My idea of the creator God comes from cosmological arguments. — Brendan Golledge
My original god-concept came from my austere religious training : back-to-the-bible-protestant-Christianity. It typically dismissed many of the specifically Catholic doctrines & miracles --- except of course the resurrection --- as either metaphors or outright fabrications by officials of the Imperial Roman religion. Hence, we were taught to be skeptical & rational about our beliefs.
So, simple "It is written" Scriptural truths were more important than pretentious Cosmological arguments. In theory, we let the Bible authors do the philosophical thinking for us. But interpretation of their meaning & intention was not so simple. Moreover, I came to learn that many of those authors were either mythical or arbitrarily assigned --- by the Catholic compilers & editors of the original letters --- into the book we now know as the New Testament.
So, I lost faith, not in a logically-necessary world-creator-God, but in the man-made religions & scriptures purporting to represent & interpret the will of God. In college, I was introduced to a variety of different god-concepts, but all failed my skeptical testing. Therefore,
I gradually constructed a god-concept of my own, not from Catholic cosmological argumentation, but from the First Cause / Prime Mover conclusions of Plato & Aristotle, supplemented by modern scientific evidence : Big Bang & Quantum Theory. I'm content to let P & A answer ↪180 Proof's challenge*1 as to why an absolute eternal un-caused Cause is necessary to explain our world of contingent causes.
Those ab-original Philosophers reached that logical conclusion without any empirical evidence of an ex nihilo beginning of space-time (matter-energy)*2.
My own personal contribution to the various philosophical god-models is based on the scientific evidence that
semantic Information is also the energetic chain-of-causation (material evolution) that can be traced back to the mysterious beginning of Time. My thesis and blog go into the details of how I arrived at that obscure notion. In my next post I'll link to a blog essay that discusses the connection between meaningful Information and causal Energy.
Since Information & Energy are physical-but-immaterial, could a hypothetical Enformer/Programmer be the transcendent First Cause/Creator God?
*1.
Challenge to Brendan Golledge :
Please explain why do you assume that a so-called (un-knowable, ubiquitously nonevident) "Deity" can be "the uncaused cause of all other causes-effects" and yet also assume that the (know-able, inescapably evident) universe itself cannot be "the uncaused cause of all other causes-effects". — 180 Proof
Note --- An eternal universe would have to be self-caused, not un-caused, hence a deity. But
Spinoza's "single-substance" could not be perishable Matter, which is dependent on Energy to actualize. The Big Bang theory presumes that Energy (cause) and Law (control) are eternal. That's why I coined the term EnFormAction, to combine causation (energy) with organization (form) into creative Action.
*2. "Plato's
first cause reasoning is based on the idea that everything that comes into being must have a cause.
It also assumes that an infinite regress of causes is impossible.
Therefore, there must be a first cause, or something that is not an effect.
Plato believed that this first cause was a god of some kind."
___ Google AI overview
Note --- Apparently 180 believes in the hypothetical infinite regress-of-causes now known as the Multiverse Theory*3. Hence his Spinozan God is both material and eternal. Ironically,
our experience with a material world implies that it is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics : "
the final entropy must be greater than the initial entropy". The only way to continue the material world after inevitable heat-death would be to import Big-Bang-scale energy from some other (transcendent) source of energy/causation (Prime Cause).
*3."
Some say that the multiverse theory is an example of the Inverse Gambler's Fallacy.
The inverse gambler's fallacy is a formal fallacy that occurs when someone concludes that a random process has likely occurred many times before based on an unlikely outcome. It's the opposite of the gambler's fallacy, which is the belief that an event that has occurred often recently is less likely to occur again.
___ Google AI overview
Note --- Multiverse Theory is based on Inflation Theory, which has been criticized as paradoxical & unproveable. Besides, the Mverse is not only hypothetical, but necessarily transcendent to the time-bound world we know.
Space-Time-Matter-Energy, as we know it, vanish into nothingness when we turn back the clock to Planck Time.
"The latest astrophysical measurements, combined with theoretical problems, cast doubt on the long-cherished inflationary theory of the early cosmos and suggest ..."
___ Google AI overview