If God can Create Something He Doesn't Have, can Nature do the Same?

It was inevitable. It's just begging to be asked. I may be the only one who saw it but it's still there. I don't remember ever reading this argument from any unbeliever (probably for good reason shown below), but if I can assign power to God to create something He doesn't have, shouldn't it be considered that maybe the physical universe could create something without containing any of the properties?

(I believe morality, consciousness, and reasoning could not possibly have arisen from the universe. Our mind is dealt with briefly below, but only as an example. Whether or not the world could demonstrably produce all that is dealt with in other posts.)

The difference between God and the world

From Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible, I learned the quip, "the danger is in the ditches."(1) What it means is it is unreasonable to say it is either absolutely one way or the other, to have a certain set of truths already decided for something and if that is false so is everything like it, because those presuppositions don't allow the evidence to ease an investigator to the truth. Everyone has biases and presuppositions, but for truth's sake they must be challenged.

Take the case of consciousness, which I have argued for extensively on my blog(2). To say the mind is the brain, or could even be caused by the brain, isn't logical because it breaks the law of identity (a law of logic). A first-person experience about truth and subjects ranging to imaginary people, places, and things, is not the same as the brain neuroscientists look at. Thus, the mind is immaterial because even if our thoughts were expressed in some bubble showing images with the words "truth" circulating around it, this wouldn't explain where first-person experiences came from. Scientists could only possibly observe the former. 

But it is ludicrous to say the mind and brain do not work together. The only reason we can even observe the physical realm is because our eyes send signals to our brain, which gets to our mind(3). Therefore, the connection must be supernatural, because nature can only affect what it can touch. 

That's just an example, and you don't have to agree with it to see my point. We humans feel like we have free will, and use it to choose to do things -- a mind causing matter to move. So we can't assume God couldn't create the universe out of nothing. 

On the other hand, nature -- materials -- can't create what they don't have. The connection between immaterial and material is a matter of principal, because nature is a matter of principle. Even if there was some type of wholly spirit realm, upon thinking of the fundamentals of matter all beings there would know it couldn't be supernatural. My unbelieving sources whose paragraphs I cited on the subject of consciousness points out nature just puts together physical atoms in different combinations. Supernatural power is by definition immaterial. If matter got the power to produce no thing, it would be exercising non-physical power, thus leaving the question of origins unanswered. A better argument would be to say no thing was uncaused(4). 

This is why we call God "supernatural" and nature "natural." Pretty much all I had to do was unravel why atheists and theists distinguish those two words. 

More on God

The entire mind-brain thing made me think of the Trinity. If existence can have a Three-in-One God, doesn't that break the law of identity? 

But philosophers wouldn't have to take any time to gather their thoughts before saying, "Obviously not. The laws of logic cannot be broken because they are just that! Being logical assumes the laws of logic. If the Trinity can be shown to break them, that God must not exist. This is especially a high-strung tightrope to walk for Christians, because they believe God is the absolute intelligent Mind who grounds logic."

Of course, Christ doesn't try to insult our intellect. I never took notes when running into defenses of the Trinity, but did come to realize how He isn't illogical. 

The Trinity is not 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, and 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. The latter drops out the differences and refers to Them as being completely the same in that They are God. A bookmark I use cites 1 John 3:24 and has a picture of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove (Mark 1:10). It has a golden string which has unraveled, and I've had to tie back together. This gave me the idea of God being like a string with three different split ends on one side. Follow the three separate parts up and you will tell they are all part of the very same thing.

A Christian would just have to keep pointing out the mathematical reasoning, which doesn't deny logic but begs the question of how God works, like a person being dogmatic. We can't fully understand, so there is no human explanation of how They make the jump. God's Three-in-One Being is beyond logic, but not against it. On the other hand, it would be a contradiction to say the Father is Spirit and the Son literally flesh! 

(This also makes the point that God is not limited to being expressed in what we learn from the physical universe. God doesn't exist in space. Jesus only mimicked us by inhabiting a human body and taking on a human nature, and remember, I am convinced the connection is supernatural.)

Then is the whole "eternity past would make the present not be so" philosophical argument I cited once in my argument for miracles(5). What would you think upon walking into a park and hearing "3...2...1... zero! There! I counted down from infinity!" They obviously didn't, because infinity has no starting point. If the past goes on for eternity, you couldn't ever reach "1," the present. But since today is now, the past is not infinite(6). Therefore, whatever the universe can do, it began to exist, and God is a very probable option for the uncaused Cause. 

Being timeless, God is obviously self-sustained. He could not have began to exist, and being self-caused is against logic. How does He do it? ...Again, we can't know. And this makes sense. Why should temporal, fallable, caused beings be able to grasp everything about their Creator? 

God is not a math problem, nor does He do scientific work (unless His plain will can be referred to as a mechanism), nor is He science. Science literally has to "make observations," but we don't ever observe consciousness, just its effects (if that's even the case; we know consciousness was there because we feel that way and there are other human bodies acting like ours, but no one can see free will work). An immaterial Spirit cannot be science.

We can use reason to get to God (an uncaused cause must exist, probability from historical and scientific arguments), but none of that is Him any more than 2 + 2 = my math teacher. With nothing behind Him, being self-sustained and timeless, God's power always was, and never was added up to. 

I argue for historical proofs of Jesus and general proofs of God(7). It is one thing to believe in a Being who has certain aspects that are beyond our understanding because of evidence, and it is understandable why we can't know. It is quite another to believe in something when it can be explained how a worldview rejects it, and can explain it away. Therefore if it can't be explained away, either understanding it or the worldview itself is false. Indeed, we can't know everything with 100% logical certainty, but matters of principal are pure logic by definition. And even if one could show, say, the world could possibly produce reasoning, the worldview should still be rejected if it is implausible and there is proof another Cause is real.

Citations/notes:

1. Andreas J. Kostenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw, Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible B&H Publishing Group: Nashville, TN. 2014), 104.

2. "Revisiting the Non-Matter of Consciousness and and Intelligence" is one of the two main defenses and cites the original at the very beginning. 

3. By the way, it would be illogical to counter the claim "Since we wouldn't know anyone was conscious if we weren't as well, therefore the mind and brain aren't the same" by saying "If we weren't conscious, we wouldn't know anything." That just fails to deal with all the differences we can determine about the mind and physical world. The weakest argument against evidence for God in physics is that since science shows there is a very, very narrow set or parameters to allow us to exist, we couldn't reason without that and so shouldn't ask questions. For that argument, see "That Great Guy Paul Davies and his Buddy, the Universe."

4. Once I heard the claim that since consciousness is immaterial, it doesn't have to be explained. My best response is to bring the discussion back to the problem that we only realize our minds don't physically exist because they work with matter. The question for the atheist is, "How did consciousness arise out of a physical universe? How did logic come to be in a world with only matter behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry?"

When it comes to being real, no thing is just as much as something. Even the concept of nothing, or imaginary creatures, is not nothing. Nothing is non-existence. And this gets us to the logical principle that nothing has nothing to give. It's not even comparable to God, who has a supernatural will. 

5. "The Possibility of Miracles?"

6. I formulated, when talking to my friend who said some worlds might have time flowing backwards, why anything like that wouldn't matter. Time is immaterial. Even if a million different universes died to birth ours, we could still express that in our understanding of time as unmalleable by space dimensions. Space is what materials are suspended in. The same matter of principle I argue lies with consciousness, morality, and reasoning goes for time as well. 

Being able to get a lot of things done in second in one universe, which would take a long time in ours, is described by not making time different, but describing the laws that govern the other physical universe. For example, take a physicist saying, "In this hypothetical universe, a person can complete a quadrillion tasks in what is for us one second." The understanding of time is kept the same.

7. For complete arguments and a quick introduction to all, see the links under the heading "suggested readings" at the bottom of this post.