(January 26, 2015 at 12:42 pm)SteveII Wrote: Bob96, I have a question. Is your argument that the universe has a cause and/or that the best explanation of the cause is God? Arguments about Jesus, morality or evolution don't seem to apply to this thread. Just a suggestion, keep to your topic or the conversation gets unwieldy and it is difficult to make a point when everyone goes pursues their favorite objection to Christianity.
@Beccs Arguments like what caused God creates an infinite regression. Within the definition of God is the property of aseity. God just is or we would not be talking about God.
Regarding the initial topic, can someone give me an answer why the popular Kalam cosmological argument does not prevail--that the universe has a cause (leaving God out of if for now). Hawkings seems to need to change the definition of time and quantum theories all seem to have the same problem: quantum fields etc. are not "nothing" and therefore need a cause.
There is a subtlety to the Kalam proof most miss, there are two sets of rules, one for God, another for the natural world. In the natural world, all things are contingent, they must have a beginning and a creator. Bit God is a supernatural being that operates with separate rules. God is defined as not contingent.
Kalam type arguments assume there must be a basic foundation that all other things rely on for there contingent existence. But there is no reason that must be so, there may well be an infinite chain of contingency, cause and effect with no entity being eternal and foundational.
Its a case of argument by definition. There is no reason to accept theology's definitions as logically necessary nor proven. The Universe may well be the result of some basic material, and a few rules such as we see in Conway's Game of Life. See Stephan Wolfram et al for more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
As Andrew Ilachinski points out in his Cellular Automata, many scholars have raised the question of whether the universe is a cellular automaton.[68] Ilachinski argues that the importance of this question may be better appreciated with a simple observation, which can be stated as follows. Consider the evolution of rule 110: if it were some kind of "alien physics", what would be a reasonable description of the observed patterns?[69] If an observer did not know how the images were generated, that observer might end up conjecturing about the movement of some particle-like objects. Indeed, physicist James Crutchfield has constructed a rigorous mathematical theory out of this idea, proving the statistical emergence of "particles" from cellular automata.[70] Then, as the argument goes, one might wonder if our world, which is currently well described by physics with particle-like objects, could be a CA at its most fundamental level.
There are other possible ways to approach things other than a supernatural God
Cheerful Charlie
If I saw a man beating a tied up dog, I couldn't prove it was wrong, but I'd know it was wrong.
- Attributed to Mark Twain
If I saw a man beating a tied up dog, I couldn't prove it was wrong, but I'd know it was wrong.
- Attributed to Mark Twain