happyboy

awwwwwwww..........
i was hoping for some psuedomathematical proof God exists, like in a post here i saw a while back. i feel cheated........

a terribly sad happyboy

Keith Russell

happy:

You'd feel a great deal happier if you had a dime for every time a theist told you they had 'proof' for 'God', and turned out to have nothing of the kind...

Keith.

Tercel

An amusing argument invented by Anselm in the late 11th Century or so. Even within the Church this argument received a lot of criticism, being rejected immediately by Gaunilo and later by Aquinas although it was defended by Descartes. It was pretty much destroyed by Kant, yet variant versions (which I believe fallacious) have since been defended by Hegel, Hartsorne and Plantinga (the last two in the 20th century).
I think it can effectively be boiled down to:
Definition: "God" - a being that nothing is greater than.
Assumption: God does not exist
Premise: An existent being is greater than a non-existent being
Conclusion 1: Something is greater than God. (from Assumption & Premise)
Conclusion 2: Conclusion 1 and Definition contradict, therefore the Assumption is false, therefore God exists.

It effectively relies on clever wording to try to sneak God's existence into the definition.

Originally (as far as we know anyway) proposed by Plato in the 4th century BC, this argument has had many formulations and defenders, -most notably Aristotle, Aquinas and Leibniz- and has had probably by far the single most brainpower put into its defence of all arguments for the existence of God. The wide number of variants make it impossible to call anything "the Cosmological Argument" and given a particular objection to one formulation of the argument, there are certainly other formulations in circulation to which the objection does not apply. For example, the version William Lane Craig currently promotes is of Muslim origin and utterly different to anything suggested in the West from Plato to Leibniz, and IMO it probably should not have the same name.

I'm inclined to grant that there most probably exists a valid Cosmological argument. However, it seems to me that the single and rather glaring fault of the traditional Cosmological argument is that it doesn't actually prove God. All it would seem to show is the definite existence of a first cause - hardly a stunning declaration, naturalists aplenty are happy with a first cause, be it natural law, the universe or something else. To prove God the Cosmological argument needs to show that the first cause is an personal or aware being - something traditional versions of the argument take no thought for. (Indeed the first causes of Plato and Aristotle seem to have been far more naturalistic than theistic) IMO time would be much better spent on speculating why the first thing should be considered aware and not natural.
More modern versions of the argument generally attempt to incorporate some sort of reason why the first cause should have a "will" or similar into the argument.

BTW eh, why do you use the 1st law of Thermodynamics (Conservation of Energy) and ignore the 2nd (Increase of Entropy) which strongly implies a finite time period of activity?

Agreed. However, the Teleological argument comes in an even wider variety of formulations than the Cosmological argument to the point that it might as well be called "miscellaneous" argument. In general what an argument must do to properly be classed as Teleological is to conclude a non-materialistic explanation from some observation or experience. Eg, your version argued that materialistic processes were insufficient to account for the observed existence of life. A more modern version -often called the Fine-Tuning argument- argues (usually based on probabilities) that the basic physical principles that determine the behaviour of the universe suggest intelligent design. Alternatively, arguments which attempt to prove the existence of non-material entities in a Platonic sense -such as numbers, ideas, concepts, sets, meanings or the like- are also often classed as Teleological.

Well personally after considering the nature of conscious awareness and teleological considerations regarding concepts, I have come to firmly believe that a material explanation of such things is always going to be fundamentally insufficient and will necessarily involve handwaving and ignorance. -For the reason that no natural materialistic cause effect system can ever generate the living awareness I observe in my own consciousness nor can such unified ideas as simple concepts be explained fully in terms of a miscellany of naturalistic atoms, particles, and laws because these things are of a fundamentally different nature and when you put matter and motion together you might get pretty patterns, you might get complex structures forming - but only by handwaving do you ever get such functionally different things as awareness, senses, will, concepts etc. Hence I am what's called a Dualist. This position, once adopted, tends to have a snowball effect when applied to other arguments and pretty quickly implies the existence of God.

Do you mean that in the majority of cases people believe because they want to as opposed to for well thought out and rationally evidenced reasons? -In which case I'd agree. Or that religion cannot (or perhaps should not?) be based on reason? -In which case I'd disagree.

luvluv

The book appears to be dealing only with Aquanian conception of the cosmological argument, and Aquinas assumed that the universe was infinite and eternal. The kalaam cosmological argument is a lot better, but a lot of medeivals rejected it since it implied a begining to the universe.

In the kalaam cosmolgical argument, we say that "everything which begins to exist has a cause". God is exempt because He did not begin to exist.

I think the ontological argument is absurd, but the cosmological argument is pretty convincing. Even if you deny that God is the entity that exists necessarily, you have to admit that SOMETHING does, and this "something" is as inexplicable in it's "uncaused-ness" as is God.

Am I to understand that you folks actually consider an infinite regress a possibility?

Biff the unclean

Isn't an "uncaused" god an infinite regress? "He always was and He always will be," as the old saw goes. "Always was," is about as infinite a regress as you can get.

eh

I don't think I ever argued that time must be infinite, so the 2nd does not hurt the argument.

However, there is nothing that prevents the universe from existing forever. Modern cosmology allows for the universe to be without beginning or end, and producing stars and galaxies forever. The 2nd law is then only a statistical law, that does not take the long term effects of gravity into account.

eh

Yeah, and we call this SOMETHING the universe.

Philosoft

Actually, it's an arbitrary way to avoid infinite regress. It seems more than a little silly to proclaim that something we can observe is caused, whereas something we can't observe is not.

luvluv

eh:

What you talking 'bout, Willis?

Are you referring to the Hawking-Hortle model with the without begining stuff? And the notion that the universe can go on producing stars forever is news to this little black duck.

eh

It's all speculation as with a lot of cosmology, but there is nothing preventing stars from emerging from the vacuum of space. Inflation is the most popular of such theories that would allow for eternal star production, but there are other models. A variation of brane cosmology allows for the universe to be cyclic, and thus stars would continually be created.

It's hard to test a lot of these ideas, but the point is that there is nothing fundemental we know of that disallows an eternal universe from existing.