So, I've been wondering for many years.
Once, during my early childhood, I asked myself:
"There is always a beginning in everything. No exception. So,
'What of God?'
'What is the beginning of God?'
'How is God created (in the mind of theists), knowing that everything HAS a beginning?'
'How can people never question this topic?'"
Too afraid to ask to my friends in my environment. Actually, I'm too afraid to ask to my surroundings.
Almost all of the environments in my country are filled with devout theists, and I know that I might get killed by them.
So, everyone,
can you answer my questions?
*note:
I do NOT interpret the question as "Who created God?".
If I ask that, theists will simply say, "Who created the sun? The universe?".
I learned that the best forms of question should be "What", "Why", and "How".
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Reid...
It may seem counter intuitive ...but man created god.
Man created god/gods out of nothing.......and if you look closely enough...... the nothing shows through.
And your quite correct ...one of the main questions is "WHY"
Primitive man found himself in a world with many things he did not ,could not understand. Many of them scary and all of them completely out of his/her control.
Look at a simple family group of hunter/gatherers... one of them is very good at finding food....it seems that he only has to throw a stone and it kills an antelope...while another cannot bring down an animal with a landslide of rocks. But he is good at constructing cunning little traps and snares.
It is not too much of a stretch to see that the hunter comes to be known to be favoured by a great hunting spirit while his cunning clever counterpart is mocked by the animal spirits but is aided by a clever "maker" spirit.
How long before the hunters name becomes synonymous with the hunting spirit .... and the trappers name becomes inextricably linked to the clever "maker" spirit.
Around the fires in the camps and caves stories begin to be told of the exploits of these characters....some may even be based on actual events and real phenomena . The antelope herds disappear in the autumn (migration) because the antelope spirits are terrified of the hunter spirit because of his mighty deeds the previous summer.
And so a mythology is born ,over time it becomes formalized with a recognised set of stories ....finally with the advent of a priesthood and the adoption of formal offerings and requests for aid in one form or another....the whole system "morphs" into a religion.
Not an exact process by any means but you see how it works and why so many deities have some appallingly primitive characteristics.
It's simply too hard to fathom the thought that everything exists through evolving states of change, each change marking a new beginning throughout time without a single point of origin. That's the crux and crucible of man's search for the answer about life. Within that search he has filled the holes in his knowledge with gods.
It's always been easier to create gods and look to them as the source of all thing inexplicable to us. Plus, gods mean man was created for a purpose. Without gods he is without purpose and that simply isn't acceptable.
Gods are, and have always been imagined and then fabricated by man. This latest so-called omnipotent, omniscient god is just the edited and refined version of all that were poor previous conjurings and too difficult to appease.
Now, I suspect there are as many versions of this latest god as there are people who profess a belief in it. I can't imagine how hard it would have been on a person (in antiquity) when there were many gods to appease. The idea of streamlining the burden of appeasement down to one god was probably quite popular and the single most valid reason for it's adoption and continued acceptance. Sounds, for lack of a better word, logical?
This ones easy, they defined god in such a way that it doesn't have a beginning, you can do that with things that don't exist with no fear that someone will prove you wrong. People are stupid like that, they define things in such a way that they don't really intersect with reality in any tangible way, then wonder why they can't find evidence of the very fiction they created.
God does not ever come into, or go out of, existence. Sans (without) the Universe; all of matter, energy, space and time, God would be timeless. If God is timeless then, as change requires time to happen, he would not change. Beginning to exist is changing, so God would never begin to exist.