Something cannot come from nothing? All I can say for sure about nothingness is that there are no rules to govern it, so the oft-babbled ex nihilo nihil fit does not even apply to begin with. The statement is self-defeating. My comments on creatio ex nihilo are that such a process is absolutely without causation, which is a defeater for Christianity. Can something spring forth from nothing? Perhaps... who knows? But even if God was present, he wasn't doing anything, and that's something we can be sure of.
I don't wish to keep defending a position I no longer hold. After all, I eventually found it untenable. But I will say a couple more things ... because I can't help myself.
I have found that 'nothing' means one thing to [some] physicists and another to [some] philosophers. In Lawrence Krauss' book
A Universe from Nothing, nothing is more like empty space. We know that that nothing is not without properties. In a sense, from that nothing something may come. (I am not a physicist and my understanding of this is poor.)
A philosopher, OTOH, may well say that yes there is the nothingness in the vacuum of space, but where did that come from. For these, the nothingness is absolute lacking even the properties of the empty space.
When I say God cannot make something from nothing, I mean absolute nothingness, not the nothingness that a physicist talks about. One cannot operate on nothingness. Nothingness is not a thing.
I certainly agree that Krauss' nothingness, supposing that the ideas hold up, makes gods unnecessary.
And, these days I often respond to theists, "what makes you think there ever was nothing?"
So then God is not separated from sin, the divine is profane, and black is white. I cannot accept this as a genuine Christian position. Perhaps some other non-Abrahamic religion, but not Christianity.
Two things here: 1) I see sin, evil, and profane as concepts. The material with which such a god makes the universe has nothing to do with these concepts. If that god gives beings the ability to act in ways that others find "profane", well, God can do that. For me, this creative act is like a mother giving birth. The child is of the mother but not the mother. The universe, then, could be (I say could of course because all of this is useless speculation) of God but not God. So whatever happens that a being could call profane is not God. But whatever. 2) So yeah, not traditional Christianity. This is a fair point and one I was coming to grips with at the end of my time as a believer. I could couch all my ideas in Christian lingo. I could say things that made other believers comfortable all the while not meaning what they meant.
At a certain point, I wasn't really being honest with myself. But the bottom line for me is that if something cannot be demonstrated, cannot be shown, cannot be tested--not even in principle--such things are not worth belief. So I abandoned Christianity and I abandoned "Tinkerism."
I don't know... read the Torah again. Lots of stuff is profane. "Unclean" is the word of choice.
I never really spent a lot of time on the specifics when it came to my ideas. But, a god connected to the universe
could have reasons. A disconnected god is simply arbitrary. Why either god would outlaw shrimp is not something I ever focused on.
I agree that creatio ex nihilo is not Biblical, but neither is your position. The best position for the Christian, which is neither blasphemous nor self-defeating, is that matter and energy are eternal and that God shaped the universe. This means that their God is no longer posed as a solution to the problem of existence, but rather is an accessory to existence. Nevertheless, this is as strong as their position can possibly be.
I would have argued that while the Bible doesn't endorse my then position, my then position was consonant with scripture--kind of like a spherical earth could be read into it.
Blaspheming to "win" an online debate with an atheist is, I'd hope, a line that even the most dishonest apologist won't cross. But who knows?
I think we have differing ideas as to what blasphemy is. Suffice it to say that merely being heterodox is not the same as blasphemy.
I'm done. I might be tempted into responding. But I weary of defending something I don't believe anyway.