God does not have a cause. Therefore by your premise, God does not exist. QED.
I think this is Aquinas’s answer (though I’m not sure I understand all the terminology):
[QUOTE=St. Thomas Aquinas]
When the existence of a cause is demonstrated from an effect, this effect takes the place of the definition of the cause in proof of the cause’s existence. This is especially the case in regard to God, because, in order to prove the existence of anything, it is necessary to accept as a middle term the meaning of the word, and not its essence, for the question of its essence follows on the question of its existence. Now the names given to God are derived from His effects; consequently, in demonstrating the existence of God from His effects, we may take for the middle term the meaning of the word “God”.
[/QUOTE]
(I’m quoting from the text of the Summa Theologica I found here.)
Is it possible to boil that down and not make it sound like circular logic?
What moved to create God? Why is there only one God? Why is that God the one Aquinas believes in, and not, Larry, the God of Anal Sex?
What created God? Saying that there must be a first cause, and then saying that God doesn’t need one is goofy.
The thing necessary to bring fort existence needn’t be an intelligent spirit. It might be the dumb, unthinking laws of the universe.
There is no need for a most perfect something. And a most perfect something, if it existed, needn’t be an intelligent spirit.
Water obeys laws when it runs down a mountain into a lake. There is no intelligence at work there.
There is nothing whatsoever you’ve said that is in the slightest a strong argument for the existence of any God, much less the psychopath with impulse control issues that is depicted in the Bible.
[William Lane Craig] That which [DEL][COLOR=“Black”]exists[/DEL][/COLOR] begins to exist must have a cause! [/William Lane Craig]
[Sye Ten Bruggencate] My logic is virtuously circular, your logic is is viciously circular, because . . . God told me! [/Sye Ten Bruggencate]
CMC fnord!
Well, the laws of the universe had to have a cause in order to exist, otherwise, they could not, and we’d be floating away in space right now. They exist because they have a cause. Remember Newton’s constant? 6.7 times 10^-23? You’re telling me that such a precise number as the universal gravitational constant just popped up outta nowhere?
God has always been. Remember that Futurama episode where Bender was God to a tiny race of aliens and then ran into the Big Man Himself?
Water and wind erodes rock formations because all things obey a natural law of conduct as Aquinas said. I never said there was an intelligence at work there.
There still has to be a Prime Mover, otherwise nothing moves and nothing exists. At the very beginning of all existence, there had to be a Creator.
I’d say these these arguments illustrate what’s wrong with Aquinas. He follows a ling of reasoning until the point where he reaches a paradox and then he declares that God lies just beyond that paradox.
The two arguments you cite start with the premises that everything in motion must have something that set it in motion and anything that exists must have a cause that made it exist. After juggling with some supposed logic, Aquinas concludes that God is the thing which is in motion that nothing set in motion and is the thing that exists without anything causing it to exist.
But wait…if you go back to the premises these arguments were built on, they were that nothing can exist with these attributes. Therefore if God must have these attributes in order to be God and nothing can exist with these attributes, then God cannot logically exist.
The alternative is that the premises were incorrect. But if that’s the case then you can’t use these premises as the foundation of a logical line of deduction.
You believe there is a god “who has always been.”
Do you believe there could be other entities who’ve always been? Dozens? Hundreds?
You believe there had to be an unmoved mover, an uncreated creator. Do you believe there could have been ten of them? Maybe twenty? Thousands? Millions?
In other words, how does the argument lead to your god, and your god only?
Sure. If things can just pop into existence it’s more likely a single number would pop into existence than a complicated intelligent being. Imagining God just popping into existence is like imagining a very complicated pocket watch just spontaneously assembling itself.
No, they don’t.
The “laws of the universe” simply describe what we observe. They are descriptive not proscriptive.
CMC fnord!
Well, he’s arguing by reductio ad absurdum, and he considers an infinite backwards chain (of causes, or movers) to count as an absurdum.
If you’re critiquing Charlie Thomas’s formulation of the arguments, you may have a point. But I think you, and/or he, may be changing Aquinas’s words in subtle but important ways. Specifically, I don’t think Aquinas does say that God is in motion (in the sense in which he is using the term).
And Aquinas never says “anything that exists must have a cause that made it exist.” What he says is that nothing causes itself to exist.
The standard response to this criticism comes from Augustine: God is not a causal link in the chain of causes (that would indeed lead to a contradiction between premise and conclusion), but an event outside the chain of causes that causes the chain as a whole.
Hume clearly explains the problem with this line of reasoning:
To explain a chain of causes one need only explain each link in the chain, such that explaining the “chain as a whole” is redundant. We do not need to invoke a cause for the chain as a whole (God) in order to explain the causal chain, only a cause for every event in the chain (perhaps in an infinite regress). Asking after a cause for the “chain as a whole” is like asking where the “house as a whole” is after someone has just shown you the entire house one room at a time.
Now read Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and then get back to us.
Aquinas never says it does. After giving arguments for God’s existence, he goes on to discuss God’s nature/properties.
Which, again, raises the question: could there be dozens or hundreds of such events “outside” the chain of causes?
The argument itself presupposes that every event has a cause, and so is part of a causal chain. A cause outside of the chain is invoked only to accommodate the concept of an uncaused cause/unmoved mover.
I’m not sure what your question even means, let alone how to answer it.
I wonder whether – if we can invoke a cause outside of the chain to accommodate the concept of an uncaused cause or an unmoved mover – we can invoke a cause outside of the chain to accommodate the concept of nine uncaused causes, or ten unmoved movers. If we can so accommodate one, can we thusly accommodate sixty?
Quibbling over the terms doesn’t invalidate my point. Aquinas’ argument is that nothing can exist without something external to it. But then he creates a special case for God and says God can exist without something external to God.
It doesn’t hold up. If Aquinas’ premise is correct then the premise proves God can’t exist. And if God exists then the premise is disproven by God’s existence. Either the premise disproves God or God disproves the premise. And that means you can’t use the premise to prove God.
Little Nemo, you said this: “And Aquinas never says “anything that exists must have a cause that made it exist.” What he says is that nothing causes itself to exist.”
There’s no fundamental difference between those two statements whatsoever.
Just like the movie Grease, at the drive-in, when Danny’s trying to console Sandy: “Sandy, we didn’t go together. We just went together.”
“Nothing causes itself to exist” is the same statement as “everything that exists must have a cause that made it exist.” It’s just using 11 words as opposed to 5. It’s the same thing.