Alan Watts once gave a lecture in which he said something like “We’re all the Big Bang”, meaning the creation of the universe has been happening since then and is still happening, and we’re all part of that, we’re all made up of the stuff that came from the Big Bang, and the ongoing process of creation never stopped. He explained it far more eloquently than I have, but that was the gist of it. That’s the first thing that jumped into my mind when I read your question, “How can God create something infinite and exist entirely within it at the same time?”

In a way, that question also reminds me of Taoism and the idea that the Tao is everything. Tao is not in everything or around everything or part of everything, it *is* everything and everything is it.

–”I’m in awe of everything that is. Exploring questions & answers about the nature of reality, quantum mechanics, string theory, consciousness, artificial intelligence, how we (and all of this) came to be… this is what I live for, really.”

I’m right there with you. You’ve basically summed up precisely what I live for.

~ Kris

Thanks for your response. Sometimes I’m hesitant to put up these types of posts that are more like philosophical reflection on my part than anything else, so it’s great getting a real response to my thoughts.

In that vein, you got me thinking about a bunch of stuff, so here it goes:

The Big Bang represents a starting point (”something out of nothing”) as opposed to everything existing infinitely back into the past; this seems to dictate the need for a creator.

So in a sense it seems the idea of a Creator God is logical if we imagine a beginning. Problem is this just moves the question around. So where did God come from? Typical answer is that God was never created, but is infinite and “self-sustaining.”

Now we’re basically back at the idea that’s it possible for something to exist without a creator, infinitely.

And yet the concept of INFINITY does weigh heavily on my brain and creates all sorts of weirdness when I think too much about it.

(Side note: When exercising I often puzzle over the idea of “infinity in one direction”, like the idea that something can have existed infinitely in the past, but have a definitive ending in the future, or the other way around (the other way around is more intuitive). But how can you chop up infinity? Seems easy enough in mathematical terms, but… eh…I’m rambling!!)

So where does all this leave me:

1) A creator God does not exist.
2) A personal God does not exist.
3) Furthermore, if God exists, God exists within everything else, not outside of it.

I don’t think this means that the “spiritual impulse” does not exist - or rather, that it should be dismissed. The search for these answers is a spiritual one, even if it leads rightly to athiesm or some sort of intellectual or abstract spiritual understanding or embrace for the universe, which does not include a God.

Whew!

What do you think?

I find myself going in that same circle quite often — if this universe was created by an intelligent Creator, who or what created that Creator? And if the Creator was created by something, who/what created whatever created the Creator, and so forth, extending onward into the infinity of the past? When viewed from that perspective, it’s a neverending string of events that seemingly has no beginning, no actual point that can be labeled “the first creation”.

When it comes to the Big Bang idea, I like to think of it as one in a series of Big Bangs, but that takes us back to the same question: How far back do we go before we reach “the first Big Bang”? And how did something — an entire universe — emerge out of an infinity of nothingness?

I have difficulty, as I’m guessing do most people who aren’t physicists, wrapping my mind around the idea of something being created from nothing. We tend to think of creation as the process of taking a set of ingredients and manipulating it in some way to produce an end result that is the sum of its parts. But when we consider the creation of the universe, it’s not so easy to grasp because we’re suddenly trying to understand how it all emerged from nothing. We can’t relate to “nothingness” because we’ve never experienced it. (LOL, if we were in the midst of nothingness, it would no longer be nothingness. It’s a catch-22.) Yet we’re also trying to grasp the concept of a creator who either:

1) exists outside our closed system, in that infinite nothingness, and created the closed system in which we exist, or

2) is inside and part of everything within this closed system (LOL, in which case I wonder, is there anything outside the closed system?)

I don’t subscribe to either idea in full, but I prefer idea #2, that the creator (either God, the Infinite Source, or whatever other terminology a person chooses to use) created this universe out of itself, that we’re all aspects of that creator and the creator experiences itself through us. I’m not sure why I prefer that idea, other than that it seems so poetic. But neither of those two ideas explain where that creator came from or how it could exist infinitely. LOL, so we’re back to square one.

I could immerse myself in discussions like this for hours and hours. I love this stuff.

“How can God create something infinite and exist entirely within it at the same time?”

I have a problem with this as well. But I have no problem with the idea that “our” idea of time and space is but a creation, and did not exist prior to the Big Bang. So that eliminates the dilemma of “what happened before the Big Bang”? There was no such thing as “before” the Big Bang. So “God”, or the first cause, exists both within and outside of the universe which He created. That, to me, is a bit easier to grasp.

Speaking as a Buddhist I thought it would be great to point out that though Buddhism is non-theistic the Buddha himself believed in and taught about the gods of Hinduism. His point was that all existent beings (including the gods) were caught in the cycle of samsara. Being a god doesn’t guarantee nirvana - in fact, the human incarnation is viewed as more conducive to enlightenment than any other.

Oneironaught,
I wasn’t aware of this. Funny to put the gods in the same cycle as us… does Buddha just try to piss of the monotheists or what?