Is There A Fourth Possibility?

[TheUmer]

I had a lengthy discussion with a theist friend about the existence of God. He sort of trapped me in a difficult situation and I’d like to discuss it here:

(This can be considered the extension of the ‘first cause’ argument.)

The universe we live in is limited and everything in it either depends on something else or some physical laws. Every dependent and limited thing is created or produced by or out of some other thing which in tern is, again limited and dependent. Now, common sense requires that this chain of cause and effect should end somewhere. But the paradox is that where can this be stopped? Because whenever we claim someone of something to be the first cause, we can label it an effect of some other cause. For a cause to be first cause, three of the following possibilities exist:

1- That the First Cause, was in turn created by some other cause.
2- That First Cause created itself.
3- That First Cause was neither created by someone else neither created itself and is infinite and independent and hence the force theists know as God.

That friend of mine ruled out the first cause by saying that if that cause is created by some other cause, it would be dependent and hence cannot be the first cause and hence we would have to extend the chain further. This rules out the first point.

The second point does not comply with common sense and logic and needs to any further discussion.

After ruling out the two points, he said that logic required that if we have three points and two of them are ruled out, the third is the only possibility. And thus he supported his claim that God exits which is infinite, independent and was not created by anything.

I was reluctant in agreeing with this all, so he challenged me to put forward a fourth possibility, and that’s what I’m here for. I’m having problems with this. Would someone help me out in finding out the fourth or any other possibilities other than the three put forward? It would also be great if you point out any flaws in the above premises.

[Pope Alfred]

4. The Big Bang goes back to a singularity, so the word 'cause' has no meaning for it.

[fr0d0]

Dawkins said to add a 'who' to the question simply complicates it.

First cause/ singularity ...same thing?

[Joe Bloe]

The first-cause argument goes something like this:
(1) Nothing happens without a cause
(2) So the Universe must have a cause
(3) This first cause can be described as "god".
(4) You can read about god in the bible
(5) He is the "cause" of the Universe.

This argument uses the fallacy of equivocation.

In the first part of the argument, "god" is just another word for "first-cause of the Universe" and we still know nothing about it - except that it caused the Universe.

In the second part, "god" has become much more specific...good, jealous, omnipotent, talking to people, handing out laws, smiting Egyptians, killing Midianites, etcetera.

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Even if the Universe had a first cause (and that's debatable) and even if we called it "god", there is still no way to take the next step and declare that the Christian god (or the god of any other religion) is the first-cause of the Universe.

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Maybe the fourth possibility is the phrase, "I don't know." (We don't have to know everything, do we?)

[theVOID]

There are more possibilities than any of us can ever imagine, the key is not in ruling out the ones that don't work, it is arriving at the most likely answer through sound reasoning and fully accounting for all relative factors.

[Purple Rabbit]

The first cause argument (I prefer lower case!) has numerous flaws. I think Joe has pointed out the most crucial one. A first cause does not necessarily equate to a personal all-loving allknowing god.

But there are other flaws too.

A minor flaw in the intro of the argument is that the universe is depicted as a limited region. Science is not conclusive about this and leaves open the possibility that the universe is truly infinite. It is true however that the visible part of the universe is limited though.

Causality is often depicted as one long straight chain of events, but there is no intrinsic reason why causality can't have cyclic aspects on a cosmic scale: the first cause of the big bang may be the last event of the universe in it's prior form. This possibility has not been disgarded by science conclusively so far (no one can claim to know what happened before time at the Planck scale).

Even if god created the universe, it may still be that god itself had a natural cause. Your friend rules out this possibility by saying that in that case his god would not be first cause. So what? He may not be happy with the fact that this demotes his god, but that would be special pleading wouldn't it?

Also observe that intention of an all-mighty agent, is used in the argument. Does the universe need some agent's intention? It is superfluous. The universe might have been created without intention, in fact it would be a striking breach of nature's laws we know so far (see my bio for a free interpreted example of this).

Another possibility is that what we observe as our universe is only part of a superuniverse in which some events are starting points for daughter universes such as ours. Odd as this may seem, this in fact is a possibility that is considered a serious candidate in theoretical phyiics (M-brame theory). Of course if you ponder about it, you could even stack an infinite hierarchy of universe-superuniverse levels and never need a first cause.

A variant on the last possibility is that we only see a part of all the dimensions of our universe. Suppose there are 30 dimensions in all while we experience only four. It may be that there is some causality chain that connects the other dimnsions with ours. It would seem to u as if the universe popped out of nothing. We would going on between the dimensions.