Well, I wrote this short article as a passing thought about God and universe. It came as an answer I wrote to a question on yahoo answers. Now I'm not claiming that these are all my own findings, but rather a summation of what I have read and studied earlier and my contemplations about these subjects. Also note that I'm not claiming that I'm 100% true about it, however this is what I believe for now.The Question: "What came before God?"
My Answer:
Well, let me be honest here, before you go through all my mumblings; I'm tying to prove that after reaching a point in a string of reasoning, we as being human beings cannot continue…
OK, let's see.
Let's start with a definition of matter and time. I'll assume that we agree that you and me and everything that exists around us, our universe, or the whole world is made of matter. (I define matter as something which is comprised by atoms). Matter is subject to change, and in fact transformation is a property of matter. Now what’s the definition of change? The word “change” itself implies the existence of “time”. When we say that X (X being anything material, a table or a human) has changed from A to B, we imply that there was a time point T0 in which X was in state A, and another time point T1 in which X has changed into state B. So as we can see, MATTER and TIME are much interleaved abstracts.
What about SPACE? Space is where matter can exist. How about ENERGY? Energy is the ability to change the state of matters. What about us humans? We live in this world, we are made of matter and exist in space and all the rules of energy apply to us. We are part of this world anyway!
Conclusion 1: MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY are all interleaved concepts that apply, in fact govern our world.
Now another branch of reasoning: It is obvious to a logical mind that every thing which exists should have a cause, a creator. There cannot exist something material that had no creator. So if you start from anything material, let’s say your computer, and go back in the chain of creators. You can go back to through this chain, but you have to stop somewhere or else your reasoning will be caught in an infinite loop. There has to be a stop somewhere. Let’s call this entity as G.
Now, this creator G cannot be made of matter, because everything which is made of matter should have a creator. So, it’s logical that the first creator should NOT be made of matter. As such, none of the other terms of TIME, ENERGY and SPACE govern it or its actions. This creator G is what we call the God.
Conclusion 2: God is not bound by MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY.
So, now by using the first two conclusions, I can reason that your question is irrelevant in some way. MATTER, TIME, SPACE and ENERGY are all the foundations of our universe, and God created them. He is out of this bound.
To clear things up, let's think about the “big bang” theory. In a nutshell, it states that at first, TIME, ENERGY, MATTER and SPACE were unite, squashed together in a tiny tiny dot. Now they still don't know what was the condition of this pile of matter and energy and time at the very first moment of time (they believe it exploded in a BIG way), but scientists have good answers for what happened after about 1e-43 seconds (i.e. 0.0000.......001 seconds, the number of zeros being 42). From then, it's known. It’s also proven that the space HAS boundaries. See the reference to know more about it.
But what was there BEFORE the big bang?! We just know two things about it. First, as I reasoned above, God SHOULD have existed before, to create that small, condensed dot of TIME, ENERGY, MATTER and SPACE. Second, I (and for this matter nobody) cannot imagine what it was like before, because we are all part of this world, material. We cannot even imagine it; we are SO made of matter and time that we cannot think outside it. As an example, as I stated earlier, it is proven that the universe (hence the space) is bounded and it’s increasing for now, but a long time from now it will start decreasing. What IS outside the boundaries? Nothing! It even is not vacuum, there is nothing, not even time exist there! (Another good answer is that we don't know, and we'll never know, because we can't reach there and see). It is obvious that comprehending the meaning of “nothing” is very hard for us, thus strengthening my theory (that we cannot comprehend facts that are outside the bounds of MATTER).
The final conclusion: Time does not apply to God, it is his creation. As much as humankind can comprehend, God has existed before the creation of time. Beyond that, we cannot know and no human being can.
Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.
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