Bill Snedden

I can't speak for Theophage, but yes, that is my position.

I'd go along with that, however every piece of data we do have does seem to suggest that causality is dependent upon time.

Your first point is certainly true. However, I don't see how it is intuitively gratifying to see time itself as being causally dependent. While it's certainly possible, it violates every observation we have yet made regarding the relationship. Again, while that certainly doesn't make it impossible, it does seem to make it counter-intuitive, rather than intuitive (seeing as how all our observations seem to confirm the converse).

Of course. I'm sure most (if not all) Christians would agree.

This seems hyperbolic to me. Certainly "death" and "taxes" are not at all brute facts; there are observable causes to both.

But even if they were, the nature of their existence is not such that it would be reasonable to attribute to them the existence of the ESB.

However, can we say the same of Existence itself? What are Life, Consciousness, & Intelligence? I don't see any reason at this point to assume that they are anything more than emergent properties of existence. In other words, they arise from the nature of Existence, but are not attributes it possesses of its own.

I don't see how this follows at all. I believe that your argument depends entirely upon the privilege you place (due to your presuppositions) upon the alleged insufficiency of Existence to account for life, consciousness & intelligence. But all this does is supplant one brute fact with another.

Not really. Affirming that existence exists also entails the affirmation that it has existed eternally. Alleging a "beginning" for existence assumes that non-existence was a state of affairs at some point; this would entail the same logical contradiction as denying existence.

Ummm...Isn't God postulated to be an un-caused cause? Do you deny that "this" universe is "regulated by causality?" If not, aren't you in the same boat?

Regards,

Bill Snedden

SteveD

Theophage,

I would like to offer my critique of your argument. I think that I can offer a relatively unbiased opinion becasue I am currently undecided as to the existence of God and am looking to arguments such as yours to help convince me one way or the other.

So let me step through your argument and I'll give you my comments on whether I think it is convincing or not.


P1) In order for something to have a cause, there must be a point in time beforehand for the cause to operate.

I would agree with this if it were limited to our observable space-time continuum (STC). But, I have seen elsewhere that you define the Universe to be all that exists in total. So, if there is anything outsite of our STC then your definition would include it as part of the Universe.

I don't think that we can make any assumption what various dimensions may exist outside of our STC but I think that I can imagine a case where cause & effect is not dependent on a temporal reference. I can think of cause & effect as a hierarchical structure defining the precedence rather than time. Imagine, if you will, a graph that has time as the horizontal axis and priority as the vertical axis. you could plot a sequence of events vertically that would identify the priority chain of causality. If this were viewed from the point of view of the horizontal axis all of these events would appear to occur simultaneously. However, viewed from the vertical axis the chain of cause & effect is perfectly clear. It hurts my brain to try to imagine causality without time but, since I think I can grasp a little corner of it, I do think it is possible.

For this reason I think that using a "point in time" for the cause is a little bit weak.

P2) There was no point in time before the Universe existed.

No problem with this one just as long as we keep in mind that the definition of the Universe is everything that exists.

C1) Therefore the Universe cannot have a cause.

Well, without P1 this doesn't follow. I agree with it, I just think that you need to get here some other way.

P3) God is defined as the creator and cause of the universe.

Big problem here. I haven't seen any theistic definition that says God created himself (of course I haven't seen a lot of things). I think that the problem here is getting your definition of the Universe crossed up with our observable STC. From what I have seen, the theistic argument is that our observable Universe, or STC, is what was caused by God and God is outside of it but certainly within the definition of "all that exists".

P4) The universe cannot have a cause (restating C1)

Again, no problem with this.

C2) Therefore God does not (and cannot) exist.


Well, after my other comments you can see that this no longer follows.

In summary, I don't find your argument convincing and certainly not definitive. If anything it actually supports the theistic idea that God can exist uncaused.

I intend this as constructive criticism so I hope you take it that way and use it to strengthen your argument.

Steve

HRGruemm

The need for a time sequence for the concept of causation is easy to explain:

Without time, we could only notice a perfect correlation between two events A and B; but we could not tell whether A caused B or B caused A.

Regards,
HRG.

SteveD

Well, I guess I didn't explain my point very well.

I agree that wecan't differentiate cause & effect without time because we are limited to the structure of our space-time continuum.

What I was trying to express was that if there is anything Outside of our space-time continuum we don't know what might exist and I can see the glimmer of a possibility that causality may not be limited to a temporal frame. I still believe that there is some kind of precedence involved. It just doesn't necessarily require time.

Thanks for your comment,

Steve