I’m going to butcher this, but if we posit that particles and anti-particles can come into existence that balance one another (as supported by experimental evidence) without ‘cause’ then the whole argument falls apart.
Everything in the universe is balanced, but we can exist in that bubble of reality.
Now beyond a logical argument that God simply must exist because Aquinas can’t conceive of a situation (such as Krauss’ hypothesis) where he didn’t, is there any real evidence that he does exist? What does the “God theory” predict? How can we test it to confirm/refute it?
In a way it does and it doesn’t. Even through evolution doesn’t strictly include abiogenesis, the fact that it allows life to “start simple” makes abiogenesis seem like a lot less of a gap in our knowledge than if we had to have sheep ex nihilo. It certainly transforms the problem form, “gotta be a god” to “I could imagine some sensible natural ways it could have happened”.
This reminds me of the method of infinite descent, which is a perfectly legitimate way of proving facts about the positive integers; but it works because we do know there is a smallest positive integer. (Which is probably irrelevant to a discussion of Thomas Aquinas, but oh well…)
I must have missed the part about the penises.
In fact, I must have missed the part where he says “everything has a cause.” Assuming you’re talking about his proofs for the existence of God, and specifically the second (the First Cause proof), I still don’t see him saying, as such, “everything has a cause.” What he does say sounds similar, but it doesn’t leave itself open to the charge of “explicit contradiction” you make.
And overall I think the proof works better than you think it does, though I agree it’s far from airtight.
As for your #4, well, this is an existence proof, not a uniqueness proof. That’s not one of the steps of this particular argument. (He addresses the uniqueness of God, and other attributes, elsewhere.)
Yeah, pretty much. If his sole purpose in writing these arguments had been to give airtight logical proof that would force belief, and he thought they achieved this goal, he wouldn’t have had any reason to give more than one “proof,” whereas he actually gives five. QED.
On the other hand, any mathematician can appreciate the desire to come up with a proof—or, better yet, several alternative proofs—of something that one already believes to be true.
If God is a “person” with emotions similar to ours, you’d expect him to converse with us. Openly and often. Not to inspire the random prophet, but to talk to anyone who’s interested.
In fact, there are Christian denominations that claim this happens, and that their members do have personal intimate relationships with God.
This claim is nearly always weakened, because God never actually tells them anything they didn’t already know.
If there were a God, and he talked to us, God-conversing people would win a lot of lotteries.
This has forced the God hypothesis to be severely modified, to describe an absentia God, one who is remote from humanity (except for occasional south Texas high school football touchdowns.)
But if it’s not a uniqueness proof, is it even an existence proof?
If it’s not a uniqueness proof, then he’s basically saying there must be at least one uncaused cause; maybe there are hundreds of those uncaused causes, I don’t know; maybe some effects were caused by God, and other effects by another uncaused cause, and yet other effects came from a hundred other uncaused causes.
If he can’t say, of any given effect, whether it traces back to (a) God or (b) any one of who-knows-how-many other uncaused causes, then does that prove God exists?
For the sake of argument, assume movement implies an unmoved mover – but not a unique unmoved mover; there may be dozens of unmoved movers. I don’t see how he gets from “maybe this movement can be traced back to one unmoved mover, while another movement can be traced to another unmoved mover, and a third and fourth movement traced to a third and fourth unmoved mover; I can’t disprove any of that” to “and one of those is God, even if the others aren’t.”
If, as you say, it’s not a uniqueness proof, then it looks like a step is missing.
One bit of refutation that I may have missed as I skimmed this thread.
The majority of people get hung up on the big bang/moment of creation. As if to say "Something must have caused it, therefore that something was god/gods/whatever.
The reality is that we have no idea what predates the big bang, we don’t even know if it makes sense to say something predates the big bang because we have no effing clue what might or might not have taken place prior to the event that was also the starting point of our universes clock.
So yeah sure everything has a cause, (maybe) and yeah sure the big bang was the start of the universe we live in, THIS does not lead us to a single conclusion about what that cause may or may not have been. There isn’t a single shred of evidence for anything beyond that boundary. It is 100% speculative masturbation to even have the conversation.
The Puddle argument really does sum this up nicely. Under 2 minutes
You are guilty of leading the evidence where you want it to go.
One might argue that there is a distinction between temporal and eternal entities, and that temporal entities require some cause which precedes them, but that eternal entities do not require a cause which precedes them, and for whom in fact the very notion of “precede” might not be applicable. In that case, one might argue that God, as an eternal entity, can validly exist without some other cause, but that the Universe, a temporal entity, cannot so exist.
Mind you, I don’t know if Aquinas actually does so argue. The distinction between the eternal and the temporal was really more Augustine’s territory. Though one would have expected that Aquinas would have been well-read in Augustine.
Yes, and one may argue that unless there are other examples of “eternal entities” to bring up, then “eternal entity” is just another way of saying “God”.
I don’t follow you; how can we prove that temporal entities do not require a cause which precedes them, and how can we prove the universe isn’t an eternal entity?
(I mean, yeah, one can argue it; one can say it, claim it, whatever. But prove?)
I’ve never seen a ‘nothing’ from which a universe was not created. Is there any example of such a thing, or any evidence that such a thing could even exist?
I read it as a smart ass response to “a universe can’t be created from nothing” as a claim. Do you know of any nothings that haven’t spawned a universe? No? Then how can you claim universes can’t be created from nothings?
Yeah but it’s a statement containing two negations and a concept that itself is usually taken to mean not-anything.
Trying my best to parse it into a concrete point, I’d respond that I’ve never seen a nothing, but arguably there are infinite not-a-things within any arbitrary space. So yeah, a “nothing” doesn’t necessarily become a universe.
But even if I supported the notion that there are no “nothings” in our current universe…unless we already knew / believed our universe came from nothing it would prove…well, nothing.
It would be equivalent to saying “I believe a leprechaun created the universe, because have you ever seen a leprechaun that didn’t create a universe?”
But I wasn’t offering the opinion that “universes can’t be created from nothing” in the first place.
I don’t know whether they can, but at least a universe from nothing is simpler, and less of a leap than a god from nothing who then creates a universe.