Only recently discovered this site and am reading the posts in chronological order

Wow! Enjoy :)

It's always annoyed me that they say that quote in a smarmy way while completely ignoring their own behavior in the same situation.

I like to say "if there are no atheists in foxholes, then three are no believers in sinking ships." After all, they're running for the lifeboats just as hard as any atheist.

(Only recently discovered this site and am reading the posts in chronological order. I realize I'm commenting on an old thread.)

"If god existed before anything else, what was god made of? Something can't exist without actually being made of something, and if this being happened to exist in nothingness, where did it come from (most especially something with self-awareness, creativity, and power to summon existance from non-existance, yet I'll assume you'll also think life is too complex to have appeared with a designer, right)? If everything requires a creator as you seem to think, something showing up in nothingness would require that same explaination."

and to the end of this question:

"if god can exist without having been caused, why couldn't the universe have always of existed, especially since the universe seems substantially less complex than god on the occam's razor scale?"

What can create itself?

Nothing that I know of.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I don't know; is this the part where you say god?

Without an eternal God, how would anything come to be?

By always existing in and of itself is an option.

I do find it kind of ironic (though not really, because I fully expected the question to be answered as such) the way you answered the question with another question, basically saying exactly what you were trying to answer to.

Q: Why is god the only thing that can exist without having a cause?
A: Because you say so?

Here are some questions for you :

Q: If god existed eternally, it must have existed somewhere. How can an all powerful, intelligent being exist in nothingness? And if you're going to play the "god is made of spirit or is immaterial" card, then I would have to ask exactly how immaterial (made of nothing) qualifies as existing seperate from nothing.

Q: If god exists as you envision it to exist, presumably this comes along with a personal quality in it that wants me to go to heaven (correct me if I'm wrong there), or at very least wants me to acknowledge it's existance, why would it's holy book be so consistently wrong? Why wouldn't this knowledge be self-appearant to anyone who examined the evidence? Dinosaurs not being mentioned in the bible? Earth's age being misrepresented? Planet being flat? Sun revolving around the earth? Bats not being birds? No evidence of a world-wide flood? Christians not being able to drink poison and survive? And that's just a quick list I could rattle off the top of my head. It doesn't speak well of a supreme being to fuck up so many no trivial details concerning the universe it created. So why the inconsistency?

You forgot one of the biggest double standards of all..."Everything that exists must have been created." So that includes God, right? WRONG. "No, God always was and always will be." So why couldn't that be true of the universe? "Because it's only true for God."

Without an eternal God, how would anything come to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? What can create itself?

Obviously every worldview ultimately involves some degree of circularity in its argument.

Not in the technical sense of assuming its conclusions among its premises. Every world view is ultimately founded on assertions that cannot be "proven," such as "there is a world external to my mind," "my senses, while imperfect, tell me something useful about it," "patterns that have held true in the past are likely to continue to unless something changes" and other aspects of cause-and-effect, etc. These propositions cannot be proven the way mathematical theorems can, and their truth cannot be established by evidence because the utility of evidence depends on their truth (I guess you could call this "circular" informally), however 1) the odds of them being false without being obviously false seem to be amazingly low and 2) if they're false, we really can't do anything useful about it. Excessive handwringing on this and similar points of epistemology within the philosophical community is widely, and with some justice, derided as "intellectual masturbation" (IE, it's perhaps gratifying, but not productive).

If an atheist has had a life of pain and hardship, theists say that they're rebelling against God; but if an atheist has had a relatively easy and comfortable life, theists say that they're only an atheist because they've had things easy and will turn to God to save them as soon as things turn bad.

Coincidence? I think so :), but cool.