God's Existence

Thanks Pro. If we do not know what a god is, how do we know that it is capable of creating the universe? Just asserting god as a creator becomes a placeholder for ignorance and not an argument. As the GOE that Pro wants to present is utterly mysterious, poorly defined and understood, we have no reason to believe that there are not multiple GOEs of equal "unlimitation", distinguished only by some trivial non relevant equally mysterious attribute, or even equally undistinguished and unlimited. As there is inadequate definition here, there is no reason to believe that it is logically impossible. And Pro has failed to demonstrate the contrary. On the point of infinities. This argument and Theists arguments in general directly beg this question. The basic premise is that if there is no god then, you are left with an infinite series of events. Theists then argue that this is impossible and "wink, wink" there must be a god. I am pointing out here that invoking an infinite being is a slight of hand and as such is even more mysterious than the problem it claims to solve, and that the rebuttals are false. For instance Pro claimed in an earlier response that even though god was indeed infinite that did not imply "an infinitely long set of things". But I"m afraid it does, if a god existed and was infinite, god would indeed need to span an infinitely long set of mental thoughts to arrive at a decision to create the universe. This is crystallized in the point about enternity. One can see the religious confusion in the response. Pro is effectively saying that god existing for all eternity, decided from the beginning of eternity (even though it did not decide because there was no time in which mental processes could act - timeless being -, and even though there is no beginning to eternity). Not to forget they were always perfectly good, perfectly just, perfectly powerful, knew everything that would happen, and always wanted a relationship with humanity. But still had the option of not creating the universe, even though if they had not they would have thwarted the desires and destiny. The confusion and mental gymnastics required to believe these propositions are not insubstantial. On the point about perfection. If a perfect god can create perfection (but chooses not to), does that not mean they lack perfection. In my mind yes, in yours not. Mine is a simple argument, anything less than perfection in the universe means god is limited or compromised in either power, autonomy, knowledge, compassion or some other attribute. Your reasoning as to why a perfect god would choose to create imperfection is "because he can". That does not seem to me to cut the logical mustard as an argument. The analogy of a man on a beach does not work. All beaches and all men are of course within a spacetime context. The causal relationship always requires time, and all analogies to argue over simultaneous or eternal causation are deeply flawed, including the "man holding on to the branch", "the bowling ball falling on a cushion", and "the chandelier being held up by cantilever action". I"ve heard them all, and all infact require causes to proceed effects as one would expect and thus time. Otherwise the propagation of forces would be faster than the speed of light. What the Theist is infact arguing for is a new mode of causation (hitherto unknown) and completely mysterious, which may be reasonable as we are talking about the so called creation of the universe, but because it has no direct analogy it also lacks any explanatory power. Pro does not like the Quantum Field analogy. That is probably due to what we respectively mean by unlimited. I think to Pro unlimited genuinely means unlimited in all attributes. Whereas I would argue that properties of objects are limited by there concomitant identity and can only be described as unlimited if there identity also allows for this possibility. Hence a Quantum field is unlimited spacially but does not for example even know of our existence and never will.