(March 22, 2013 at 8:16 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: The cosmological argument does not rest on the premise that "everything has a cause" which opens the door to what caused God. The idea is that "Everything that comes into being has a cause". That means that all contingent beings have a cause. Therefore, to ask "what caused God?" is really to ask "what caused the thing that cannot in principle have a cause?" Even if the universe has always existed, it nonetheless owes its existence to an unmoved mover, i.e. God. Even if there are an infinite series of contingencies, there must be an original, non-contingent force that is doing the moving, a force that has not been, and cannot be influenced by any other.
Well then, let's come up with a new name for the obvious argument that wonders how we ascribe something as complex as the universe to god, yet something as complex as god to "always there." Or whatever it is that allowed the most complex thing in existence to NOT be proof for intelligent design.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
