Can anything exist for an infinite time or outside of time?

If there must be a "first cause," cause that itself was not caused, why assert God? Why not remove the extraneous unproven entity, and simply say that the Universe itself is the "first cause?"After all, we at least have evidence the Universe exists. We do not have evidence for God.Besides, this line of reasoning is nothing more than special pleading from the outset. If everything requires a cause, then your God must also have been caused. If some things require causes and some things (Gods, in this instance) do not, then you cannot argue with logical consistency that God must exist because the Universe requires a cause. "Everything requires a cause, ergo my personal exception to the very rule I just claimed was universal" is not a logically consistent argument.If everything requires a cause, then your God must have been caused by something else.If you can arbitrarily state that there is one thing that does not adhere to causality, then there is no reason whatsoever to assign that immunity to God while insisting that the Universe itself still requires a cause.Causality only makes sense in the framework of the Universe anyway - time being a part of the Universe, and the definition of "cause" and "effect" being tied intimately to relative coordinates of time. Without the Universe to give us a framework for causality, the best can be said is that your question doesn't make sense, like asking what comes before the 0 mark on a ruler.

That statement is only valid if you redefine the term "God" to exclusively mean "that which exists but had no cause." As this doesn't actually fit with any previously used definition of "God" (those definitions typically being far more anthropomorphic, including the ability to think and have a will, interfere with human affairs, etc), this would require you to drastically shift the goalposts.You aren't shifting the goalposts, are you, DPowell? But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, "there is stuff," full stop.The logic is simple: if all things require a cause, then any proposes cause of the Universe must also have a cause, which must also have a cause, ad infinitum. If there is something that does not require a cause, then there is no reason whatsoever to propose a new entity in the equation when there is no evidence to support it's existence.If 1+2+x = 1+2, then x is extraneous, irrelevant, and equivalent to 0. THis is an argument from personal incredulity. Your ability to comprehend reality, as well as your sense of whether a given fact is personally satisfying, is utterly irrelevant to whether that fact is true.Frankly, it doesn't matter if something "seems odd" to you. You can think it "seems odd" that the sky is blue, but it's still blue. That's the thing about objective reality - it's decidedly unconcerned with our own opinions and beliefs. If a thing exists, it exists regardless of whether we believe in it or know about it or think it's "weird." The duckbilled platypus is weird, and it still exists. Science has not yet developed a firmly supproted theory for how life on Earth began. Abiogenesis research is extremely promising in that they're getting closer and closer all the time in progressing from raw organic compounds that we know exist naturally in lifeless environments towards the basics of what we would identify as "life."However, "I don;t know yet" is never an acceptible reason to jump to "Goddidit."What you call "less of a reach" is absolutely no different from some caveman exclaiming "it's magic!" It's not an explanation at all, it proposes the existence of entities that you cannot show to exist, it uses undefined and unknown absurd mechanisms like "the breath of life," and there is absolutely no reason to believe such an asserton whatsoever beyond an appeal to the authority of an ancient book which itself is contradicted by innumerable other ancient books.In short: science does not reach, and when we don't know something or have strong evidence to support an assertion, we say "I don't know."Religion proposes deities to "explain" unknowns with magic rather than being intellectually honest.And this is the science forum, DPowell. Here, you need to support your assertions with evidence, and the Bible is just a book.Do you have any evidence that suggests the existence of a deity? Or are we to simply trust your personal sense of credulity as to what "sounds right" and is more personally believable to you?The fact that you believe you've made any valid points or have effectively responded to my own amuses me.

There is no hypocrisy. I was perfectly clear: while abiogenesis research is [i]promising,[/]i the fact remains that we don't know.More pertinently, "we don;t know" does not in any way mean that "God did it" is a preferred explanation. Mainly because "God did it" is not an explanation at all, but is rather the invocation of magic.Would you care to support your assertion that life arose because of the direct intervention of a deity?Note: I don't have to supply a plausible explanation for the origins of life. "We don't know yet, insufficient data" is perfectly acceptable when it's true. The burden of proof is on you to prove that life was divinely created, because you have made that assertion.I find it rather telling, however, that you chose to ignore a rather lengthy and detailed post, simply to reply with "lol, you don't know, so God did it!"It;s also rather amusing that you're focused on the origin of life, when that is not the topic of this thread. The topic relates to cosmology, and the origin of the Universe, something that predates life on Earth by quite a long time.So I'll restate my point on that issue, since you enjoy ignoring it:If everything requires a cause, then any porposed cause for the Unvierse will itself require a cause, which will require a cause, ad infinitum. In your terms, your Creator would need to have been Created by a still greater Creator, who would also need to be Created by a Creator, and so on forever.If you propose that some things (like Gods) are exempt from causality and do not require a cause, then parsimony (commonly known as Occam's Razor) suggests that we should prefer the explanation with the fewest terms. Since Gods are unevidenced assertions and an uncaused Universe works just as well as a Universe caused by an uncaused deity, it is logical to conclude that the Universe is the uncaused factor, and not your wholly imagined deity.Now, would you care to make an actual contribution to discussion by addressing my actual points as stated, or would you prefer to continue to risk the ire of the moderators by posting inane nonsense, strawmen, and assertions that you refuse to support with evidence in the science forums?

I understand the problems with the proverbial dog-pile. It's an unfortunate inevitability in an online forum environment. I would suggest to you, as the mods often have in cases like this, that you shouldn;t feel required to reply to every single person, but you should feel the need to make those replies that you do make contain some substance. We'd rather have you respond to 10% of the replies you generate with quality arguments than reply to everyone with simplistic one-liners. Why does the Universe itself not occupy the role of the "uncaused?" Why must there be a "Creator?" More importantly, how is one to know the qualities of such an entity if you cannot even show that it exists? How would I differentiate a "Creator" that actually exists in objective reality from one that exists only within your own mind? Why should I push back the "uncaused" beginning one notch, when I know that the Universe exists but I do not know that a "Creator" exists?Remember, I'm going for logical consistency here. That means that, if you assert that "everything requires a cause," logically that statement must apply to any proposed "Creator."If you say that "there are exceptions to the rule of causality," then not only are you engaging in special pleading (a logical fallacy in itself), you are also violating Occam's Razor by inserting an additional entity without any evidence-based reason for doing so. It neither needs nor intends to answer "all of the questions." It needs and intends to answer the question "what is the origin of the Universe?" If you accept "The Creator Just Is," why could you not accept that "the Universe just is?"I'd also like to remind you that our notions of causality are the result of the Universe itself and its framework of time. Let me use an analogy:Imagine time as being analogous to the North/South axis of the Earth, and let the beginning of time be represented by the North pole. Causality is modeled here as well - just as every action has a preceding "cause" adjacent to it in time, every point on the Earth has an adjacent point closer to the North pole.What "caused" the beginning of time is therefore analogous to asking "what is farther North than the North Pole?"The answer to this question requires more information than we possess. There are innumerable conceivable possibilities (yes, including divine Creation), but very few are also supported by evidence, and even those are not very solid or well-tested. Ojective evidence tells us that the Universe is finite, having an absolute minimum value for time (at which point all of space was confined to a single dimensionless point as well), and that the Universe has expanded since then in a process we can still observe today through the redshift of distant stars and the cosmic microwave background. Our understanding of gravity and spacetime also shows that mass literally warps, or distorts, both space and time, which is indirectly observable through such processes as gravitational lensing and more direct measurements on Einstein's Theory of Relativity (which is extremely well-supported by evidence).Cavediver and Son Goku are the people to listen to at this point, because they are real-life, actual-factual physicists who have studied cosmology professionally. The best I can tell you at this point is that, because mass causes curvatures in spacetime, causality as we understand it from a human perspective gets incredibly weird as you approach the first moment, T=0. I'm sorry, but all of this is irrelevant and completely off-topic. "The Bible says so" is just as insufficient as it would be for me to say "Steven Hawking said so." Biblical assertions are perfectly welcome here if they can be corroborated with supporting evidence from the outside world. In other words, if you were to assert that there was a global Flood as described in Genesis, in the science forums you would be required to submit evidence from geology, as an example, showing objective evidence of a global Flood aside from the claims of your ancient text.As it pertains to this thread, you are suggesting that we should assume the universality of causality even as it applies to the Universe itself, yet make a special exception for a deity you claim to exist. In this case, you must provide objective evidence that your deity actually exists, that causality does not apply to it, that it did in fact cause the Universe, etc. Cosmology, incidentally, is a field of science.Science does not pretend to answer all questions. However, it does use evidence to support the answers it does give. The theories of science are tested against reality to determine their accuracy; we can never know everything (or anything, really) with 100% certainty, but we can test our knowledge against reality to see if we're close, and what is practical. I can never be absolutely certain that gravity is not the result of invisible angels holding me down to the ground, but the accuracy and practical usefulness of the modern Theory of Gravity make it vastly superior.Science is able to answer questions only about the objective world around us. It cannot answer subjective questions. But it is extremely good at unlocking the various secrets of the Universe. It is only via the scientific method that we today have a firm grasp on the nature of the expansion of teh Universe, the orbits of planets, the nature of gravity and the other fundamental forces, and so on.Theology makes a great many assertions, but has a remarkably poor track record when it comes to either accuracy or practical usefulness. How, by any methods, could we determine such a thing with any reasonable degree of certainty? Magical invisible and intangible all-powerful beings are by their nature unfalsifiable; I can no more disprove your notion of "God" than you can disprove the notion of Allah, or Quetzalcoatl, or ghosts, or fairies, or any other unfalsifiable assertion.That, of course, is the problem - if you tell me about something that is compeltely invisible, completely intangible, infinitely large, ancient, knowledgeable, and powerful, what reason do I have to believe you?If I tried to convince you that the Universe was Created last Thursday by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, along with all of our memories and the world around us with the appearance of age, could you falsify such an assertion? Would you believe me? Specifically, why or why not? What if I had an ancient book and a few million other people who believed me already? What if I called the Flying Spaghetti Monster "God" instead? What would be the objective difference between my assertion and yours?This is the real problem with theological assertions. If a given assertion cannot be differentiated from any other similar assertion in terms of its accuracy as it relates to the objective, real world, then it has the same level of accuracy as any random guess that anyone can conceive - and models of the Universe tend to work just as well without them as with them.