How can there be a loving God?

Tetsugaku said:
It directly addresses that. I'm saying you have related them by placing them in relations of 'before' and 'after'.
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God would have to exist transcendently in his own timeline and transcendently and imamnently in the other two timelines. How confusing!
Tetsugaku said:
What do you mean by eternal? Infinite time, or no time at all? Thoughts clearly occur in temporal sequence just like anything else.
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Why would there be time in eternity? So , in eternity there could be sequence without time.
 
5wize said:
You are claiming that she was totally brain dead during the time she received these impressions. You have never given us a timeline of the corroborated conversations juxtaposed to the actual span of time she was fully flatlined in the middle of the operation. The majority of the operation she was not flatlined.
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5wize said:
There is very little corroborated with the external operation room and the conversations in comparison to the time she was under. Most of the time she was communing with dead relatives.
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Here, this will answer all your questions:
 
5wize said:
The amount of time during which Reynolds was "flatlined" is generally misrepresented and suggest that her NDE occurred under general anesthesia when the brain was still active, hours before Reynolds underwent hypothermic cardiac arrest.
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Watch the video I just posted.
 
5wize said:
I don’t even know what “soul awareness” means. I dream. Sometimes vividly where my wife has to wake me because I think its real and sometimes only impressionistically - vaguely. What is “soul awareness”?
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Instead of me explaining it again, re-read this:

Judges13:18 said:
The soul does not sleep. The capacity to be aware of your own soul ceases when you sleep. Sometimes it doesn't. The experience varies one experience to another. And varies one person from another. There is nothing to suggest that soul awareness has to be constant and unvarying for it to be real.
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But, anyway, your argument about when she perceived the events of her experience is irrelevant now that we know from the video I posted in post #1122 what actually happened and when during Pam Reynolds experience. Every argument raised so far in this thread against the supernatural nature of the experience is answered in the video I posted.

We have to accept that she had an awareness and consciousness that simply did not come from her brain that by all medical and scientific measurement was dead, including the fact it had ZERO metabolic rate. What this proves is there is consciousness after death not connected to the body of a person. This person died and brought back her verifiable observations of things that happened while she was verifiably clinically dead. A discussion about the rarity and inconsistency of when this experience happens does not negate the fact that, in her case, when it happened it really did happen. Everything science uses to explain this as a naturally occurring phenomenon was absent from this experience.
 
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Caroljeen said:
Nothingness cannot have properties because its the absence of something. Only something can have properties. Nothing is nonexistence.
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Exactly. Nothingness has no properties. It has no light, therefore it is dark. It has no life, therefore it is dead. It has no stability, therefore it is unstable.
 
Caroljeen said:
God would have to exist transcendently in his own timeline and transcendently and imamnently in the other two timelines. How confusing!
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My point doesn't even concern God. It's about the contradiction involved in saying two timelines are unrelated while also saying they are related by having one occur before the other.

Caroljeen said:
Why would there be time in eternity? So, in eternity there could be sequence without time.
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What kind of sequence? Temporal sequence (before and after) would be time.
 
Tetsugaku said:
Sure, but we've been discussing whether or not causes must precede their effects in time, with you saying God (the cause) causes time (the effect) without preceding it. Your analogy instead gives a case where the cause (gun firer) does precede the effect (the race) in time.
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No. The gunfire does not precede the race time. It initiates it. God does not precede the universe. He creates it. We do not say, "Shakespeare precedes Hamlet." He lives in a different milieu from Hamlet.

Tetsugaku said:
So what part of this did you disagree with: "Okay, so you believe in causation from outside of time into it, without the cause [God] having to precede its effect [time]."
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Did I say somewhere I disagreed with that? If so, I was mistaken, at least in the case of the Creation.
 
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stiggy wiggy said:
No. The gunfire does not precede the race time. It initiates it.
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The gunfire precedes anything it causes. The runners can't be caused to start running until after the gun has fired and the sound has had time to reach the ears of the runners. If you want to define the race time as beginning simultaneously with the gun firing then that is fine, but it won't be something the gun firing has caused. Rather, both aspects of that same moment will have been caused by what came immediately before (presumably a nerve signal traveling from the shooter's brain to his trigger finger).

stiggy wiggy said:
God does not precede the universe. He creates it. We do not say, "Shakespeare precedes Hamlet." He lives in a different milieu from Hamlet.
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I don't think we'd say Shakespeare causes Hamlet either. We'd rather say he wrote it, and that anything Shakespeare writes down about the fictional character is preceded by decisions in his brain about how he wants the story to proceed. I don't see anything in either of these examples to justify rejecting the principle that causes precede their effects.
 
Tetsugaku said:
The gunfire precedes anything it causes.
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Correct. Likewise, the act of Creation precedes that which it causes, i.e. Creation.

Tetsugaku said:
The runners can't be caused to start running until after the gun has fired and the sound has had time to reach the ears of the runners.
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Correct. Likewise creatures cannot start to live until the universe has been created.

Tetsugaku said:
. If you want to define the race time as beginning simultaneously with the gun firing then that is fine, but it won't be something the gun firing has caused. Rather, both aspects of that same moment will have been caused by what came immediately before (presumably a nerve signal traveling from the shooter's brain to his trigger finger).
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Correct. Likewise the first act occurring at creation, i.e. the big bang, is not something the big bang caused, since it could not cause itself, having impossibly pre-existed itself.

Tetsugaku said:
I don't think we'd say Shakespeare causes Hamlet either.
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No. Without Shakespeare, no Hamlet. Without God, no universe.
 
Caroljeen said:
Why does it follow that there must be a law or principle that determines something cannot come from nothing...and without a law nothingness can bring about something? That's just the semantics of absence. Nothingness is the absence of absolutely everything. Nothingness is the state of nonexistence.
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It’s all speculation, on either side of the issue, so, first of all, I wouldn’t say *must*, but maybe. And I’m suggesting that your position can’t say “must” either: we can’t say that something can’t possibly come from nothing.p with strong certainty.

Secondly, did you mis-type something, because I’m not saying that “something cannot come from nothing,” I’m saying something can come from nothing.

Caroljeen said:
Let's pretend that you somehow had the power to walk into the state of nothingness would you find anything there other than yourself? Would you find instability?
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It would be unstable.
 
Caroljeen said:
Nothingness cannot have properties because its the absence of something. Only something can have properties. Nothing is nonexistence.
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That is the strongest reply to Carriers idea that I’ve heard. But, then, we’d have to say that nothingness is not stable and it is not unstable. Now what?
 
stiggy wiggy said:
Correct. Likewise, the act of Creation precedes that which it causes, i.e. Creation.
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You can't have an act of creating time preceding that which it creates though. So you're back to square one, needing to explain how you can have causation without the cause preceding its effect.

stiggy wiggy said:
Correct. Likewise creatures cannot start to live until the universe has been created.

Correct. Likewise the first act occurring at creation, i.e. the big bang, is not something the big bang caused, since it could not cause itself, having impossibly pre-existed itself.

No. Without Shakespeare, no Hamlet. Without God, no universe.
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As you've just agreed with me on all points, I'm left with no example of causation where the cause doesn't precede its effect.
 
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Tetsugaku said:
My point doesn't even concern God. It's about the contradiction involved in saying two timelines are unrelated while also saying they are related by having one occur before the other.
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How are they related? The eternal timeline from which God created did not affect the finite timeline of our universe and visa versa.
Tetsugaku said:
What kind of sequence? Temporal sequence (before and after) would be time.
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I don't think the time in an eternal timeline is the same as time measured in our timeline.
 
stiggy wiggy said:
Not in the time which is being created, correct. That's too obvious to state.

Easy. God caused time by creating it. The effect was time. The cause was God, Who is not an effect.
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Okay, so you believe in causation from outside of time into it, without the cause having to precede its effect. I don't.
 
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