Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rogues”, came with an email note:
It must be true. It’s in a hadith!
Yep, it’s the old “turtles all the way down” answer to the question “But who made “Allah,”, except this time delivered with pebbles!
And here’s that hadith:
The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said to me: they (the people) will constantly ask you, Abu Huraira, (about different things pertaining to religion) then they would say: Well, there is Allah, but after all who created Allah? He (Abu Huraira) narrated: Once we were in the mosque that some of the Bedouins came there and said: Well, there is Allah, but who created Allah? He (the narrator) said: I took hold of the pebbles in my fist and flung at them and remarked: Stand up, stand up (go away) my friend (the Holy Prophet) told the truth.
What do the Christians say? Is there a standard Catholic answer?
FWIW, the standard christian answer (catholic or protestant) is that god is eternally existent, with no beginning or end. There are a substantial number of bible verses which assert this without, of course, any substantiation or evidence. Stones, if I recall correctly, are optional; there is a well-known, though possibly apocryphal story that someone once asked Martin Luther what god was doing before he created the world. Luther’s answer was either “cutting straps to beat people who asked such questions” or “creating hell for people who asked such questions,” depending on which version of the story you read.
You got me curious, so I googled and this is how Catholic theologians explain why God could create the universe without being created himself:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/who-created-god
I didn’t read the answer too carefully since I get bored with this kind of philosophical folderol. But the gist of it appears to be that ‘since’ God is a necessary being, he doesn’t have to have a cause. It seems to rest on the impermissible extension of the concept of necessary causes to the cause of the universe itself. IMO you can’t get out of it THAT easily!
Still, I kinda wish I could accept God because I’ve been tormented by the question of the ultimate origins of the universe – or, as I prefer to put it, the question of why there is something rather than nothing – since I was 12. For a long time I comforted myself with the belief that ‘scientists’ would discover the answer during my lifetime. Now I know that’s not going to happen, and I’m kinda bitter about it. It just seems sooo unfair that I’ll never know the answer to this one little question….
Physical Cosmology deals with a myriad of theories
involving questions of what happened approximately
13.78+billion years ago. Some of those concepts are complex, but the basic premise of multiverses includes the possibility that before “our” big bang occured, there was a big “crunch”. IANAP (I Am Not a Physicist) but I find many explanations that popularizers like Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, and the most recent authors of that genre tend to stay on point better than (fortunately)
celibate clergy and their mumblings about ” mysterious ways”.
And most of them are willing to admit that “we don’t really know”.
Since mass/energy and gravitational energy seem to cancel. there is a plausible hypothesis that the net content of the universe is nothing.
I’ve always found the question of why there is something rather than nothing as incoherent, since nothing (no-thing) presupposes the existence of something (some-thing). If nothing is the negation of existence of something, it presupposes the existence of something.
Sorry, but if you are being honest with yourself, accepting a god would not deliver you from your torment. It would merely transfer your questions about the ultimate origin of the Universe from the Universe to whatever flavour of God you choose to accept.
Conversely, any property of God that you can think up (e.g. being eternal and uncreated) could equally be assigned to the Universe, thus eliminating an unnecessary entity. A lot of Christians don’t seem to understand that.
But who created the stones that Mo threw at the infidels? Allah, of course! And thus the circle remains unbroken.
The translation of “Abu Huraira” is “Father of the Kitten”.
I asked my Sunday school teacher who made God when I was about ten. His response, “Only a child would ask such a silly question.”
When I was a kid, I said that I could not understand the concept of eternity–that God had always existed and would always exist. My parents said that it was beyond human understanding; we could no more understand it than a mouse could understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. They added that it would become clear when we got to Heaven.
While I am no longer religious, I am sure that some things ARE beyond human understanding. In the same way that a mouse not only can’t understand Einstein’s theory, but doesn’t know it doesn’t understand it, there are things we will not only never understand, but won’t ever be aware of, since our brains haven’t been wired by evolution in a way that will allow us to glimpse them. (An illiterate man can’t read, but he may still have a sense of what reading is. A chicken can’t read either, but has no sense that such a thing as reading exists.)
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Children are born philosophers.
When I was a child I wondered why the sky was dark at night. I reasoned that with all those stars–an infinite number–every point in the sky must end in a star.
My question was dismissed by the grown-ups I asked, but in college I learned that it has a name: Olbers Paradox.
If only your ten year old self had remembered Matthew 18 verse 3.
And only a Sunday school teacher would give such an evasive reply.