Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency

[RoadRunner79]

I was agreeing with you!

You don't even look at things (let alone think), before attacking;   do you?

How the heck  was your last statement agreeing with me ?

You pontificated that time may be running in both directions at once.
I agreed and go a little further, to think that it entails it.

[Edwardo Piet]

If time goes on without boundary into the past, then there is always more past prior to any given point.  It is part of you saying that it is infinite in the direction of the past, and that it goes on without end.  How do say that it is infinite, and that it does not proceed forever into the past.

I don't know why you think I was saying otherwise? If time is infinite then it does indeed stretch on forever into the past. If there are infinite causes then the universe is infinite. This is why I was saying that there are only two ways to argue against a first cause. One way is to say that the universe is infinite and the other is to say that causality is illusory.

[Neo-Scholastic]

You don't seem to even understand how logic works. Logic actually has to make sense and follow logically, logic doesn't just have to seem smart and result in a conclusion you like the sound of. I am correct because the argument indeed does NOT show that the uncaused cause must be God.

Two things:

1) Neither you or anyone else on AF has revealed any actual flaw in the logic of the 5W, despite repeated and unsupported assertions that it has been debunked. Not once and I've been here for nearly 4 years.

2) It doesn't matter that the prime mover isn't called out definitatively as the Christian God. This is one attribute among many that is traditionally associated with the God of Classical theism that is available to natural reason. Special revelation is necessary to make that relationship explicit although as I have said many times further logical demonstrations show that the attributes of prime mover, necessary being, etc. are unified in a single being that is absolutely simple.

[Edwardo Piet]

How the heck  was your last statement agreeing with me ?

You pontificated that time may be running in both directions at once.
I agreed and go a little further, to think that it entails it.

1. Give an example of time running backwards in a way that makes any sense. 2. Are you saying that an infinite universe implies causation that "works both ways"?

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1) Neither you or anyone else on AF has revealed any actual flaw in the logic of the 5W, despite repeated and unsupported assertions that it has been debunked. Not once and I've been here for nearly 4 years.

Aquinas has been debunked thoroughly by many, many people over hundreds of years, not just us AFers. And I've been here nearly 10 years.

(See, I can say stuff like that too).

It doesn't matter that the prime mover isn't called out definitatively as the Christian God.

It isn't even shown to be a generic deist God.

[Amarok]

How the heck  was your last statement agreeing with me ?

You pontificated that time may be running in both directions at once.
I agreed and go a little further, to think that it entails it.

Oh thank you for the clarification

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It doesn't matter that the prime mover isn't called out definitatively as the Christian God.

It isn't even called out by any god

[RoadRunner79]

You pontificated that time may be running in both directions at once.
I agreed and go a little further, to think that it entails it.

1. Give an example of time running backwards in a way that makes any sense. 2. Are you saying that an infinite universe implies causation that "works both ways"?

1.  I don't think that it does?

2. Yes... you have an unbound ever increasing number of causes that stretch back into the past.  How do you do that, if you do not have new causes, that didn't exist prior to, current cause/effect?   If you quit having more prior causes, then you have stopped, and are no longer infinite in the past. You have a first cause.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, -after a cause-

Yes. And what happens after a cause is what happens in the future.

Whose future?  Which future?  Are all futures running in a concordant direction...and how would you determine any of this?

No it isn't. What happens next is by definition what happens in the future. "Y happens next" and "Y happens in the future" are the same thing. Time necessarily works in one direction, forwards, otherwise we're equivocating when we're talking about it. The very idea of time working in an alternative direction doesn't even make sense.

If you say so, Ham.  

What is an MP/MT conversion?

The rule by which any modus ponens can be converted to a modus tollens and vv.  Whereby, "If P then Q" is mechanically equivalent to "If not Q then Not P"

So, "If a ship will sink tonight, there will be a report in the morning" -or- "If there will not be a report in the morning, a ship will not sink tonight".  Both statements are sensible. If one statement is valid and true, then the other must be equally so....notice that the first is an implication of orthodox causality..the other, retro-causality.

-Alot- of ink has been spilled on this one. If there is some reason for accepting the one statement but not the other, and their attendant implications..it's not made apparent by either's relative sensibility. We have to refer to other propositions for a justification..which you did, two of them, as much as you'd like to imagine you didn't. Mind you, I'm not telling you that you're wrong in either of those additional qualifiers...simply explaining that it is those things by which you (and pretty much every one else) rejects bi-directionality of cause in-time....but in doing so it does call into question some of the rules by which we handle material implications and the sensibility of propositions or perhaps even the applicability of natural language to conditional logic.

In sum, we intuitively recognize that there's an issue with the second proposition..but what is it? Further, if there is a problem with the second proposition then it must carry back over to the first in transposition...but that;s the one that we intuitively recognize to accurately describe causality as we know it. Trouble, trouble.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Aquinas has been debunked thoroughly by many, many people over hundreds of years, not just us AFers.

Well, gee, I guess since you said so. Please present in your own words, if you can, how Aquinas has been debunked. I will not respond to dumb-ass youtube videos or cut-and-paste blog posts or links to articles on atheist websites. I want to hear it from you.

[Edwardo Piet]

For starters, Neo, take this from Wikipedia:

In the world we can see that at least some things are changing. Whatever is changing is being changed by something else. If that by which it is changing is itself changed, then it too is being changed by something else. But this chain cannot be infinitely long, so there must be something that causes change without itself changing. This everyone understands to be God.

I'm with this until the part I bolded. It just says all this stuff that makes sense logically and then falsely concludes "Therefore God".

Aquinas doesn't just have to say a bunch of stuff that makes sense, he actually has to say a bunch of stuff that makes sense and actually concludes logically that "Therefore God."

I can say lots of true things that are logically flawless like:

2+2=4
Squares have 4 sides.
All bachelors are unmarried.

But I can't then conclude:

"Therefore God."

And I can't simply say something true of cosmology and then conclude "Therefore God" either.

You don't seem to even recognize non-sequiturs. And in my experience that is really a theist thing. How can so many theists not see that the "Therefore God" part is pulled out of nowhere?

[Catholic_Lady]

For starters, Neo, take this from Wikipedia:

In the world we can see that at least some things are changing. Whatever is changing is being changed by something else. If that by which it is changing is itself changed, then it too is being changed by something else. But this chain cannot be infinitely long, so there must be something that causes change without itself changing. This everyone understands to be God.

I'm with this until the part I bolded. It just says all this stuff that makes sense logically and then falsely concludes "Therefore God".

What they mean is it takes a force that is not bound by the laws of physics or time to have started all this, hence the "this chain cannot be infinitely long." We call this force, this supreme being, "God". But if the word is your hang up, I suppose you can call it something else.