The lack of logic in the eternal God of Christianity
God has existed for all eternity. Let us see if we can apply any sort of reasoned thinking to this concept. Let's use the Big Bang at 13.8 billion years ago as a fixed point for our purposes. Prior to that moment let us assume we do not know what existed or did not. Now let us take the mythology of the creation as expressed in the book of Genesis. This book asserts that there was nothing and over this "brooded" the Creator. It both posits that there was nothing and at the same time that there was The Creator, something. Even if we were to interpret the nothing as the void it amounts to the same thing, a nothing over which something brooded which is self-contradictory. Let's ignore the impossibility for now and take it on faith that this was the case. Now going backward from the Big Bang we have God and nothing for eternity. Just that...for eternity...backward. Before the creation of angels, before begetting a son and proceeding a Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit if you don't like the archaic term). God and nothing and infinite time. But time has no meaning if you say it is infinite right? You cannot measure the passage of it if it is infinite because nothing changes to mark it as finite.
Let's circle back to the bits in the Nicene Creed that I've hinted at. "I believe in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, begotten of His Father before all worlds. Begotten, not made. Being of one substance with the Father." Begetting another is an act. It is a change from one state to another wherein someone is begotten into existence. This means at some point there was only the Father but then there was the Father and the Son because of a begetting. "I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son." While it is impossible to apply any logic to this use of the word proceed to indicate a separate but the same individual let's just focus on this being another event because it indicates an action and a result, someone called the Holy Spirit. So let me remind you that there was a being brooding over the void for an eternal amount of time but then something changed and begetting and proceeding happened. Then, somewhere in this infinite time there was another change. This eternal, begotten and proceeded 3 persons in one person made angels. While the Bible doesn't say so in this case let's just assume this also happened "before all worlds" just to make it easier. Let me borrow a term from a friend and put all of these events in meta time. We could imagine that one day of meta time is a billion years. Maybe a billion meta time days passed between the begetting and the proceeding and one hundred billion until it was time for creating angels. Then 3 meta time days later some of the angels rebelled and there was a war and a bunch of them were exiled from Heaven, which got created in the void without mention of how or why or when.
All of that, based on the mythology, happened before the Big Bang somewhere back into that eternity before time. Now, with the previous changes to the eternal void occurring at some point in an infinite amount of time with no changes (confusing I know) comes the need for another change and the infinite being brooding over the void creates a temporal universe and puts people in it. Why that change, or any change for that matter, to the eternal void and brooding suddenly became necessary is anyone's guess. I'll make a guess and say that the average person would say that God didn't want to be alone. Here's the problem with that though. If, in the beginning there was God And God has always existed that means that for some immeasurable period he WAS alone. There was a period, the aforementioned meta time, prior to the getting and creation of angels and humans and all of that shit. What changed that made God need companionship in the void so that he exerted his power of creation and made stuff out of nothing?
I will conclude by harking back to a previous writing where I asked how eternity was not a stasis. I was addressing the idea of my human existence have a perpetual spiritual component wherein, unlike God, I have not existed for infinity going backward, having been created in 1962 by God making two people I've never met conceive me into a temporal form with a soul that will exist forever. Whether forward or backward the concept of eternity having a change in it is nonsense. What would prompt a need for change? For illustration imagine a straight line that has a starting point, in Wisconsin in 1962, and then goes on for infinity. At some point it changes direction. Wrong. It can't. It won't. It is a straight line for infinity with no need or compulsion to change. A change in direction would violate the description of it. It is no longer an infinite line. So when the belief structure of Christianity states that God is eternal and unchanging the changes in eternity necessary for begetting, proceeding and creating are logical fallacies and the concept of a consciousness existing in eternity but thinking or doing anything different from one moment to the next is nonsense.
Let's circle back to the bits in the Nicene Creed that I've hinted at. "I believe in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, begotten of His Father before all worlds. Begotten, not made. Being of one substance with the Father." Begetting another is an act. It is a change from one state to another wherein someone is begotten into existence. This means at some point there was only the Father but then there was the Father and the Son because of a begetting. "I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son." While it is impossible to apply any logic to this use of the word proceed to indicate a separate but the same individual let's just focus on this being another event because it indicates an action and a result, someone called the Holy Spirit. So let me remind you that there was a being brooding over the void for an eternal amount of time but then something changed and begetting and proceeding happened. Then, somewhere in this infinite time there was another change. This eternal, begotten and proceeded 3 persons in one person made angels. While the Bible doesn't say so in this case let's just assume this also happened "before all worlds" just to make it easier. Let me borrow a term from a friend and put all of these events in meta time. We could imagine that one day of meta time is a billion years. Maybe a billion meta time days passed between the begetting and the proceeding and one hundred billion until it was time for creating angels. Then 3 meta time days later some of the angels rebelled and there was a war and a bunch of them were exiled from Heaven, which got created in the void without mention of how or why or when.
All of that, based on the mythology, happened before the Big Bang somewhere back into that eternity before time. Now, with the previous changes to the eternal void occurring at some point in an infinite amount of time with no changes (confusing I know) comes the need for another change and the infinite being brooding over the void creates a temporal universe and puts people in it. Why that change, or any change for that matter, to the eternal void and brooding suddenly became necessary is anyone's guess. I'll make a guess and say that the average person would say that God didn't want to be alone. Here's the problem with that though. If, in the beginning there was God And God has always existed that means that for some immeasurable period he WAS alone. There was a period, the aforementioned meta time, prior to the getting and creation of angels and humans and all of that shit. What changed that made God need companionship in the void so that he exerted his power of creation and made stuff out of nothing?
I will conclude by harking back to a previous writing where I asked how eternity was not a stasis. I was addressing the idea of my human existence have a perpetual spiritual component wherein, unlike God, I have not existed for infinity going backward, having been created in 1962 by God making two people I've never met conceive me into a temporal form with a soul that will exist forever. Whether forward or backward the concept of eternity having a change in it is nonsense. What would prompt a need for change? For illustration imagine a straight line that has a starting point, in Wisconsin in 1962, and then goes on for infinity. At some point it changes direction. Wrong. It can't. It won't. It is a straight line for infinity with no need or compulsion to change. A change in direction would violate the description of it. It is no longer an infinite line. So when the belief structure of Christianity states that God is eternal and unchanging the changes in eternity necessary for begetting, proceeding and creating are logical fallacies and the concept of a consciousness existing in eternity but thinking or doing anything different from one moment to the next is nonsense.
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