(January 15, 2026 at 4:52 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:(January 15, 2026 at 3:41 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I suspect you know the traditional answer to this...
Christians say that God is uncaused. This is because if we look at a chain of causation (essential, not temporal), in order to avoid infinite regress, we follow the chain back to one thing that is required to have always been the case, in order for anything else to be the case.
Of course some people think an infinite regress is OK, but of course that raises different problems of its own.
And I suspect you know the objections.
Theists require that everything be caused except for their deity. That's special pleading. The Prime Mover argument doesn't solve the problem. It just calls it Divine and makes it taboo to think about it any further.
The chief trouble with the ontological argument is that it is definitional. You can’t define something into existence.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
