Who made God?

Originally posted by LemonJello
Hmmm, that's a toughie.

For starters, how about

2004 Asian Tsunami = 200,000 dead persons.

Your formula actually assumes the existance of God if you are saying that He is responisble for the deaths.

You cannot assume his existance whilest trying to disprove it.

Originally posted by dj2becker
Your formula actually assumes the existance of God if you are saying that He is responisble for the deaths.

You cannot assume his existance whilest trying to disprove it.

You can if your argument is a reductio ad absurdum.

Originally posted by LemonJello
Hmmm, that's a toughie.

For starters, how about

2004 Asian Tsunami = 200,000 dead persons.

Hmmmm,

I must have missed something in the calculation.

Exactly where in those figures does it prove with mathematical certainty that God does not exist?

I said a formula that proved beyond all reasonable doubt. At most your formula only suggests that God either does or allows some things to happen which we consider great tragedies. It doesn't say, and certainly doesn't prove with mathematical certainty that God does not exist.

"Here are numbers which show God is not nice if He exists" is not the same thing as "Here are numbers which show that God does not exist"

You stated before about "the fact that your God does not exist." The only fact I see so far is that you have no proof that God's nonexistence is a fact.


Now if that is for starters, where's your other formulas - chemical, statistical, mathematical? I don't think we've gotten started yet.

Originally posted by LemonJello
Hmmm, that's a toughie.

For starters, how about

2004 Asian Tsunami = 200,000 dead persons.

What do you think that proves and why?
KJ

Originally posted by jaywill
Okay, here is another issue. If God designed the universe how come ebola virus? How come the common cold? How come desease, earthquake, tornadoes, cancer, mental illness, death?

This is another debate. "We don't like the design." Or at least "There are a number of things designed by this designer/s that we do not like."

So by pushing the argume ...[text shortened]... gent design is there, but a bunch of lousy things were included in all the things designed?

O! You liek the eebowla. You liek tornaydos and kanser.

You are two smart fur me. You no lojic is god.

Iz that our pozishun now.

Originally posted by scottishinnz
If you make an assumption that is not true, for example that lead is lighter than water, it cannot lead to a successful, true, deduction. This is why we do not make life rafts out of lead.

Go ahead and explain why the philosophical assumption that God exists as a priori, is a fallacious one, and why the philosophical assumption that God does not exist, is a logical one.

Originally posted by dottewell
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing anything; I'm merely granting you the "created" part of your formulation for the sake of argument.

In other words, you are arguing that the universe was designed and created. I'm prepared to give you created, and suggest we concentrate on "designed".

I reject the so-called "evidence" that the universe is de ...[text shortened]... ese precise paths (as opposed to all others) will be incredibly huge. So what?

Let me just try to understand what you are saying...

By rejecting "God" as your philosophical priori for a first cause, you have to replace him with "nothing".


So actually you are saying that nothing created everything out of nothing?

Originally posted by LemonJello
Yes, sorry. My post was probably very confusing.

Your initial post stated that "If the universe is not eternal, it needs a cause." This walks and talks like the Craigian formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, one premise of which states that everything that begins to exist has a cause. (You can also see why this ties in with the PSR.)

...[text shortened]... pening post, so maybe we could discuss it somewhere else -- like the "But Marge..." thread.

Christians naturally believe there must be a God because the world had a beginning. And everything that had a beginning had a beginner. But the tough question to answer is how we know the world had a beginning. Maybe the world always existed.

Famous agnostic Bertrand Russell presented this dilemma: Either the world had a beginning, or it did not. If it did not, it did not need a cause (God). If it did, we can ask, "Who caused God?" But if God has a cause, he is not God. In either case, we do not arrive at a first uncaused cause (God).

The answer to this tough question is that it, too, asks a meaningless question: Who made God? To put it another way, it wrongly assumes that "everything must have a cause" when what is claimed is that "everything that had a beginning had a cause." This is quite a different matter. Of course, everything that had a beginning had a beginner. Nothing cannot make something. As Julie Andrews once sang, "Nothing came from nothing. Nothing ever could." So God does not need a cause because he had no beginning.

This being the case, we need only to show that the universe had a beginning, to show that there must have been a cause of it (i.e., God). Two strong arguments will be offered as evidence that the universe had a beginning. One is from science—the second law of thermodynamics. The second is from philosophy, namely, the impossibility of an infinite number of moments.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is running out of usable energy. But if the universe is running down, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would have run down completely by now. While you can never run out of an unlimited amount of energy, it does not take forever to run out of a limited amount of energy. Hence, the universe must have had a beginning. To illustrate, every car has a limited amount of energy (gas). That is why we have to refuel from time to time—more often than we like. If we had an unlimited (i.e., infinitely) large gas tank, we would never have to stop for gas again. The fact that we have to refill shows that it was filled up to begin with. Or, to use another example, an old clock that gradually unwinds and has to be rewound would not unwind unless it had been wound up to begin with. In short, the universe had a beginning. And whatever had a beginning must have had a beginner. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginner (God).

Some have speculated that the universe is self-winding or self-rebounding. But this position is exactly that—pure speculation without any real evidence. In fact, it is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. For even if the universe were rebounding, like a bouncing ball in reverse, it would gradually peter out. There is simply no observational evidence that the universe is self-winding. Even agnostic astronomers like Robert Jastrow have pointed out: "Once hydrogen has been burned within that star and converted to heavier elements, it can never be restored to its original state." Thus, "minute by minute and year by year, as hydrogen is used up in stars, the supply of this element grows smaller."

If the overall amount of actual energy stays the same but the universe is running out of usable energy, it has never had an infinite amount—for an infinite amount of energy can never run down. This would mean that the universe could not have existed forever in the past. It must have had a beginning. Or, to put it another way, according to the second law, since the universe is getting more and more disordered, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would be totally disordered by now, which it is not. So it must have had a beginning—one that was highly ordered.

A second argument that the universe had a beginning—and hence a beginner—comes from philosophy. It argues that there could not have been an infinite number of moments before today; otherwise today never would have come (which it has). This is because, by definition, an infinite can never be traversed—it has no end (or beginning). But since the moments before today have been traversed—that is, we have arrived at today—it follows that there must only have been a finite (limited) number of moments before today. That is, time had a beginning. But if the space-time universe had a beginning, it must have been caused to come into existence. This cause of everything else that exists is called God. God exists.

Even the great skeptic David Hume held both premises of this argument for God. What is more, Hume himself never denied that things have a cause for their existence. He wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause." He also said that it was absurd to believe there were an infinite number of moments: "The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it." Now if both of these premises are true, it follows that there must have been a creator of the space-time universe we call the cosmos—that is, God exists.

(As stated by Dr. Norman Geisler)

Originally posted by dottewell
I conceded, for the sake of argument, only that the universe might be caused. Not by any sentient being.

Could you describe for me a few examples of possible non sentient beings that could have caused the universe to come into existence?

And of which of these would you propose as the most likely cause?

Originally posted by jaywill
Could you describe for me a few examples of possible non sentient beings that could have caused the universe to come into existence?

Nothing I said implied the universe could have been created by a "non-sentient being", or that I was granting that possibility for the sake of argument.

Perhaps, for clarity, I should have left out the word "sentient". But this is utterly irrelevant.

The point is that you cannot move from the premise "all things have a cause", to "all things are made", to "all things have a maker". What I grant, for argument's sake, in addressing these issues, is of no consequence here.

Originally posted by dottewell
Nothing I said implied the universe could have been created by a "non-sentient being", or that I was granting that possibility for the sake of argument.

Perhaps, for clarity, I should have left out the word "sentient". But this is utterly irrelevant.

The point is that you cannot move from the premise "all things have a cause", to "all things are made I grant, for argument's sake, in addressing these issues, is of no consequence here.

What do you think caused the universe to come into existence?

Everybody knows that no position is the easier to defend.

Why not propose a positive solution to the problem of what caused the universe to come into existence?

Originally posted by dottewell
You can if your argument is a reductio ad absurdum.

The reductio ad absurdum leans on a strawman argument.

Originally posted by jaywill
Everybody knows that no position is the easier to defend.

Why not propose a positive solution to the problem of what caused the universe to come into existence?

Because we were in the process of working through someone else's argument.

Originally posted by dj2becker
The reductio ad absurdum leans on a strawman argument.

My point was that the statement:

You cannot assume his existance whilest trying to disprove it.

...is wrong.