RE: Why make stupid unsustainable arguments?
December 10, 2015 at 10:38 am
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2015 at 10:53 am by SteveII.)
(December 10, 2015 at 10:06 am)Cato Wrote:(December 9, 2015 at 10:48 pm)SteveII Wrote: Your missing the 20 paragraphs of argumentation that comes AFTER you establish that the universe had a cause. God is not just stated. Each factor is examined as to what could be the cause and not create an infinite regression. You can debate the conclusions all you want--you can't claim that the conclusion is simply "therefore God". The other arguments are similarly structured.
What factors are examined?We're blind to what came before the Big Bang. Stating that there cannot be an infinite causal chain is a lot different than claiming that chain is stopped at the moment our universe came into existence. There's absolutely no justification for this. You cannot claim as knowledge where this infinite causal chain broke, let alone know anything about this chain breaker. An uncause cause does not necessitate intelligence or the idea of God. There is absolutely no way you can get from this chain breaker argument to the lead character in your special book; it's impossible. God as portrayed in the Bible most certainly does not exist. You cannot argue this thing into existence, we know too much.
The Kalam does not argue the God of the Bible into existence. Since none of you want to actually read it, I'll cut and paste a portion of WLC's argument:
So what properties must such a cause of the universe possess? As the cause of space and time, it must transcend space and time and therefore exist timelessly and non-spatially (at least without the universe). This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial because (1) anything that is timeless must also be unchanging and (2) anything that is changeless must be non-physical and immaterial since material things are constantly changing at the molecular and atomic levels. Such a cause must be without a beginning and uncaused, at least in the sense of lacking any prior causal conditions, since there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Ockham’s Razor (the principle that states that we should not multiply causes beyond necessity) will shave away any other causes since only one cause is required to explain the effect. This entity must be unimaginably powerful, if not omnipotent, since it created the universe without any material cause.
Finally, and most remarkably, such a transcendent first cause is plausibly personal. We’ve already seen in our discussion of the argument from contingency that the personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality. The only entities that can possess such properties are either minds or abstract objects like numbers. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. Therefore, the transcendent cause of the origin of the universe must be an unembodied mind.
Moreover, the personhood of the first cause is also implied since the origin of an effect with a beginning is a cause without a beginning. We’ve seen that the beginning of the universe was the effect of a first cause. By the nature of the case that cause cannot have a beginning of its existence or any prior cause. It just exists changelessly without beginning, and a finite time ago it brought the universe into existence. Now this is very peculiar. The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect that it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this happen? If the sufficient conditions for the effect are eternal, then why isn’t the effect also eternal? How can a first event come to exist if the cause of that event exists changelessly and eternally? How can the cause exist without its effect?
There seems to be only one way out of this dilemma, and that’s to say that the cause of the universe’s beginning is a personal agent who freely chooses to create a universe in time. Philosophers call this type of causation “agent causation,” and because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions that were not previously present. Thus, a finite time ago a Creator could have freely brought the world into being at that moment. In this way, the Creator could exist changelessly and eternally but choose to create the world in time. (By “choose” one need not mean that the Creator changes his mind about the decision to create, but that he freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning.) By exercising his causal power, he therefore brings it about that a world with a beginning comes to exist. So the cause is eternal, but the effect is not. In this way, then, it is possible for the temporal universe to have come to exist from an eternal cause: through the free will of a personal Creator.
So on the basis of an analysis of the argument’s conclusion, we may therefore infer that a personal Creator of the universe exists who is uncaused, without beginning, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginably powerful.
Read more[url=http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-new-atheism-and-five-arguments-for-god#ixzz3tvdrNWQG][/url]