Creationism

[The Grand Nudger]

Specifically, all three of saint tommys cosmological arguments...in order, no less.

The argument from the first mover.
The argument from causation.
The argument from contingency.

That is what those arguments state.

No they don't. Neither does the Kalam for that matter. None of them state that all things that exist must be unconditionally caused, therefore god. There's always some condition such as: "potency", "essence and existence not identical", "contingency", "begin to exist".

It's misleading to argue that any of these arguments follow the form you stated above.

Are you completely insane, or just arguing with me because you're pissed?  Yes, each of those arguments proposes an un-x'ed x,  even gave them to you in order, and I'm tired of your shit.

the first mover is unmoved, itself.
the first cause is uncaused.
the being upon which all contingent beings depend is non contingent.

Yes, that is what the arguments state, that's the entire point of their existence, as saint tommy understood an uncreated creator, and uncaused cause, and the non contingent being...to be god. They're called cosmological arguments because they purport to determine something about a god by reference to some x in this world. The un-x-ed x of each argument is asserted to exist to solve an asserted problem with everything needing an x. You can accept these premises if you don't mind special pleading, after all..the x tommy argued for is supposed to be super duper special. It's a god. You can accept a fallacy of composition, we know that it's not necessarily true, but it can be true sometimes. Toms idle ideas about things like potency essence and existence have nothing to do with the form of an argument. We could sub out what saint tommy argued for with any other thing and the arguments will still fail, because they're not valid - for exactly the reasons I have explained to you. The arguments would fail even if the conclusion and the premises were accurate - that's what it means for an argument to be invalid.

All cats have an explanation.
The explanation for cats must be a non-cat.
Therefore non-cat exists.

Coincidentally, all cats do have an explanation, and non-cat does exist - but not because the explanation for cats must be non-cat. A special pleading fallacy of composition...about cats and things that aren't cats.

None of this...for the umpteenth time, is a subject of academic debate. We don't remember aquinas because he proved god, you do understand that, right? This is the last time I'll re-explain any of this to you. If you're still convinced that saint tom made successful arguments then you should let wonder lead you to knowledge on your own, on that count.

We can discuss kalam next, if you like, it's fucked up in the same way that any cosmological argument is fucked up. Not a successful argument, and that's fucking boring, compared to discussing a successful argument - your call. OTOH, I'm aware that people (apparently) find a whole raft of invalid arguments to be more compelling than a successful argument, that's a whole hell of alot more interesting than invalid arguments too, imo.

[GrandizerII]

If by "pink unicorn" you have in mind that which we imagine to be a "pink unicorn" then that can't be semantically equivalent to "first cause" as is traditionally understood.

Why not?

What i have in mind with *pink unicorn* is something that caused existence. Logically of course, not in a time related fashion, of course. Its property is a kind of "proto existence", not existence per se, some *pre-existence*  (or pre existing if you will   ) condition. The pink unicorn is proto-existence.

Alright, no argument there, lol.

For your last sentence, I don't know how to answer that other than what was already said. Maybe your point is that this can't but be abstract, but for Aquinas, "Existence" is "something" and not a mere abstract notion.

Im not making claims about what existence is, Aquinas does. I am only interested if Aquinas idea is true or even possibly true as a coherent concept. I certainly do not accept his assertion "its a thing!" on the face of it.

If existence is a "something" and not some abstract notion. Can that "thing" exist in an environment without time ("to exist", pun intended...to a certain degree) or space to inhabit? If it can, particularly without the necessity of space or time, what is this thing called existence exactly? Can you give a detailed definition of it (since i do not yet know of things that can ...exist....without time and/or space)? How can it be more than a property all things have? Can existence exist without a thing that has existence as a property?

If existence was the first thing to exist (aka. first cause), what were its properties? Existence? Seems so, as there was nothing else (than this first cause called *existence*). Did it have itself as a property? Is that even possible? If existence is the property of the *thing* existence, then....*trying to wrap my head around this)* arent we talking of two different things? If they are. Then we have two first causes, not one: the thing existence, and the property existence. Or if its the same thing, how can a thing be a thing and a property?

Fair questions. I'm going to be straight out honest with you. I really don't have a clue how this works. I will say that Aquinas and classical theists in general do believe in the first cause as this absolutely simple "thing" in which everything about it (such as "essence", "existence", "goodness") are strictly identical to each other. It's not two "things", but strictly one "thing". This is something that defies our imaginations, and it's possible there's some logical incoherence involved there, but atm I can only stick with a "I have no clue" because I can't pinpoint where the incoherence lies exactly.

My aim here in this thread isn't to defend the soundness of Aquinas' arguments, or any arguments for God for that matter. For me, pure argumentation on metaphysics will forever have its weaknesses, no matter how plausible the premises may sound and no matter the validity of the arguments. The initial reason I posted here was I saw Eleven make a clear error in his OP and wanted to point it out, then a few exchanges occurred along the way, and here we are.

I do care, as atheists, that we examine these arguments as fairly as possible. And I feel like sometimes we do fail to do that. I'm not referring to your argument here btw, but rather to certain claims that are based on misunderstandings of the contents/purposes of these arguments, such as Gae's argument that the first three Ways are invalid because they each contain a rewording of the general premise that all things that exist are caused.

For Aquinas, yes, basically.

Lets go back to the time when there was only the first cause, *existence* (ignoring the problem i mentioned in my previous paragraph). At some point *existence* had to be followed up by a second thing, or property, second only to existence. Would you say that there are any preconditions for existence to cause that second thing? Can / must have existence be the cause of that second thing in a logical only fashion? As i understood Aquinas, as he is presented to me here, it is. But how so? How can existence, in an environment without time or space cause, logically, anything else? How can this thing (Aquinas said so: its *something*) exist, at all? Because he can conceive so? Because he can conceive of nothing else? Because he says so?
Thats my personal suspicion, for the record.

I won't reiterate everything I said right above here because the answer is basically the same. No clue. I do want to remind you, however, that Aquinas didn't say that there was a "time when there was only the first cause". Aquinas, at least per logic, was fine with the universe itself being eternal. He just reckoned that, at any point in time, every being nevertheless requires a first cause ultimately to sustain its existence.

I suppose so, since eternity is defined in terms of "time", whether its definition is "infinite time" or "beyond time".

Fair enough on your footnote.

Eternity is a temporal concept, and existence is the first cause, and existence is eternal (all claims you have made, or lets say claims of others you have restated here), right? How can existence be eternal (as Plantinga said) when modern cosmology shows strong evidence that at some point in the past time (and space) broke down, aka. there was no time, and thus no eternity? Ergo, the first cause can not have been eternal, or (as Plantinga defined it) couldnt have existed at all.

So just to be clear. I don't think Platinga sees the first cause as "existence" in the same way classical theists see it. I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

But let's step back just a little bit here.

Broadly speaking (and I can't emphasise the term "broadly" enough), when it comes to intellectual Christians (philosophers and theologians), there are two types of Christians/theists.

The classical theists who believe God is so absolutely simple, that every one of its "property" (and I mean this is a casual sense, not necessarily in any Thomistic sense) is just really one "property" seen differently by us and it's one with "being/existence". There is a risk with how I just worded this of course, because classical theists use common words in their theologies to mean things that we modern-day laypeople just aren't conditioned to think without prior training in these theologies. But somehow they just believe in this absolutely simple "Being" that has no potential for anything and is "pure act" (basically means it can't be anything else but what it is because it is "full/complete" in its being).

Theistic personalists, on the other hand, are the broad camp of theists who don't believe God is absolutely simple. They generally still believe God is simple (not complex) but it is not "ridiculously" simple the way classical theists believe. So for example, some (or maybe most/all) believe God has multiple properties that are not strictly identical to each other. And they would not say that God is Being/Existence itself but rather a being that is nevertheless "infinite".

So with that in mind, going back to using "first cause" instead of "God" and to the point you were making, I'm not sure that physical time and space "at some point" breaking down means there can't be whatever that's "beyond it". This doesn't mean it's ever easy to fathom, but imagine that we're dealing with a relativistic notion of time instead of the kind of time we intuit. Then it can mean that all space and time is there existing "eternally" and the "breaking down" stuff would probably mean that there is no way to map to an "absolute beginning point" of the universe.

Anyway, there are physicists (like Sean Carroll) who have said that while there was (or may have been) a beginning to the inflation of the universe but doesn't necessarily mean the universe itself had a beginning.

Here's a relevant physics video for your viewing. Make of it what you will:

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No they don't. Neither does the Kalam for that matter. None of them state that all things that exist must be unconditionally caused, therefore god. There's always some condition such as: "potency", "essence and existence not identical", "contingency", "begin to exist".

It's misleading to argue that any of these arguments follow the form you stated above.

Are you completely insane, or just arguing with me because you're pissed?  Yes, each of those arguments proposes an un-x'ed x,  even gave them to you in order, and I'm tired of your shit.

Dude, either address what I actually said, and quit with these red herrings, or just acknowledge you did a strawman.

Toms idle ideas about things like potency essence and existence have nothing to do with the form of an argument.

This here is the flaw in your reasoning. You think these extra conditions don't reveal the flaw in the general form you presented to be a strawman, but none of these arguments actually contain any premise that can be in harmony with your ridiculous strawman of a premise. None of them, in any kind of proper rewording, ever state that "all things that exist must have a cause".

All cats have an explanation.
The explanation for cats must be a non-cat.
Therefore non-cat exists.

Coincidentally, all cats do have an explanation, and non-cat does exist - but not because the explanation for cats must be non-cat.  A special pleading fallacy of composition...about cats and things that aren't cats.

Again, if you're going to present these example arguments in that way, you're just strawmanning the actual arguments.

The "explanation" needs to exist in order to act in any way on what it "creates" per Aquinas and others. I suspect your conflating of "explanation" with "cause/create" is part of the issue here, maybe.

For Aquinas, there needs to be an actual actualizer, an actual conjoiner of existence to essence, basically an actual creator. That's in the arguments before you get to their conclusions.

[The Grand Nudger]

Tom can need whatever he likes - that has nothing to do with the metrics of a valid argumentative form.

You want to bicker over whether the assertions are sound-in-detail...but I don't care, since a fallacious argument cannot guarantee the truth of it's conclusion even if we supply it with sound assertions. Each argument asserts a cosmological x - it then proceeds to assert that a non-x x must exist in order to make sense of the x. That's what you asked me to explain, that's what I have explained, that's what you could have easily found with your own google search, and that's the end of my participation in your internal disagreement with the requirements of a valid argumentative form. If saint toms arguments are valid, the rules of logical inference are wrong. That may be true, but gl with that bullshit.

[GrandizerII]

Tom can need whatever he likes - that has nothing to do with the metrics of a valid argumentative form.  

You want to bicker over whether the assertions are sound-in-detail...but I don't care, since a fallacious argument cannot guarantee the truth of it's conclusion even if we supply it with sound assertions.  Each argument asserts a cosmological x - it then proceeds to assert that a non-x x must exist in order to make sense of the x.  That's what you asked me to explain, that's what I  have explained, that's what you could have easily found with your own google search, and that's the end of my participation in your internal disagreement with the requirements of a valid argumentative form.  If saint toms arguments are valid, the rules of logical inference are wrong.  That may be true, but gl with that bullshit.

You tried to argue that the actual arguments are invalid by presenting so-called "example arguments" that are invalid. No shit. These example arguments don't contain premises that would render them valid.

Done arguing with you as well.

[The Grand Nudger]

You can refer to the explanation you've already received, or you can google it yourself. All you're doing now is bitching, moaning, and lying.

If you don't want someone to answer a question, don't ask. I'm sorry that these arguments turned out not to be what you thought they were.

[Belacqua]

If existence is a "something" and not some abstract notion. Can that "thing" exist in an environment without time ("to exist", pun intended...to a certain degree) or space to inhabit? If it can, particularly without the necessity of space or time, what is this thing called existence exactly? Can you give a detailed definition of it (since i do not yet know of things that can ...exist....without time and/or space)? How can it be more than a property all things have? Can existence exist without a thing that has existence as a property?

It's tricky to discuss this stuff because our language tends to mislead. We can say that existence is the first cause, and that makes it sound like it's another in the list of things that exist. But it's not that.

So for example if a tiger and a mountain exist, you don't have three things. There is existence -- we know because the tiger and the mountain exist -- but existence doesn't count as another thing. 

Likewise Aquinas says that God and the universe do not make two. Other theologians, especially in Orthodox countries, are happy to say that the sentence "God exists" is not a good sentence. It is misleading, because the language implies that God exists in the way that tigers and mountains exist. For naive people this can lead to the Bigfoot theory of God, in which we could find him if we just knew where to look. 

But I don't think it's coherent to deny that existence is real. To try to deny it you'd have to exist. Even if we're all in the Matrix and the appearance of reality is all an illusion, the illusion exists, and presumably some reality beyond the illusion.

So tentatively, maybe we can say that existence is the state or condition in which things exist.

Lets go back to the time when there was only the first cause, *existence* (ignoring the problem i mentioned in my previous paragraph). At some point *existence* had to be followed up by a second thing, or property, second only to existence. 

As Grandizer pointed out, the Thomist first cause isn't something that happened at a point in time. It is the ongoing condition that must be the case for all other things to be the case. So Aquinas doesn't address temporal points when there was only a first cause and not yet anything else. 

I suppose a physicist could follow the essential chain back to the first cause, and posit what the last step is before we get to existence. So for the sun to exist there have to be hydrogen atoms (among other things) for the atoms to exist there have to be subatomic particles, for the particles there has to be space/time, for space/time there has to be existence. 

Or maybe for space/time there have to be laws of nature, and for laws of nature to exist you have to have existence. Because in the absence of all existence, there would be no laws either. 

Again, Aquinas isn't discussing Big Bang-like events. But we could still look at such an event from a Thomist perspective. What had to be the case so that the Big Bang could be the case? The thing that had to be the case would be the first cause.

Don't some people speculate that the universe "budded" off from other ones, in a multiverse? That would demand that other universes exist. Or maybe they say that there was a quantum fluctuation, but that means there must have been in existence a quantum something which could fluctuate. Or maybe in the absence of all material things, there are still laws of nature which allow for a Big Bang to happen. So laws of nature existed.

[no one]

Thisguy:
Children need their fables to protect them from the big, bad, scary, monstrous evils!

Knucklehead ned:
Certainly, a lot of people cling to the fable that theology consists of nothing but easily disproven fables.

Keep telling yourself that buddy. Whatever fairytale you need to believe.

[The Grand Nudger]

The problem with toms argument and validity is completely unrelated to any notion that a cause must be temporal.

Obviously you already know this, as our resident tom scholar, Bel.

[Fake Messiah]

Back in a day, Stephen Hawking made a short overview of thinking about the beginning and creation of the universe from before science times to how it became science, in his landmark book "A Brief History of Time"

The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of early cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause” to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.)

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization.

The questions of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental (and very obscure) work Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. He called these questions antinomies (that is, contradictions) of pure reason because he felt that there were equally compelling arguments for believing the thesis, that the universe had a beginning, and the antithesis, that it had existed forever. His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever. As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: “What did God do before he created the universe?” Augustine didn’t reply: “He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.” Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

When most people believed in an essentially static and unchanging universe, the question of whether or not it had a beginning was really one of metaphysics or theology. One could account for what was observed equally well on the theory that the universe had existed forever or on the theory that it was set in motion at some finite time in such a manner as to look as though it had existed forever. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time, about ten or twenty thousand million years ago, when they were all at exactly the same place and when, therefore, the density of the universe was infinite. This discovery finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science.

[GrandizerII]

Not trying to be difficult for the sake of being difficult, FM. But do you have a link to the primary source and section/verse(?) in source that states what's in bold? Just wanting to confirm, that's all.

I think I got it:
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.XII.10.html

That said, something admirable about him is that he cautioned Christians against being stupid by taking Genesis too literally even in spite of what the sciences say.