Which Comes First?

[Ryft]

The flood comes to mind ...

You just earned me twenty bucks. I appreciate that, thank you. As I was typing out my request to you I had a friend sitting beside me; I looked at him and said, "I'll bet you $20 that the one and only example he comes up with is a fundy interpretation of Noah's flood." Way too predictable. It's nothing personal, by the way: had I been talking to Adrian or Eilonnwy or anyone else, I would have made the same bet. And I would have won.

Unfortunately, the example does not work. Even if we grant an actual worldwide flood, that would not serve as evidence that it was God who acted to bring it about. As you already recognize, rain and flooding have natural explanations. But Noah having "knowledge of the flood before it happened" likewise doesn't provide sufficient evidence, and for quite a number of reasons but I'll undercut it with just one proposed counterfactual: a technologically advanced alien race, wanting to preserve the delicate biological experiment they are conducting on this planet, had the technological means to detect the impending flood and warned Noah.

Ergo, a fundy interpretation of Noah's flood fails to serve as evidence of God acting. So I have to reassert the question: "If God acting on reality should leave evidence, what does that evidence look like, such that it would indicate God as the agent to you?"

Yes, I would agree [that nothing exists unless it has spatio-temporal properties]

Then the universe does not exist. (How ever a person chooses to define existence, at minimum it must allow us to say the universe exists. This is why no philosopher worth his salt defines existence in spatio-temporal terms: such a definition self-destructs.)

I agree: if there were a God, he would need to exist outside space and time in order to create space and time. Your definition is correct in that respect. So where that leaves me is, "Why God at all? Why the Christian God?"

This answer will be too succinct by half, but it nevertheless is the answer and can be the starting point of further conversation: "Because the God of Christianity is the only answer that remains constant under every and all considerations, the only answer that provides intelligibility to the entire scope of human experience." (I have spent almost ten years studying several branches of philosophy, and I've also explored approximately two dozen world religions since the late '90s. In other words, I'm not talking out of my ass. I've done the work of testing this, and still continue to test it.)

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A truly 100% benevolent all-loving God would allow the moral, of course, but why would he also allow so much immorality?

Does the Bible describe God as "100% benevolent all-loving"? No. Ergo, why ask Christians about some deity foreign to their beliefs?

Morality is subjective ... from most of us: killing and raping, etc., is evil or wrong.

If John from Society A has an affair with Jane from Society B at a hotel in Society C, then how is the morality of the act to be judged? Worse yet, if Society A views affairs as immoral, Society B views affairs as moral, and the affair took place in Society C, then your view affirms a logical contradiction: the affair is both moral and immoral at the same time and in the same respect. And logical contradictions are necessarily false. You can either find a new moral theory or assert that morality as a normative principle does not exist (e.g., rape is neither wrong nor good).