Paul2

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but i've not found it yet.

A typical theist argument for the existance of god is the first cause argument. god being the first cause. he himself is the only uncaused cause.

What i don't understand is why this first uncaused cause is labled "god". why can't it be the "big bang" ?




Thank's in advance.

Oxymoron

The poor theists can't really handle not knowing. That's why you get really duff answers to "who created God?" because the whole God idea is to give them a nice simple universe without them requiring to read and study lots of hard stuff before finding out that the answers might be unknowable in their lifetime.

In other words, you answered your own question: if it's good enough for God to "just exist", why isn't it ok for the universe to "just exist"? I fail to see what God buys.

AbbyNormal

It can be labelled the big bang....but, you know, that's just so impersonal and empty. Much better to have the warm, fuzzy notion that this was all planned.
This comes to the root of my rejection of a god. It just adds another layer and works against Ockham's Razor. It is argued that the universe could not create itself, there needed to be "something" before the big bang. However, for what ever reason, this same argument does not apply to god. He....well, just "is". Why is god exempt? And if god is exempt, why not the singularity before the big bang? And if the singularity is exempt, then what's the point of god in the first place? To me, throwing a god into the mix just raises more unanswerable questions instead of attempting to answer the ones we can address.

Regards,
AbbyNormal

Paul2

Thank's for the replies, at least i know that i'm not missing something in their argument now.

Denis Giron

Paul, if you haven't already, I'd advise that you use Imran Aijaz' opening statement in his debate with Bill Cooke as a bit of context:

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/bill_cooke/cooke-aijaz/aijaz1.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/bill_cooke/cooke-aijaz/aijaz1.html</a>

First, I would think that the Theists would argue that saying the universe came from the Big Bang is analsgous to saying that babies come from maternity wards. Regardless, there is a mode of thinking behind the sort of argument employed by Imran Aijaz.

If all the Theists had was an appeal to the fact that you cannot have an infinite regress, then Imran Aijaz would readily admit that we cannot say what the prima causa was. It is for this reason that Aijaz suppliments his argument with another one with regards to whether the first cause is "mechanical" or "personal" (this is the bifurcation Imran presents; I still am not sure I accept it as necessarily the case). If we do accept this distinction, the tendency to lean towards the personal has at least something to do with the difficulty in imagining a proverbial "unmoved mover" moving things (id est setting the universe into motion via the "Big Bang") yet not being conscious.

It is, to some degree, analagous to a billard ball getting up and moving across the table on its own without any force acting on it (wind, gravity, a pool stick). Though, maybe this is rooted in an erroneous application of classical (or Newtonian) mechanics to things that we cannot apply it to (like the "cause" of the Big Bang, which may outside time and space, thus outside many of our laws). If this is the case, I think we Atheists have no choice but to defer to modern theoretical physics, even if we don't understand it; but if we can't explain it, all we have is an ad-verecundiam.

These are just my loose thoughts...

Paul2

Ah yes, very good. thanks. that clears up a few thing, like how they get from first uncaused cause to an intelligent creator.