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Question:11

God in my view is invisible, incomprehensible, inaccessible, a pure essence, which cannot be described. You attempt to describe the indescribable and explain the unexplainable. You are the creation of God; your attempt to understand God is like Mona Lisa trying to understand Da Vinci.  No matter how intelligent you may be you cannot understand your creator.  

You cannot say that God is an “unknowable essence” and then say that he is the creator. If you say that he is the creator, then you have already DEFINED him as the “creator”. So he is no more an unknowable essence.

I do not accept god as a creator because:

·        God as a creator becomes a “being”. A being must have a physical or a spiritual existence. Anything that exists is limited in space and is subject to time.

·        If God is the creator, he cannot be the creation. So where the creation is, God is not. Take your own example of Leonardo Da Vinci and Mona Lisa. They are two separate entities and each can exist without the other. Each is limited in time and space. If the relationship between God and his creation is, as you described, that of the creator and the created, then God and the creation are two distinct entities and therefore God cannot be infinite otherwise he would overlap his creation, which is not possible because in that case we (the creation) would be part of the creator, which means God has created himself.

·        If God is the creator, then there must have been a time that the creation did not exist. Therefore before the creation, God was not the creator. Just as Da Vinci was not a painter before he started to paint; and you are not a father before you sire. This creates the problem that God too is improving and acquiring faculties that he did not have. Before the universe came to be, he was not the creator, and then he became the creator after he created it. In other words God also changes. Therefore God is neither perfect nor absolute. If God was perfect, he need not change. He could not improve nor become anything, like “becoming” a creator. “Becoming” behoves the creation and not an absolute and unchanging god.

·        If you say that the creation always existed parallel to God then God cannot be the creator because in that case God and the Universe are twins that existed from eternity, which makes the existence of God as the creator superfluous. If the Universe is created, God must have preceded it. That of course, as we saw above, is not possible because in that case God would be acquiring attributes like becoming a creator. 

In conclusion, God cannot be the creator of the universe because 

·         He would have acted in time, therefore becoming limited in time.

·         His creation falling out of himself proves that he is not omnipresent and therefore limited in space.

·         If God and the creation co-existed always beyond time, then God as a creator become superfluous

As you see, even if you say that God is an unknowable essence, as soon as you say he is the creator, you are limiting him and denying his perfection and therefore his godhood.  

 

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