Friday, May 10, 2013

If God Created Us, Then Who Created God?

A friend described that question as a problem in circular logic?

If one thinks of God as a creature who exists in our three dimensional world delimited by the boundaries of time, then there is a circular logic problem as he says.  If something must be created, then there must be a creator, but then if the creator exists, mustn't He also have a creator and so on and so on?

If, however, you believe, as I do, that God exists in a dimension that is outside of time, then the question as to who created God is meaningless. This problem arises because we are three dimensional creatures.  We experience life as a moving event, traveling along a stretch of time, experiencing one moment after another in linear fashion. We can neither go backward nor leap forward.  We assume, therefore, that everything in the universe experiences things in the same manner.

I don't believe that is true.  I believe, with some support from physics, that there are other dimensions beyond three dimensional space-time.  I believe that God exists in this higher dimension or "spiritual plane" as Scripture indicates.  I believe God occupies today, tomorrow and yesterday all at once.  That's kind of mind-boggling, but not necessarily impossible to get your head around.

I don't mean that God moves back and forth in time as Scripture seems to hint that angels do. I mean, rather, that God is always there a thousand years ago, today, tomorrow - all at the same "time" for want of a better word for an idea that transcends time itself.  So a "beginning" for God is a meaningless concept.   He is as Revelation says, the alpha and the Omega - the beginning and end all at once.  We have a hard time comprehending how that can be so. 

Physicists believe that there may be multiple dimensions beyond our own which encompass ours, but which we cannot touch nor comprehend in the same way that a two dimensional being who lived on a flat piece of paper could not comprehend the idea of depth, his body limited only to having length and width without any idea of "thickness".  He could not see us except where we placed our hands against the flat world and then he would only see the place where we touched his world and not us as we truly are.


In the same way we cannot truly see God.  When Moses asked to see God, God could only show him his "back parts".  For us to see God in any meaningful way, he had to create an image of Himself that was limited to our 3 dimensional world - in other words he had to create Christ who was in that sense God's son and yet Himself.

The idea that a powerful creative intelligence might exist in some higher dimension is not beyond the realms of science at all.  If anything at all, it should not be at all surprising that such a dimension might organize itself into a vast "intelligence" given it had infinite space and time to work with.  Why should we be surprised that there is someone there?

It may be that at some higher dimension than ours, only one creature may inhabit that dimension. Of course He would be exactly like God and I believe that He is God. No beginning, no end, the self existent one.  In the Old Testament he even calls Himself "I Am".   In that higher dimension, our time and space, the entire history of our world would seem like a rope to be twisted and created in one act - the beginning and end created at the same time.  It is we, the created who live out our lives along the strands one day after another.  For an intelligence to exist in a higher plane of existence, He would simply be there or not - either through the whole of time at once or not at all.

Based on the things I have seen and experienced, I think it's a very good bet that God is there.
  I think He made this world like a cook makes a stew, placing all the ingredients here to insure that what comes out at the end of the process is the greatest good for all creation - a people who can be trusted with the keeping of the universe.

Tom King (c) 2013

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