Creationism

[GrandizerII]

If by "pink unicorn" you have in mind that which we imagine to be a "pink unicorn" then that can't be semantically equivalent to "first cause" as is traditionally understood.

Why not?

What i have in mind with *pink unicorn* is something that caused existence. Logically of course, not in a time related fashion, of course. Its property is a kind of "proto existence", not existence per se, some *pre-existence*  (or pre existing if you will   ) condition. The pink unicorn is proto-existence.

Alright, no argument there, lol.

For your last sentence, I don't know how to answer that other than what was already said. Maybe your point is that this can't but be abstract, but for Aquinas, "Existence" is "something" and not a mere abstract notion.

Im not making claims about what existence is, Aquinas does. I am only interested if Aquinas idea is true or even possibly true as a coherent concept. I certainly do not accept his assertion "its a thing!" on the face of it.

If existence is a "something" and not some abstract notion. Can that "thing" exist in an environment without time ("to exist", pun intended...to a certain degree) or space to inhabit? If it can, particularly without the necessity of space or time, what is this thing called existence exactly? Can you give a detailed definition of it (since i do not yet know of things that can ...exist....without time and/or space)? How can it be more than a property all things have? Can existence exist without a thing that has existence as a property?

If existence was the first thing to exist (aka. first cause), what were its properties? Existence? Seems so, as there was nothing else (than this first cause called *existence*). Did it have itself as a property? Is that even possible? If existence is the property of the *thing* existence, then....*trying to wrap my head around this)* arent we talking of two different things? If they are. Then we have two first causes, not one: the thing existence, and the property existence. Or if its the same thing, how can a thing be a thing and a property?

Fair questions. I'm going to be straight out honest with you. I really don't have a clue how this works. I will say that Aquinas and classical theists in general do believe in the first cause as this absolutely simple "thing" in which everything about it (such as "essence", "existence", "goodness") are strictly identical to each other. It's not two "things", but strictly one "thing". This is something that defies our imaginations, and it's possible there's some logical incoherence involved there, but atm I can only stick with a "I have no clue" because I can't pinpoint where the incoherence lies exactly.

My aim here in this thread isn't to defend the soundness of Aquinas' arguments, or any arguments for God for that matter. For me, pure argumentation on metaphysics will forever have its weaknesses, no matter how plausible the premises may sound and no matter the validity of the arguments. The initial reason I posted here was I saw Eleven make a clear error in his OP and wanted to point it out, then a few exchanges occurred along the way, and here we are.

I do care, as atheists, that we examine these arguments as fairly as possible. And I feel like sometimes we do fail to do that. I'm not referring to your argument here btw, but rather to certain claims that are based on misunderstandings of the contents/purposes of these arguments, such as Gae's argument that the first three Ways are invalid because they each contain a rewording of the general premise that all things that exist are caused.

For Aquinas, yes, basically.

Lets go back to the time when there was only the first cause, *existence* (ignoring the problem i mentioned in my previous paragraph). At some point *existence* had to be followed up by a second thing, or property, second only to existence. Would you say that there are any preconditions for existence to cause that second thing? Can / must have existence be the cause of that second thing in a logical only fashion? As i understood Aquinas, as he is presented to me here, it is. But how so? How can existence, in an environment without time or space cause, logically, anything else? How can this thing (Aquinas said so: its *something*) exist, at all? Because he can conceive so? Because he can conceive of nothing else? Because he says so?
Thats my personal suspicion, for the record.

I won't reiterate everything I said right above here because the answer is basically the same. No clue. I do want to remind you, however, that Aquinas didn't say that there was a "time when there was only the first cause". Aquinas, at least per logic, was fine with the universe itself being eternal. He just reckoned that, at any point in time, every being nevertheless requires a first cause ultimately to sustain its existence.

I suppose so, since eternity is defined in terms of "time", whether its definition is "infinite time" or "beyond time".

Fair enough on your footnote.

Eternity is a temporal concept, and existence is the first cause, and existence is eternal (all claims you have made, or lets say claims of others you have restated here), right? How can existence be eternal (as Plantinga said) when modern cosmology shows strong evidence that at some point in the past time (and space) broke down, aka. there was no time, and thus no eternity? Ergo, the first cause can not have been eternal, or (as Plantinga defined it) couldnt have existed at all.

So just to be clear. I don't think Platinga sees the first cause as "existence" in the same way classical theists see it. I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

But let's step back just a little bit here.

Broadly speaking (and I can't emphasise the term "broadly" enough), when it comes to intellectual Christians (philosophers and theologians), there are two types of Christians/theists.

The classical theists who believe God is so absolutely simple, that every one of its "property" (and I mean this is a casual sense, not necessarily in any Thomistic sense) is just really one "property" seen differently by us and it's one with "being/existence". There is a risk with how I just worded this of course, because classical theists use common words in their theologies to mean things that we modern-day laypeople just aren't conditioned to think without prior training in these theologies. But somehow they just believe in this absolutely simple "Being" that has no potential for anything and is "pure act" (basically means it can't be anything else but what it is because it is "full/complete" in its being).

Theistic personalists, on the other hand, are the broad camp of theists who don't believe God is absolutely simple. They generally still believe God is simple (not complex) but it is not "ridiculously" simple the way classical theists believe. So for example, some (or maybe most/all) believe God has multiple properties that are not strictly identical to each other. And they would not say that God is Being/Existence itself but rather a being that is nevertheless "infinite".

So with that in mind, going back to using "first cause" instead of "God" and to the point you were making, I'm not sure that physical time and space "at some point" breaking down means there can't be whatever that's "beyond it". This doesn't mean it's ever easy to fathom, but imagine that we're dealing with a relativistic notion of time instead of the kind of time we intuit. Then it can mean that all space and time is there existing "eternally" and the "breaking down" stuff would probably mean that there is no way to map to an "absolute beginning point" of the universe.

Anyway, there are physicists (like Sean Carroll) who have said that while there was (or may have been) a beginning to the inflation of the universe but doesn't necessarily mean the universe itself had a beginning.

Here's a relevant physics video for your viewing. Make of it what you will:

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No they don't. Neither does the Kalam for that matter. None of them state that all things that exist must be unconditionally caused, therefore god. There's always some condition such as: "potency", "essence and existence not identical", "contingency", "begin to exist".

It's misleading to argue that any of these arguments follow the form you stated above.

Are you completely insane, or just arguing with me because you're pissed?  Yes, each of those arguments proposes an un-x'ed x,  even gave them to you in order, and I'm tired of your shit.

Dude, either address what I actually said, and quit with these red herrings, or just acknowledge you did a strawman.

Toms idle ideas about things like potency essence and existence have nothing to do with the form of an argument.

This here is the flaw in your reasoning. You think these extra conditions don't reveal the flaw in the general form you presented to be a strawman, but none of these arguments actually contain any premise that can be in harmony with your ridiculous strawman of a premise. None of them, in any kind of proper rewording, ever state that "all things that exist must have a cause".

All cats have an explanation.
The explanation for cats must be a non-cat.
Therefore non-cat exists.

Coincidentally, all cats do have an explanation, and non-cat does exist - but not because the explanation for cats must be non-cat.  A special pleading fallacy of composition...about cats and things that aren't cats.

Again, if you're going to present these example arguments in that way, you're just strawmanning the actual arguments.

The "explanation" needs to exist in order to act in any way on what it "creates" per Aquinas and others. I suspect your conflating of "explanation" with "cause/create" is part of the issue here, maybe.

For Aquinas, there needs to be an actual actualizer, an actual conjoiner of existence to essence, basically an actual creator. That's in the arguments before you get to their conclusions.