DQ wrote:What about thoughts and emotions? Do they have mass?
They always have an associated mass.
jupiviv wrote:Then you are defining the universe to mean something finite. God cannot be the All and yet be able to create something finite.
This makes no sense. Logically, if God were Infinite and Eternal, what would prevent him from "being able" to create anything, let alone something finite? I prefer to stick with the divestiture idea - he divested himself of all that became the physical universe, but like parents who create offspring - something separate - a part of them remains a part of the offspring. As such, part of God (the Holy Spirit, perhaps) permeates Utterly Everything and gives rise to the idea that God is everywhere. God is certainly not every
thing, as David mistakenly believes. For as soon as you make God everything, the Islamic God who stands outside of space, time and therefore causality ceases to exist, and then you must make the Everything both Infinite and timeless, ie, eternal. Since this is clearly at odds with empirical evidence and scientific observation and reasoning, it is faith-based.
DQ wrote:What about thoughts about Allah?
I have asked you more or less this same question and you have yet to reply. Are thoughts in fact things? If they are included in Utterly Everything, then they must be subject to cause and effect. Thus every one would have to be a cause and effect. In other words, you cannot have a thought that was not caused. Moreover, every single thought you have must have an effect on something, not necessarily another thought, for that would be a baseless assumption. David, your notion of causality is faulty at the core - you miss the essence of things by eternally returning to cause and effect as if running for cover.
All logic, when extended far enough, seems to have a navel. David, your logic obviously has one, which you have often admitted - you have certainly contemplated your navel. Yours is that a thing can be said to exist because it is in relation to something else, or A=A. But Utterly Everything is the navel in the sense that logic breaks down when trying to use the same definition of existence: again, the Totality neither exists nor does not exist.
How do you know logic does not break down everywhere in Reality? What if the world were rife with uncaused causes, most of which go unnoticed because they have an ensuing effect, which then becomes cause for another effect, which vanishes without causing anything further. Some uncaused causes take root as it were and lead to endless causal chains, which other die out without a trace, such as virtual particles in a bubble chamber that appear out of nowhere and vanish instantly. If you could accept this, then a First Cause is no longer an impossibility - it is but another uncaused cause, albeit the first one. Hell, you could call it a quantum fluctuation, and never have to think of Deity again. But by the same token, you could never again rule Deity out because a First Cause is rationally unacceptable.