God's God

[Mystic]

Unless you're infallible, what things seem like to you is an irrelevancy. It could simply be that you're lacking key pieces of information- unknown unknowns, if you like- that could radically change the way we must approach this question. Making concrete statements right now is pointless.

Why is it irrelevant if I'm not infallible. I go do a math test, an answer seems true to me, I shouldn't write it after much studying, because I'm not infallible? Of course I can be wrong, it doesn't mean I ought to not have the answer to what seems true to me.

Also, you are assuming this all from the lenses of naturalism. If naturalism is true, I agree we really can't know existence requires a constant cause.

However if is the case the existence does require a constant cause, and the Creator requires to constantly cause himself and everything else in existence, then, I don't see, how given that we have logic, and knowledge of other intuitive things like praise, morals, etc, or "from nothing, nothing follows", that we can't be given knowledge of this?

But aside from that, aside from the issue of knowledge, even if we weren't given knowledge, it does seem to be the case that existence too requires a constant cause instead of simply things like motion.

Well, except that the atheist position generally says nothing about creators in general, just that specific religious ones haven't met their burden of proof. I'm entirely willing to accept that there may be a creator, just that as yet, religions haven't satisfied me that it's theirs.

Agnostic and atheist aren't mutually exclusive terms.The former addresses what you claim to know, the latter what you claim to believe. Besides, atheism isn't a stance on creators, it's a stance on religion: not "there's probably no creator," but "your specific religious creator does not seem likely."

True enough. However, most Atheists tend to think a cosmic creator his highly unlikely as opposed to highly likely.

How do I know that you don't know for certain if everything requires a creator? Because you're not omnipotent. There's things you don't know, and much of the universe falls under that category. It's nothing to feel bad about, but it is the truth; we as a species could be missing some immense, vital part of the puzzle.

I don't need to know everything to know somethings. That's just silly.

Accepting things as they seem is intellectual laziness; lots of things seem one way but are actually another. That's what science is for, to cut through what seems intuitively to be true into what is actually true.

Science can't really answer for you regarding this. It's ontological...not empirical.

You can't give up what you never had.

What I meant is why give up being certain. Often, when I do a math problem, I redo it a few times to become certain of it.

Perhaps constant reflection over this issue, can make us certain. I don't know. It may, it may not.

Not necessarily. Even if it implied a constant cause there's no reason to assume that cause is supernatural; it could just be a feature of the universe our technology can't detect yet. This is the problem with making blanket statements about things we can't possibly know.

But I reasoned why it can't be a feature of the universe. So the conclusion would follow from the reasoning I showed, even if you disagreed with it.

I take evidence seriously, but since we don't yet have any evidence of what happened before the big bang, I'm taking a sabbatical on answering questions about the beginning of the universe. What's the problem with that?

We have evidence that time is not infinite (it doesn't go back forever and ever). You can make conclusions based on that.

Because we have no evidence for things causing themselves to exist. You're asking us to accept your conclusion, only it's based on a premise you can't quite prove.

That was the conclusion that followed from a premise though, mainly that everything requires a cause including existence.

It's not. That's why I added "as far as we know," before talking about everything requiring a cause.

It's still special pleading. It's saying we do know everything else requires a cause but we don't know existence does.

Seems like special pleading still. Unless you can explain why existence should be treated differently.