The absolute absurdity of God

[Angrboda]

Still wrong.  We've been over this several times and seem at an impasse.  You seem to delight in asserting it even though the fundamental arguments for it are flawed.  As best I can recall, you never responded to my pointing out that your first response to the problem didn't actually solve the problem.  If you responded and I simply missed it, feel free to bring it to my attention.  Oh, and for what it's worth, it doesn't require a person to make a decision.  Computers do it all the time.  There's no reason to believe that God's creative act and his being are not co-extensive, other than that you need to make the assumption to reach your conclusion.  Furthermore, as I've argued elsewhere, a sentient God with all the other relevant properties is indistinguishable from a God that is not sentient whose decisions are driven by his omniscience.  So nothing it seems, can get you to a personal God being necessary.

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That 14 billion years is all post-creation and so it doesn't even factor into the equation.  That you even bring it up makes me strongly suspect you don't know what you're talking about.

6. If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect then if the cause is there, so is the effect.

But that is not what we model when we discuss the universe. We believe the universe came into being 14 billion years ago and is in fact not timeless, beginningless, and unchanging. So, the effect (the universe) is not timeless, beginningless, and unchanging. But the cause seems like it must be (or an infinite regress). So why wasn't the universe as permanent as its cause? 

You're not making sense here.  You seem to be suggesting that an effect must have the same properties as its cause, in which case, I must ask why the universe is not also immaterial?  I don't understand what you're getting at here.  The question is what can we know about what existed when the universe did not exist.  You're claiming we can know that the entity which existed was possessed of a mind, presumably like ours (Imago Dei).  Beyond that, I can't make sense of your objection here.

The solution to that question is that a decision to bring the universe into being was made by a mind. Under the concept of libertarian free will, a decision requires no deterministic causal chain. You can say the argument is not convincing--but it is sound reasoning. Do you have another more-plausible explanation? 

The question was why is the cause necessarily a personal one, possessed of mind.  An entity with libertarian free will could precede creation.  That alone doesn't show that the entity which existed in the absence of creation was such an entity.  As pointed out, a non-sentient entity satisfies the priors just as satisfactorily.  

Regarding your idea that God could be coextensive with creation. The universe began to exist a finite time ago and marches on toward heat death in a finite amount of time. There is no reason to think that creation and God are inseparable other than to avoid the 'personal' conclusion.

Who said anything about God and creation being separable.  My whole point was that they might be inseparable.  That God and the creative act need not be separable.  You are not only arguing the converse, but that it is necessarily so.  Where are you getting this from?

Are there other reasons to think this might be true?

I'm not making the affirmative case.  You are.  I only need to establish the possibility to undermine your argument.  I have no need for reasons for thinking it is true, nor am I 'avoiding' anything by pointing that out.

How does omniscience work without a sentient center of being? For there to be knowledge, doesn't there have to be a mind to comprehend?

Your question has to do with meaning and knowledge.  How does it work without a mind?  How does it work with a mind?  You don't have an explanation for the latter; why do I need one for the former?  Ultimately the question relates not to how knowledge and meaning works, I freely admit I don't know.  But that's not necessary to my conclusion.  All that is required is some non-sentient power or process that can form appropriate relationships between information and logically consistent and appropriate acts.  You don't know what is under the hood with respect to God, and you seem to be begging the question by assuming that the activity of whatever cause existed required comprehension in the same manner as we possess comprehension.  It doesn't.

Let me illustrate with regard to the example of John Searle's classic Chinese Room argument.  In that gedanken, Searle postulated that one could create a room containing a set of rules for responding to Chinese language queries, and an automaton necessary to carry out those rules.  His point was that there is no actual understanding in such a room in the sense that we understand things.  However, from the point of view of someone outside the room, there's no way to tell whether what is inside the room is an automaton, mindlessly carrying out a process, or an actual person with a mind that comprehends Chinese as a native speaker does.  Essentially, we only know God by his effects.  If an automaton can have the same effects as a sentient entity, then you have failed to show that the entity in question necessarily is sentient.  To do that would either be to show that no such automaton or other non-sentient entity could accomplish the same effects, or that sentience is a requirement for understanding, neither of which I think is within the realm of possibility here.  The assumption of natural theology is that you can know God through his effects, specifically in the natural world.  If you cannot show that those effects require sentience, then you cannot establish that the first cause was necessarily personal.

Note that I am not suggesting that the cause was an automaton in the sense of being a material process or having any specific mechanism of operation.  If you can appeal to mystery and magic, so can I.  A relevant example is the Turing Oracle.  We have no idea how such an oracle would work, but it is not a logical contradiction to propose such an oracle.  The idea itself is not incoherent.

An additional possibility that I'll raise as long as I'm at it is that the initial cause was a non-sentient entity possessed of the necessary powers that simply creates the effects we are trying to explain in the appropriate time and order for no reason whatsoever.  While such an entity may seem improbable, it's not necessarily any more improbable than the God you postulate, nor is it necessary that I establish that it is -- again, I'm not making the affirmative case; it only need be possible, not necessarily actual.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you are objecting to my inferences about what a first cause must be like by proposing a necessarily-existing universal consciousness? If so, does this universal consciousness have purposes?

Let me ask you this: how do you know that God has purposes?  You don't.  You're either pulling it from an interpretation of special revelation, or out of thin air.  These are natural theology arguments.  What relation is there between your question about purpose and the general question at issue?  Can you demonstrate that any supposed first cause is necessarily personal?  I don't think you can.  You initially appealed to Ghazali's argument, which was shown to be flawed.  You've yet to replace it with anything substantial other than a bunch of talk about the finite and tensed nature of the universe, which doesn't seem to relate to any necessity about the nature of the first cause that I can see.  It seems nothing more than a non sequitur.

A computer does not make decisions in the sense we mean when we talk about libertarian free will--which seems a necessary understanding of the word when talking about whether a first cause had it or not.

It needn't do so.  All that is required is a process or cause that is indistinguishable from an entity possessing a mind. Arguing that this entity or cause must work in the same way that we or God works is basically special pleading; placing a requirement on the answer that has no reason for being there.  How we got on the subject of libertarian free will is a mystery to me.  It seems to bear no relation to what you are trying to prove.  You can't as yet demonstrate that a first cause necessarily reasoned as we do.  I'm reasonably certain you're simply pushing a successful argument further out of your reach by claiming that these natural theology arguments establish that the cause had libertarian free will.  I'll entertain some contemplation on the matter simply because I find it amusing.  It's predicated that our minds have a will which operates in some as yet not fully determined manner.  Libertarian free will is a specific way of conceptualizing this will, but it's not the only one.  Physicalists postulate that as a consequence of materialism and determinism, that libertarian free will does not exist.  But it's not necessary to retain the requirement that the will be the effect of a material process.  One could equally as well postulate a will that was completely deterministic in its operation, completely independent of the brain.  A "robot soul," so to speak.  We don't know whether libertarian free will is the reality anymore than we know that the hard incompatibilist account is.  You can't determine which is the case with respect to human beings, how are you going to do so for a supposed first cause?

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To characterize the universe as "more organized" is an incredible understatment. We can turn to the fine-tuning argument to see that the chances of the initial conditions being such that life is possible have more zeros to the right of the decimal than there are elements in the universe.

No, we cannot. The odds of the initial conditions being what they are is unknown. You're making unwarranted assumptions that undermine your entire point.