Where did God come from?

For me personally, I can only explain my faith. I have seen the many arguments of the biblical inerrency guys. I also have respectfully read many of the quite educated counterpoints offered by the positiveatheism.org and other similar sites which are represented by quite intelligent atheists. I myself am a believer because of several mystic experiences which I believed to be more than coincidental. As a believer, I claim no superiority. I can not even judge anyone, although I mistakenly do occasionally in my posts. I love to talk about the potential reality of a living and personal God for the benifit of all wh listen. Its kinda like teenagers wanting their friends to "try some of this stuff" cuz it gets you high! What more do you want to hear? Much Love and Peace, Phatboy

Woah! I am new to this discussion group, and I am finding some of these streams of thought quite interesting! On a professional note, I take the side of "Believers in a Higher power" but on a personal note, I find no preferred group of panelists, here. Both sides ==the scientific and the faith based==have some good points and some redundant sloppy ones. (I am still reading, not trying to judge anyone..forgive me!) Here is my thoughts for the hour:
The theory of evolution really boils down to the development of all living things from a single cell, which itself came from non-living chemicals. A creationist point of view will admit that changes occur through time in living organisms. Creationists may disagree that the type of changes required for molecules to man evolution occur. In other words, changes that increase information content. Lets go to our fable book, the Bible. In the "myth" known as the Genesis Original Sin story, the following events occur:
1)In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
One side is quite happy with this as a fact. The other side sees no proof for this. Hence the question of "where is the proof for God?"
Next...God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures".
One side will point out the ridiculous inconsistency of Genesis. The other side is quite happy to believe that life was created.
Next..."Let us make man in our image". The Bible thumpers may say that "us" refers to the Holy Trinity. The other side sees no proof of a Creator and sees more proof of evolution. My point is that the act of belief in "facts" is not a strong enough belief. Case in point: Bumblebees cannot fly when measured mathimatically. Yet they fly. One side claims that science is evolving in knowledge...which brings up a neat point. Note the following:
Gen 3:1-5
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" 2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" 4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Ok...this serpent states that basically Man will not die for disobeying God but, rather, will evolve into being like God.
QUESTION FOR EVOLUTIONIST: If we are evolving, what will we become next? Will we move objects with our minds? Will we fly? Will we someday teleport ourselves? If so, will we learn not to hate? Not to lust? Not to kill? Discuss amongst yourselves.
I guess that another simple way of asking a basic question related to all of this is:
What came first? The Creator or Creation itself? If one is without belief in God, one would state that science can prove the origin of life. Indeed. We are the sh*t now! We may yet evolve into super beings, eh? Note the connection with this so called creation myth story?

Man! Keeping up with the likes of you guys is a challenge to a simpleton theist such as myself! While in my sinful, prideful nature it is tempting to skim past many of your replies,(since, after all, only what I am talking about has any importance,right?) I have been reading your replies and at the same time trying to keep a focus on the overall topic. Allow me to attempt to make sense to myself as I attempt to add to the collective response:
It seems that we all must agree somewhat on the definitions of words, because only by agreement can we be sure that we are talking about the same thing,right? For example, if the topic were apples and my definition of an apple was a circular red edible fruit and your definition of apple were an edible object which when consumed somehow illuminated my mind towards an entire new paradigm where I was co-aware of the reality of nature in a context labeled as "good and evil", we would be hard pressed towards agreement of the purpose of the fable/inerrent truth...
Philosophically, all of us are free to discuss meaning and to assign any value to our search that we wish. Lets agree on the meaning of the terms which we use, however.
Does Absolute Truth mean that Truth exists as a set value outside of our search? To one person, absolute truth may mean that God is real for them. It is circular reasoning on their part, because God is absolutely true for them and Truth equals an unchanging reality. For others, truth is an evolving and changing concept. Even looking at the Bible, God is said to be the same yesterday, today, and forever, yet God shows us quite different personality quirks in the Old Testament vs the New Testament. Stephen brought up a good point as saying that regardless of whether one believes in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, gravity is still observed the same way. It is understood perhaps in new ways, however. The same argument could be said of God. While the exact words of the Bible can be mocked for their inconsistencies and errors, the philosophical meaning of imperfect humans reacting to events by talking to their deity (whom either exists regardless of what is believed, or...exists only because people allow the thought) is the real meaning of the book. Many, many words and stories have been written by humans over time. Words have been organized into coherant theories, understanding has increased, and we are civilized, although still imperfect.
The "Fable" of original sin basically only shows that at some point, humans had an awareness of their own potential and that this somehow was the alternative to blind faith. Or am I wrong?

A couple of cents worth on my part of this diatribe:
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"Disagree. "Truth" is a word of human language, and its meaning is therefore defined by human minds. Reality exists, obviously, but it does not say "A is true" or "B is true" or "A and ~A is false." These are statements in human language. Reality says only "A." Or reality says only "B." Then humans, upon observing "A," construct the statement "A is true." This does not bind reality at all, but instead describes our observations of it."
_____________________________________________________________________ ===Based on this, any word of the human language invented by humans is thus defineable by humans. This cuts to the chase. My Original premise is that there are two basic belief paradigms:
A-God exists. He is the source of all truth, all knowledge, all love, and all wisdom. OR...
B-Man...human intellect...defines all concepts ever uttered by man. In other words, human intellect is the center of all definitions, all theories, all beliefs, and all that we talk about. god is an invention of the human mind.
Now....does this not sound a bit like the Genesis "fable" of the tree of knowledge? Does not this tree hypothetically split awareness into more than one reality? Was not awareness totally mono BEFORE the Fall, and very much expanded after? In other words,(bare with me as I struggle with this thought concept) The Tree of Knowledge represents an expansion of the original command, which was "Obey". The Original command was also a choice. A or B. Once B was chosen,(which God must have foreknown)the eyes of the "sinners" were opened.
This opening of awareness...this concept of "ye shall be as gods" seems to equate with my definition of the alternative belief system where humans invented all concepts through language and have defined everything....in a sense, creation by definition. Discuss amongst yourselves.[This message has been edited by Phatboy, 01-03-2004]

Commentary and more fable philosophy:
grace2u saidregarding absolute truths)
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So either,
1) They exist. Observations in the physical world suggest this.2) They do not exist. Unlikely since it is impossible for them to NOT exist(since to claim something to not exist is to declare an absolute).3)They exist and do not exist at the same time. This is irrational and there is no evidence which would suggest this.
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May I bring up some more of the "biblical fable" to engage the discussion philosophically:
Revelation discusses the concept of Jesus Christ as God and also discusses the Beast.(foul arch enemy!) For the sake of the philosophy, let us assume that God=Absolute. Notice how Revelation breaks down the concept of these entities: Rev 1:8
8 "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come,the Almighty."(from New International Version)
It could be surmised that God Was before Man, Is during Man and Will Be after Man, since we all know that we are born and we die. Notice how in Genesis, the "serpant" states that (Gen 3:4-5
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.")
Now...bear with me, guys...for I am fascinated by this "fable book".
Notice how the bad guy...ie serpant which presumably also is the Beast..is defined in Revelation: Rev 17:7-8
" 8 The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come."
Notice how the Beast Was..(perhaps as an angel?) Now is not(perhaps because in our human era, there is no absolute) and yet will come(only for those who are not written in the book of life...perhaps they chose not to believe?) Just a thought.[This message has been edited by Phatboy, 01-03-2004]

First a few observations about God.( I am taking this information from a respected apologist,found at Why Isn't the Evidence Clearer?) ==Ancient thought often held that the gods made man because they were in need of servants. Much modern thought argues that God made man because He was lonely or did not have anyone around to love or appreciate Him. However, the God of the Bible is in no way dependent upon mankind even for love or worship. That He reveals Himself at all is for our benefit, not His.
But even if He reveals evidence of Himself only to benefit us, why isn't He more forthright about it? This much seems clear: If He made His presence or the evidence too obvious, it would interfere with His demonstration, which is intended to draw out or reveal the true inner character of mankind. We know from several passages of Scripture that this is part of God's purpose for maintaining a relative silence. For example, in Psalm 50:21-22 we read, "These things you have done, and I kept silence; you thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you, and state the case in order before your eyes." From these statements we come to see that God is not struggling desperately to gain man's attention. Actually He is restraining Himself in order to demonstrate to human beings something about our inner character, or tendency to evil. We might call this "the Sheriff in the tavern" principle--people tend to be good when they think they are being watched by an authority. If a sheriff wants to find out or reveal who the troublemakers are in a tavern, he must either hide or appear to be an ineffective wimp, otherwise the bad guys will behave as well as everyone else.
Of course we should not push this analogy too far: unlike the Sheriff, God doesn't need to see men's evil actions in order to accurately judge them. Moreover, He has not stated His full reasons for allowing men to demonstrate their evil intent through their actions. The point we are trying to make here is that there are reasons that we can understand that may explain to some degree why God has chosen to run the world the way He has."====I know that the thing that is hard to accept is the audacity of absolute truth believers to speculate on how God thinks while still not being able to prove His existance. SIGH>>>>>