The response was amusing. As far as I know, you’ve never used the first cause argument as a justification for belief in a particular deity - though many have. Perhaps they are part of the class of religious idiots, which, while not equivalent to the set of all believers, is alas not null.
The OP’s argument is for a personal god (which seems unjustified) but not for any particular brand of personal god.
Someday I may run into someone who has a decent argument that the caused creation of the universe implies the existence of their particular god - but I’m not holding my breath.
I saw zero relevance there. God has Necessary Existence. The Axioms of Logic have necessary existence (as your link shows). Therefore, with regard to modality, they are identical. Since you are not speaking about anything else, then we’re done there.
Not true. There is nothing incoherent with sometimes being contingent upon something else and having necessary existence, as long as that other thing has necessary existence. It follows necessarily, anyways.
Sure. We have not proven the existence of any prelimenary idea that we have of “God”. We can call “God”, “asdkjfasldj”, it matters not. All we need to acknowledge is that whatever it is, it has necessary existence.
Well, thank goodness we’re not to worry about that because if we did, we would have a contradiction. God is either necessary or contingent, but cannot be both.
Well, that depends on what we look at, the tools with which we look, and the scope of what it is we are to determine. As with anything else, we can ask any number of questions about God and make any number of determinations. For example, if x is necessary, then we know that there exists for every x some y such that y = x. (Proof). But if it is given that God has logically necessary existence, then the question in the thread title in answered.
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Well. See, thing is, you could write a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem using nothing but the five Peano axioms. Of course, it would have manifold lemmas spawning a multitude of corollaries, recursing often to establish new inferences that serve as premises, and be enough volumes to fill a library. Often, when these sorts of proofs are given, the logician then writes commentary in which he draws upon conclusions from other —read: unrelated — arguments to make statements that, on the surface, seem to come out of nowhere. I’m not saying you’re doing this, necessarily, but if you aren’t careful, it will be like saying of Andrew Wiles’ famous proof, “But sir, you have failed to establish that zero is a number.”
Then we are at an impasse. You asserted: “there is no difference between God and an axiom of logic”. I explained that “because we can make a logical statement about God does not mean that God is a logical statement”. The only thing that I can even imagine that might be missing to connect it all for you is that you might not know that an axiom is itself a logical statement — merely one that is accepted without proof.
That is not what the link shows. It shows, as I said, that for every x, there must be some y such that y = x. In other words, it shows that necessary existence obtains in se.
Oy. Even giving you your dubious point for the sake of argument only raises another fallacy, a fallacy of composition. It is not necessarily the case that two entities sharing a common attribute share every attribute in common. Otherwise, there would be no difference between the sun and a tennis ball, both of which are yellow and spherical.
That’s ridiculous. A contingent proposition is one that might be true in some circumstances but false in others. A necessary proposition is one that is always true. (Cite) For example, the statement that the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter is pi is true if the circle is drawn on a flat plane, but false if the circle is drawn on a sphere or saddle. That is a contingent statement. But A -> A is always true. It is a necessary statement.
Not at all. But I’m tired of explaining it. That’s my fault, not yours.
What? Are you arguing that the axioms of logic do not have necessary existence? All worlds that do not have the axioms of logic, we disregard. They are impossible worlds. We are not concerned with the impossible.
[qoute]Oy. Even giving you your dubious point for the sake of argument only raises another fallacy, a fallacy of composition. It is not necessarily the case that two entities sharing a common attribute share every attribute in common. Otherwise, there would be no difference between the sun and a tennis ball, both of which are yellow and spherical.
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Not at all, I said that with *regard to modality, they are the same. They both share the same modal status. Necessary existence. No fallacy in there.
You’re missing the point. If something is contingent upon something else, then it depends upon that for its existence. For example, consider being A that has property B (no other being can have this property, let us say). Property B cannot exist if being A does not exist. So, property B is contingent upon A, but its existence can still be necessary (existence in all possible worlds), if the existence of A is necessary. It is completely different to suggest that x is contingent upon y, than saying that x’s existence is contingent.