(February 27, 2015 at 1:57 am)Harris Wrote: Al-Ghazali proposed:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Any power that is capable to create and sustain universe is God.
Hasn't this been dismissed already, in various occasions?
First premise: wrong!
The definitions employed are faulty. Our brains cannot grasp what it means "to begin to exist" in a real sense. We can grasp what it means to begin to exist in a transformative sense: things get transformed into other things - A few planks of wood get transformed into a chair or a table; two hydrogen nuclei get transformed into an alpha particle, a bunch of organic matter is transformed into a new baby, etc...
But nowhere in here is anything purely created, just transformed.
And, indeed, for a transformative event, you need some prior energy, something that acts on something else. But that is not where you want to apply this premise. You want magic to happen to nothing creating the building blocks of the Universe.
Second premise: Not necessarily! At best, you can claim that, at the big bang, all the particles that were later transformed into hydrogen, stars, planets, etc. were created... but... given that our understanding of "created" relies on a transformative event, that means that something would have to exist prior to the Universe... and that is what current physics is suggesting with virtual particles and fields that, under some conditions do cross into real particles... it is a possibility.
Can you safely say that the big bang wasn't itself a tranformative event from some unknown (very likely unknowable) state into what we call the known universe... the known particles?
If it was, then, just like the stars don't need a helping hand to become super-novae, then the universe too would need no help in becoming what we see now
Hence, "premise" 3 follows in the same way as any other event in the cosmos... it is as it is. No magic is required!
And your conclusion that the only power that could give rise to a Universe is god is completely erroneous. It could happen by purely natural means.
Unless you wish to call that process "god", but why carry all the baggage associated with all the gods that have ever been created by human imagination into that definition?