I hesitate to speak for the Master, but I think he’d acknowledge he was overstating the case in the sentence you cite. No attempt was made to interrogate all arguments for the existence of God. The point was simply this: the more closely we examine such arguments, the more surely traditional belief in the deity slips from our grasp. In fact, I’ll advise amending the column to say just that.
“Contingent” was meant in the Thomistic sense. So far as we’re aware, the term has no significance in physics.
I think I have been misunderstood. Let me try again. I take something (loosely speaking qua “something”) to be contingent if it could have been otherwise. I was suggesting that it is odd to say that the things physics tell us are true, the facts relayed by physics, or however you like to put it, could not have been otherwise. For example, the “conjectured 11-dimensional reality” could surely (surely I say) have been 12-dimensional.
I’m not sure what you think Cecil said that causes you to raise this objection. No claim was made that physicists are searching for a sustaining (that is, non-continent) cause in the sense that Thomas might have used the term. However, the scientific search for fundamentals is sufficiently similar to Thomas’s investigation of the First Cause to provide us with a basis for examining belief in God.
That merely demonstrates the poverty of your reasoning process. The existence of those phenomena does not demonstrate the existence of any deity; nor does it disprove it.
[QUOTE=Cecil, “Is There a God?”]
Thomistic distinction between temporal and sustaining causes, we realize the conjectured 11-dimensional reality of which they speak arguably is itself the First Cause from which all else springs."
[/QUOTE]
I thought, given the context of discussing Aquinas, and the capitalisation, that any “First Cause”, by the meaning of the term, must be a necessary being. Instead I now take it that the idea is that there is something in the ballpark (of what Aquinas looking for) that one might think of as these things physics studies.
When I took “Introduction to Philosophy” at The University of Texas at Austin the professor used “is there a God?” as a semester long example to use on various philosophical reasonings. The first half of the semester was basically “it must have come from somewhere” reasoning (e.g. Thomas Aquinas). That line of reasoning kind-of petered out. The second half of the semester was based around “if I think therefore I am” type reasonings (e.g. Descartes). In my opinion the Descartes line of reasoning is much more compelling - especially given that today’s cosmologists are circling around concepts of infinite and multiple universes (lining up with string theory and such).
Beautiful last line " … the more closely we examine arguments for the existence of God, the more surely traditional belief in the deity slips from our grasp."
States in one line exactly everything I’ve felt was true, yet could not express.
And the explanation of the essence of energy was powerfully simple.
Thanks, Cecil, for bringing voice to those us who lack the words for the ideas we share!
I’d like to narrow the goalposts from this position actually. It just so happens that there are entirely natural explanations with a wealth of scientific information for the four thing you mentioned. But I don’t think that even if you came up with something that science doesn’t have a complete answer for or perhaps even something beyond the purview of science completely that God becomes a more reasonable phenomena: it just multiplies the unexplained entities. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone really believes in a God of the gaps and is convinced when that one intermediate fossil (as all fossils are…) is found.
It is said that the Sultan of Morocco declared that Virginia Mayo proved the existence of God. For me, I say that the domestic cat proves the existence of God—and that He’s a satirist.
Cecil your latest argument contains the seeds of its own destruction. As the Greeks knew, Something cannot come from Nothing & vice versa. You said as much. Thus God cannot be a Creator, without himself having been created from . . . Nothing! The only logical extension is to worship Nothing, or accept that the Universe, which IS something, is eternal.
You wrote, "“Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² suggests energy can be transmuted into matter and vice versa, and so may be said to be the wellspring of all creation, just as God is.”
This buys into a massive & widespread failure to understand numbers and mathematics. The Pythagoreans thought actual numbers exist in the Universe (such as ‘37’ on the back of the moon; as opposed to units of things). I think we know better. But the same sort of error still persists with equations.
Consider mpg = miles traveled (m) / gallons consumed (g). Gallons as a measure of liquid (fuel) and miles as a measure of distance are themselves abstractions that only point to a way of dealing with the physical fact that some sort of space or distance exists between two points and a quantity (volume) of a substance also exists. Like numbers, there is no physical thing that is a mile or a gallon until humans demarcate it.
So what the heck is a mile per gallon? It is an abstraction made (mathematically) from other abstractions. It does not exist in the physical world. It is not an existent, nor a substantive. Except in the abstract sense, mpg=m/v does not imply that miles per gallon can be transmuted into gallons or miles. Energy is somewhat more abstract, and any transmutation you are referring to is simply not rational… regardless of the fantasies fo some physicists, science journalists, and science fiction writers.
Units and numbering systems are human constructs. Ratios such as pi and E=MC^2 exist independent of humans. E=MC^2 describes a very real and verifiable thing. The more energy something has, the more mass it has. A photon of sufficient energy can split into two particles whose combined mass is less than the energy of the photon divided by the speed of light squared. Those are observable things that do happen.
The major problem with the first cause argument is that it is self-contradictory. If you’re arguing that nothing can exist without a cause, then you necessarily must accept the unbroken chain-of-events hypothesis, otherwise you’re not really saying that. If you’re arguing that nothing EXCEPT ONE THING can exist without a cause, you must demonstrate that one thing exists, why it necessarily must be only one thing, and also provide evidence as to why your First Cause is an exception to the rule (otherwise it’s a special pleading fallacy: if we assume my conclusion is true, my conclusion is true), three things theists have failed to do so far.
Regardless of all that, certain subatomic particles do “pop” in and out of existence without apparent cause, which falsifies Aquinas’ argument anyway.
I disagree with Cecil’s definition of God as “the thing that caused the Universe,” because that’s not how the vast majority of believers define it. “God,” in the minds of most people who believe, is an intelligent force who not only created the Universe but also takes an interest in human beings and intervenes in their affairs. The passive, impersonal, and perhaps unintelligent “domino pusher” is not the image most people have when they think of God. What Cecil is doing is basically defining God into existence.
To my right, there is a coffee cup. Let’s say I choose to call that coffee cup “God.” Would it be intellectually honest of me to travel the church circuit, claiming I have absolutely unassailable evidence for the existence of God? No, because as much as I might want my coffee cup to be God, I cannot single-handedly re-define a word to fit with my desires. If I, or anyone else, could do that, language would have no point, and our “words” would be meaningless noises having significance only to ourselves. The purpose of words is to convey ideas, and the fact that words have commonly-understood meanings is an essential part of language. When you go outside the common definition, you need to explain your deviation in order to ensure the intent of what you’re saying is accurately relayed. Cecil did that in this article, but he had to write an entire article explaining it. It’s much simpler to state, “no, there is no evidence for the existence of God,” than to start re-defining terms in an effort to be more diplomatic.