(September 23, 2016 at 2:18 pm)_Velvet_ Wrote: Anyways, my point was that wizards doing magic makes sense... something not-a-wizard doing magic makes no sense.
Why does wizards doing magic make sense? Is it simply because you're more familiar with the concept of wizards?
It seems to me that the idea of beings doing magic is just as fantastical as the idea of something coming from nothing.
I don't think that you've so much found an answer to the paradox that makes sense so much as found one that seems less nonsensical. These type of proofs all go the same way. We can't solve them through ordinary means, so we'll invent something extraordinary as the answer. If you were prepared to accept extraordinary things, why were you attempting to solve it through ordinary means in the first place. It's like being unable to solve the Rubik's cube the normal way, so you take a hammer to it so that you can arrange the pieces anyway you like.
The question is why invisible magic beings are more familiar to us than infinite regresses or somethings coming from nothing? We certainly have no actual experience with beings that can do magic. So why does this idea seem familiar to us, familiar enough to make its way into many fairy tales? Could it be that our brains are predisposed to imagine such creatures? We deal with invisible minds all day long. We can't see the 'person' behind the words and looks and body movements. We imagine an invisible mind coordinating their behavior. A mind with intention. We're predisposed to imagining things have a mind, so that howling storm approaching is a malevolent force. It's not just impersonal weather. It has intent. Does our attributing minds to things that have them lead to our attributing minds to things that don't? I think so. We have a long history of doing so. So we find it easier to imagine a disembodied mind behind the creation of the universe than another cause which doesn't have a mind. It is our habit of inferring minds behind (purposeful) action that makes it more familiar. It makes more sense just out of habit because our brains are built to infer invisible minds at work.