RE: Am I a Deist? Cosmological Argument seems reasonable to me.
September 23, 2016 at 1:23 pm
(This post was last modified: September 23, 2016 at 1:26 pm by Whateverist.)
(September 23, 2016 at 9:49 am)_Velvet_ Wrote: 3: The universe coming into existance expontaneously (or uncaused) makes no sense to me, so the cosmological argument seem very compelling and the classic refutations of it don't really hold ihmo (maybe i'm too ignorant to grasp them, but that's why i'm here anyways)
So I tend (for now) to think its reasonable to believe there might be a first cause, and that cause would need be somewhat different from what we do know, outside of time, (because time its "a thing" of our universe) and thinking of this stuff makes my head hurt, because while I do think that the universe needing a cause its reasonable enough, we also can't really have it because it can't be anything prior to time, due to time itself being part of what makes a cause what it is.
So yeah, I have no idea.
What I do know tho its that the cosmological argument doesn't really point to anything like a personal god, it only talks about causality and how our universe usualy works and predicts that something would be "the first cause" and that cause would be somehow special, to avoid infinite regression of causes, anyways i'm not a theist, thats for sure.
And I think we can't really know if there's really a necessity for a first cause, because its not something we can really confirm so I might be agnostic on that sense, since agnostic its a position about "you think that it can be known?"
But I still find it very hard to believe that the universe (or the quantum fluctuations that might have caused the big bang, or whatever you want it to be your first cause) be an uncaused cause, unless it is something different from everything we know (maybe this is argument from incredulity, but to me it really wouldn't make any sense to have a natural uncaused first cause while everything else has a cause prior, including time itself, so the only way to stop the regression of causes its coming to a "special" cause)
A first cause makes no sense to me without imagining something far more mysterious having always existed without the need of a prior cause which has the ability to whip shit up out of nothing in a manner we can't fathom. If natural causes can't get us to a big bang, how much less reason is there to think some omni-powerful creator came into being without ever having been created itself? The idea of such a thing existing seems far more preposterous than that stuff has always existed in some form or other and somehow transforms by natural processes -not all of which we understand.
Everything we can detect and everything we can reasonably infer based on that does indeed seem to stem from one big bang event. But to just assume that time itself and all locations began and will end there .. seems as naive as all the other earth centric assumptions our species has always held. If you believe as I do in a multiverse cosmos then the clock for the universe associated with our local bang needn't have been started in a vacuum. Whether we ever have the ability to confirm this, it is still far easier to believe than that eternally existent capricious beings magically throw out first causes when they feel like it.