Ro: Who Created God? Where is He (Don´t Say Heaven)? Me? Contemplative Historical Sociology

Ro: I’m a free thinker and I don’t want generic answers. I want something I can really think on. Question for believers: If god created the earth and people and animals then who created god? Where exactly does he reside? (Don’t say heaven) Non believers: who created the earth and people and animals? (Don’t say evolution or aliens unless you can tell me where they evolved from) General question: certain things like germs and lice need a host to live on. Where did they originate? Please don’t laugh at me or mock me. I’m trying to understand things and get different points of view. Mark Rego Monteiro I want to acknowledge C Mis (see below) for his response´s extensive thoughtfulness. I want to emphasize that thinking about the Creator isn´t originally merely a logical question. We don´t know about the transcendental primarily because of logical reasoning. Christians took the First Cause argument of Aristotle, but even he came from a culture with spiritual-religious practices and knowledge, like the Eleusian Mysteries, besides the Oracles, like Delphi´s in the Apollo Temple. Socrates had his own spiritual understanding, as did Plato. Yet, all that died in its indigenous form. Christians at least as early as the NT Gospel Book of John were syncretizing Greek philosophical thinking. There were the generation after the Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers. Then came the Christian philosophers, the "apologists" like Justin Martyr, a pioneer of sorts I understand. Their philosophizing perhaps was more neo-platonic, although I recall hearing additional details, up to Augustine of Hippo, and beyond. Anthony of the Desert appeared in mature form around 300 AD as the pioneering Christian ascetic who inspired monasticism. By 1250, it was the Christians like the monk Thomas of Aquinas who Christianized Aristotle´s First Cause argument, notably. Yet, as a Christian monk, he was in the legacy of Anthony of the Desert, who was of course in Jesus´ legacy. That is, all that followed Jesus in that context of building culture was in reference to Jesus´ standard of loving integrity, as Christians turned monastic schools into Universities. Jesus´ heritage refers back to Moses and his experience with God and the Burning Bush, and leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt to freedom. None of that is optional, but part of a logically coherent account based on prophetic culture. In Jesus´ legacy of University-based philosophical scholarship we have reference to studies of shamanism and comparative religious studies to understand spiritual-religious phenomena, practice, experience, and knowledge. All that involves the base of philosophical inquiry, orientation to a lawful Creator and Creation, and diversified observational empiricism, the empirical method that in fact underlies the scientific method for physical objects and processes. John Locke´s moral philosophy, like Descartes´ and Spinoza, sought to identify even psychological phenomena and processes like the self and identity, and posited the "clean slate" "open book" of child development psychology, the "tabula rasa." Ideally, the love of learning about God´s lawful creation. In Jesus´ legacy. Thus, if we are aware of details like Thomas of Aquinas taking Aristotle´s esoteric First Cause god who is co-eternal with the Universe, and applying Jesus´ heritage of the Creator God, which linked the lawful parental God of Jesus to make Christianized modern philosophy with empiricism in studying a lawful Creation. That´s why we can identify God as the Cause of the Universe, transcendentally. Since we are actually not made Masters of the Universe by "science", but instead, are creating symbolic representations of the Universe with scientific philosophy, we are using our minds. As humans, we are doing it still in the full context of that University-based scientific philosophy, all the disciplines that have been developed, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. All directly in Jesus´ legacy according to his underlying standard of loving integrity for Moses and God, and spiritual-religious practice to be clear. They had syncretized ancient Greek philosophy, and drawn on other influences like the Hindu invention of "zero" absorbed in Muslim-related Arabic numerals, and other Muslim-related scholarship for a limited period. Al-Isidri was a Muslim cartographer who fled Islamic in-fighting for Christian Sicily, for one. Christian culture was controlled by one Church for some time, but that control began to broken and reoriented after Luther´s successful inspiration, reaching Jefferson et al´s Civil Rights with Freedom of Religion and Expression. Meanwhile, the Quaker-Friend Christians in George Fox legacy for Jesus acknowledged spiritual-religious practice in a new, or revived, streamlined way, leading to their high integrity leading role in sparking modern social movements. That includes Marg Fell´s work writing about women, and Olaudah Equiano, a liberated ex-enslaved African given achievable terms by a Quaker, who joined the abolition movement. All Fox´s and Jefferson´s, and Fell´s and Equiano´s efforts were innovated, in Jesus´ long term legacy for Moses et al and God, by people using their minds. Not just in churches, but in church-related society. Thus, the human mind, on top of a biological substrate the symbolic-energetic psychosocial systems that make it what it is in the amazing spectacles of co-existing subcultures now in globalized civilization, and at its best, the UN human rights community. That human mind then gives us an idea of the kind of entity that we are talking about, the immaterial First Cause. What is immaterial and can cause anything? Abstractions, like numbers? Or a mind, an Immaterial Transcendental Mind of some kind, extremely powerful, and capable of intentional action. That is, not just humans have symbolic capability of minds. JF Ferrier innovated the word "epistemology" and the view that the human mind is predicated on a Universe that already has mental phenomena, or a Divine Mind. That´s what the miracles helped Jesus communicate, like his heritage, and that we can corroborate with all kinds of other examples of. Modern medically attested, medically impossible healings with spiritual-religious testimony are all part of that. Ro Author Mark Rego Monteiro ok…thank you C Mis We live in a dimensional world within a linear timeframe so we think within that framework, it’s very hard for us to conceive of anything outside of that framework. God is outside that framework, God is pre-existing, that is God exists both before time and outside of time and space but also inside time and space, God has always been, there is no beginning and no end to God because God is not defined by time or space. So when folk say who created God, they are thinking within the space time dynamic, not their fault because it’s all we’ve ever known. Where does God reside? God resides in and outside all space and time, God is omnipresent, that is, in all places all the time, this is why the psalmist asks “where can I go from God”, and his answer is, If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!(Psalm 139:8 ESVi)In other words you are everywhere God. As far as I know, nobody knows what heaven is, our best guess is it’s a reality that exist in another dimension but is interconnected to our dimension this is why we can have experiences of heaven on earth. God resides both in heaven and in earth and in us and in all that is. So God can be experienced in all people, in animals, in trees, in oceans and in the rain. The presence of God fills the whole earth says the prophet, Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD.(Jeremiah 23:24 ESVi) As a follower of Christ I am panentheist, meaning I believe God is in all things, but not a pantheist, who believes all things are God. I believe God created the right environment for evolution to occur and that God is intimately involved in the process of evolution, shaping creation as the ongoing work of creation. I don’t believe creation has stopped as I don’t believe evolution has stopped. I hope that gives you some ideas to think about as you ponder these deep questions.)