Subject:
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Re: Holy crap! Four out of five scientists claim....
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 16 Oct 2003 17:32:11 GMT
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Viewed:
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762 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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Deists agree to let point 1 be “God”, and it seems to me that Science also
needs to let point 1 be something for which it has no explanation or any
hope thereof.
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I don’t think that science necessarily agrees that there is a point 1. For
that matter, point 1 may have been caused by point 2 (a statement which I
regurgitate here but cannot further explain, because it has to do with
quantum physics well beyond me, though I assert the point as another
theoretical explanation of origin).
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Hmmm, sounds convenient (point 2 from point 1) and complicated:-)
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Another way to look at it is this: deists sometimes assert that “anything
that began to exist had a cause.” Of course, “began to exist” is a clunky,
artificial phrase created expressly to put God in a category by himself,
since He’s the only thing usually allowed to have always existed. But there
are two problems. If God can always have existed, why couldn’t the
universe?
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Yes, I am conceding this from the beginning.
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After all, the universe is not a thing--it is the set of all
things (just the set of all numbers is not itself a number). To this end,
the positing of God creates an extraneous step (and a big one); if the
universe can in some way have created itself or could always have existed,
then no God is needed.
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My point is that if you hold that the universe always existed, that is a faith
statement as much as any about God having always existed.
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Also, if God is the only thing that didn’t “begin to exist,” then to say that
“all things that began to exist had a cause” is circular (and also special
pleading (a double standard)), since it says “all things except God had a
cause.” On the other hand, if there’s something else that didn’t “begin to
exist,” then that thing was by definition not created by God and is thus not
beholden to God; therefore, God would not be infinite or omnipotent.
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I think that the entity of God by definition would qualify as relevently
different from the universe as an entity, and therefore not special pleading.
So, either:
A) God is the only thing that didn’t have a cause (using the Principle of
Relevant Difference) and He created the universe, or
B) The universe didn’t have a cause, it always existed.
Either way, both statements are beyond the peruse of Science and therefore
faith-based.
JOHN
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