Are we made of the same stuff God is made of?

[BwhoUR]

God couldn't have created himself, and he didn't create what he's made of. If he created us "in his image," how can he have created us if he didn't create what he's made of?

If we were created from the same stuff he is created from why aren't we omniscient and omnipresent? Why aren't we only spirits or able to shift from the physical to the spirit form at will or send physical representations of ourselves somewhere else? Since we obviously don't have the same characteristics, what about us is the same "image" as God?

If what he is made of has always existed and we are made from the same stuff, then we also always existed and couldn't have been created. If we always existed, why don't we remember? God remembers.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 3 by The Tanager]

Then robots are not created "in our image" as they do not have free will. They do not possess rationality, they only analyze based on what we program them to analyze. Robots also don't have a self-consciousness that would give it a type of personhood or subject it to the same rights we give animals and people. If they did, they could jump off the table, walk down the street and start a parade, without asking permission or being programmed to do that, but they can't.

Actually modern day robots are already capable of full autonomy, including self-learning and self-programming. So the idea that robots can only do what we've programmed them to do is already an out-dated belief that no longer holds true in our world today.

In a very real sense some modern day robots do indeed have "free will". The question is still open concerning whether or not those robots have any actual awareness of their own existence. I personally don't believe that will ever happen with a digital-based robot, but that is just my own opinion. However, there are also people who are working on building an analog-based robot, and that type of robot may very well be capable of becoming fully sentient.

So your arguments about the difference between robots and humans is a very weak argument that is very likely to change in the very near future. It is very likely that humans will be able to construct sentient androids in the very near future. Certainly within the next century to be sure.

However, this doesn't address your original issue. If a God created us in the same way that we will eventually create sentient beings, then God would be no different from us. In other words, God would need to start with materials that he, she, it, didn't already create. And therefore God would be as clueless as to how it came into existence as we are. This would also suggest that perhaps then this God had been created by an even higher God, and that becomes an infinite regression that solves nothing.

William suggested a "Pantheistic" view of God. Of course, there are many different ideas of what that entails. I have disagreed with many of William's ideas of what a pantheistic God would be. I do however, agree that fundamentally the pantheistic God is thought of as a mind capable of conscious thought. And in pantheism life is but a dream.

However, even this doesn't address your original question. Would even the Pantheistic God have a clue how or why it is capable of consciousness? It's hard to imagine that even a consciousness should fully understand the true nature of its existence, or why it is that it exists. So pantheism doesn't answer your basic question.

What is God made of? To say that God is made of consciousness is no answer because insofar as we can tell consciousness is not even possible without a physical brain which serves as the computer to generate and facilitate consciousness. So the idea that a God could be conscious but have "no brain" doesn't really make any sense.

So your question then becomes, "What is the physics of God's Brain?"

If God exists, then he, she, it, must have some sort of physics behind it. And the God itself could not be the creator of that physics. That physics would have needed to preexist the creation of the God.

So as Carl Sagan had suggested, why not save a step and just realize that we have evolved from a preexisting physics. No need to postulate the existence of a God who would have also needed to come into being from a preexisting physics.

And just because we may someday be able to create fully sentient lifeforms, doesn't mean that there had to be a God who created us. We clearly evolved from scratch. No need for a designing creator.

[wiploc]

Are we made of the same stuff God is made of?

If you believe William Lane Craig when he says, "Nothing comes from nothing," and if you believe there was a time when nothing existed except god, then you must conclude that god made everything else out of himself.

So, yes, we would be made of the same stuff as god.