(May 30, 2020 at 11:40 pm)brokenreflector Wrote: By God I mean a necessary, non-physical, and personal being who created all things: seen, unseen, discovered, and undiscovered. Being a Christian, I believe God is more than that, but this post is about the general concept of God.
Ask yourself this question: What are the plausible explanations for the origin of all things? It seems to me that we're left with the following explanations:
First explanation. Ultimately, nonbeing produced being. The problem with this explanation should be obvious. How could nonbeing produce being? What would be producing it? Nonbeing is the absence of any kind of existence.
Second explanation. Something is past-eternal. This something could be the universe, multiverse, or one of its constituents. Or it could be something else entirely. Let's call it X. X would need to exist and there was never a point where the proposition "X exists" was false.
The second explanation gets rid of the problem of nonbeing producing being and there doesn't seem to be any glaring issue with it. Issues arise only if you're an atheist. Put simply, atheists do not believe that God exists. There are many flavors of atheism and ways that people spin the word, but this is what it really comes down to. If an atheist chooses to accept the second explanation, then they're forced to believe that something eternal exists, but it's not God. Typically, atheists who choose this second explanation will believe that the universe or multiverse is eternal. But the idea that the universe is eternal is logically incoherent and not to mention against what contemporary scientific evidence suggests. For the latter, I refer you to a certain point of a debate between philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig and physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss (https://youtu.be/mj4nbL53I-E?t=5408). Despite being a staunch and vocal atheist, Dr. Krauss begrudgingly admits in this YouTube clip that contemporary scientific evidence points to the universe being past-finite.
Going back to the logical problem with the second explanation, the incoherence stems from the implications of an eternal universe. If the universe is indeed eternal, then that means our universe has already been through an actually infinite number of changes or processes, all leading up to the present. Otherwise, the present wouldn't be occurring. But how did an infinite amount of changes already transpire? The fact that these changes were traversed seems to suggest that they're finite rather than infinite. This seems to be a big problem for the atheist.
I argue that in order for the second explanation to work, God must be the eternal cause. This is because God doesn't go through changes. He's not made up of parts or processes. He's non-physical or immaterial. Therefore, God being past-eternal doesn't lead to the same implausible implication that an actually infinite number of changes has already transpired.
That seems like a flavor of a modal ontological argument.
If you have 34 minutes to spare:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard P. Feynman
