It is common to just assume God is timeless and spaceless. But I aver that’s logically impossible.
You Have to Exist Somewhere to Exist at All
If God has no location, then by definition there is no location at which God exists. And if there is no location at which God exists, then by definition God exists nowhere. Which entails that God does not exist. Because the proposition “there is nowhere that God exists” is literally synonymous with “God does not exist.” Just as with anything else. If I tell you “there is nowhere that faeries exist” or “Plato’s Forms don’t exist anywhere,” you would correctly apprehend me to be saying faeries and Plato’s Forms simply don’t exist at all. If there is nowhere that you (or anything at all) can even conceptually go and be where God or faeries are, then God and faeries don’t exist. Yet being somewhere is what it means to be located in space. That particular space might have no extension (it might be a one dimensional point and thus have no radius or any other properties); but it must still exist.
Which means God needs a place to exist before he can exist at all. He cannot think up where to exist and then locate himself there. He cannot exist “nowhere” and still exist to work out where to exist, so as to exist (by analogy, that “lands us” in the same “nonsense” as “that God, before making himself able to make himself, makes himself,” Thomas Ward, Divine Ideas, p. 17). Whereas space does not need God to exist. Nor does it need a “place” to exist because it is a “place.” Space is self-locating, by definition. Space is therefore a more fundamental ground of all being than God. In terms of existential quantifiers, God existing but existing nowhere is akin to “There is an even number n by which n × n = 25,” which is false. Existing somewhere is simply a fundamental requirement of existing at all.
Since it is the case that from any intelligible definition of being, in order for anything to exist, it must exist somewhere, this requirement of existence is satisfied even if that somewhere is everywhere (like the universe itself, or even abstract objects, however you conceive of them, and whether you are thinking of numbers or more complex ideas: they do not exist “nowhere,” because they exist, as potentialities, everywhere), or some other space than ours (like, say, another plane of existence). Even your love for your wife exists at a location in space: your brain. And since existing nowhere is not existing, it cannot be that God has no location, or exists in no space. And since it is circularly impossible to be at a place to think up a place to exist when no place to be at exists, God cannot have created a place for himself to exist.
And no, you can’t defeat this conclusion by saying, “But I can imagine God existing nowhere,” because that statement will be literally false: to imagine anything at all, you have to use a brain, which has a location. It is logically impossible for you to imagine something without a location. You are always imagining things in a location. The converse is not the case, of course—that you can’t imagine something without a location does not itself prove a location is required to exist (it’s simply a product of you using a located computer to simulate things). But it is proved by tautology. Existing nowhere simply is what not existing means. If you look in every place something can exist, and it’s not in any of them, it doesn’t exist. To not exist anywhere and still exist is a contradiction in terms. Hence you are always putting God somewhere when you think of God existing at all.
Indeed, “omnipresence” as an attribute entails God is everywhere, and thus far from nowhere: on that theology, God exists at every point of space we know. I’m not the first to point this out. See, for example, Arcadi’s analysis in “God is Where God Acts: Reconceiving Divine Omnipresence” in Topoi and Buckareff’s study of “Divine Location” in Alternative Concepts of God. See also “God and Spacelessness” by Paul Helm (and even the reply of Ishtiyaque Haji, “God and Omnispatiality”); and Brian Davies’ famous article on the whole problem of God’s relationship to time in “A Timeless God” where he shows you can only coherently rescue God as timeless by denying he is a person! The same would hold for space (to not be “here,” you have to be, by definition, “somewhere else”). Ultimately, every attempt to get God to both have no location and still be real is illogical—it contradicts something else the theist needs to believe about God, or else leans on magic words with a perpetually equivocated meaning (like “transcendence”).
That kind of confidently asserted nonsense is par for the course for modern theism, though. Just think of the Christian obsession with still insisting the Trinity is logical, or that God can be made compatible with the world’s malignancy. They confidently assert these problems to have been solved when in fact they haven’t—their conceptions are simply illogical. Hence their confidence in what they say is a solution should not be mistaken for having any actual solution. The fact remains that God must have spatial location. “I just don’t believe that” is not a valid response, any more than it is a valid response to pointing out that the Nicene Trinity is logically impossible or that one’s God as just described is logically incompatible with observed malignancies. The only real solution to those problems is to abandon them (adopt a heretical resolution of the Trinity or redefine your god or his limitations). In respect to place, God must be located either everywhere or only some places and not others—or else no longer exist, or not yet exist, or never have existed (a point we’ll return to shortly). No other option is logically available.
Which is why this is not really a huge problem for theists. It only annoys them because they are emotionally attached to all their weird preconceptions—just as with the Trinity and Theodicy, which are easily solved by simply giving up on their weird formulas and accepting some “shocking” heresy or other. Hence a theist can easily solve the location problem by accepting God is omnilocated and thus a spatial being after all—or by simply declaring that God necessarily exists, and if that logically requires a place to exist (some dimensionless, propertyless point of hyperspace), then it necessarily exists along with him. Of course, the theist has no reason to believe God necessarily exists—whereas we do have reason to believe space necessarily exists. For example, it is logically impossible to have less than zero of something and still have nothing, so there must be at minimum a zero-point of space. But that’s still a point of space (it just has zero extension; but it is still a location). Negative space is just more space. Positive space is just more space. So the least amount of space you can have is zero space. But that defines a geometric point of space. It’s still a place to be. And that’s part of The Problem with Nothing.
You Have to Exist Sometime to Have Ever Existed at All
It gets to be a bigger problem for theists when we point out that to exist, something also has to exist at some time. If there is no time at which you exist, then by definition you never existed. And if you never exist, you don’t ever exist—by definition. It is therefore logically impossible for a God to be wholly “timeless.” God can be timeless in a less ambitious sense: if he is located at the first (and, until he acts to extend it, only) point of time, then it can still be the case that time has zero extension. Like that previously-imagined minimal space, time is then a geometric point: a location in time, but still no span of time has passed. God can thus “instantaneously” work out what to do at t=0 and “instantaneously” act to do it, like some amazing quantum computer that solves every problem the moment it is turned on. But it cannot be the case that God created time. Just as with space, he cannot exist at some time so as to work out that he needs to cause time to exist. Time has to already exist for there to be any time “when” God figured that out. God therefore needs time to exist—otherwise he never existed—not the other way around (see, for example, the Oxford analysis of R.T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God).
Time is thus more fundamental than God. God needs time to exist to himself exist. But time does not need God to exist. Because it is again logically impossible to have less than zero of something and still have nothing. So there must always be at minimum a zero-point of time. But that’s still a point of time (it just has zero extension; but it is still a time, and hence a location in time). Negative time is just more time—an extension beyond zero. Positive time is just more time—an extension beyond zero in the other direction. So the least amount of time you can have is zero time. But that defines a geometric point of time. It’s still a time to be. And that’s also part of The Problem with Nothing.
In fact, any zero-point of space that necessarily exists must itself be located at some of time (whether a zero-point of time or not)—otherwise that space “never existed,” and thus didn’t and doesn’t exist. There has to be a “time when” there was zero space, otherwise there never was zero space (and there was, instead, always a nonzero quantity of space)—and no, it can’t be located before time, any more than you can be north of the north pole. Time, conversely, must exist somewhere to exist at all, and so it must always be co-located with some space, even if a dimensionless point of it. There could conceivably be multiple, even infinite, such zero-points of spacetime (unless you conclude that that constitutes more than zero things, and you are supposing that everything started with the least amount of things possible—and hence no unnecessary things). But there can never be a time without a space, nor a space without a time, nor any place or time when neither existed.
This is again solvable, and in the same way—if a dimensionless point of time must exist for God to exist, and God necessarily exists, then so would the time necessary for his existence. But he won’t have caused that to be, because it won’t have been contingent: the existence of time is then logically necessary; and so time, like space, is a necessary being. The extension of time can be contingent—so God can still be responsible for making there be any more time than just the zero-point of time he exists at—but time itself must exist apart from God; he can’t be responsible for it. Nor, of course, can God “predate” time (that is literally illogical, a direct self-contradiction, as already noted: it’s like being north of the north pole).
Once we admit that God cannot exist but for a spacetime allowing a where and when to exist, yet also admit that spacetime does not require a God to make it exist, we come to realize spacetime requires no God—but God requires a spacetime. Spacetime is therefore more fundamental than God (a problem I pointed out before to Edward Feser; indeed, again and again). If spacetime can exist independently of God, requiring nothing more fundamental than itself, then spacetime has the better claim to being the ground of all being than God. After all, like space, time does not need another time in which to be located—time is a time, and thus is itself a time when to be. Time exists at all times. And space exists in all places, at all times. And thus time is also self-locating, by definition; just like space. No “second” time need exist to establish when time exists, just as no “second” space need exist to establish where space exists.
What would cause a dimensionless point of spacetime to expand into an extended spacetime is then the Cosmological Problem, but atheists have as many solutions to that as theists. Just explore the cosmology category in my website’s drop-down menu; but have a start with, again, The Problem with Nothing, or for a scientific model, see What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State? And if you want a more proactive hypothesis, something to match the theist’s weird theory that God just “makes” things keep existing and have the properties they do, we can theorize just as easily (and with a stronger basis in logic and evidence) that spacetime itself does that (see Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism). “But you don’t know that for sure” is no more an objection to that than to the theist’s even weirder theory it replaces. Ockham’s Razor resolves that dispute in our favor (see The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).
Conclusion
As I wrote before:
[Theists will say] God is a good candidate for the First Cause because he is “not essentially located in space or time.” [But] this is actually false. A thing has to be essentially located in space and time even to exist; otherwise, by definition, it never exists and exists nowhere, which is literally what it means to not exist. But what I think [they want] to say is that God does not have a specific location in spacetime (he exists everywhere at every time), which would be a contingent fact, and we need God to be a necessary fact. But a primordial or existential “nothing”-state satisfies this condition. It is no more “essentially located in space or time” than [their] God has to be. Insofar as there has to be a time when there was nothing, and nothing has to occupy a position different from or the same as any resulting something, it necessarily did. Just like [their] God.
And elsewhere (and again in a followup):
To exist, an entity requires there to be a place and time to exist. Otherwise it by definition never exists and exists nowhere. Thus all entities that exist are dependent on and thus subordinate to spacetime. Everything that exists, to exist, requires spacetime. But spacetime itself, to exist, requires nothing but itself. It does not require some extra place and time to exist. It is place and time. Spacetime is therefore the only conceivable thing that requires no further substrate for it to be. Nothing “extra” need exist for spacetime to exist. But something extra must always exist for anything else to exist. That something extra is [minimally] spacetime: a place and time to be.
So it should have been obvious that spacetime is the fundamental ground of all being. We need nothing else to explain existence. Because it needs nothing else to exist. All the “being” and “isness” that is and ever was and ever can be, boils down to nothing more than place and time: existing somewhere, at some time. Even what everything is ultimately made of, may well indeed be nothing other than spacetime, suitably twisted and knotted up into the geometries we mistake as atoms and photons. There is no evidence it’s not.
In short, to exist, God needs other things to exist—principally somewhere to exist, and some time when to exist, as well as a great deal else (a plethora of superpowers, a convenient commitment to a particular morality, a working mind without any material to hold it together). But spacetime does not need anything else to exist to exist. Nothing could exist but spacetime, and yet spacetime could still then exist. Everything else, to exist, requires adding things to that—but none of those things that would make for a God are logically necessary; whereas a mere spacetime, even a zero-point of it, already contains everything logically necessary for a spontaneous multiverse to inevitably expand from it.
It thus matters that God cannot be spaceless and timeless. Those are nonsensical properties for anything that exists. Because to be spaceless and timeless is literally what it means not to exist. And since God is therefore not needed for spacetime to exist, but rather spacetime has a much clearer basis to necessarily exist than something as bizarrely elaborate as a God, and since just “spacetime” existing can explain all the rest of existence, exactly as observed, the impossibility of God being timeless and spaceless tells against there being a God. It does not make God impossible; but it does make God too unnecessary to credit. The rest falls to the evidence. And that does not bode well for there being any God (see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed and its converse exploration in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics).
The point of the Argument from Non-Locality, therefore, is not that it proves God does not exist, any more than finding logical contradictions in a particular conception of omnipotence does. One can always restore coherence to theism by simply abandoning a dumb position. For example, you can redefine omnipotence as “has all logically possible powers,” and thus avoid any “omnipotence entails contradictions” argument. Likewise with Nonlocality. I have shown various ways a theology can be retooled to rescue God from these findings, and keep him compatible with them. But what the argument does is reset the playing board: there are conceptions of God it rules out; and those conceptions are often resorted to in other arguments (such as the Kalam). And there are consequences of the argument that favor atheism: it is easier to conceive of a mindless spacetime as a necessary being, and as the ground of all being, than anything as contingently elaborate as an intelligent magical being with unexplained motivations and inexplicable abilities.
Hi there Richard! Im really enamored by your work! Well done! OTHJ is HUGELY interesting. I have been a student of Ehrman for sometime, and quite frankly your historical scholarship has revealed mistakes he’s made on a variety of things. The Josephus question about being meddled with and the Talmud revealing the messiah in Ish 53 are really obvious. Anyway, keep up the GREAT scholarship! Your rebuttals to would be “experts” is classic!
I appreciate the support.
To the believers this would be no argument at all. God can do anything! Reason, logic, rationale, sanity, etc. has nothing to do with God.
That does not describe all believers, though. It doesn’t really even describe any actual Christian academics (or hardly any).
Most believers do not buy into any kind of presuppositionalism like that. Least of all academics. And you won’t find it hardly anywhere in even Christian-peer reviewed literature.
I’m curious how you would view some of the recent work in quantum gravity that proposes spacetime is emergent rather than fundamental. Would you say such models are illogical because they describe things existing without requiring spacetime, or would you say they smuggle in spacetime under a different name?
So are you saying that scientists were too quick to rule out “aether”? 😀
That’s not ether theory. Ether was a substance pervading spacetime, not spacetime itself. Spacetime realism is known today as Superstring Theory or M Theory, and is not the same as luminiferous ether theory. M Theory posits spacetime as the medium, not a substance pervading spacetime.
A closer analog is Maxwell’s gravitational ether theory, which ended up being partly true: quantum mechanics entails gravity is produced by a universal graviton field pervading space. That’s not exactly what Maxwell meant, but it comes pretty close, since it makes gravity analogous to electromagnetism, which was Maxwell’s objective.
Hence elements of ether theory ended up true as a result of quantum mechanics (e.g. the universe is awash with an ether called “electromagnetic fields,” i.e photons) but ether theory itself didn’t hold up (due to Relativity Theory, no “ether” was needed to explain light; light explains itself: see the entire history of this).
Do you remember a paper I showed you that defined a “phenomenon” in terms of its “object-involved occurent(s)”? In this way, a phenomenon can be thought of as the part of a process that we can see. But what we can see is a result of the stuff we can’t see “doing stuff.” so all I’m really asking is if we can call spacetime itself a “substance.” (if we can’t call it a “substance” or a “stuff,” then I am very confused)
Semantics is a vexing field of philosophy, because it uncovers the chaos behind how humans actually define and use words. The truth is, people use words in a fuzzy way based on trained neurolinguistic patterns and not through careful analysis. Professional fields try to fix that, but they can’t fix all of it.
So whether you call spacetime a “substance” simply depends on what you mean by that word. Likewise “stuff.” If, tautologically, you mean things that exist other than spacetime, then it analytically excludes spacetime. If you mean things that have volume, then spacetime must be included. If you mean things that have mass, then it depends on to what extent you distinguish spacetime from the virtual particle field that emerges from it. And so on.
In short, people do not actually have a very clear idea of what they even mean by “substance” or “stuff,” and so one has to start with “Why do you care?”
In other words, why do you need, say, “substance” to mean one particular thing rather than another? The answer will then guide you in how to delineate what “substance” analytically refers to when you use the word.
If, however, you want to know empirically what other people mean by it, then you have to empirically go and find out.
For example, there is no scientific definition of the word. Physicists eschew it for more precise designators like “volume” or “mass” or “particles/fields.” And if you query people, everyone will give you a different answer, and since most actually haven’t thought about it, they will tend to confabulate an answer, which will not correspond to how they actually use the word (this is what Ayer meant by definitions “in practice,” since what people “say” they mean by a word rarely correlates to how they actually use the word).
There is also the problem of what a thing appears to be vs. what it is. I use the example of “life force” in Sense and Goodness without God. People will think it means (and use it as if it meant) some fluid or force that one could separate from an organism; when in fact every time they point to where it is and isn’t, they are simply pointing to the physical state of the organism’s metabolism, and not some separate extra force or power.
So, “substance” usually “in practice” means matter-energy, hence “particles” or “fields.” It thus tautologically excludes spacetime. But on some models of Superstring theory, particles and hence fields and hence matter and energy are just vibrations of spacetime (in a complex manifold of at least eleven total dimensions), so all “substance” is an emergent property “of” spacetime. One can still distinguish them, insofar as spacetime can be flat (and thus manifest no substances in that sense), and this is like distinguishing a rug from its bumps: the rug is not bumps, the bumps are not a rug, but the bumps wholly reduce to the shape of the rug so that really all that exists is the rug.
So…
Semantics is hard.
The reason I’m referring to it as “substance” is, well, any wave is merely the phenomenal aspect of an “OIO,” as the paper said. Hence, a water “wave” is merely the phenomenal aspect of the (more or less circular) motion of the water wave OIOs, i.e., the individual water molecules and their combined interactions. I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s “this is water” speech. Indeed, here we are, two over-evolved fish asking, “what the fuck is spacetime!?”
Variants of Superstring Theory (M Theory) make spacetime the “water” in terms of analogous function, but water is only a substance because it has mass. Spacetime does not. Also, an ether would move through spacetime; whereas spacetime cannot move through itself. Moreover, because of relativity, bosons (particles without a rest mass, like photons) don’t actually “move” at all: they comprise a frozen static wave in the time block they pass through; being their own anti-particle, they simultaneously move both forwards and backwards in time, such that in their reference frame, no time passes.
Do you get what I’m saying? It’s not that you “need a medium to propagate a wave,” it’s that a wave is always merely a phenomenal aspect of cyclical “motion” (it works just as well for social “waves” and “movements”!) of OIOs, be they quantized EM energy “packets” or be they human beings! You’ve studied movements, Dr. Carrier! You know all about it!
That’s what I am saying. So I don’t know what point you intend to make.
Yes. But water only has mass because it’s made of massive “particles,” right? So doesn’t “mass” itself basically “emerge” from something “sub-mass” (they did discover “the Higgs boson,” right?), sort of like how “temperature” emerges from the motion of molecules. We know there IS “mass” in something somewhere because of “dark matter.” Are we afraid to say “things are made out of stuff” just because we can’t define “stuff”? There are definitely a lot of people who aren’t afraid to say “things are made out of math.” that IS something I would be afraid to say! I’m more made out of stuff than I’m made out of math! I can assure you of that! My eye floaters aren’t “made of math” just because they exhibit Brownian motion! 😛
Yes. On current theory, (rest) mass emerges from interaction with the Higgs field (a product of the Higgs boson), though not in the sense of temperature (temperature is a human construct for averaging kinetic energy transfer across billions of collisions), but more in the sense of electric charge (which arises from interaction with the electromagnetic field, a product of the photon).
But I don’t see the relevance of this or anything else you are saying to what we were discussing.
Dr. Carrier! The real lesson from Lakoff is that many of our concepts are metaphorical! “imaginary” numbers, for example! That means a metaphor IS a kind of LOGIC! And metaphor logic is positive sum! That means we can all be “right”! We just need to translate all the metaphors into scientific language! You’ve made similar points regarding what things are versus how we talk about them when you’ve talked about how to separate two parts of the data from an experiment (or something like that). Your point was that “you have to draw the line somewhere.” and we have so much more potential to darken and sharpen those lines! The metaphor “contains multitudes” in terms of meaning, just like a quantum computer could perform two calculations at once! Hegelian positive sum logic contains within it Aristotelian true/false logic! It just INCLUDES everything the Aristotelian logic leaves out! Metaphor, for example! It’s the logic that “tells” metaphors “how” to interact with propositions! It’s the logic that says, at the same time, “no, a tree that falls in the forest with no ears to hear it doesn’t stimulate any hearing organs, but yes, it does vibrate air molecules”
Ok, so why can’t we define “substance” or “stuff” or “material” as WHAT everything is made OF? That the “substance” “becomes” “particles” when it’s “energized” in a “particular” way? Because if it’s all “stuff,” then it’s all the same stuff and there’s only one kind of stuff and we’re all it all at the same time!
ChatGPT said:
ChatGPT
The idea that spacetime might be emergent rather than fundamental is a fascinating and complex topic in theoretical physics. It’s not necessarily illogical, but it does challenge our traditional intuitions about reality.
Emergence of Spacetime
In some approaches to quantum gravity, like those involving string theory, loop quantum gravity, or the holographic principle, spacetime is not treated as a fundamental entity but as something that emerges from more basic, non-spatial, and non-temporal degrees of freedom. This is akin to how temperature emerges from the collective behavior of particles in a gas—temperature doesn’t exist at the level of individual particles, but it emerges at a macroscopic scale.
Logical Consistency
From a logical standpoint, these models are consistent, but they require rethinking what we mean by concepts like “existence” and “reality.” In traditional physics, spacetime is the stage on which all physical events play out. But in these emergent models, the stage itself arises from a deeper, possibly more abstract level of reality.
Smuggling in Spacetime?
One could argue that some models might be “smuggling” in spacetime under a different name. For instance, if the underlying structure from which spacetime emerges has elements that correspond to causal relationships or information flows, one might wonder if we’re just reinterpreting spacetime in a different language. However, the key idea in these models is that what we recognize as spacetime and its geometric properties are secondary, derived features, not fundamental ones.
Metaphysical Implications
If spacetime is emergent, this has profound implications not only for physics but also for our metaphysical understanding of existence. It suggests that space and time, as we experience them, are not the most basic aspects of reality, but rather phenomena that arise from something more fundamental.
Conclusion
In summary, these models are not illogical, but they do require a shift in how we conceptualize reality. Rather than smuggling in spacetime, they often propose that what we experience as spacetime is a derived concept, emerging from a more fundamental, pre-geometric framework. This is an area of active research, and while still speculative, it offers intriguing possibilities for understanding the true nature of the universe.
AI is rubbish. Much of this is “off,” almost like a Deepak Chopra deepity machine. For a more coherent and level discussion, see my following comment.
Note that “emergent spacetime” is actually the most popular position in physics right now.
I am skeptical, because I find the reasons given for it poor, and the converse position has more explanatory power. So I am with the M theory camp (superstring theorists).
But, that said:
One can do all the same things with the other view, since even if spacetime is emergent, that simply swaps spacetime for fields (or quantum loops in the corresponding TOE), and then fields are fundamental and do all the same stuff.
And this is, really, what is going on with “creation from nothing” cosmologies that physicists like Krauss talk about: theists will accuse them of starting with something that isn’t nothing (a minimal quantum false vacuum state); but they will respond that it isn’t logically possible to have less than that. The case to make for that is more convoluted and shaky to me (it’s far easier to do it with spacetime, and that explains far more), but you can do it, if you know the physics.
So a Krauss could take my article and replace all the space and time stuff with quantum field state equations and get the same result. You could call that smuggling, I guess, but neither I nor they would characterize it that way, since they fully admit spacetime comes along with it as a logically necessary outcome.
For example, a zero-point of spacetime, in quantum emergence, becomes a quantum singularity. The state of space and time (and their potential for extension) are then in the resulting equations describing that quantum singularity. You could then say that for God to exist before anything happens, he has to exist there. Which then gets you to quantum theology, where God is the ultimate quantum state, yadayada. But that is, once again, not going to be emotionally appealing to traditional theists. But alas, it’s where they could go to escape the problem.
Thanks,Richard, for putting ChatGPT to shame as I knew you would and for giving me a chuckle from the Deepak Chopra deepity machine as well. 🙂
My wife gave up using AI notetakers at work because they simply don’t work. They are far too unreliable to accurately annotate a meeting. They miss important things, include unimportant things, hallucinate things, describe things strangely or misleadingly. It was more work to fix its output than to just write up your own summary of the meeting.
They can sound like they are correctly describing something; they are good at that. But their frequent subtle errors (and sometimes grossly negligent errors) are too numerous for anyone to trust them. They also tend to simply repeat the errors and biases of society—because that’s what they train on and are trying to ape. No one has built an AI that trains solely on peer reviewed source material, for example—much less that won’t hallucinate results even from that. AI already often fabricates sources that don’t exist. It would continue to do so even if trained solely on quality material.
I think AI has generally been a failure. Which was partly the cause of the recent stockmarket crash: investors have finally figured out AI is garbage and can’t make any money; so AI tech stocks plummeted. The only people still holding that stock are suckers and pumpers.
I always like to say: “If God existed, it would not be God.” Because everything that exists, is natural, even massless photons that “experience” neither time nor space, even the cosmos itself, whether (like in our era) with mass in it, or (in the very far future) devoid of mass (and therefore of time).
Without time, this god can do nothing.
Wouldn’t Christians just say that god exists ‘in heaven’, which, of course also can’t be located and hence the same arguments apply.
Thank you so much for your rebuttle to the article by Bill Cooke in the ‘Free Inquiry’ magazine. I was riled when I read it, and I hoped someone will real credibility, like you, would respond. You did it well.
Elaine Olson
That’s a popular response, but it is loathed by academic Christians because God has to create heaven, so it can’t “already exist” before he creates anything.
This illustrates my point about their emotional attachment to dogmas: they could easily solve a lot of theological difficulties like this by simply dropping some unnecessary conceits, but those “unnecessary conceits” are too emotionally “necessary” for them to drop. This reflects the fact that theology is not empirical. It is fideist. You start with what you must believe, and then try to rationalize it, the opposite of any sound method.
It seems like the programming to believe in God exists in the minds of the believer and utilizes the those processing resources within their network of neurons.
Contrarily, the rational skeptic’s neurological network dedicates those resources to processing critical thought about the information obtained from processing reality.
It seems the God programming roots in the cognitive centers when processing reality and acts to bias the believer’s realism.
Richard,
It always made me uncomfortable and outright baffled the mental gymnastics which otherwise atheist, critical scholars and experts employ
to explain how, setting aside preexisting similar stories and cults like the Dead Sea scroll community, Osiris etc etc which constitute the fertile soil from which Christianity could spring, as far as the origins of the novel, distinct thing we call Christianity goes
“Paul” is the first we have (in fact in many ways “Paul” is the ONLY thing we have since the entire gospels and everything else that came after come through “Paul”)
and how, despite that, somehow, it’s “Paul” who hijacked the supposedly preexisting movement, glossed over all of it’s core concepts and groundings in reality and replaced them with something completely different
and we have to like tease out this non-extant supposedly preexisting movement from that later material (which, illogically, has MORE details about basically everything) (and are in plain conflict with each other about pretty much absolutely every single thing they allege)
it just makes SO much more sense to simply START with “Paul” and the, by “Paul’s” own admission, NON historical, REVEALED and SPIRITUAL nature of the concepts (which, if you think about it, while spiritual and light on detail, for those very reasons are actually MORE internally consistent than what comes after)
and watch instead how it is LATER developments which hijack THAT movement and start trying filling in all the blanks in a what is a plain and vain attempt to ground it in reality
However! There’s one detail I haven’t been able to reconcile and which I’m sure you’ve addressed but I haven’t been able to find if you have – “Paul’s” references to Peter and James. (which afaik are in the “undisputed” Paul) (which admittedly, like, who knows, lol, but assuming those references are in fact real “Paul”, how do we square that? Since they do seem to imply a preexisting movement and an actual “brother” and “disciple”) Any light you may have to shed on that would be deeply appreciated.
This comment is not relevant to the article you are posting it under so I will be brief:
(1) Paul himself says he hijacked and modified a prexisting movement. So, you are contradicting yourself here if you mean to cite Paul as evidence against that. But all Paul says he changed was the requirements for Gentiles to join.
(2) The Gospels are a second wave of “hijacking” insofar as they euhemerized what Paul reveals those of his generation only knew as a revelatory being. Paul makes clear Peter and James also thought that, so the question of whether there is any pre-Pauline support for the Gospel narratives is answered by Paul himself (and the authors of 1 Clement and Hebrews and possibly even 1 Peter): no, there isn’t.
So I am not clear what you mean to be asking. It sounds like you need to read my study On the Historicity of Jesus. It will answer all questions. Because it was designed to.
How would you respond to someone saying that God is, essentially, the substrate of existence? A lot of Christians say God is omnipresent and “sustains” all things. God then creates all things as extensions of himself (similar to the way M Theory works). Everything God create is different from their pure “spirit”, but is ultimately still connected to it in a concrete way. The universe and potentially our understanding of time is still emergent, but those things don’t impinge on God’s location or time (he kind of IS the B theory of time in this case, where all slices of time and locations exist simultaneously, and he sort of just flings humans through himself).
Now, the obvious discussion I would have is how is that description any different than a Godless universe/nature, basically just describing pantheism. They’d probably claim this God is an agent. I could ask whey they think that, and they’d just say because Bible/Quran/Bhagavad Gita/whatever. And it’s still stymies their argument, but wondering if there is any inherent contradiction or impossibility in claiming the first paragraph.
A substrate has to still exist somewhere and sometime, otherwise it never exists, and exists nowhere. God cannot preexist time to create time, nor coexist with time and have created it (as that requires the same logical order: he somehow has to exist without time to decide he needs time to exist). Likewise space.
On the rest of “grounding” theory see my article The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit.
Great stuff as usual Richard! I have a Christian friend who responds to this by saying God is an extra-dimensional being that interacts with our dimension by “slipping through” it, much like the higher dimensional beings in that old Flatland story by Edwin Abbott. For a 3 dimensional creature like us, this “slipping through” appears nothing short of miraculous and accounts for all kinds of supernatural experiences (short of other simpler explanations like hallucinations, intoxication, mental health illnesses, poor reasoning, etc I suppose). I don’t usually engage him too much (he doesn’t really listen anyway), but what would your take be on God as an extra-dimensional being?
Note that that is conceding my point: if God exists in another dimension, he has a location. If he needs to be interdimensional to create this world, then the dimension he exists in has to preexist him, either temporally or ontologically.
So, there you go.
Hi Richard did you manage to get the text inquiry on facebook messenger I sent to you?
Facebook spammed your comments. But I dug them out and answered there. So it was good to ask.
https://www.lanacion.com.ar/lifestyle/en-las-redes/giro-arqueologico-cientificos-aseguran-que-el-santo-sudario-de-turin-podria-ser-veridico-nid20082024/
Not relevant here. But read the original study. It does not establish what the headlines claim. It argues that if we adopt certain assumptions that are entirely implausible, then their results are compatible with a 2000 ya date, not that that date is required; and since the assumptions required to get even that result are bogus, the result is bogus. Shroud science is always cranking out bogus studies like this, so one should always be skeptical and read the original study carefully, or even wait until expert critics weigh in.
Have been following your work for some time, but this is my first time commenting, because I feel like I can say something substantive about this topic.
I didn’t find the argument from non-locality compelling, didn’t quite see where the force for theists* (that believe God exists “outside” space) to endorse the claim if X exists, then X exists somewhere (I’ll call this claim S from now on). This is different from the claim that if X exists, then X began existing somewhere (I think theists* could actually endorse the latter by denying that to start by existing somewhere entails that one can’t exist outside space at some point, but this isn’t particularly relevant to my point and I grant that it would be a weird view).
My main issue has to do with there being compelling counter-examples to S, particularly if you’re a Platonist. The main counter-examples have to with abstracta such as Universals (or Forms). You stated that a Universal such as BEAUTY exists everywhere (at all places). I find this highly controversial. I would say it doesn’t exist anywhere, its instantiations exist somewhere, e.g. the Pietá instantiates beauty somewhere, but not the Universal. And Platonists are committed to this, because they need to distinguish between Universals with instantions and non-intantianted Universals (which also exist according to them).
A second point, I can conceive God existing outside space. If everything that’s conceivable is possible (this is disputed), then it’s possible that God exists outside space. That’s the inference for the theist*, the issue about the brain that conceives this existing somewhere is irrelevant.
I conclude by taking the chance to thank you for all your incredible work over the years.
Platonism is incoherent and illogical. But even it requires a location for Platonic objects: either a Platonic Realm, or “everywhere” (e.g. triangularity has to exist everywhere there is a triangle—otherwise, triangularity can have nothing to do with the existence of triangles, and we’ve just eliminated Platonic objects).
And “I can conceive” is an argument already refuted in the article you are commenting on. Please read the article. You cannot conceive of God being nowhere in a brain located somewhere. That is logically impossible. All you are doing is imagining God in a different plane of location. Which is just another space.
Thank you for the prompt reply and for taking the time to address my comment.
Starting with the last part. I’m specifically addressing the argument in the article. We shouldn’t conflate what is being conceived (i.e. the putative object that is being conceived) with where what is doing the conceiving is located. We can conceive of “things” as not located in space. Whether or not the brain that is doing the conceiving has to be located isn’t relevant. The conceivability is a criterion for metaphysical possibility, not existence. What is metaphysically possible is the object existing mind-independently, not the mental content that is conceived per se. To sum it up, what I mean is that the brain having to be spatially located doesn’t entail that we can’t conceive non-spatial entities.
I wouldn’t call the view illogical or incoherent, it’s still the main view in contemporary metaphysics (granted, with substantive differences from the original view, but e.g. some still hold that some non-intantianted Universals exist). Platonists aren’t committed to the “Platonic Realm” being a location in space; it’s largely a metaphor. One typical way of characterising abstracta is by describing them as non-spacial (not all are). Triangularity doesn’t have to exist at any location in space to be instantiated, its instances certainly do, but not the Universal. There’s nothing incoherent about this.
Triangularity is not a triangle, thus nothing forces us to attribute every property (or any for that matter) of a triangle to Triangularity, including spatial location.
The connection between Triangularity and triangles is due to there being an exemplification relation between the latter and the former. Don’t see any reason to accept that that relation can only obtain if Triangularity is spatial, or exists at every location that triangles exist, or that exists at every location.
(Note: I’m not claiming that the view you described is incoherent or illogical, but neither is the other view, and this suffices for the theist* to not have to endorse S).
So I remain unconvinced that the theist* has to accept claim S.
Actually, we cannot separate them. That is my point. Because your brain has a location, you can never actually conceive of an a-locational entity. You might be telling yourself you are doing that, but you aren’t. Because the thing you are imagining is located in your brain. You cannot know whether it could also exist outside a located mind. This is the entire point or my article The God Impossible, linked in the article here. That shows why what you are claiming is logically impossible.
But you are imagining them somewhere. You have to start with a place for them to be, before you can imagine them being at all. It need not be “space” as in our local spacetime. But you are starting with somewhere, and building up from there. You cannot deny this. You can pretend you are building a thing up nowhere, but you are in fact always building them up somewhere. At the very least, in your brain. But even apart from that, conceptually, you are always logically necessarily assuming there is a place for it (that it exists somewhere) whenever you assume a thing exists. There is no escaping this fact. That is the entire point of my article.
No, it is not. Most philosophers reject Platonism (64% of philosophers reject Platonism). More are Nominalists.
Yes, it is quite incoherent. If triangularity doesn’t have to exist on my desk for several triangles to exist on my desk, I have Aristotelian triangularity on my desk, but no Platonic triangularity on my desk. The latter therefore can’t be referring to what is on my desk. It is therefore incoherent to say triangularity does or must exist somewhere else than my desk. The thing referenced (a common property shared by the triangles on my desk, which can be defined in observational terms as “the shape shared by every planar polygon with three corners and three sides”) is on my desk. It therefore cannot be somewhere else.
But worse than that, if it exists “nowhere” you are saying it doesn’t exist. So if triangularity exists somewhere other than my desk, it has to exist somewhere. Otherwise it exists nowhere and thus doesn’t exist. This is the problem. Saying Platonists just ignore this problem or claim, contra logic, that it doesn’t exist, simply makes Platonism more illogical. It does not provide empirical evidence against my point. It simply tautologically ignores my point. Which is why alocational Platonism is as incoherent as alocational theism.
In short, you can’t escape my conclusion by mere gainsaying it. That simply replicates the logical error my article is exposing and pointing out.
We’ve had this conversation before. God is the creator of place, space and time. It’s unreasonable to think he created space so he could occupy it – when he’s existed without space/place etc.
It’s no good strawmanning/aunt sallying things: one must engage with the other’s belief as they state it.
https://tinyurl.com/4yebwvsd
I just proved it is logically impossible for God to have existed without a place to exist. Because then by definition he never exists, and exists nowhere.
It is illogical to just gainsay a conclusion. You have to actually respond to the argument.
‘If God has no location, then by definition there is no location at which God exists. And if there is no location at which God exists, then by definition God exists nowhere.’
All this is perfectly correct – and states the theist’s belief. However….
‘Which entails that God does not exist.’ an unwarranted entailment.
You can only adduce as much as God does not exist in a where;
not that he doesn’t exist sans-where.
Your discussion above is the exact charge the muhummudun anthropomorphists (‘hashwiyyah – the ‘stuffers’) made against the sunnes -ashares/maturedes:
The biggest pitfall is your analogising God to creation.
/quote ‘And He, The Exalted, Is the Creator of directions and places (Makan), and He brought them into existence after they did not exist, And therefore they are impossible for Him. Allah was and there was no direction or place (makan), And he is as he was.”
وهو تعالى خالق الجهات والأمكنة ومحدثها بعد أن لم تكن فهي لحدوثها مستحيلة على الله تعالى، فإنه كان في القدم ولا جهة ولا مكان، وهو الآن على ما عليه كان.
Yes, we can. Because those are synonymous. Read the article. You can’t just gainsay the conclusion. You have to actually engage with the arguments to that conclusion.
The ashares/maturedes that Alif is citing are masters in this gainsaying. My favourite of theirs is “God is neither inside the universe nor outside it” which I couldn’t swallow even when I was a conservative Muslim, I leant towards the Salafi theological school which comes pretty close to what Alif calls Hashwiyyah but still insists that place doesn’t confine God solving a logical contradiction by another.
Boy, I wasted too much time in my past on this these empty nonsensical theological debates that the article reminded me of them even before I saw Alif’s comments 🙂