god exists

To begin at an answer, lets deal with the problem of contingency, or infinite regress as its called. I note here that there are plenty of other arguments for God (as a necessary part of objective existence) of course, but for ease of discussion lets deal with only one.

So firstly, science and reason accept the reality that contingent things pre-require causes—namely, other things, to be. You cannot exist without your parents for example. But notice that the whole system of contingent things (finite or not) is itself contingent. The universe is not eternal, it has limits. If contingent things cannot cause themselves, we can conclude that the whole system of contingent things cannot cause itself.

Thus taking this as true, If God is indeed contingent, he becomes subject to this same problem, and all your objections to him are cogent. But if that is the case, then we are left with the conclusion that the whole system of contingent things, including God, is causeless. But if the whole system of contingent things is without cause, then there is no causation at work anywhere in that system. The result of that would be that nothing that happens would be the least bit intelligible. Yet we do in fact find the world intelligible (its order being discernible by humans as I noted previously), so there has to be a causal order. For if there is to be any order at all, then the whole system of contingent things must be caused by something (to indeed be contingent as we observe it to be), and that something must not be contingent. A non-contingent reality simply must be present. A non-contingent thing I must note furthermore is a necessary thing; and a necessary thing is an eternal thing. The conclusion from this is that treating God as a contingent being is incoherent, a non-starter, a simple error of reasoning. If God is anything at all, he is eternal and necessary. An eternal necessity requires no cause, because what is necessary cannot fail to exist. Only contingent things require causes. So, all contingent things depend upon the necessary being, the necessary first principle, while the necessary being itself is not dependent. Ergo since the universe by the very fact its not eternal is contingent, something non-contingent necessarily exists a pre-requisite to its contingent reality. Thus the need for a Creator Spiritus if the universe is to exist and our base understanding of God (as a philosophical principle) as the necessary un-contingent being.

To help unravel this, lets imagine If you and I were walking along and we came upon a marble statue of Zeus, and you said that the statue had created itself through a process of random change, and I said, no, this statue has been created by a sculptor, would I be starting or implying or making necessary an infinite regress? No. I’d simply be saying that this statue was self-evidently the work of a sculptor. I wouldn’t have to know anything in particular about the sculptor for that statement to be true. I wouldn’t have to know what his intentions were, or how he came to be inspired to make this statue, or what tools he used, or how he had come to be born, or what his parents were like, or indeed who he was as a person, to know for an absolute fact that the statue had been made by a sculptor. There is no infinite regress here, rather I would be pointing to the fact that the sculpture is contingent and cannot itself come into existence by itself.

It seems to me, coming from the above points as such, that atheism is logically incoherent and self-refuting with regards to explaining material existence. The allegorical atheist must, necessarily as a matter of course, maintain that the physical laws of the universe (its ordered principles) simply exist in and of themselves and do not indicate any first principle or any intelligence that created the laws. He has to believe it, because any cause would have to be transcendent, i.e., God.

Atheism cannot account for the existence of many things that self-evidently do exist, such as mathematics, science, natural laws and so forth which are not physical realities, but which are clearly evident in the material world.

Even more broadly, notice that with regard to the Big Bang, it isn’t just that atheism does not know what caused the universe but that according to atheism (taken to its logical conclusion) the universe should not even really exist. Anything that is not eternal needs a cause that is outside itself as I have noted with regards to contingency. According however to atheism everything that exists was created at the Big Bang: all matter, energy, space and time. Therefore, according to atheism, we have the ultimate absurdity of existence spontaneously leaping in to being out of absolute nothingness if we remove the un-contingent necessary principle (ergo God). We simply have is the lunacy of a contingent chain of being, without a non-contingent cause.

The atheist in justifying this must either say “I don’t need to account for the cause of Big Bang, and the other things you mention mention, they’re just there, somehow,” that “I have confidence that science will discover the causes some day.” or that "space, time and matter only came into existence with the Big Bang, and therefore the question of what preceded the Big Bang is meaningless and cannot be asked." It’s an obvious attempt to get away from their logically unsustainable premise.

An atheist who answers with any of these three points (or variations thereof) as such becomes like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who won’t acknowledge he’s been defeated, even though King Arthur has cut off both his arms and both his legs.

It seems as such that rather than theists being subject to infinite regress, it is contemporary atheists who have decided to accept an infinite regress at least in part because they are otherwise forced to accept the existence of a First in the order of causality, i.e., they are forced to accept the existence of that which all men call God which is something they cannot do and remain atheists.

But theists don’t have this problem; the nature of a First is that nothing preceded it. What we call “God,” is what philosophers call a first efficient cause and metaphysical absolute of being, which means it is an immaterial ground and source of all being, motion and causality. To ask what caused God is implicitly to reject the idea of a “first” in the order of causality, and hence being. As far as I know, no contemporary atheist philosophers make this argument—they know (not being idiots) that it’s a non-starter. It is atheists therefore who must explain why they accept what Aquinas says no rational man accepts.

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sincerely

Jehoshua

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Ok. Thank you for taking the time to message me.

I think you are making an assumption with respect to the need for an originator, and the assumption is that all things which are contingent cannot originate in themselves. They need, therefore, a non-contingent object or originator to create them. Do I have this right? Something cannot come from nothing, in other words.

My principle objection to this argument is that we don't know if it is true. We don't know something can't come from nothing and it is the work of physicists like Lawrence Krauss that are particularly enlightening in this way. Modern physicists will argue that it is entirely possible - indeed, it is probable - that the universe self-originated despite its "contingent nature." How can this be? Would not, then, all things be lacking in an apparent order? Well, perhaps they are, and the order that we perceive is a human conceit. Or, more likely, the universe as self-originator represents a new terrain in the argument about contingency, one where something and nothing are (as Lawrence Krauss puts it) two sides of the same coin. If this were the case, there'd be no particular need for an originator - just patterns etched across space-time, in small quantities crossing the barrier, and at the beginning shifting in dramatic form due to no particular volition.

I cannot speak for most atheists, but as a man who has long struggled to keep the faith (and ultimately lost, as it were), I see the first cause argument as one that relies too heavily on logic and too little on observation. It is reasonable to suppose that the Statue of Zeus was built by a sculptor, even if possible that it was a random assortment of objects that just happened to fall together, and this is because we have seen statues before. We know how they're made. But universes? We don't know an awful lot about that so the best we can prescribe for this lack of knowledge is an "I don't know, yet" rather than an appeal to God.

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Firstly lets deal with Lawrence Krauss, since there are problems with an uncritical reference of his work. Namely if we actually read his book Krauss spends most of his time redefining ‘nothing’ in terms of increasingly incorporeal somethings (from ‘empty space’ to reified ‘laws of physics’), as if this justified the conclusion that literal nothingness could be the cause the cosmos. That’s like arguing that since its possible to live on less and less food each day it must be possible to live on no food. He is arguing to his own self-serving definition of nothing.

Indeed if we look at Krauss’ claim that "surely 'nothing' is every bit as physical as 'something'." – on the one hand this this is so drastically idiosyncratic that one hardly knows where to begin; whereas, on the other hand, this claim reveals why A Universe From Nothing is a veritable school of red herrings. Faced with the philosophical question of ultimate origins, Krauss simply changes the subject to discuss the scientific question of how one natural thing (e.g. the big bang) might possibly have been caused by some other natural thing (e.g. a multi-verse). Krauss may complain that "religion and theology … muddy the waters … by focusing on questions of nothingness without providing any definition of the term based on empirical evidence" – but any definition of nothing "based on empirical evidence" would be a definition of ‘nothing’ that has nothing to do with the philosophical questions of why there is something rather than nothing, or whether or not the existence of an empirical realm entails or is best explained by a non-empirical (metaphysical) order of reality. Hence page 149 of A Universe From Nothing contains the candid admission that the kind of ‘nothing’ Krauss has been discussing thus far is:

"the simplest version of nothing, namely empty space. For the moment, I will assume space exists, with nothing at all in it, and that the laws of physics also exist. Once again, I realise that in the revised versions of nothingness that those who wish to continually redefine the word so that no scientific definition is practical, this version of nothing doesn’t cut the mustard. However, I suspect that, at the times of Plato and Aquinas, when they pondered why there was something rather than nothing, empty space with nothing in it was probably a good approximation of what they were thinking about

This needless to say is not nothing (true nonexistence) at all, but rather a something. Ergo he does not at all resolve or even address in any way the argument to contingency (indeed all his multiverse theory does is lengthen the contingency chain indefinitely without addressing the need for first principles, it does not as you suggest in any way answer the problem of contingent causes requiring a non-contingent origin) I have noted. I would also point out that he blankly admits in his book that he is "not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator" which seems to me to really mean that he isn’t sympathetic to the idea that the cosmos is a creation, because that would entail a Creator: Ergo his work is intellectually uncredible, and based on his own religious position. He says for example that "I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist," and that he would "much rather live in a universe without one". He is, in short, yet another new atheist with an agenda attempting to address a topic he has no expertise in. He is a physicist masquerading as a philosopher, falling into a scientism of the most ludicrous proportions.

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Now that Krauss' stupidity has been pointed out (otherwise intelligent academics are guilty of many exercises in idiocy when they step foot outside their fields), lets deal with the rest of your argument that is not immediately dependant on his ideas.

Your main argument if I get it, seems to be that if the universe is non-contingent (your assumption) than perhaps we are just insane to perceive an order which does not exist. In addition to making all science meaningless if true (if there is no order, there can be no scientific laws) this position doesn't answer the problem of infinite regress and indeed is effectively the answer I noted atheists are obliged to provide to any reasonable debate on this topic, namely that “I don’t need to account for the cause of Big Bang, and the other things you mention, they’re just there... somehow.” This of course in a scientific or a philosophical sense is not a valid answer. You also open yourself to all the points I made (most of which you haven't addressed other than to simply dismiss them)

To continue, you also say that "I see the first cause argument as one that relies too heavily on logic and too little on observation", but you fail to see that on the contrary its the opposite that's true. Atheism fails to take into count observation. Science observes for example that all things in the universe are contingent, and that the universe itself is finite and has a beginning. It also observes that there is order in the universe, laws that are intelligible to human beings and is comprehensible. The atheist argument you have provided is to simply dismiss the scientifically observable facts of the universe and say they exist without seeking to explain why this order exists. Indeed even Krauss resorts to redefining the terms of the philosophical debate so that nothing really is a something (he actually seems to be arguing for an eternal universe, which is scientifically discredited. Indeed when the big bang theory was first originated the eternal universe theory was the popular one, and most atheists poo pooed the big bang theory as intruding religion into science. Not helped by the fact it was theorised by a Catholic priest) and lengthening the contingency chain in an attempt to push his own agenda. Indeed your statue allegory is also a red herring in that whether we know how the statue is made is not the point, the point is that in observing the nature of the statue we can perceive intuitively that there is a sculptor behind it. Ergo we know that the universe is ordered since science (and human reason) shows it to be true, we know that the universe is finite and not eternal. We can deduce thus from evidence and reason that there is a necessary first principle, ergo God.

There is simply no other way around it. You either continue to insist upon the absurdity that, despite the fact reason and science show it not to be true, the universe spontaneously emerged into existence (Krauss argues that it came from pre-existing universes, not that it is spontaneous), or you accept that there is indeed a first principle (since the multiverse theory of Krauss does not solve the problem, particularly since as I am at pains to repeat his "nothing' is not really nothing at all, but a something)

sincerely

Jehoshua

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Oh, OK. I guess God does exist after all. Cool.