(November 28, 2022 at 11:07 pm)LinuxGal Wrote: If God is the uncaused cause, as neo-Thomists and others assert, then his existence has no reason. His existence is simply a brute fact.
And if God's existence has no basis in reason, then there is also no reason to assert he is the solitary uncaused cause. He may very well be one of many uncaused causes.
Exactly. People find the Kalam convincing because they hold a flawed view of causality. They hold an events based view of causation. Everything is a result of an antecedant cause or event. But in my view this is wrong. Once you concede that something can exist without a cause there is simply no need for "God" as an explanation.
I think that every action has a cause - some entity takes an action - but not every entity has a cause. The nature of any action an entity performs is determined by the nature of the entity. A is A. If A exists, it must be A. If A acts, it must act as A and not non-A.
Hume got it wrong. The necessary relationship is not between events but between an entity and its actions.
The Kalam has many other flaws but What LinuxGal pointed out is sufficient to refute the Kalam.
Whenever someone asks where anything came from the proper answer is that it came from existence. There is nowhere else for things to come from.
Folks, it really is that easy to refute theism. Why does it persist? Because people want to believe it.
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."