(February 12, 2014 at 1:21 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote:

(February 12, 2014 at 12:09 pm)Rampant.A.I. Wrote: You are? Where?

I'm explaining why something with attributes like that of God has to exist in order for anything else to exist. No-one has suggested anything that would work as an alternative, that's because there isn't one.

Quote:"We have no examples of necessary existence; we just have examples of necessary inferences or judgments. There can be no empirical necessities."

You can still take what you have an apply some deductive reasoning to it.

Quote:"The fact that many things exist when, if the argument were correct, the probability of objects existing is self-refuting since being must exist at the same time as these arguments in order to evaluate such arguments.
If God is an existent object in the universe, then by premise (1), it is possible for God not to exist.

God is not an existent object in the universe but can still be immanent within it.

Quote: If God is a different kind of existent thing, then the argument commits the fallacy of petitio principii or the circularity of assuming in the premises what is to be proved.

You need one kind of thing to explain another different kind of thing. The two go together, one necessitates the other.

Quote:The premise "If, for all existent objects, they do not exist at some time, then, given infinite time, there would be nothing in existence" commits the fallacy of composition. Simply because the parts of a group are limited, it does not follow that the group as a whole is limited.

If it was unlimited group as a whole you would have a infinite regression of caused events and all events would require an infinite number of events to happen in order to happen therefore nothing can happen. It doesn't work you still something else beyond the system and cycle of events.

Quote: The properties of whole do not necessarily exhibit the properties of the parts. [hide] Simply because all human beings have a finite life-span, it does not follow logically that someday the human race will come to an end— unless, of course, additional assumptions are made.

It does follow logically if all organic species go extinct and/or the universe itself will end. Providing God exists that wouldn't be a problem for us though we will outlast the universe.

Quote: Moreover, in Aristotelian philosophy, the corruption of one being is the generation of another—nothing ceases to exist without the generation of something else.

Nothing is removed from existence matter and energy just changes from one form to another and it would consistently follow that consciousness is immortal as well in much the same way.

Quote:Necessity is a property of statements not of objects. It doesn't make sense to claim that an existent thing is logically necessary. Existent things just are, that's all.

God "just is" and through God everything else exists or "just is" though it has a reason/purpose to exist. God exists for all the necessary reasons I've explained to this point.

Quote: We have no examples of necessary existence; we just have examples of necessary inferences or judgments. There can be no empirical necessities.

It makes more sense for existence to have a context to explain why it exists then to have no explanation or framework at all. We don't go around saying there is no explanation for anything at all and this can apply equally to everything as a whole.

Quote:As Kant notes, existence is not a real predicate or property; existence is not a characteristic which can be added to the concept of the subject. Thus, the concept of necessary existence is not meaningful. (Q.v., the notes Existence Is Not a Predicate)

Even a possible explanation is better than no possible explanation whatsoever. There is only one possible explanation that is possible to deduce, something eternal beyond time and space that brought forth time and space. This fits 100% with what God is supposed to be.

Quote:The idea of necessary being is unintelligible. As Hume point out, any statement concerning existence can be denied. Hume writes, "The words, therefore "necessary existence," have no meaning, or which is the same thing, none of which is consistent." Whatever we can conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent.

You literally can't conceive of non-existence as only existence exists and therefore only existence ever existed. Therefore there has to be something eternal within and behind existence as from nothing nothing comes. An infinite regression as we have covered won't work as everything in the system relies on an infinite number of other things to happen before they can happen. Instead you have only one thing that causes everything else to happen/exist. and this thing must have always existed.

Quote:Nevertheless, Charles Hartshorne claims that the predicate "necessary existence" does add something the concept of God and so is a real predicate or property. E. g., "necessary existence" is distinguished from contingent existence in that necessary existence cannot not exist.
Problem with Creation ex nihilo. Thomas' statement of our premiss (3) that nothing can come from nothing is expressed by him this way: "…that which does not exist begins to exist only through something already existing." This premise implies that the newly existent thing is only a transformation of the already existing thing; otherwise, there would be no way to account for the newly existing thing given the truth of the principle of the conservation of matter and energy.

Only God can create and he created the universe as a whole with all the necessary energy contained within it all at once. No energy is feed into or withdrawn from the system it is merely sustained in existence.

Quote: If Aquinas were to deny the principle of the conservation of matter and energy, then he would be tacitly denying the principle of creation ex nihilo for contingent things.

Only the universe itself had to be created ex nihilo and it's only the universe we can observe.

Quote:As reasonable as this assumption appears to be, consider Stephen Hawking's explanation of creation of matter and energy:
Where did they [i.e., 1080 particles in the universe] all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero.

The total energy of the universe means nothing as that was created by God along with everything else that exists.

Quote: The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

That's all very good but this observation as factual as it it means nothing at all as far as this question is concerned.

Quote:The physicist Heinz Pagels speculates, "Maybe the universe itself sprang into existence out of nothingness
—a gigantic vacuum fluctuation which we know today as the big bang.

Fluctuations in a vacuum require the existence of time and space to start with? That all started with the big bang science can't go beyond that as everything science can ever study came into existence at that point.

Quote:Remarkably, the laws of modern physics allow for this possibility."
Problem of Criterion of Counting. Are space and nature continuous or discrete? Where does one object end and another begin? Is a fist made from a closed hand something or nothing? Where does the fist go when the hand is opened? Where does a lap go when one stands up? In premise (2) there is a serious problem of criterion of counting objects and their parts. How could Thomas handle these and similar examples?
Problem of the Ultimate Consistent of the Universe. Ultimately is nature continuous or discrete? Do we have any good reasons for assuming with Thomas that nature is discrete rather than continuous?

Through God nature is discrete and continuous as God is continuous and nature is a creation of God. The two flow together.

Quote:As Hume points out in his Dialogues, nature, the universe itself, or something else could qualify as just as much a "necessary being" as God would. Why would we suppose that there could just be one necessary being in the universe?"

Well for one there must be a maximal form of being, the highest you can go is infinity and this would be God, you can only have one infinity and one highest point. Then you can bring all the other arguments I made for Gods existence into the picture with a dash of the traditional cosmological arguments. Certainly God accounts for the unlikelihood of the supreme order and life generating complexity that the universe is observed to have. You can see that more as an added bonus than the crux of the argument.