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Consider: There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all

Consider: There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."

Banana699 5y ago
>He doesn't "exist", he just is This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'? This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ? If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.
- positus 5y ago
  The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else. Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc. God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be. I hope I've worded that clearly.

Banana699 5y ago

>He doesn't "exist", he just is This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'? This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ? If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.

positus 5y ago
The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else. Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc. God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be. I hope I've worded that clearly.