You need to be more specific, mjpb..

>>There is a uniqueness about the JudeoChristian God that led to the birthing of modern science... Unique for a God<<

What form did that uniqueness take?

Because the image of your JudeoChristian God - which, by the way, I still consider a personal version of the Platonic ideal - undergoes constant change, does it not?

Even between the Old and New Testaments.

He is as his followers imagine him to be, and always has been.

Compare the image of Jesus that existed in Europe for hundreds of years, with our modern realistic understanding of what an inhabitant of that part of the world, two thousand years ago, would have looked like.

Explain to yourself what mental contortions led to the creation of the Jesus in Jusepe Ribera's painting of "Jesus and the doctors of the Faith", in which a twelve-year-old Jesus has a lilywhite complexion and curly golden hair.

An example of Ribera's personal "ideal", possibly?

And these are all just stories, I'm afraid.

>>[Paul] did have a rather unique experience and he did hang out with people who witnessed a man come back to life<<

Again, there is a strong thread of self-reinforcement going on here. There are no contemporary accounts of Jesus' life. So the building of the legend necessarily rests on hearsay. Who is to say that Paul didn't embellish the oral history a little, here and there? Creating his own "ideal" in the process, perhaps?

>>In between those possibilities is the idea that everything but God has a cause<<

Given that you are willing to accept that God "caused" the universe, and therefore pre-dated it, would you care to hazard a guess as to how long he waited to bring it all into being.

And why?

What is it that makes you resist the notion that they could both just... "be".

I'm genuinely interested in your response, mjpb.

What makes you resist the notion that the universe requires a starting point? I know it isn't easy, but there has to be a reason why your mind simply cannot accept it.

The first difficulty, for me at any rate, is the concept of "nothingness". It is pretty much beyond my capabilities to imagine it, let alone describe it.

The best I have been able to come up with so far is "the non-existence of time". It at least allows me to postulate that, without time, nothing can ever be proven to exist - the logical extension, if you will, of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

To human experience, this state is similar, in perception terms, to "life before birth" and "life after death". Neither time, nor space - nor anything, in fact - exists in this condition.

(I am aware that some religions speak of a "life after death". I'm sure that it isn't meant to be taken literally. But it still puzzles me why so many of them have no views on "life before birth".)

Moving from nothingness to somethingness needs the addition of time to the equation, which provides a similar challenge - what existed before time, and what caused it to come into being?

So to me, the only conclusion that my feeble brain can come up with is "being".

The universe just "is".

It needs for us to be able to contemplate the concept of infinity, but apart from that, it fits comfortably with our human experience.

It is so much easier to justify, for example, than trying to wrestle with infinity in the way that you do:

>>...an uncaused cause must exist at the end of the chain<<

My theory is that there is no "chain" as such, only "being".

Of course I do understand, that without the Creation, your God loses a great deal of credibility.

Is that what worries you?

"I'm genuinely interested in your response, mjpb."

That caught my eye. I will read the rest of the post and other intervening posts when I get a spare moment. Since there is still something to discuss I'm putting this in to fend off that wretched 21 day deadline that seems to creep up so quickly.

Deadline, mjpb?

>>...I'm putting this in to fend off that wretched 21 day deadline that seems to creep up so quickly<<

I wasn't aware of any deadline.

Take your time.