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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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But the universe itself can be a causeless phenomenon, there is no need to posit a God. You can call the universe itself God, of course, but this is not what Christians mean by God.

Can a phenomenon be both "causeless" and have a discrete beginning/end? That seems to invite paradox unless you want to go the full Pyrrho and argue against the principles of cause and effect more generally.

I don't see why not but to be fair, I am not well versed in either philosophy or physics.

Okay fine, but you’ve already shifted the goalposts significantly. Your original argument was “nothing can be causeless, not even God”. Now you’ve switched to “okay, God could be causeless, but so could the universe even if it wasn’t God”. Two completely different and mutually-contradictory arguments.

The two things could still be mutually excluding possibilities: If it's impossible for a thing to exist without a cause, than the Uncaused Cause is impossible too, much like a circumference-less circle is impossible; if that's not the case, then there's no reason there must be only one from which everything else is caused. You can, of course, say that everything needs a cause to exist except for a special uncaused being that is an exception to the general rule; but then the statement collapses to "assuming that one and only one Uncaused Cause exists, then one and only one Uncaused Cause exists".

I never said that nothing can be causeless. I said the opposite: "It is not necessarily necessary for everything to have a cause. There is nothing fundamentally illogical as far as I can tell about the notion of an uncaused phenomenon.".

You did, but right after that you argued that anyone who believes that all things need a cause must necessarily believe that God also himself needs a cause, but this doesn’t follow, because anyone who believes in God by definition believes that God does not require a cause. Since you yourself believe that the universe doesn’t require a cause, it doesn’t make sense to then argue that God does.

Fair enough, you are right about that. It's just that to me one might as well accept the universe itself as being an exception to the rule of things needing causes, without a need to posit a God.

What metaphysical sort of thing does this rule exist in? Why is the universe an exception? I don't see why the universe would be the sort of thing that would be uncaused, while that seems much more plausible for a classical theistic God. A priori, I'd be more likely to expect an uncaused God than an uncaused universe, since one seems more likely to be something that would be intrinsically necessary.

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