> So God creates the game of life. God has the convenience of being free of time.
More than a convenience, it follows from being the creator: the time of an abstraction is never the same time of the plane where the abstraction is thought up in our universe, after all.
Time, in a game of life can be defined as the discrete sequence of generations. How long it take to compute them is not relevant to the abstraction.
Time in a game of chess can be defined as the sequence of moves: even if the rules refer to timeouts, time annotations are just metadata.
I say can be defined because time is not in any of those abstractions.
> The presupposition however in the "who created god" rebuttal above is 'creation requires an antecedent'.
Not really, the rebuttal is "the term creation is undefined in the domain of the hypothetical god", "who created god" does not make sense. We can only define god, by exclusion. By attributing any property to the concept we already stepped out of the domain of logic. This is why I prefer staying in the universe and talk about abstractions we create, instead of the hypothetical domain in respect to which we are the abstraction.
The fact that creation IN OUR UNIVERSE is impossible without unidirectional time is just a proof of the link between the concept "creation" and "time" in our universe, so that any attempt of redefining it in the dimension of a hypothetical god must define the equivalent of an unidirectional time axis in which he operates. Of course such definitions are equivalent to all the assertions made about objects outside this universe AKA religions.
> However claiming that creation implies an antecedent makes no sense if God is 'free' from time.
This is a narrower assertion. The term "creation" needs to be defined for an objection to be made.
> It is therefore self-contradictory and we exclude it and move on..
whatever.
> to your ontological argument.
Well, it is yours, you called it an ontological argument.
To me it is an example that proves the OP claim as inconclusive.
>To get there the first implication: immediately 'infinite assumptions' requiring a 'unidirectional time axis' is not a rebuttal--if creation doesn't rely on time, neither does existence.
It is not a rebuttal, it is an automatic implication IMO, but of course if those talking about creators of creators have some interesting alternative models those can be discussed. Still belonging to the field of religions of course.
(...)
> Your argument makes an example of a universe where your definition of God is possible and if you read carefully you will see that never did I contest the analogy itself, I demonstrate that it exists in an
infinite sea of possibilities.
You can go further, after all there is no way to prove numbers or infinity has any meaning outside of this universe.
Anyway you derived an argument from an example, the argument in your opinion would be "if the universe is an abstraction itself...". And that is indeed an assumption, a supposition.
I'd rather say: "how the universe got formed according to a cosmological theory has no influence on it being an abstraction or not".
Proof: just simulate the universe with the same rules of the universe as modeled by the cosmological theory. Does not matter how well. You end up with two universes. This one and the simulated one. They have the same rules, as far as the cosmological theory is concerned, but one is surely an abstraction and has a plane originating it. QED.
If I had an argument it would rather be something like "the way the universe is formed might be in the future discovered as one without external intervention, beyond all doubts, and logically proven as the only possible one, or even proven as the only conceivable one. But that's empty circular reasoning, because the proofs have modeled the universe in terms of concepts which we have derived from our understanding of it. So all we have proved is that the universe is a closed system"
But that's outside the topic.