Cynosure

People ask the question, "If God created everything, then who created God?" because they know that everything in our universe – including the universe itself – has a beginning (and an end, for that matter). However, people who ask such a question about God are thinking in mundane and temporal terms, and they are thinking too small about God, for God is not part of our universe. Thus God is not, nor was He ever, subject to our universe's laws and limitations.

God exists outside of our universe, and it may very well be that everything outside our universe is God, and that our universe is in fact contained (and maintained) within God. Thus, God is not subject to our universe's laws/limitations of time, space, creation, decay, the speed of light, etc.

This old and trite "line of reasoning" is nonsensical, and not really worth contemplating if you're earnest about knowing God.

MSD

2) If he can do anything, he can create a rock which he cannot lift

Assuming God exists he can't, nor can he draw you a square circle or create a brick of solid gold which meets our definition of life. The question is internally inconsistent and therefore logically invalid.

KnifeMissile

Participate in any thread that you enjoy; there's got to be some. Why read and post in a thread that pisses you off?

Perhaps I have missed your point. You came in here and told people "I don't care what you think" and "shut up about what you think." So what was your point?

If you truly didn't care and you truly want people to "shut up" then why read? ...why participate?

new man

I don't enjoy debating religious people. It's a pain in the ass because there is NO LOGIC in faith. You cannot win with idiots who keep insisting the same thing over and over again without any proof that their little god or fetish cross or little book or crazy prophet is the right one so they are right. If folks want to delude themselves I cannot stop them. But when they try to change laws based on their twisted little interpretations of what some crazy camel fucker or heat stroked sheperd boy says, or some guy who sets fire to a bush and claims its god says, then I have to fight them. Stop trying to legislate based on some bullshit story about how little provincial tribes kicked sand in each other's faces and 3,000 years later creationism is passed off as a science, allah supports terrorism, jews have some sacred spit of land, and mormons are baptizing the dead while wearing magical underwear.

KnifeMissile

No, only you are thinking in mundane terms...

First of all, people ask the question "then who created God?" as a response to the Ontological argument. If everything has a beginning then what was God's beginning? If God doesn't have a beginning then not everything has a beginning...

The idea that everything has a beginning is also simplistic. All the constituent particles that make you up have been around long before you were born and will be around to be many other things long after you're dead. Those other things will even be other people. Hell, that will happen long before you're dead too, so what's all this about everything having a beginning? The entire Universe is a complex and continuous system that is constantly changing. There are small patterns that we find meaningful and so we say that those begin and end but the Universe is one long continuum of moving energy in one form or another and the beginnings and endings we assign in it are arbitrary. Really, there was only one beginning and that is of the Universe itself. One example hardly makes a pattern...

By definition, the Universe includes everything, even God. If you're making statements about God, you're making statements about a Universe with a God in it...

This "old and trite" reasoning isn't worth contemplating if you're determined to believe whatever you want. However, if you want to at least pretend that your beliefs are reasonable then you must consider all reasonable questions about them...

Why do you say that there's an entity that is not constrained by reality or logic? Your statement that God is such a being is just bare assertion. It's a claim that doesn't even make any sense. Ironically, in your attempt to support the original poster, you've just denigrated his main point: omnipotence without qualification is meaningless. God can't do simply "anything" because that doesn't make any sense...

Cynosure

Everything within our universe has to have a beginning. However, since God is not contained within our universe, He does not has to have a beginning.

Thus, the question "Who created God?" is wrong-headed from the get go.

You're being obtuse. Everything within this universe does indeed have a beginning. My beginning was in my mother's womb. Sure, the particles that I'm made of, existed a long, long time before I was born, and will continue to exist for a long, long time after I die. But, so what? It wasn't until those particles were brought together and formed into me, that I became "me".

The same can be said about you and every other living being on this planet. Why, the same can be said about everything within this universe; every rock, tree, mountain, river, ocean... every planet, moon, and star... and so on.



I've encountered lots of people who focus so much on the little things, they can't see the big picture. Now I'm encountering someone who's so focused on the big picture, he can't see the little things. Either extreme is wrong-headed.



Oh, really? You don't even believe God exists, so how can uphold any absolute statement about His existence in the positive?

So sorry, that you cannot imagine a God who exists outside the universe.

I said that God is not constrained by the laws and limitations of this universe, i.e. space, time, creation, decay, etc.

Well, it makes perfect sense to me. And, according to many of the scientists and Biblical scholars and theologians and philosophers I've read, it makes perfect sense to many, many others.

My purpose here is not to support the original poster, but to share my beliefs regarding the question posed by the original poster.

biznatch

I'm sorry, but you're exactly the same way. You're upholding an absolute statement about his location.
You say that god definitely lives outside of the Universe. Well, why should I trust you? What if I think he doesn't, or woudln't ? It's not at all something that is a well known truth, and, just like the existence of God, is highly debatable.
Just because you have faith in something doesn't make you right about it. I could believe that Satan's incarnation is Nancy Pelosi, or some other person, I don't think everyone would accept it as a truth, although some people might feel the same way.

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Cynosure

You missed the point of my sentence. Go back and re-read it.

Who said you should trust me?

That the God of the Bible exists outside of our universe, that He is not contained within it and thus is not subject to its laws and limitations, is a well known truth (or at least, a well known concept) among Christian scholars and believers. If this is the first time you or others here have encountered this concept, then I can only assume you have not studied the Bible very closely, and/or you have not read much in the way of post-20th Century Christian theologians and apologists.

This is a thread about "Who created God?", in a forum about philosophy. So, of course just about everything in here is going to be speculative and based on belief/faith.

Whatever... I'm not right because I have faith in something. I have faith in something because I believe it's right.

Mantus

Because we often base our objective actions on them...

Skitto

Debate --> de-bait?


Is this a hint?

I think so.



It's this easy.

Belief or the lack of such is, at the level of politics, a simple vague category for the peasant-sorting.

The reason it is such a vague and often touchy topic is that in theologistics, the plane it draws its relevance from, the basic assumption is the protection of the Instinct/Conscience borderline, and borders are just imaginary lines that make people feel self-important. It makes me wanna eat God, God it ticks me off. It's divvying up our psyche's natural inclinations. 'Nuff said.

---------- Post added at 10:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:50 PM ----------

Amen, words are based in strict en tempora at best, reality itself bears no words that aren't written, only itself.

As another layer, reality has no words, man is resident in existence, words are made by man. Ideology is at the bottom of the food chain.

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levite

So...you're Catholic?




Sorry, I really couldn't resist. I apologize for that....

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Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

thespian86

I had a discussion with a staunch christian about the existence of God the other night for a couple of hours. I was told that I was "wrong" and that she "knew God was true".

There are two many philosophical holes for me to understand his existence or this statement.

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Skitto

Has NO ONE paid attention to what I wrote here?

The whole idea of theology, right or wrong, is irrelevant where it comes to natural tendencies.


It is as irrelevant as it is instinctively obvious, or should be obvious, to any human!

---------- Post added at 04:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:33 PM ----------

I guess I'll leave it to language: debate is debaiting the idea. Then you "cast"

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Cynosure

I read it. But I couldn't fully figure out what the hell you were trying to say.



Cripes, man, your wording is more dense – more needlessly complex – than roachboy's. (Hey, but at least you use proper upper/lower case letters.)



If you say so.

roachboy

i have no idea what you're talking about, skitto. when you say "natural tendencies" you seem to imagine that it's obvious what you're talking about. it isn't.
the sentence after that can only make even a little sense if you know what the previous one is about.
you seem fond of this "debate=debait" pun, but you don't do anything with it.

maybe explain your position.

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it make you sick.

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Mantus

I’ve missed this forum. It helped me find my beliefs and grow as a person. There are several key ideas central to my belief system that are constantly being illustrated in this thread.

The biggest pitfall is that people tend to use words and concepts that are far beyond their realm of comprehension to illustrate concepts outside the realm of comprehension.

Take Omnipotence for example. The power to do anything! How did we come up with such an idea? Well, we know what lifting a rock is like. We know what it’s like not to be able to lift something. So we infer that being omnipotent is just like being the guy who can lift any rock in our universe. No matter how big or small a rock this dude would walk up and lift it.

What a simplistic load of crap! Our mind is picturing some Joe walking up to a huge boulder and lifting it above his head like Hercules and we think “oh, ok, now I know exactly what omnipotence means”. Bullshit. We throw the word around as we were talking about that familiar toaster on our kitchen counter.

We can’t have a scientific or logical discussion about this subject without comprehending what God’s omnipotence really means. When we try all sorts of amusing scenarios pop up and while entertaining it’s ultimately fruitless in helping us explore our faiths.

To illustrate, I’ll pick on Cynosure. ^^ He claims that:

Really?!

Raise your hand if you just painted a mental picture of a bubble full of bright lights with a bearded guy floating beside it. That’s how I visualize Cyno's description of God. Yet I have no clue of what being outside our universe actually means. This concept has absolutely no value to me. I've never been outside Earths atmosphere never mind the universe.

But I can draw parallels with similar experiences. I know what it’s like to be outside of my house. Maybe finding God is like visiting your neighbor. Find a door at the edge of the universe. Walk though it. Stroll along the streets of limbo until you get to God’s crib. There you’ll see God watching the game and he’ll invite you in for a cold one.

You may think I’m being an ass but it’s through these metaphors that most faith based systems are maintained within people’s heads. Using big words doesn’t make us understand the concepts behind them. All Cyno is doing is using terms we cannot comprehend (being outside the universe) to support other terms we cannot understand (God) – leaving us nowhere. It's fun though!

biznatch

What I don't get is how believers of supernatural beings argue that they know something, for example, Cynosure's belief that god exists outside the Universe.
We don't know if/where the Universe ends, or "how" it ends, there are a few theories, but none of them have any evidence that is firm.
I just don't understand faith, and I guess it's frustrating for me, is it a "either you get it or you don't?" thing?
You can talk about theologists and scholars like they present overwhelming evidence of God's location, but everyone who believes in this stuff basically get their info from the same source, and it's not really a vast one: the Bible.
On religion, I think whether you're an atheist or not depends mostly on your parents. Most people just believe what their parents tell them. Some change, but on a whole I think that's how it works.
I guess it goes both ways, but wouldn't it make more sense to be skeptical about something you can't see or touch or ever have proof of, instead of just believing it because everyone else does?
I guess there's no real aim to my post, just expressing what I don't "get" about religion. And I'm not trying to be narrow minded either, I really wanna understand how religious people think.

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levite

The thing is, speculation about where God is or isn't, and what He can or can't do, and what He might or might not like, is all dependent upon two things: that a given person has faith in the existence of God, and that said person is willing to gamble that religious traditions might perpetuated at least in part by other folks who had faith, and who might even have experienced revelation, which might make at least some of their claims about God worthy of consideration as in some way accurate.

But it does come down to faith, and unfortunately, faith is not something rational, it is arational, and cannot be demanded by external proofs. One either acquires faith through experience of something that one defines either as revelatory or miraculous (it is still called faith after such an experience because those experiences, even if real, are still subjective, and may be proof to oneself, but not to others; also such experiences tend not to answer many detailed or abstruse questions), or through a decision to believe until one has more conclusive subjective proof.

The problem is that those who claim to have faith are far too cavalier about demanding it in those who do not, and those who do not have faith are far too cavalier in dismissing it in those who do. Frankly, I think it would be nice if everyone just decided that as long as everyone else acts like a mensch, what everyone else does or does not believe about a Supreme Being and the origin of the universe is of no concern to them....

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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Cynosure

Well, as Rodney King said, "Why can't we just all get along?"

If we're not fighting over religion, we're fighting over race, or culture, or land, or money, or oil, or (soon to come) water.

So, don't just blame religion for mankind's inability to all get along. Even if we'd somehow totally eradicate religion from mankind (as militant atheists are want to do), we'd still be fighting and destroying ourselves over those other things.

Speak for yourself, and do not assume that all of us are unable to grasp concepts that are beyond the limitations of space and time.

Yes, raise your hand and show everyone here that your imagination and your ability to think "big" is so limited, you cannot imagine God beyond an image of a bearded guy floating in the aether.

This is the main reason why God forbade the Hebrews to make graven images of Him, so that they would not limit themselves to carnal and temporal views of Him, and so that they could reach out past the earth-bound pictures and idols created by the polytheistic religions to represent their gods.

Furthermore, as wikipedia explains it...

Whatever, dude.

I think you are smarter, and your imagination and your ability to think "big" is greater, than you're letting on, here.


Well, just for starters, God literally interacted with mankind through the Hebrews and conveyed this concept about Himself to them, which they passed on to us.

shakran

Mantus

Apologies for baiting that kind of response Sharkan.
If it's worth saying: I saw passion, not aggression, on Cynosure's part - which is great.


After writing that post I reviewed all the metaphors that I, and people I know, use to understand subjective parts of reality. There are many! Allot of them involve use of concepts outside our realm of logical or scientific understanding. The most famous ones that came to mind are Einstein's - which are now in the realm of scientific understanding.

Yet we are not beyond the limitations of space and time and thus cannot realistically grasp such concepts. We draw metaphors to understand subjective concepts allowing us to stretch our limitations on experience. These metaphors are built from pieces of our everyday experience leaving us with limitations to our comprehension of subjective concepts.

Take infinity for example. Let discuss it in terms of distances. We know what it’s like to travel long distances. In our experience no mater how far we travel there always seems to be something else on the horizon only to discover when we get there that there is something else still further. Those are the limitations of our actual “distance experience”. We can use our imagination to stretch our distance experience ten fold. Going anywhere beyond that leaves us with a very fuzzy picture. Imagining a thousand fold our distance experience would leaves us with a visual blank but the feeling of comprehension remains leaving us with more of an emotional metaphor than a conceptual one. We feel that we understand what it is to travel for infinity more than we can visualize.

This happens to me when I imagine the above scenario. Would be wonderful if we all do an infinity thought experiment just to see if everyone is on the same page.




I agree. A better imagination can help but adding complexity and depth to our mental image of God doesn’t guarantee insight into truth. Using metaphors to explain metaphors leads us down a slippery slope.

Lets describe a God that exists outside of our universe, and it may very well be that everything outside our universe is God, and that our universe is in fact contained (and maintained) within God as:

A (greater consciousness)(outside the realms of reality)(encompassing)(all of reality)(like an awake mind)(looking upon a dream)(permeating everything within)(being a part of it)( yet having the perspective to look from afar.)

Every bracketed term is a subjective concept. This description of God may sound more advanced and smarter than our bearded dude floating in space but does it offer any more value? What kind of value?

The "World is God's dream" metaphor feels allot more real to me but is a nightmare to test logically or scientifically. The floating dude in a void makes me laugh - I have no emotional connection to it but would much easier to introduce to a philosophical or scientific discussion.

Simple metaphors are more effective at helping us understand how the world works while complex multi-level metaphors are easier to relate to emotionally rather than conceptually. The more subjective layers a concept has the more emotional vocabulary it requires to comprehend.

Perhaps this is why faith is so addictive. We are very emotionally driven creatures. It’s only makes sense that the next step is to link emotions we experience in the real world to emotions we experience in our metaphors. Emotion provides the bond between faith and objective reality. Oh my God…

Cynosure

My apologies to you, Mantus, if you were truly insulted by my "don't read a book on quantum physics because it will blow your little mind" remark. Really, that remark was meant to be just a tongue-in-cheek put down in response to your flagrantly silly, Bill & Ted-like comments on what I was saying about God. After all, I did say, further down in my post, that I thought you were a lot smarter, and your ability to think "big" was greater, than you were letting on.

hunnychile

Simple: God's God.

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rahl

The problem I have with religion is that it's totally unprovable. I went to catholic school for 12 years, and to even question the bible, or question our religion teachers was strictly prohibited. It wasn't until my mid twenties that I became agnostic. I'm atleast open to the possiblility of a supreme being out there, but I require substantial proof for me to believe whole heartedly

My problem with your statement is that you take this and pass it on as an absolute fact that God "literallly" interacted with the hebrews. How do you know? Because it's written in a book?

Skitto

Sorry, I'm leaving myself raw for now.

Here, I'll rewrite that last thing.


Belief or the lack of such is a nonissue on every level, especially the psychological.

The psychological part is what makes this all possible for the political.
At the level of politics, it's just the first, simple, vague category for, what I call the transgovernmental peasant-sorting.
It could also be called the extraterrestrial human-sorting, interracial intercompany customer-categorization. No matter what your personal conspiracy-belief system is, it's simply people organizing other people. Everyone does it; so far as I know there's no one that makes no distinction whatsoever between peoples' differences. Race, religion, sleeping habits,

Everyone's gotta have their own little drawer and file, Obama goes here, Britney goes there. Steven Hyde, Janice Joplin, Venus and Serena, OJ, the X-Men, all go in the Pop file, and in my family file, there's my brother, the dog goes over there, and that there's the file for Animals, Plants and the nameless people on the street, Streetpeople. Andy McKee, Steve Vai, John Mayer, dingoes, Steve Jordan, Elephant man. Then there's all the cabinets for ideas, concepts, talents, Karate, sleeping, technology and of course, belief. Of course.

The reason religion is such a vague and often touchy topic is that in Theologistics (belief draws its academic relevance from this plane of thought) the basic assumption is the protection of the Instinct/Conscience borderline. This isn't a conscious protection, of course; it is a mental borderline, of course; and a man made one at at that. Of course primal man had no concept of the difference! He had a feeling that there must've been something that allowed him thoughts, and he praised it when he saw things in the sky, or made fire, or got a lucky break when he was out hunting. There was no difference between his instinctive belief and the evidence he thought he saw. It was the later humans that found out that there was a difference, and what I'm saying is that I think we CREATED that difference by discovering it.

The instinct/conscience borderline.

Borders are just imaginary lines that make people feel self-important. It's divvying up our psyche. Natural inclinations put into sterile categories. 'Nuff said.

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levite

^ ^ ^
| | |

I'm sorry, I really don't mean this in an offensive way, but...am I all alone in not understanding what that meant?

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Mantus

Not at all Cynosure! That's why I defended you in my post.

So what do you think about my idea that "thinking bigger" doesn't necessarily give us more insight or understanding of our faith based beliefs?


Ya man! Skitto, you gota use smaller words and dumb down the concepts for my sake.

Skitto

I'm being raw, that's all.

Okay... This God, you know, he's a really cool guy, right?
This dude made everything, or so they say, and they also say that he is somehow inside everything (physically, aurically, idealistically, take your pick)

And if he IS everything, and he MADE everything, and he is IN everything, why do we not get the connection, god is made in EVERYTHING!

He is made IN everything, he is made OF everything, he is made WITHOUT everything, am I right so far? I took a little Beatles logic there, but I assume that God must also exist where existence does not... exist...

Uh, right?



Alright, now here is the basis of the argument: if God is Everything, and God is everywhere and nowhere,
inside and outside of his existence, existing even where he doesn't exist (because presumably in a
balanced-universe there must also be some kind of Void-of-god space)... if this is true, then does God get
tired of this kind of talk too? I mean, he can't sit and contemplate his omnipotence...

so what DOES he do?

None of our business, I say. It's our business to assume that it works beyond our comprehension,
it can also be a fun hobby to expand that comprehension through the argument; but it isn't anything to
REALLY worry about. It's His business.


That's why you said, Mantus, that:
"You may think I’m being an ass but it’s through these metaphors [kudos, btw for those]
that most faith based systems are maintained within people’s heads. Using big words doesn’t make us understand the concepts behind them [I've stayed on the side of the road intentionally, via big words]. All Cyno is doing is using terms we cannot comprehend (being outside the universe) [ding dong, the witch is dead- kill her more!] to support other terms we cannot understand (God) – leaving us nowhere. It's fun though!"

I'd like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important:

"Leaves us nowhere,
it's fun though!"

I couldn't have said it better -and I didn't. What I said, in my frustration, was "The whole idea of theology, right or wrong, is irrelevant where it comes to natural tendencies. It is as irrelevant as it is instinctively obvious, or should be obvious, to any human!" Okay, I admit that I was insulting everyone's intelligence by calling out humanity for this. Yeesh, I wanna bite the head off a Jesus cookie after this...

So, point well and painfully taken: Mantus, Cynosure, even roachboy.













I'm sick of this.

but I'm gonna keep going because, 'ooh it's soooo fun!'

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Yeah, well, you're just that awesome, I guess. It's not like I guessed so anyways.

Skitto

Did I, like, end this thread or something? Is everybody done?

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Yeah, well, you're just that awesome, I guess. It's not like I guessed so anyways.

Mantus

Nah man, it's just the way these forums work. If you want to discuss something make a new thread, I'll be happy to participate.

Skitto

Oh!

Naw, I just got suspicious that, I posted a serious post, and then everyone just- stopped...

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biznatch

I lost interest, I guess, when everyone stopped listening. Should have expected it in a thread that discusses belief.

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tisonlyi

Some of us happen to be of the opinion that "belief" is very nice way of saying "someone making shit up and having others falling for it". Fairies, trolls, halflings, UFO's, crop circle aliens, chiropractic healing of deafness, autism caused by vaccines and, oh yes, the big one: God(s).

Some of us happen to think that Humanity needs to get past the idea that "making shit up and then believing it's true", sorry, "believing" or "faith" is reasonable, acceptable or even OK.

There'd be a lot less abortion clinic murders, holy wars, children dying through lack of herd immunity to preventable diseases, children being raped as a cure for aids, mass hysteria for witches making men impotent, etc, etc... if we could just get past the whole idea that it's a good thing to believe in things that have zero basis in evidence.

To clarify, with regard to God(s), I'm talking about the variety that might have any passing interest in the observable universe we inhabit, other flavours are still fairy stories, but less damaging aside from encouraging the belief in nonsense.

So yes, there is a reason to have the occasional quarrel with people who "make shit up".

I believe we generally discourage lying... just not about the Zombie Jew who dies for Original Sins that... you get the point.

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Reese

We're constantly improving our scientific understanding, Do you really think this is the end of our advancement? That is completely ridiculous. What we know about our universe doesn't amount to a speck of dust. 300-500 more years what we know about space/time/physics/universe will be taught in 3rd grade history class. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up.


Maybe science's final destination is God but our whacked out theories are taking us on a little detour. Never know.

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tisonlyi

QFT... mostly. Science doesn't have a destination in an emergent universe such as we exist within.

150 years ago, Spontaneous Generation was a respectable point of view.

Literally, it was 'reasonable' to hold the view that mice pop into existence in the presence of cheese.

How crazy would you be thought to be if you had "Faith" in that little pieces of make-believe today?

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"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

Skitto

Mr. Tisjustme, go back and read the last large postings that Knifemissle, Cynosure, and I made, and catch up with the debate.

...

Ready?

Who can make ANY statement about an idea like "the Universe" equally as vague as that of "God"... SCIENCE even! Science is just as deferrant as religion, being the balance to religion, for most people. Religion forms questions, Science gets the tangible answers; these are separate institutions, mind you: separate cultures are dominated by either of these two on an esoteric level, and a society in a good balance between them is rare at best.


p.s. Amen Cyberjake, you have good sensibilities on this.

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cellfactor

Hello, hope all are good, this is my first post

The reasoning is very interesting however it has 1 major flaw that I think makes it invalid. Omnipotent according to Wikipedia means unlimited power. That would be the unlimited power to do something. What you are asking is the Unlimited power to not be able to do something. This doesn't make sense. You want unlimited power to "not" be able to lift a rock. This negation,"not" cannot be used in contest as it contradicts the purpose of the definition. You can ask for unlimited power to be able to do something. You can ask for unlimited power to be able to stop something. You cannot however contradict ask for unlimited power to stop you from doing what you want to do.

In summary what you're saying is: I want the power of not being able to have the power to lift a rock. "Not power" + "power" in the same purpose of the same statement, hence self contradiction.

pan6467

Our "universe" is nothing but the atoms/molecules (and we as individuals are micro, micro atomic particles) of some other dimensional beings snot. Who in turn is Just part of another being's snot molecules and so on into eternity, where at the very end, we find we are somehow our own snot molecules............... beware the great sneeze.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Lady Bear Cub

I thought that if energy couldn't be created or destroyed then everything was basically around forever in some form. I could be totally wrong. I just thought that beginnings and ends were things our minds made up so we could keep a hold of our sanity when thinking about shit like this.

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"I give myself very good advice,
But I very seldom follow it,
Will I ever learn to do the things I should?"

Willravel

Conservation of energy is an incarnation of the first law of thermodynamics if I'm remembering my physics correctly, but doesn't take into account some of the fun things we've stated learning since delving into quantum mechanics. And example would be vacuum fluctuations.

There might have been a beginning of what we now consider space/time in the form of the singularity exploding in the Big Bang process. I'm not sure if you can say "before the big bang", as time started with the cosmic origin along with energy and matter.

I think. I'm a bit of a dolt when it comes to physics.