Okay, to keep this short, I was wondering if anyone had a genuine theory/explanation to this concept I see a lot;
Eternal universe = false, because we need God for the universe to exist
God's existence = He always existed, thus created the universe
There's kind of a...contradiction here? A 'special plead' or exception for God, as I've heard some put it. It's an interesting concept and I wondered if anyone else has put much thought into it.
We say that the universe cannot be infinite or eternal because it needed God to exist, yet we have no explanation for how or when God came into existence.
I'd prefer replies from people who are at least semi-versed in cosmology, so no quoting the bible to base arguments
(which is funny coming from a Christian)
First, consider the proposition: if God exists, then He'd "
always" (see below for meaning of "always") have existed in this Universe timeline.
Either:
A) God has always existed in the sense of "real time" (* see below) -- for instance this particular Universe we are in is widely thought in the leading theory today -- the plain vanilla Big Bang/Inflation model -- to have had a beginning point in
"real time". God would have existed at that point simultaneously (or from the first moment) of that beginning of real time.
We don't have to assume that's all there is to it, but, in this view, God "
always" existed at least in the only sense of the word "
always" that can be
meaningful, see. It's not meaningful to speak of what is before anything that exists in time -- there is no "time before time" (but see just below!). The word "before" refers to a moment in time prior to another moment, timewise.
* -- (by
"real time" a physicist would mean what people commonly think of as simply "time", but that's not the only time-like possible dimension; to read more about a representative theory of another type of time-like dimension vis-a-vis this Unverse, this overview is useful (for me, but possibly for anyone with some moderate ability to tolerate new ideas and a desire to get an overview):
The Beginning of TIme note that these are theories in this Stephen Hawking monograph).
or
B) Instead we are only one Universe of many, and then God might be as it were,
either:
1) Operating from another Universe into ours, or with physics we cannot access (or perhaps that other Universe physics we might access(!)).
2) Or, God may transcend
any physics (i.e. fixed natural laws that obey some kinds of rules in their constancy or evolution). This is one more pronounced meaning of the word "
Transcendent"
This last could also be a separate possibility
C)
But none of these would suggest that God is necessarily dependent on this Universe. To assume He is an assumption that would seem to be chancy. A guess that could easily be not even close. It begs a lot of questions to assume that. But already modern physics widely shows we don't know all physics, and it's quite possibly the case other Universes exists, and possibly other time-like dimensions.
In short, people think on these questions far too simply, and also, wrongly think they can reach final conclusions, which of course they cannot short of God appearing to them and answering such questions.
So, recognizing that everyone else is guessing (and many don't even know they are), my own "guess" is C, as it seems more fitting the sense, metaphorically implied, in scripture, when one reads through all the entire full 66 books of the common grouping.