(June 15, 2019 at 11:27 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: You said the First Cause is not a thing, but then you go on to say, “without it.”
Yes, reasonable questions. The whole thing goes outside our daily experience of the world, and is hard to picture. And pushes the limits of English.
By thing in that sentence, I mean a tangible, separable object. As if when you see the First Cause and the universe, you're seeing two objects. But the world and the First Cause do not make two.
Quote:What is existence then, if it isn’t a thing?
I guess if we say "this cat exists," then we're not talking about a cat and something else. The cat exists. And existence -- the fact that things exist -- is necessary for that cat to exist. And everything else.
Quote:Do you mean to say, ‘without the potential for things to exist?’ If so, what are the preconditions necessary for anything at all to exist?
Well, personally, I don't know. Those who argue for a First Cause say that existence per se is necessary for anything at all to exist. And they have elaborate arguments as to why existence itself must be uncaused and unchanging. Things change, but existence itself remains existence.
When they posit a First Cause, they are hoping to answer your question here: for anything contingent, changing, and tangible to exist, we require the precondition of something non-contingent, unchanging, and intangible -- namely, existence.
Quote:I believe that it is logically contradictory to describe “nothing” as a potential alternative to “something”, because “nothing”, by definition, cannot be.
You may not be a philosopher, but here you've stated an important part of the argument as to why there must be a First Cause.
The standard thinking says that if there were absolutely nothing, then existing things couldn't come to be. But obviously some things exist. Therefore there must be something which doesn't need to come to be.
(And this is tricky because what I say sounds temporal, when it isn't necessarily. Existence itself and the laws of nature, for example, or existence itself and space-time, may well be simultaneous. But existence itself is necessary for the laws of nature. It is logically prior, but not temporally prior.)
Now I suppose that if science really could prove, somehow, that there really was nothing at some point, and then the universe popped into existence uncaused, then the First Cause argument would be finished. But is that really what anybody argues? Lawrence Krauss, for example, in his book purporting to answer this question, says that given the laws of nature as they are, it is inevitable that things exist. But he doesn't explain why the laws of nature exist. I think that if there are laws of nature floating around waiting for the universe to pop up, it means there was something already. Perhaps not tangible, countable somethings, but laws. And since the standard argument says that the First Cause is not tangible, nothing Krauss says rules out a First Cause.
