" adds nothing, there's no logic there that supports the claim.
That is exactly how logical deduction works. Axioms are unsupported. And yes just reaffirming the an axiom is logical deduction of the most trivial sort.
>Is your entire worldview really just "don't think, ever and sperg at anyone that tries"?.
Says the guy who jumps to all kind of hoops trying to avoid answering the question what created God? I bet taking God as an axiom would be magically exempt from account for the phenomena in your words.

>That is exactly how logical deduction works.
Why do you just say things? That's not deduction, it's just restating the axiom.
>Axioms are unsupported.
This just reveals you really "think" in mindless appeals to dogma. This is the opposite of reason.
>what created God
I very explicitly described my worldview until the end of where human knowledge can account for anything. You completely ignore everything said and jerk off about your petty internet memes. Why do you do this? Why not sincerely try to understand things and other perspectives?

>Do you think Euclid's axioms are supernatural?
You can't logically derive the conclusion that points exist using the model built on the axiom that points exist. You would just be repeating your premise. "Because I assume x is 1 therefore x is 1".
The assumption that points exist isn't representative of physical reality but a simplified version of it constructed using the rules of logic.
When it comes to physics the same applies, any model will always rest on axiomatic fundamentals like fundamental forces.
>So if you're taking the universe's existence as an axiom what are we even talking about then? There would be no need for God.
Depends on your definitions, which in your mind seem to shift depending on convenience. The world that emerged from the big bang is not the "universe" as in the totality of everything and the system beyond time that contains the big bang is not the totality either. Nothing we can describe can logically ever be the totality, partly simply because it's not accounting for the logic we're appealing to in order to build the description. Our logic demands an irreducible phenomena outside time and space that contains all things we can conceive of including logic itself.
This phenomena matches all the classical theist ideas of "God". If you disagree about historical claims about properties God has like sentience that's a different subject.

>Rofl yes you can absolutely logically derive that.
Again you work as hard as you possibly can to sabotage any chance of understanding anything said.
"Because I assume x is 1 therefore x is 1" adds nothing, there's no logic there that supports the claim.
>No it doesn't. If you're taking the universe's existence as an axiom then that's it. Nothing else needed.
Depends if you want to attempt to account for the phenomena in the universe or not. Is your entire worldview really just "don't think, ever and sperg at anyone that tries"?.

A point has no part, thoughts on this

A line is length without breadth whose extremities are points. Thoughts on this

I don't care, just answer the questions

>No it doesn't. If you're taking the universe's existence as an axiom then that's it. Nothing else needed.

>Any model rests on axioms not within that model
Axioms are very much a part of the model. You can't have any type of logical deduction without starting axioms.
>Any "natural" model must rest on "supernatural" axioms.
No clue what you're talking about here. Do you think Euclid's axioms are supernatural?
>I'm already doing that but then I'm separating what is describable about the universe from what is not.
So if you're taking the universe's existence as an axiom what are we even talking about then? There would be no need for God.

>So if you're taking the universe's existence as an axiom what are we even talking about then?
Are you really that much of a sophomore that you're conflating logical axioms with epistemological conclusions about ontology?

>you don't believe in my magical skydaddy, an idea bereft of logic or evidence
>therefore you are moronic

How can one man say so much yet so little. I mean trying to use heavy words to appear erudite is probably a requirement if the position you are arguing for is clearly absurd and has no answers for any criticism thrown its way. Its a common grifter tactic except in this case he is fooling no one but himself.

>How is the concept of atemporal, eternal causation logically inconsistent

This has already been addressed by the other guy. But of course the real issue is not if causation can be atemporal or not. The elephant in the room is that this moronic little argument is all it takes for a man to render his belief in an all powerful all knowing mind and live his life, (re)organise his mind and emotions in light of it. Clearly showcasing a lack of critical thinking skills and profound intellectual gullibility.

I suspect one of the three options here

1. A shut in neet with zero irl experience of the world
2. An internet larper who'll adopt a new personality and idea in a heartbeat when his gullible mind is easily convinced by some other equally vacuous line of reasoning
3. A lifelong christian who just wants to re-affirm his beliefs and will grasp at any straw, no matter how thin and flimsy, to hang on to it (this probably applies to 1 and 2 as well)

On the basis of this post, I have to conclude you're one of the following:

1. A degenerate and dissipative sodomite whose indulgent and hedonistic lifestyle induces him to despise Christianity for objurgating his vile turpitude.
2. A mentally stunted manchild with loathing for his parents for taking him to church and who resents his evangelical background; likely a fool who supports flooding the West with trillions of Black folk to own his parents or something.
3. A vain mediocre narcissist who abhors the idea of being inferior to something.

Actually, you're no doubt all three.

If God is atemporal, he wouldn't enter time at the first moment to create it and then "see what happens", if he is atemporal, he is outside of time, he would have created the entirety of all time and space all at that moment, or at least it would appear so to him since he is outside of time. This argument unintentionally removes free will and uncertainty, does it not?

Predestination is an exceedingly common Christian belief, and so is the compatibilist notion that predestination and free will are reconcilable, as free will requires solely the conviction that an agent was not compelled by extraneous factors to make choice A in lieu of B, and not as such the notion it was metaphysically possible for events to unfold differently. Note that metaphysically possible is different from logically possible; from the perspective of God, all creatures have made their choices within the paradigm of the world He created.

>With your poor and pathetic grasp at logic or argumentation
Your understanding of those can be boiled down to a very liberal usage of ad hominems. It's clear you're some mentally ill subhuman mystery meat shitskin defiling the English language with his verbiage that ought to be put down. Maybe you'll learn your place eventually and leave intellectually sophisticated matters to white Europeans.

>All I did was point out that rejection is empiricism is ante-thetical to christian tradition
You don't understand the Christian tradition at all, you're a dilettante who could not understand my explanation of said tradition and immediately had a meltdown because you obviously lack the requisite intelligence for comprehending anything beyond middle school science lessons. You were provided with several different essays explicating what can and cannot be known about God, and you proved yourself too much of a braindead Black person moron to discuss them in any depth. Man, frick depth, you could not even enter the atmosphere yet alone penetrate the surface. You're a moron, you're a homosexual, and you should feel bad for getting schooled like the mentally stunted disabled person with the intelligence of a 10 year old that you are. You can go back to doing volcano experiments now.

>arguing whether Superman is stronger than the Hulk
Is that like arguing whether or not you were a monkey or a slug 5000 years ago which gradually evolved and stuff?

>the God humping 70iq moron who accuses other people of "lacking intellectual depth" is also a fact denier

Like pottery

>Lol the little homosexual still has nothing meaningful to say about my post. Still insisting like a broken schizo in a psych ward that his completely tangential nonsense is relevant and his superiors here did not understand it because he used "le big words". Lmao, this is such cringe.
>If one could see the world from someone else's eyes I would love to jump into your consciousness and experience first hand what being such a brainlet is like. One cannot even claim that you are the peak of Dunning-Kruger because even that requires an intellectual journey to take off. Which apparently never happened in your case.

An example of heirarchical causality would be the Earth holding your house, your house holding your desk, your desk holding your computer. You have a complete causal chain. And yet, the anterior cause is simultaneous with the final effect, that being your computer. Yes, this causal chain happens in time, but it demonstrates that there doesn't need to be a temporal passing to define the causal chain as cause and effect are concurrent. With regards to God's relationship to the world and how God causes the world to exist atemporally, He provides the baseline. That's called the principle of divine conservation

The argument is neither arbitrary nor subjective. It's fine if you disagree with the argument but those terms arent accurate representations.
>trace line of physical forces
This just restated my argument but instead of saying floor and desk you said forces. The forces are concurrent and simultaneous and form a hierarchical causal chain. It's not the passage of time which defines the causal chain

Not evidential, yes (that's the whole point of faith), but not illogical. In fact, the only thing keeping you from behaving like a complete lunatic is the fact that you ultimately believe and comport yourself in harmony with things that you have zero evidence for (i.e., the future).

[...]
Thus, God's act of creation and His act of healing human nature are the only two acts that are fully proper to God but do not communicate His essence; no wonder since the latter is an extension of the former. It is what proves that the Son and the Spirit are God: for it is in the latter and through the former that we may know God the Father by becoming gods in imitation of His glory.

[...]
[...]
Christ is risen, brother.

[...]
>>gets BTFOd by pagan deities and iron chariots
>muh New Atheist memes from 2006
You're illiterate

[...]
It can utilize probability to make reasonable conjectures, but if the singularity was eternal you'd still need to explain what caused it burst suddenly, making it likely that it came into being the moment it fissiparated into the universe.

Regardless of whether you are religious or not I'd recommend gaining at least a rudmientary understanding of special and general relativity and many dimensions. In daily life we consider ourselves experiencing time linearly but spacetime is one inseperable structure. "What happened before x" is a midwit question to ask both about god and the observable universe because spacetime didn't exist before spacetime (time didn't exist before time) - or to put it more temporally accurate: spacetime without spacetime exists not.

Maybe if you weren't an utter intellectual mediocrity with an embarrassingly narrow intellectual horizon, you would have been capable of comprehending my lucubration; alas, it appears you're too much of a conceited neophyte and philosophical illiterate to meaningfully engage with metaphysical subjects.

Stop using words that literally don't exist you hilarious Christroony pseud

Someone didn't know the terms fissiparous and fissiparation, huh?

>That's a hyper-specific and purely hypothetical model of scientific method.
It's the ideal and the more scientists stray from it the less reliable their findings due to its being less rigourous.

>This point simply agrees with the anon's statement that the existence and nature of transcendent phenomena cannot be understood through rational means, but in a very roundabout way.
Not rational but rather mundane means; God does not entail epistemic irrationality, but the arational as the consummation of the rational; the mystical as the apex of the logical, which has been fully exhausted.

>One anon made a argument for the existence of God from pure logic, another anon called his bullshit, you attacked him, and now that you don't have any argument you are just saying "yes that is correct but overall it does not matter because you are wrong"
Lol anon how moronic do you have to be to think that cosmological arguments are at odds with apophatic theology?

>Now that popular religious theosophy has successfully commited an agnosticism to try and not appear entirey moronic
Negative theology has been part of the Platonic intellectual tradition since the dialogue Parmenides. The fact that you think that it is a recent invention engendered by the intellectual profundity of tendentious assaults by mendacious mediocrities such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is exposing your conceited ignorance of philisophy.

The funny thing about rejection of empirical evidence as a source of knowledge about God is that even Bible does not operate from that position. Moses was literally splitting Oceans into half and even Jesus knew to perform a few magic tricks inorder to convince us plebians that he speaks for the Big man.

Oh wow man! Somebody should have gone back and St Gregory of Nyssa before he wrote his Life of Moses! It should would have blown his mind and utterly dismantled his explication of his mystical theology of the eternal assent to God.

I suppose it is not shocking at all that an unimaginative and intellectually narrow mediocrity such as yourself would readily jump at any excuse irrespective of its exiguousness and tentativeness to obviate addressing the arguments of your otherwise erudite interlocutor.

>Thus leading to your inability to make a single meaningful reply to anything that anyone else posts.
Point to just a single statement that I failed to substantively refute in one of my replies.

Your initial post was entirely predicated on an inability to comprehend a sliver of what I had articulated in my prior posts; you seemingly wholly missed the point of my explicating the distinction between God's internal essential activity that is identical with His Being and the external activities that are contingently willed by Him as excrescences that are extensions of His one internal activity, unnecessary and arbitrily chosen from our narrow perspective but nonetheless meaningful (as God could have chosen to not conduct them as a freely willing agent, but they cannot contravene His one activity of eternal self-contemplation, merely extend it: think of it as a marathon runner choosing to do one extra lap, an activity that is not contrary to his prior activity but is not necessary as such due to its already having been completed); the former is incomprehensible, inaccessible, ineffable, eminently transcendental, whereas the latter is something we can perceive and apprehend, attaining true and meaningful yet inexhaustive knowledge of God, which though splendorous and incandescent is but an infinitesmal of the comprehensive totality of His Being. In

Well of course, but a Christian would deny that we can gain knowledge of the perfect and divine through pure rationality, with no empirical experience of our own; the Platonists and Peripatetics of centuries past produced many intellectually edifying and compelling systems of metaphysics and metaethics, but often they are but pure speculation. Christianity offers us direct Revelation from the higher realms; the knowledge attained through Scripture is superior to that from natural revelation, ie. the knowledge we get from observation of the created world, the first and greatest theophany of all alongside the Incarnation, for both are activities proper solely to God.

We may distinguish two criteria through which we can apprehend the nature of God's activities: whether or not they are proper solely to God, and whether or not they reveal exhaustively the nature of God. As previously mentioned in [...], the essential activity of God's perpending Himself is inaccessible to us; it shall forever remain a mystery. But that is His internal activity, within God Himself; its extensions, the external activities that are consequent to and derivative of it yet only contingently so, the ones that relate to creation, are the ones through which we come to know God. They cannot and never do reveal God fully to us. God's creating the world is what leads us to contemplate the cause of all that is, as well as begin to conceptualize His attributes; His theophanies ammend and elaborate upon said knowledge. But many of His activities God can conduct through His intermediaries. He can contingently imbue them with aspects and exiguous amounts of His power (as with Moses parting the sea), but He can never contingently confer onto a creature the fullness of the breadth and expanse of His power, for His power is proper to His essence, His nature. There are certain activities that He can conduct, even if they do not fully communicate the extent of His essence: such are the creation of the world and the Incarnation, a most salubrious munificence from God. Only God can exist outside of time and possesses the omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenelovence prerequisite to engender it, but that does not communicate His essence; with His life, death and resurrection, Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the most perfect image of God the Father Almighty, His Word and Wisdom Who in the beginning was with Him and through Whom all things were made and in Whom me live, allowed human nature to participate in His divine nature, bequeathed to Him by His Father, by imitating to its most metaphysically possible extent its attributes: for in imitating His simplicity and eternity, we become immortal and indestructible, and in imitating His infinity, we strive eternally to reach Him. Only God can make others gods. He became man so that we might become gods, sons of the Most High.

, I quite literally defend Christianity as superior to Hellenistic speculation due to direct empirical interactions with God. That is not contradictory with dismissing the idea that a discipline founded on methodological naturalism can disprove the supernatural. The extent to which you completely misread and misapprehended all I had said is astonishing.

As for St Gregory of Nyssa, he propounded most sagaciously and inspiredly the doctrine of epektasis, of eternal moving repose in God, our eternally imitating God's own transcendental and ineffable act of self-contemplation; man's telos is God, something he can never attain, but he nonetheless continues to strive towards Him, sipping from an infinite well of water, each gulp satisfying his thirst yet further igniting a most passionate desire for more from the reservoir that is God's glory which he can never exhaust. Upon man's resurrection in the regenerated flesh so thoroughly repaired by God's most salubrious munificence, there shall be no contradiction between man's passions, urges, and his reason, for both shall be united in seeking after God. God shall walk among men and be most thoroughly exalted by those who know Him but not truly Him, those who live in His comprehensibly incomprehensible infinite glory but do not see the incomprehensibly incomprehensible essence that is greater than infinite an infinite amount of times, transcending ever our notions of infinity, beyond which we cannot comprehend. All shall be like Moses, eternally ascending on Mount Sinai, never getting to see God's face (Exodus 33:20) but basking in His glory.

If you're so intent on being an arrogant, supercilious and cantankerous buffoon wholly bereft of any intellectual humility or curiosity, if you're going to vitiate each and every discussion of the divine that you encounter with scurrilous animadversions and repetitive fulminations, without exhibiting any willingness to properly imbibe and masticate upon the ideas propounded by your interlocutors or even tergiversate on any given stance were the argumentation adduced compelling and sophisticated, then I suggest you simply do stay away from these sorts of colloquys, because you are an emotionally immature and intellectually stunted twat. If you're going to merely asseverate the non-existence of God as an epistemological axiom without adumbrating a perfunctory justification for you educing such a stance, then you have nothing worthwhile to contribute and are just a waste of time. Now sod off.

>Thanks for the kekfuel tho
No, clearly this subject is a bit too abstruse for someone of your limited intellectual capacities. You're better off being insufflated with profound knowledge of the middle school science sort propounded by Hank Green.

>Therefore, a cause of time beginning would need to precede the existence of time, it would need to be in the time before time existed, an incoherent proposition

Oh that's not really a problem. You can simply hand wave it away by claiming something absurd like that God is timeless? See? Problemo solvo. When you've made up your mind that God necessarily exists then you can literally ascribe any attribute to him to solve contradictions that arise. Of course the problem here is that since God is timeless therefore God exists outside the laws of causation. And hence cannot cause anything since the concept of being a cause cannot be applied here

>Of course the problem here is that since God is timeless therefore God exists outside the laws of causation. And hence cannot cause anything since the concept of being a cause cannot be applied here
How is the concept of atemporal, eternal causation logically inconsistent?

If God is atemporal, he wouldn't enter time at the first moment to create it and then "see what happens", if he is atemporal, he is outside of time, he would have created the entirety of all time and space all at that moment, or at least it would appear so to him since he is outside of time. This argument unintentionally removes free will and uncertainty, does it not?

>that it refutes the point you have made

Ah so he is still not willing to say anything meaningful straight up. Got it.

This mindsets means you would believe literally everything and anything without evidence. I'm not a child. I can't believe in fantasy like that.

Miracles I can understand. Hundreds of 800 year old men? Surely there would be some writings or records of these people. 800 years is a long time.

How old do you think the earth is?

Something in the billion I'm not much of a rock guy

And you're saying that the Aphrodite worshipers who created and codified the Bible for the israelites are trustworthy?

>It's supernatural but so is every other explanation on how something can come from nothing

Where do you get the idea that something came from nothing?

>The only thing that could create something from nothing and the big bang would have to be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. What else could this but a God?

This kind of language holds the hidden presupposition that the world was created. Hence begging the question

>That's what the big bang homies say.

Big Bang cosmology, in my limited understanding, does not presume that there was "nothing" prior to the event. There was a singularity at the beginning of time and that's as far as our knowledge goes. Some models predict a universe in a state of collapse prior to singularity but that's just speculation for now. So we can't be sure that there was "nothing" at any point

What else could what be?

Wow. How enlightening. You really got me there buddy. Really dismantled my points.

Huh?

yes, father told me to punish evil, jesus is just a manifestation of the father will

Psalm 141:4 Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practice wicked works with men that work iniquity: and let me not eat of their dainties.

I’ve already been sent $10 by one of your fellow Christians. I guess he is an idiot as well lol

he is ok, you are an idiot, keep going and at some point all your money will be lost fool

you are a fool, i can't even comprehend your level of moronation

be quite, peasent

2 Corinthians 6:14 In-Context

14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

وَقَاتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ الَّذِينَ يُقَاتِلُونَكُمْ وَلَا تَعْتَدُوا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ الْمُعْتَدِينَ (190)

people like you should be killed, you spread evil

God have mercy upon the likes of you

كسمك

the righteous man should handle the sin of his ancestors responsibly

I see you neglected to mention imaginations role in creation, and just how wide the array of creation is as it applies to all facets of one and all's life and existence.

I already answered them twice. For the third time those are the definitions of point and line taken from Euclid.

>So simplicity can be unexplained but complexity can't?
Correct. God's absolute simplicity entails there being nothing simpler and qualitatively eminent above God. Ergo, He cannot be explained.

>Why was one specific God required to create the universe instead of another?
The argument proving God's existence is a prerequisite for all subsequent discussions about His nature.

>And I can easily conceive of a necessary universe with no cause.
Would it be in accordance with reason, though?

>I can also conceive of your infinite property being consequent to something.
Alright, please elucidate me about what could conceivable and in accordance with logic be ontologically prior to God.

>Again this is just something you're asserting here. Do you even understand the difference? You have given no reason why something simple can be unexplained while complex things can't

LMAO are you a moron? Complex things are built on simpler things that we use to explain said complex things. The simpler things are built of even simpler things that we use to explain them. What happens when you reach the most simple? Please, enlighten me on how you will explain that.

>You have given no reason why something simple can be unexplained while complex things can't
Yes it can actually, since God's being absolutely simple entails His also being eternal or timeless, omnipresent, pure actuality, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, etc. How can something eternal, beyond alteration, qualitatively infinite, etc. possibly be caused by something different to it nature? (This post presuming that God generating His Son and His Spirit as extensions of His Being's being perfectly rational.)

>You're using aspects of his nature to prove his existence.
I am using properties of the cosmos to explain what the first cause must necessarily be and explaining why asserting that the cosmos is uncaused is not intellectually justifiable.

>In the same way you think a God with no cause is in accordance with reason.
God cannot be caused from what we know of Him through delineation.

>Barney the giant purple dinosaur that is ontologically prior to God.
What is it with New Atheists and your infantilisms? Sorry, but you can't actually logically prove that it is metaphysically possible for your childish construct there to create God.

All you're doing is proving that all atheists are simply conducting absurd mental gymnastics to avoid reaching the obvious conclusion.

>Again a wild baseless assertion.
It's an inference on the basis of creation. Try reading the posts that have already been made in this thread:

Science can't prove nothing existed before reality, this is idiotic epistemology. The scientific method is about educing hypotheseis on the basis of repeatable observation within varying degrees of controllable environment through induction and subsequently subjecting them to scrutiny through falsification, which engenders post hoc rationalization that modify the initial hypothesis for the purpose of salvaging its explanatory and predictive power; it cannot provide any insight into any supernatural and transcendental forces since they by definition supervene the created order, and thus supernatural occurrances or miracles are suspensions of the natural order that cannot be subject to repeatable observation. God is the creator and fashioner of all laws in the cosmos, and it is through His omnipotence that they subsist; He can temporary annul if He so pleases. Science is circumscribed within the natural order and cannot exceed it. That is why we turn to other means for transcendental truths.

[...]
>And asking what created the universe isn't?
Indeed, it's a perfectly rational inquiry to make.

>You can't just define him as such then claim you can't define the universe the same way and make God superfluous.
God is never defined; He is merely delineated. He transcends all things so that we can never have access to Him. We merely describe the realities around Him, hopelessly attempt to circumscribe Him, but fail and fail each and every time. We call Him timeless and eternal since He transcends time; we call Him omnipresent since He is beyond space; we are composed, so He is composite; consequently, we call Him immutable since time and composition engender potentiality by being the metaphysical prerequisites for it, and He transcends both, being pure actuality; we call Him infinite since He is qualitatively eminently above all things in this world, circumscribable and finite; consequently, He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenelovent: but all we gain from Him are notions, for we define Him in relation to ourselves through negation, whether privation or eminence, but we never define Him or comprehend Him, since by conceptualizing Him in contradistinction to ourselves, we fail to elucidate Him on His own terms. His essence is truly beyond us; it is far eminently above the attributes predicated of Him. The divine attributes or names are comprehensibly incomprehensible, for through empirical experience we have notions of infinity through finitude that allows us to comprehend our limitude; but the essence of God is incomprehensibly incomprehensible, since it is infinitely greater than infinite, behind it, above it, necessarily engendering it.

It is because the universe is circumscribable that we know God cannot be.

My metaphysics are derived from the patristic and Eastern Orthodox intellectual tradition, primarily the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, St Maximus the Confessor, and St Gregory Palamas, who all distinguish between the essence of God that is synonymous to Him and the realities that are consequent to and derivative of said essence, which can be characterized as both extensions and aspects of it, ie. the divine names infinity, omnipotence, omnibenelovence, incompositeness, immutability, eternity, love, etc. It's not that we cannot know things about God, but that we can never know Him exhaustively, hence the distinction I make between His comprehensibly incomprehensible divine names and His incomprehensibly incomprehensible essence; we can never run out of things to discover or know about God. Each statement of negation carries concomitantly with itself a positive predication, but the essence of God is beyond negation, neither privation nor eminence being useful for explicating it, for it is eminently above eminence.

When we say that man is the image of God, what we mean is that God is a pure activity that we seek to imitate. That activity can be described as thought, though that does not fully exhaust what it entails. In God, the distinction between property and activity is non-existant; we logically distinguish between the attributes that define a thing's nature, and the activities that are consequent to said nature that fully and truly communicate it, so that we may more properly explicate God, but in God they are identical. God is as Aristotle says Thought Thinking of Itself, though that scarcely conveys the entirety of it. God eternally perpends Himself and His grandeur; He eternally contemplates the infinite upon infinite worlds He can create, among other things. The content and nature of His thought are ineffably indescribable, even if we can describe aspects of it. God's being perfectly simple necessarily implies that He has but one activity: His contemplating Himself. He cannot have another. All activities He conducts are but extensions of that one prime activity: God creates the world for the purpose of contemplating Himself. It is a monument to His being all powerful, all knowing, all loving, and so forth. He creates intelligent creatures so that they may experience a most perfect and sublime bliss in imitating by eternally perpending His inexhaustible transcendental being; the beauty in creation lies in the freely willed effort of limited creatures to exhaustively apprehend and exalt God as He does Himself, despite their being incapable of doing so. Man as God's image merely imitates Him, he never captures His being.

Well of course, but a Christian would deny that we can gain knowledge of the perfect and divine through pure rationality, with no empirical experience of our own; the Platonists and Peripatetics of centuries past produced many intellectually edifying and compelling systems of metaphysics and metaethics, but often they are but pure speculation. Christianity offers us direct Revelation from the higher realms; the knowledge attained through Scripture is superior to that from natural revelation, ie. the knowledge we get from observation of the created world, the first and greatest theophany of all alongside the Incarnation, for both are activities proper solely to God.

We may distinguish two criteria through which we can apprehend the nature of God's activities: whether or not they are proper solely to God, and whether or not they reveal exhaustively the nature of God. As previously mentioned in [...], the essential activity of God's perpending Himself is inaccessible to us; it shall forever remain a mystery. But that is His internal activity, within God Himself; its extensions, the external activities that are consequent to and derivative of it yet only contingently so, the ones that relate to creation, are the ones through which we come to know God. They cannot and never do reveal God fully to us. God's creating the world is what leads us to contemplate the cause of all that is, as well as begin to conceptualize His attributes; His theophanies ammend and elaborate upon said knowledge. But many of His activities God can conduct through His intermediaries. He can contingently imbue them with aspects and exiguous amounts of His power (as with Moses parting the sea), but He can never contingently confer onto a creature the fullness of the breadth and expanse of His power, for His power is proper to His essence, His nature. There are certain activities that He can conduct, even if they do not fully communicate the extent of His essence: such are the creation of the world and the Incarnation, a most salubrious munificence from God. Only God can exist outside of time and possesses the omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenelovence prerequisite to engender it, but that does not communicate His essence; with His life, death and resurrection, Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the most perfect image of God the Father Almighty, His Word and Wisdom Who in the beginning was with Him and through Whom all things were made and in Whom me live, allowed human nature to participate in His divine nature, bequeathed to Him by His Father, by imitating to its most metaphysically possible extent its attributes: for in imitating His simplicity and eternity, we become immortal and indestructible, and in imitating His infinity, we strive eternally to reach Him. Only God can make others gods. He became man so that we might become gods, sons of the Most High.

[...]
Thus, God's act of creation and His act of healing human nature are the only two acts that are fully proper to God but do not communicate His essence; no wonder since the latter is an extension of the former. It is what proves that the Son and the Spirit are God: for it is in the latter and through the former that we may know God the Father by becoming gods in imitation of His glory.

[...]
[...]
Christ is risen, brother.

[...]
>>gets BTFOd by pagan deities and iron chariots
>muh New Atheist memes from 2006
You're illiterate

[...]
It can utilize probability to make reasonable conjectures, but if the singularity was eternal you'd still need to explain what caused it burst suddenly, making it likely that it came into being the moment it fissiparated into the universe.

>Thus leading to your inability to make a single meaningful reply to anything that anyone else posts.
Point to just a single statement that I failed to substantively refute in one of my replies.

Your initial post was entirely predicated on an inability to comprehend a sliver of what I had articulated in my prior posts; you seemingly wholly missed the point of my explicating the distinction between God's internal essential activity that is identical with His Being and the external activities that are contingently willed by Him as excrescences that are extensions of His one internal activity, unnecessary and arbitrily chosen from our narrow perspective but nonetheless meaningful (as God could have chosen to not conduct them as a freely willing agent, but they cannot contravene His one activity of eternal self-contemplation, merely extend it: think of it as a marathon runner choosing to do one extra lap, an activity that is not contrary to his prior activity but is not necessary as such due to its already having been completed); the former is incomprehensible, inaccessible, ineffable, eminently transcendental, whereas the latter is something we can perceive and apprehend, attaining true and meaningful yet inexhaustive knowledge of God, which though splendorous and incandescent is but an infinitesmal of the comprehensive totality of His Being. In [...], I quite literally defend Christianity as superior to Hellenistic speculation due to direct empirical interactions with God. That is not contradictory with dismissing the idea that a discipline founded on methodological naturalism can disprove the supernatural. The extent to which you completely misread and misapprehended all I had said is astonishing.

As for St Gregory of Nyssa, he propounded most sagaciously and inspiredly the doctrine of epektasis, of eternal moving repose in God, our eternally imitating God's own transcendental and ineffable act of self-contemplation; man's telos is God, something he can never attain, but he nonetheless continues to strive towards Him, sipping from an infinite well of water, each gulp satisfying his thirst yet further igniting a most passionate desire for more from the reservoir that is God's glory which he can never exhaust. Upon man's resurrection in the regenerated flesh so thoroughly repaired by God's most salubrious munificence, there shall be no contradiction between man's passions, urges, and his reason, for both shall be united in seeking after God. God shall walk among men and be most thoroughly exalted by those who know Him but not truly Him, those who live in His comprehensibly incomprehensible infinite glory but do not see the incomprehensibly incomprehensible essence that is greater than infinite an infinite amount of times, transcending ever our notions of infinity, beyond which we cannot comprehend. All shall be like Moses, eternally ascending on Mount Sinai, never getting to see God's face (Exodus 33:20) but basking in His glory.

>And you can't metaphysically prove it is impossible.
Yes I can. Barney the Purple Dinosaur is a temporal, composite entity, who due to his being a bundle of qualitative and mereological properties on account of existing within time and space is subject to alteration and is ontological circumscribed, ie. finite. He cannot cause an entity that ontologically transcends all metaphysical preconditions for his own subsistence to come into being.

>So now you're claiming you have empirical evidence of God?
How are you such an illiterate midwit that you've had the opportunity to read my posts 50 times over but still don't comprehend a thing I am saying? Here's your empirical evidence: the resurrection of Jesus, the Biblical theophanies, miracles on Mt Athos.

>The purple dinosaur Barney interacts with the universe in the same way you claim God does while being an atemporal, simple entity that created God.
So you're a roundabout Christian who call God the Father Almighty a purple dinosaur by the name of Barney, and the Son of God, Who is Word, Power and Wisdom of God, simply "God." Strange, but alright. So long as you admit Barney's aseity, you're not awful. But you should perhaps study the doctrine of inseparable operations more closely:
refuting the following:

[...]

[...]

[...]

[...]

[...]

>>I can also conceive of your infinite property being consequent to something.
No you can not. If you are dealing with my "infinite property", in good faith, then you must concede that existence is contingent on said property. Therefore, nothing else can exist, no other cause or Gods to speak of. Moreover, by infinite here we mean it in the true sense of the word. This property, or rather agent, is a changeless standard of all that is. There can be, quite literally, nothing outside of this.

>And I can easily conceive of a necessary universe with no cause.
You sound like Hume. Just because you can imagine a rabbit without a cause doesn't mean cause and effect don't exist. On the contrary, your idea may very well result in a generation of philosophers laughing at your stupidity.