Dear Isabel,
If there is a God, where did God come from? I ask believers among my friends this and they say “God always existed.” I can’t wrap my mind around “always.” Something must have created God, but what?
Mind-Boggled
Dear Mind-Boggled,
This is one of those conundrums (conundra?) that, first of all, is undeniable, and that, second, doesn’t help us decide whether there is or is not a God.
I remember encountering a similar problem when I was a child lying on my back, looking at the stars. Trying to imagine how the universe could possibly go on without an edge made my mind itch. But if I imagined an edge, then something was outside of it, and that created the same itch. You probably have a similar childhood memory.
That’s the spatial version of the conundrum: infinity. You’ve asked about the temporal version: eternity.
To my first point, it’s undeniable, because we can either decide that God has always existed and then we come up against that unimaginable “always,” or we can decide that “always” doesn’t make any sense and so we give God a beginning point. Which doesn’t resolve the problem, because what existed before that point? Even answering “nothing” doesn’t resolve it.
And to my second point, it doesn’t help us decide whether God exists, because we face the same conundrum even if we take God out of the question entirely. Substitute “the universe” for “God.” Has the universe always existed? If yes, whaaaaat? And if no, what was before that? It is just as mind-boggling a problem without God in it.
And just as mind-boggling with God in it.
So: you can embrace the boggle or avoid thinking about the boggle, but the boggle exists. And you can add God to it or not, but it doesn’t resolve the conundrum, so I don’t believe the existence of the conundrum constitutes an argument for, or against, God’s existence.
Wishing you well,
Isabel
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Next week: Are religious experiences the same as drug experiences? They seem similar.