(July 10, 2014 at 1:50 pm)SteveII Wrote: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.If I'm not mistaken, the cosmological argument originally stated that "whatever exists must have a cause." Since this simply led to the problem of infinite regression (if god exists, what 'caused' him?) the wording was changed from "exists" to "begins to exist." Which makes a lot more sense, but which requires that we prove that god always existed, and which doesn't stop us from assuming that the universe always existed in some form.
It is an argument that relies on at least a couple of suppositions and if those aren't the ones you expect, you wind up with a result you might not like.
"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
