A timeless being cannot create

[The Grand Nudger]

Not so much. The belief in god is not interchangeable with the belief in afterlives or conscious continuity. It commonly exploits that fear, and that belief, sure.

I say commonly, but that’s a recent development of a single religious tradition and our place in time. The idea that human beings were finite can be and commonly has been expressed by other traditions in other times, and it does persist today in the margins of post classical encroachment and heterodox belief.

[tackattack]

If He is a personal God that "walks in the garden" with his creation, your fault is in your definition of "unaffected by temporal changes" . God is eternal, consistent and He is eternally Himself is usually the definition.

He is only eternally himself if he is absolutely static and does nothing whatsoever. 

It is like saying god is by definition 2+2=5 and never wrong in his math.

Concocting a definition does not make the ill conceived ignoramus fantasy Less ill conceived, less revealing of the ignorance of the fantasist, or less of a fantasy.

That a definition like this can be claimed only shows how shallow the concept of god is, and how pathetically besotted the adherents to this fantasy have become.

As Gae pointed out as well, I thought it was a commonly understood definition but apparently still needed to be pointed out. This isn't a definition I concocted or had to do word salad to line up. Let me show you an example,
"You are only eternally yourself if you are absolutely static and do nothing whatsoever." Doesn't that seem a little ridiculous? You are yourself always, whether you're inside or outside or cleaning a toilet. The fact you clean toilets for eternity doesn't make you any less you. In the case of this argument I am that I am.

[Deesse23]

At work.

Hello Belaqua.  

Just some questions for my puzzlement.

Would you classify your diety as "Being 'Maximaly' great"?

Y'know, the greatest greatness a great thing can be.... kind'a thing.

Cheers.

Is this in reference to his claim that the *real* omnipotent god can do *only* logical possibilities? And you are gonna tell him you can conceive of a god that can do logic impossibilities?

Question from me to Belaqua:
Who has the authority to define what qualities the *real* god has? As far as i know every theist on this planet has his own definition of what his god is precisely is supposed to be. Sure, some definitions seem to be self defeating, but so what? So who are you to claim that omnipotence must be the kinda omnipotence you (and Aquinas and Aristotle of course) have in mind?

[The Grand Nudger]

Pointless, miracles are the impossible by another name. The incredible retreating god is s rhetorical device, not the god believed in by the faithful.

Saint Tommy believed in miracle god as much as any other nutter in his time. At the end of his life, he even believed that he’d received a personal revelation that reduced his work, in his words, to straw.

He’s been retconned as something he wasn’t for no reason other than it’s being useful to the Catholic Church to have done so. He was a charlatan and a loon whose theology was abandoned and only recently revived in an attempt to intellectualize their dying institution as something it never was in the first place.

These arguments over the god of the philosophers is nothing other than trading on credibility that never existed. Aristotle was wrong, and directly as a consequence of that, Saint Tom was wrong, full stop. At least the former cared whether or not his ideas were accurate. The latter emphatically and demonstrably did not.

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

Hello Belaqua.  

Just some questions for my puzzlement.

Would you classify your diety as "Being 'Maximaly' great"?

Y'know, the greatest greatness a great thing can be.... kind'a thing.

Cheers.

Is this in reference to his claim that the *real* omnipotent god can do *only* logical possibilities? And you are gonna tell him you can conceive of a god that can do logic impossibilities?

Hey Deesse23!

No.

Just trying for some understanding, is all.

Personally I find all the concepts/abilites/propositions that the Christian deity has as pretty incoherant.

But getting a better handle on terms and meanings is always a good thing.

Cheers.

[no one]

Chad32:
And that's not even getting into how a timeless being acquired the power to bring things into existence by commanding it to.

Obviously, by collecting all the Pokemon, Duh!

[brewer]

At work.

Hello Belaqua.  

Just some questions for my puzzlement.

Would you classify your diety as "Being 'Maximaly' great"?

Y'know, the greatest greatness a great thing can be.... kind'a thing.

Cheers.

Is this in reference to his claim that the *real* omnipotent god can do *only* logical possibilities? And you are gonna tell him you can conceive of a god that can do logic impossibilities?

Question from me to Belaqua:
Who has the authority to define what qualities the *real* god has? As far as i know every theist on this planet has his own definition of what his god is precisely is supposed to be. Sure, some definitions seem to be self defeating, but so what? So who are you to claim that omnipotence must be the kinda omnipotence you (and Aquinas and Aristotle of course) have in mind?

Which simply indicates that humans created gods.

[comet]

I think there's a logical argument to be made against God's existence here on the basis of incompatible properties. God is outside time, we're told. He's not only eternal (existing forever) but also unaffected by temporal changes. He is after all the creator too, and that includes time. Yet when something is created, it comes into being. That entails a previous instance where it didn't exist of course. Yet if time itself was created, that makes no sense. To speak of a time "before" time is meaningless. Moreover, how does a timeless being create while outside time (and space as well)? A creation involves a change in space and time. It's enough to see how this could be done by a lesser being. How though could it be with a timeless being? I suggest it's incoherent, and the very fact that things do exist shows that such a being (i.e. God) doesn't. What do you think?

justify not believing any way ya want.

from an engineering perspective it seems more likely they have some properties of their god correct and some properties not so much.

[The Grand Nudger]

Godgineering?

[mcc1789]

Ah, yes. All those experts on who and what God is have told us (or their holy books have told us) that God cannot possibly be a temporal thing. He is above and beyond temporality, they say, in much the same way that he is above and beyond physicality. No self-respecting God would dirty himself by association with material objects. No self-respecting God would associate himself with any given moment of time, such as the present... or a specific movement of the past or future.

The Hindus have a concept of Brahman who is not only entwined with, but characterized by the events of the present moment. As disagreeable as the concept of Brahman may be to many here, there is no contradiction with Brahman like the one you have described with "other" god-concepts. As I see it, Brahman, is far more realistic than those other "timeless" god concepts.

This wouldn't apply to every concept of course, only a particular one.