Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Minimalist]

The whole point I'm getting at is that there had to be some being that did not need to be created.

No, there did not. You are a prisoner of your own delusions.

[Captain Colostomy]

Huh, dunno what happened to my post.

BettyG-

No. Just...no.

[Esquilax]

I need to define some things about the nature of God.

Huh, silly me. I thought you just asserted some things baselessly and expected us all to swallow them.

The whole point I'm getting at is that there had to be some being that did not need to be created.

Knowledge claims are demonstrated, not just asserted. How do you know there needs to be this thing? How do you know it needs to be a being? And how do you know that being is necessarily your god?

This something we know from logic since the universe did not and cannot create itself.

And how do you know the universe hasn't just always existed in one form or another? See, according to your earlier quote, you already believe in eternal things that need no creation, you just want your presupposition about it being your god to be true. How can you possibly say that?

There had to be an intelligent being to create it because we observe a complex universe.

How do you know it's not just a necessary alignment of the laws of physics? And before you come back with "who created physics?" I'll need you to detail how you know physics needed to be created at all.

God is the nth degree of perfection, so since to be a being is a greater perfection than not being a being, God is a being.

Where did you hear that? Was it a bible? How do you know that book is true? How are you intending to demonstrate any existential claims about god?

Nothing comes from nothing.

Except your god, right?

God is not a thing,

Either you just admitted he doesn't exist, or that's the most lazy example of special pleading I've ever encountered.

Since He is uncreated, He is not limited by time and space. Instead, He created time and space.

She stated, arrogantly, without even a shred of evidence.

By definition, God is the uncaused cause of everything.

Definitions are formed by mutual consensus, and you'd better believe that I disagree with your proposal. No consensus, no definition. Enjoy language at work.

God, by definition, is eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent.

Nope.

See what I just did there? Didn't feel good, right? That approach is your entire post.

The Higgs particle and other particles had to be created, so they exist in time and space because there was a time when they did not exist. So you cannot compare the characteristics of God to particles.

You can't compare god to anything extant until you've demonstrated that he, too, exists. You got that in you?

[Undeceived]

It seems that the whole "jesus" as a personification of Christos did not begin until later in the second century when, all of a sudden Greco- Roman writers like Celsus and Lucian of Samosata did start to take notice of this rather silly cult.

What about this bone box from 63 AD mentioning Jesus? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...suary.html
The writing of Acts is also dated to the 60s AD, including mentions of Jesus.
Or just answer this question: If Jesus did not exist, where did Christianity come from? How could Paul write, "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor. 1:23)?

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Undeceived, clearly you have no concept of how important a contemporary is in determining whether or not someone or something existed.

The earliest histories of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than four hundred years after his death. Plato was born in 427 BC-- his earliest manuscript is dated 895 BC. Both are considered to be generally trustworthy. In fact, if you researched, you’d be hard-pressed to find originals of most historical documents. Other examples, first date is time written and second is earliest copy:
Herodotus (History) 480 - 425 BC _____900 AD
Thucydides (History) 460 - 400 BC ____900 AD
Aristotle (Philosopher) 384 - 322 BC ___1,100 AD
Caesar (History) 100 - 44 BC _________900 AD

Now compare those to Jesus. We have physical Gospel quotes from as early as three decades after Jesus' death.

[Bad Writer]

I think I peed a little.

Hopefully this fixes your post.

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Undeceived, clearly you have no concept of how important a contemporary is in determining whether or not someone or something existed.

The earliest histories of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than four hundred years after his death. Plato was born in 427 BC-- his earliest manuscript is dated 895 BC. Both are considered to be generally trustworthy. In fact, if you researched, you’d be hard-pressed to find originals of most historical documents. Other examples, first date is time written and second is earliest copy:
Herodotus (History) 480 - 425 BC _____900 AD
Thucydides (History) 460 - 400 BC ____900 AD
Aristotle (Philosopher) 384 - 322 BC ___1,100 AD
Caesar (History) 100 - 44 BC _________900 AD

Now compare those to Jesus. We have physical Gospel quotes from as early as three decades after Jesus' death.

How do we know Alexander the Great existed? For all we know he is legend just like King Arthur. The same goes for Jesus. At least with Alexander the Great we aren't making up a religion based on someone that may or may not have existed.

And you still haven't given me any hope in your future of understanding what a contemporary is.

[Minimalist]

What about this bone box from 63 AD mentioning Jesus? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...suary.html

Josephus speaks of over 20 jesuses ( Y'shua - transliterated as Iesou in Greek and (much) later as "Jesus" in Latin when they got around to inventing the letter "J."

It was a very common name. For that matter, so was Yosep. So Y'shua bar Yosep would have been a dime a dozen. BTW, none of the Y'shua's that Josephus wrote about died and came back from the dead. A number of them were killed....but they stayed DEAD. Centuries later, the noted xtian liar Eusebius suddenly (ahem) "discovered" the so-called Testimonium Flavianum when the absence of your godboy from the historical record became an embarrassment to the newly empowered xtian thugs who supported Constantine in his bid for power. Luckily for us a somewhat earlier xtian writer named Origen had made specific reference to Book XVIII of Antiquities of the Jews and not only did not find the glorious reference which Eusebius later "discovered" ( but only if "discovered" in this instance means "forged!") he directly contradicts Eusebius' later claim.

I am sure that there are xtian scholars who will go to their graves swearing that Acts and Luke and Matty and the rest of the holy horseshit were written while the godboy was still bleeding on the fucking cross. They were not. The earliest xtian writers know nothing about them.

Xtianity, as we now know it, emerged in the mid-2d century and even then underwent continuous revision.

You believe in a pile of man-made shit, my son.

[pocaracas]

Esquilax already tore your post down, but I'll just add a few things here and there.

I need to define some things about the nature of God.

And why should a god require you, lowly human, to define these things?
Why should a god require that I accept your view/interpretation of what other humans wrote about that god?
What does god need with a starship?!!?

The whole point I'm getting at is that there had to be some being that did not need to be created. This something we know from logic since the universe did not and cannot create itself.

And this is the part of Krauss's book that you failed to understand.
There is a very real chance that all the constituents of the Universe have always been there... under some other guise, true, but it was always there... at some point, for whatever reason, we got the big bang. Krauss's major point on this is that, adding up all the energy and anti-energy you get a nice fat ZERO. Conservation of energy? check!
A God-like interference would have added some energy into this mix and the whole would be far from zero.
So.... on the whole, the Universe is nothing.
Try to wrap your head around that... it's not easy, even I have some difficulty with it...

There had to be an intelligent being to create it because we observe a complex universe.

Aren't you working backwards?
We see a complex universe... well, not that complex, but a bit more complex than "sleep, eat, fuck & die".
So our limited comprehension leaps to some higher intelligence behind that "complexity"... I wouldn't make such a leap. There may be other explanations. Why don't we try to find them, instead of getting stuck in one that has no evidence to support it?

God is the nth degree of perfection, so since to be a being is a greater perfection than not being a being, God is a being.

Superman is the nth degree of perfection... n=10?... so since to be a being is a greater perfection than not being a being, superman is a being.
Way to go, supes!
Now, the same for Wolverine, Spiderman, The Spawn, Freddy Kruger, darth vader, yoda, etc...

Nothing comes from nothing.

Krauss is still making your head ache, huh?
The Nothing which is empty space is not really nothing. It's full of virtual particles and fields.

God is not a thing, though Jesus did take on flesh about 0 AD give or take a few.

This view of Jesus was made up some time later. Here's what a scholar of the subject says:

Since He is uncreated, He is not limited by time and space. Instead, He created time and space.

No, space-time seems to have always been there.

By definition, God is the uncaused cause of everything. God, by definition, is eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent.

Yes... a pretty definition.
But where is this being? How did you get to know this about it?
Let me guess: someone told you, someone wrote about it in a book.

Well, I will only accept such information coming directly from the origin. I dislike the human chain of information transfer regarding this kind of entities. Too many inventions get put in the story along the way...

The Higgs particle and other particles had to be created, so they exist in time and space because there was a time when they did not exist. So you cannot compare the characteristics of God to particles.

How do you know there was a time when time and space did not exist?

[downbeatplumb]

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/new...nce-space/

Ring-like patterns in the sky could be ghostly imprints of a universe that existed before the big bang, according to a controversial new study.

If the theory is correct, the cosmic rings may be the first real-world evidence that our current universe is just the latest in an endless string of recycled universes, the study authors say. (Related: "Universe Reborn Endlessly in New Model of the Cosmos.")

Astronomers found the circular patterns in a new analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the radiation left over from the big bang that now permeates the universe.

Within the newly described rings, many of which are nested like ripples in a pond, the temperature is more uniform than elsewhere in the CMB sky.

[StuW]

This something we know from logic since the universe did not and cannot create itself.

Where are you getting this from? Particles are created out of nothing all the time through quantum fluctuation, it's a basic principle of quantum mechanics, is the origin of Hawking radiation and is why there is no such thing as a vacuum! and before you say "Prove it", they produce measurable effects, such as the Lamb shift and the Casimir-Polder force.

[Bad Writer]

What does god need with a starship?!!?

This.