If God exists, where is he? (Page 3)

ghostgeek: You're living in the wrong century. Nowadays people worship life and want more than their bodies can give them.

Zanjan: I get more than my body can give. I traded off hiking for growing roses that have a fragrance. My lungs are weaker now but my mind can still inhale.

ghostgeek: I've got roses that are heading for the sky and have cornered the market on thorns. The bastard things were only supposed to grow three feet.

Zanjan: Yes, nurserymen aren't experts. They only look after young plants. I've had that same experience but soon came to learn they'll sell you anything. You should have consulted the breeders.

Life is supposed to be challenging so you'll gain the experience you need to prevent the wool from being pulled over your eyes. At least your roses are a barrier to thieves and spies. Be thankful to the Lord for having made them.

ghostgeek: "Yeah, I've got a hedge that only the suicidal would try to breach.

Zanjan: Like you, I’m on the downgrade with maybe a couple years or a few hours left. Saying ‘Who gives a shit’ was what we said when we were young with the fierce energy to challenge all the fates that lay ahead.

No, at our age, it’s unwise to flip the bird – by the time our knuckles respond, the reproving moment has passed, leaving our hand extended like a staghorn antler. BUT, at our age, being saintly and virginal is a piece of cake. Why not command the effortless and tax- free?

You ask where God is - He’s right under your nose.
Don’t reach for the fridge, reach into your heart. (Ok, that sounds lame but it works)

ghostgeek: I'm sober today and ruminating on what it means to call God placeless.

Definition of 'placeless' - adjective; not rooted in a specific place or community [ Collins English Dictionary ]

Well, that doesn't sound like God because he isn't in any place, is He, however unspecific? No, he's swanning around in the non-existence of nothing, which makes me wonder how He could possibly exist.

Zanjan: The word "roots" suggests a place of birth/issuance. That would apply to the Tree of Life but not to God, per se.

God is "swanning about" in eternity. Eternity has no time or space so, the word "placeless" , in religion, is applied to that effect. Since language has its limitations, some things are better observed than described.

"Pre-existence", on the other hand, is unknown and inconceivable to us. That word has to stand on its own. We don't need to bother with it to understand how God moves. God is changeless; therefore, His ways never change.

ghostgeek: If God, or anything else for that matter, never changes then He, or it, is inert, totally unresponsive and incapable of action or thought. Just something in nothing. Quite inconceivable in other words.

ghostgeek: This mightn't bother you but I think it should.

Zanjan: There you go again, only thinking of physics and things that apply to the physical plane.

To be changeless doesn't mean doing nothing. God is always working - His WAYS never change.

ghostgeek: Why shouldn't I be thinking of the physical plane, seeing as it's the only thing we know anything about? But even if there's some other plane, it can't exist in the nothingness of nothing. And yet that's seemingly what we're expected to believe. I find it quite loony.

ghostgeek: The problem, as I see it, boils down to this. Where did God park His cloud if He was the only thing that existed before the universe was created?

Zanjan: The physical plane ISN'T the only one we know about - you're speaking for yourself there.

"it can't exist in the nothingness of nothing."

It doesn't.

The physical senses feed only physical information to the brain. I think every kid has heard the story of Flatland to explain the dimensions. Whereas, the mind detects the spiritual realities and processes those through the faculty of intellect.

To imagine one can trap that in a box or hide it in a closet is silly. The individual soul is the issuance of spiritual light, itself - its 'heat' must affect everything near it.

You remember Jesus saying 'No one hides their lamp under a bushel'. He wasn't just pointing out the obvious; it follows what would happen of you did. You have to intuit the reality. The bushel ( was a wooden bucket or woven basket) is affected by the heat and will react in kind; likewise, anything that passes nearby. Nobody needs exploding bombs.

Ergo, if you don't mention your good deeds, others will tell people about them. God wanted people to see the Source from afar.

Meanwhile, Pre-existence is a dimension above all that is. There are no lower dimensions without the presence of the higher. There's no general without foot soldiers and there's no king without subjects.

You've assumed there was a time when physical matter didn't exist, aka 'nothing'. How would you be able to establish that? Your feeble senses can barely keep up with daily demands on earth. For all intents and purposes, everything outside the field of your vision doesn't exist so would be meaningless to you.

ghostgeek: I'm not the one who's assuming there was a time when nothing other than God existed, but anyone who believes the Bible is forced to do so.

ghostgeek: So, if there wasn't anything, how could there be something? Seems a contradiction to me.

Zanjan: Bible believers aren't forced - they believe but often don't understand. Some believers are actually quite ignorant but there's enough well-educated believers to present reasonable responses to questions such as yours, no matter how absurd. We don't consult the ignorant nor do we imagine the ignorant will always change their mind.

Since part of the evidence is the text, itself, one can hardly say they're making assumptions.
Are you saying *you're* not assuming? If so, what's your reference point?

In my experience, most Christians think something always existed, being able to see that everything in the universe changes. They understand that nature rushes in to replace a void.

Perhaps it's you that's misinterpreting. "Nothing" only means an unrecognized presence. For example, yesterday, no cake existed in my house: today, it exists, sitting right on the table. Yet all of its ingredients have been present in my kitchen on an ongoing basis. Clearly, something happened to produce that result.

Life is chock full of many beginnings and endings, firsts and lasts. Technically, all of those pre- existed, just like the ingredients in the cake. Nothing was missing except the timing.

ghostgeek: Just found this and wonder if it mirrors your way of thinking:

Because of my stand on a young universe, a man approached me and said, “But it makes no sense to believe in a young universe. After all, what was God doing all that time before He created?”

I answered, “What time do you mean?”

The person answered, “Well, it doesn’t make sense to say that God has always existed, and yet He didn’t create the universe until just six thousand years ago.” Apparently, he was worried that God once had a lot of time on His hands with nothing to do.

I then went on to explain that because God has always existed, then it is meaningless to ask, “What was God doing all that time before He created?” No matter how far you were to go back in time, you would still have an infinite amount of time before He created! So even if the universe were billions or trillions or quadrillions of years old, you could still ask the same question.

I then answered, “But you are missing the fact that there was no time before God created.”

Time is actually a created entity. The first verse of the Bible reads: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, emphasis added).

A study of this verse reveals that God created time, space, and matter on the first day of Creation Week. No one of these can have a meaningful existence without the others. God created the space-mass-time universe. Space and matter must exist in time, and time requires space and matter. Time is only meaningful if physical entities exist and events transpire during time.

“In the beginning . . .” is when time began! There was no time before time was created!

[ https://answersingenesis.org/who-is-god/what-was-god-doing-before-creation/ ]

ghostgeek: This, of course, doesn't provide any sort of answer to my question. There is no hint here as to where God performed the miracle of Creation or how, without the pre-existence of time, He could actually do anything. People, it seems to me, pay too little attention to the nuts and bolts of their beliefs.

Zanjan: That Bible verse says nothing about time, space or the universe. We shouldn't
read into something that's simply not there. When people flip ahead in the Book, they can't resist going back to their preferred spot and filling in between the lines. That's messed up.

It makes sense to leave it pristine then ask again, "in the beginning of WHAT"? The text doesn't state 'in the beginning.... of creation'. Since the heavens and earth were created, that would be the end, not the beginning. We'll have to continue the exploration.

Instead, we're told how God moves - that is, what happened first, then what happened next and so on. This verse is the preamble to a larger story. However, from thoughtfully reading all of Genesis, we gather this is the introduction to a divine cycle; having been designed in advance, it unfolds in phases in an orderly manner.

If it IS a cycle, then the so called 'creation' story is a template.

If we were to answer the question of WHAT? In the beginning of.... 'a divine cycle' OR In the beginning of ...' spiritual life', I think we'd be closer to the truth than is commonly accepted.

Zanjan: Of course, time is a human construct, requiring physical substance to hook it into. Heaven is not physical substance - the sky is, be it the atmosphere or cosmos.

When we say that God existed before time, that certainly doesn't imply He'd been doing nothing. The mind of God must necessarily produce something as a constant. Thought and action go hand in hand. So, if He isn't creating something new, He must be sustaining something already created. If He's doing both simultaneously, that's re-creating.

Having said that, later on in the texts, God does give a time conversion rate but this is only for human understanding as it applies to the future of mankind, specifically, in matters of religion.

ghostgeek: Action, be it thinking or making a mountain, requires the existence of time as a prerequisite. So if God decided to do a spot of creating, this implies that time is also eternal and not brought about at the Creation.

ghostgeek: Seems physics is starting to tread the same road:

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense--that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology.

[ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-beginning-of-time-2006-02/ ]

Zanjan: "this implies that time is also eternal and not brought about at the Creation. "

I think it implies pace, not time. In eternity, there is no time so things don't unfold there - in eternity, they already have. It's merely a matter of them being manifested on the physical plane at the appropriate pace.


For example, your name, your spouse and 3 children and their names, the first house you bought - those events all existed in eternity before you were born. We've called them destiny but "fate" is the better word because it can't be changed by us.

As you were born and aged on the physical plane, your mind manifested your part in those events being played out here; you only recognized them at each particular stage of your life. The timing of your realization had nothing to do with their creation. For all you know, your fates were created 500 years ago.

Zanjan: To my knowledge, the BBT never suggested there was a beginning of time. The date of our universe as we know it begins with the appearance of the first primordial suns.

Those suns weren't like the suns we see - they didn't have a carbon core. It took the birth and death of millions of suns to gradually build larger and larger cores. Obviously, the elements and certain conditions had to exist before those first suns turned on. We know how suns are made; the theory is based on known laws of the universe. Ergo, the first laws.

If the universe didn't exist prior to sun-making, neither would any laws of physics exist. There simply wouldn't be any material to work with. So, where text says "Out of nothing, I created...', we can understand that this 'nothingness' merely lacks order. Chaos has material but no visible form.

I'm lost in the string theory but I don't need to know that to intuit the universe has always been present in various forms. My favorite form is the one that can sustain mankind, albeit its a bit of a puzzle how the human species has ever been useful to the environment.