Dear Resident Theists

[Whateverist]

Correct me if I'm wrong....

Okey dokey .. and welcome.

First cause:

It really is prior necessary conditions all the way down.  There is no bottom turtle.

We are part of the self-conscious universe. Our brains are the most complex things we know in the universe. We are parts of the universe that probe the universe and are fascinated by it, because being intelligent, we can also sense intelligence when it is there.

And that right there [my bolded] is why we sense God.  Just as the brain creates the world for us on a preconscious level, so it also creates a primal Thou.  Not because the primal Thou is literally out there, but because the brain is nimble about building up interactive profiles of "others' ranging from neighbors and family to enemies and even the dead.  

When the conscious mind reaches out to the primal Thou, there it is.  It was never the conscious mind that created the sense of how proud your dead granny would be.  The 'thou's the brain constructs are no more our conscious creations than what we see is.  Yet our brains produce both and much more.  Unbidden.

That doesn't mean there is actually an intelligence out there.  Our preconscious minds are wondrous things but they are no more infallible than we are.  The intelligence we consciously sought was unconsciously produced and then consciously found.  If that sounds nuts, imagine how it sounds to imagine a cosmic tinkerer making something from nothing.

But so what if the unconscious mind is producing this apprehension of intelligence and the conscious mind is interpreting that as the response of the primal-Thou/God?  It doesn't mean that the primal Thou produced by these deeper, archaic levels of the mind don't have anything useful to share.  If you like your relationship with God, keep it.  I just prefer to conceptualize the primal Thou as coming from the totality of my self, that which gives rise both to my conscious mind and the vast house of many  rooms which is unconscious from the point of view of the conscious mind. 

We are able to create things in the small scheme, and we look for a creator on the grand scheme of things. The Cal Tech supercomputer can now make measurements 10 to the 23rd power. It has been estimated by astronomers that the complexity of the universe in simply balancing gravity against the electric force needs calculations a hundred trillion times more precise. And this is just one aspect of the universe that without which life could never happen.

This reminds me of the the just-so story which explains the shape of the rain puddle.  Truly in heaven there is just such a hole and so on earth the puddle was formed in just that shape.  

The Universe had a beginning. It is no longer believed to be infinite. This was shown by the Big Bang theory.

The correct conclusion for the fact that we're unable to locate the bottom turtle is to say that any 'true' beginning is indefinite.  All we'll ever find as we search beneath each turtle is another turtle.  No it is not correct to say the universe had a beginning.