Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2023 7:15 am
Who says god must by definition be transcendent of time?
It's unavoidable. If God is subject-to or less-than anything, then the entity we are talking about is not the Creator, not the First Cause, and not the Supreme Being. The Creator is then something prior to that entity, which itself has to be prior to time, and is the real first cause of things, and that other entity is the "supreme" one.
So (leaving aside for the second the question of whether God exists) you can see that the very concept "God," as understood by Christians and Jews, means an Entity that transcends all things. But if He does not exist, then He is also not the Creator, the First Cause or the Supreme Being, but is rather a fictional entity. So any Christian or Jew has to be also talking about an Entity that exists.
And it's only THAT entity, the Creator, First Cause and Supreme Being that is being debated here: not some demi-god or lesser deity. Christians and Jews have no stake in contending for such lesser "god" concepts.
What is severely self-evident is that a god explanation no-longer applies based on our current state of knowledge.
You're actually in the vast minority if you think that. According to the CIA Factbook, at least 96% of humanity on this planet still thinks that God is a live issue. So it's not at all "self-evident," and certainly not "severely." You'll need to justify that claim to most of the planet.
God explains nothing except in old scripture when people knew virtually nothing of how the world works.
That's called the "God of the Gaps" argument. The idea is that God only stands as a relevant explanation of things so long as we don't really know what causes them. And allegedly, as human knowledge increases, this "god" shrinks and diminishes in utility until we no longer need that explanation at all. Nietzsche thought that's how it was.
But there are plenty of problems with that. One is that our knowledge doesn't really save us from the basic experience of human existence...birth, tragedy and ecstasy, and death. Those still remain beyond our power, as does the moral condition of our species and a variety of other things...disease, contingency, entropy, necessity...and so on. So reference to God will never disappear, even if the "God of the Gaps' thing were correct at all...which I think it pretty obviously isn't.
Jews and Christians do not believe in "the God of the Gaps." They do not believe that "God" was ever an explanation for routine scientific phenomena; rather, they believe that God has created a world governed by discernable natural laws, and has intervened only very occasionally in that since, only on particular miraculous occasions. Thus, it is impossible to deduce from something like the realization that lightning is generated by heat and cold fronts that God has shrunk in size, or that that explanation takes away any job we have been attributing to Him. The "God of the Gaps" critique is just naive about what we actually believe, and about how God operates in this world.
Most of the gods we created rank as travesties,
The Bible completely agrees. It says,
"Can a person make gods for himself? But they are not gods!" (Jer. 6:22)
...that idiot god whose first commandment was to have no other gods before him
For your own sake, please be very careful. I'm not threatening you, because I have no power to do so, so take this in the right spirit, please: it's just information for you, but very relevant information to your welfare, I believe. Jesus Himself said,
"But I tell you that for every careless word that people speak, they will give an account of it on the day of judgment." (Matthew 12:36)
But on the contrary to what you wish to indict in Him, look at it more objectively: if God did not care what we did, and abandoned us to believe in what you already have said are false gods that only confuse us and teach us evil, instead of teaching us to pursue relationship with the one true God, the Source of all goodness and blessing, would such a "God" be loving at all?