The Best Logique Evidence of God Existence

[Belacqua]

@Belaqua

I’m still stuck on this notion of “existence” versus “that which exists”. 

Yes, I think this is a reasonable argument. It's probably a side effect of English grammar that we can say something like, "Existence hung around for a while before there was any stuff." It's grammatical but it's nonsense. 

I keep coming back to the same problem in my mind. Aristotelian thinking seems to insinuate that existence is in some way separate, or beyond, or ontologically different from that which exists; that existence can somehow be “prior” to things existing. I feel like that’s unnecessary. It’s a tautology. Existence is simply a state of being. The cosmos exist. Earth exists. This pencil exists. I’ve asked this before, but I’d like to address the question again: do you think that there is a good reason why we shouldn’t accept existence as a brute fact?  Is there a good reason to believe that “the cosmos” and “existence” can’t be synonymous terms?

I don't think Aristotle makes that separation. (I wish I spoke Greek so I could look at his grammar.) 

In fact I think that, again, you are coming close to a common argument for a First Cause. It is a brute fact that stuff exists. It is logically incoherent to talk about a state of absolute nothingness. Therefore, the brute fact of stuff existing is the First Cause. It is the deepest foundation of talking about all the various stuff. 

So people may say that the First Cause is the Ground of Being, or existence, or -- in an attempt to be more careful -- the unavoidability of stuff being around. When we say that, for example, the continued existence of space-time depends for its continuation on the brute fact that there has to be stuff, we have come to the necessary end of the chain. Which makes it the First Cause. 

The word "prior" is misleading because we are so used to using it in a temporal sense. But in logic, it just means X has to be the case for Y to be the case. Or in the present discussion, there has to be stuff in order for there to be hydrogen. The fact that there is stuff isn't a "cause" in the modern English sense of an act or event which made something else come about. 

Whether all this is true -- that existence is inevitable and nothingness is nonsense -- I can't say. But in terms of a First Cause, it is part of the old argument.

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Since spacetime is, in essence, equivalent to 'the universe', you are saying that hydrogen can't exist without the universe. Well, duh. That simply isn't an informative statement. It isn't a type of causality.

It is a "cause" in the sense that Aristotle used the term which we translate into English as "cause." But as I said, that's different from the way you want to use the word, and that's OK with me. 

Now, how does that apply in the Kalam argument? Everything has something that is required for it to exist? Outside of the universe itself, I'm not sure that is even true.

It doesn't apply to the Kalam argument. That's different. 

Both Aristotle and Thomas rejected the Kalam argument.