1) There is no evidence the universe had a beginning. If you disagree, cite your evidence.
Cause and effect, Universe isn't infinite, thus it had a beginning.
2) There is no evidence the universe is not infinite. If you disagree, cite your evidence.
Hilbert's Hotel, this universe isn't infinite, thus it had a start.
3) Even if the universe had a beginning and isn't infinite, that doesn't mean that, logically, something must have brought it into existence.
Yes, because again, something caused it to exist. it didn't just exist to exist, there's a reason it started existing.
4) Even if something brought it into existence, that doesn't mean that something had to be either a) eternal, or b) uncaused.
Yes it does, otherwise we'd just keep going until we get that first uncaused cause, and since it is the first cause, it isn't caused, thus always existed, eternal, uncaused.
5) Even if there was something eternal and uncaused which created the universe, that doesn't mean it was a deity.
by Timothy McCabe:
There is no other logical possibility.
Either some things are caused, or nothing is.
If nothing is caused, then I never wrote this. But I did write this, so at least some things are caused.
If some things are caused, either their causing is the result of a previous cause, or it isn't. In other words, either something caused it to cause, or nothing caused it to cause.
If every cause is the result of a previous cause, or, if everything is caused by something else, then we have an "infinite regress" of causes.
An infinite regress of causes is logically incoherent. To suggest that there have been an infinite regress of past causes is to suggest that we have come to the end of an infinite series. An infinite series, however, is by definition a series with no end. So this would mean that we have come to the end of a series with no end, which is logically incoherent.
Infinite regress would mean that we have iterated, one-by-one, through every single item of an infinite series. But an infinite series always has more items than those that have been iterated through. We would have iterated through something that cannot be iterated through, which is logically incoherent.
If we were to go backwards through each previous cause, and there were an infinite number of past causes, there would necessarily be some cause in the set of previous causes that we would never, ever get to. If that were not the case, it would not be infinite. If there is some supposed prior cause in the set of previous causes that we could never get to while iterating backwards through all previous causes, then, iterating forward from that cause to the present state, we would never arrive at the present state for the same reason that going backwards we could never arrive at the previous state -- namely, the infinite (or unending) number of causes in between the two.
Infinite regress would mean that we have completed something that cannot be completed. We have traversed something that cannot be traversed. We have itemized what cannot be itemized, counted what cannot be counted, spanned what cannot be spanned.
Infinite regress is logically incoherent. Therefore, not everything is caused by a previous cause.
This means, necessarily, that EVERY series of causes has its own first cause, and since this first cause is a FIRST cause, it is uncaused.
What we also see is that since this first cause is never the result of a prior cause, since it is in fact a FIRST cause, it does not cause involuntarily. In other words, nothing made it cause: it did it voluntarily -- on its own. The first cause, in every series of causes, is therefore necessarily volitional: it is willful; it has personhood.
Every uncaused first cause, since it is uncaused, either began to exist without cause, or else it did not begin to exist, and is therefore self-existent.
If it began to exist without cause, then having nothing, adding nothing to it, something results. Or, in other words:
0 + 0 > 0.
This is the same as claiming that zero is not zero, which is logically contradictory. I like to call this "Atheist Math".
Therefore, since nothing can be caused by nothing, every uncaused first cause is self-existent. It is eternal, permanent, and not subject to change over time. It simply... is.
When anyone talks about some kind of uncaused, self-existent, willful, eternal, personal entity that is the first cause of things, the label generally applied to such an entity is "God".
By Timothy McCabe:
By Due to character restraints and the nature of the comments section, I am trying to be brief. Sometimes brevity makes my arguments unclear.
Below, x is the *being* of the First Cause (God or the quantum whatzits); y is the *doing* of the First Cause (the creation event or the Big Bang); z is temporal progression, or vectoral movement through time (the process of one moment following the next).
If I'm not mistaken, the position you are presenting goes as follows:
If x, then necessarily y.
If y, then necessarily z.
This means that if x, then necessarily z.
The Christian position, due to the willful nature of x, goes as follows:
If x, then optionally y.
If y, then necessarily z.
So, under the position you are presenting, the existence of the First Cause is bound necessarily to the passage of time. If x is, then so is z. If z had a beginning, so did x, which is to say that 0 + 0 > 0. If x did not have a beginning, then neither did z, which is to endorse infinite regress. So this position is incoherent, unless I misunderstood your question.
In Christianity this is not the case due to the optional (willful) relationship between x and y.
God bless.
6) Even if the universe had such a cause, and that cause was a deity, that doesn't mean if was the God of Christianity - it could be any of the other thousands of deities humanity has invented, or it could be a deity that has had no interaction with humans.
(continued)
In fact, Christianity is the only worldview that is logically coherent. All other worldviews fall victim to inherent logical contradictions within their most basic presuppositions, particularly wherever they diverge from Christianity.
For example, due to the lack of divine sacrificial substitutionary atonement in Islam, when Allah, who is always just, forgives, He is not just.
Due to the prophecies of the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish prophecy is rejected by the Jews.
Due to the multiplicity of disagreeing gods in polytheism, wherever there is divine disagreement, things are and are not at the same time and in the same way.
The Christian God never contradicts Himself (2 Timothy 2:13); He fulfills the prophecies of the Jews (Acts 3:18); and the sacrifice of Christ makes it possible for the Christian God to be both just and forgiving at the same time (Hebrews 2:17).
Ultimately, only the Christian worldview provides a coherent understanding of reality and is not inherently contradictory.
God bless.
First, you've yet to provide any substance to your continual claim that evolution is mathematically impossible - even the article you cite doesn't say it's mathematically impossible, only improbable.
Mathematically impossible, biologically impossible, logically impossible. nothing comes from nothing. intelligence doesn't come from nothing, chances of it happening even if miraculously biologically and logically possible, still no chance of happening.
"evolution" = impossible
Second, even if both the cosmological and teleological arguments worked (hint: they don't), there's nothing to suggest that the first cause and the designer are, in fact, a single deity. It could be, for instance, that any intelligent design on Earth is from an alien intelligence that developed, by wholly natural processes, elsewhere in the universe. That is as plausible as your "Goddidit" scenario.
Natural(space, time, matter) it isn't infinite, refer back to previous paragraphs. either way, we are lead to the first uncaused cause, God, which no greater can be conceived.
Third, the teleological argument doesn't work. You might have been suckered in by televangelists talking about fine tuning, how if the Earth were a gnat's hair closer to or further from the Sun we'd boil or freeze, etc. Not only are they simply not true, the Anthropic Principle easily rebuts any notion that the Earth, with its particular properties, was designed by God. Unless you can find a manufacturer's logo on the bottom of Thailand, the fact that, say, the specificity of oxygen is 'just right' for life means squat.
from AllAboutPhilosophy org, Teleological Argument – Overwhelming Evidence for Design
It is instructive to note that one of the developers of the “Anthropic Principle” concept, Dr. Frank Tipler, has become a Christian since that time, due in large part to reflections on the overwhelming evidence for a Designer from nature.
One question that is often raised subsequent to hearing of the fine-tuning of the universe is “if the parameters were different, why couldn’t life have evolved within the different parameters?” The answer to that is that life cannot evolve even under the most ideal of conditions—the irreducible and specified complexity of life has disproven Darwinian evolution (we’ll discuss that in more detail later). Although micro-evolution (small changes within a species or “kind”
has been observed and does occur in nature, it always results in a loss or lateral drift in information. It never results in an increase in information. The media and many philosophically driven scientists ascribe tremendous flexibility to the idea of micro-evolution, many claiming or assuming that macro-evolution is simply a result of large quantities of micro-evolution, but this has been shown to be impossible under every kind of testing. Darwinian, or macro-evolution, has not been reproducible under even the most artificially ideal conditions in the laboratory. Moreover, changes in most of the aforementioned parameters of fine-tuning would result in no planetary habitat forming that could support life, which eliminates the possibility of life before we even get to the insurmountable problem of biological assembly.
Of course I do, I'd be a fool if I didn't. But let's not go into the tired old argument of, "Oh, you're an atheist, therefore you say there is no God! That's faith".
So you admit you aren't an "atheist".
No, it isn't. If you think it is, then you don't understand what evolution is. It would be more accurate to say that evolution is like a pencil writing 43 random letters on a line, then repeating that series of letters onto the next line, with some minor mistakes. Any letters that happen to be in the right place for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", those letters are 'locked'. After only a few 'generations', this system of reproduction and imperfect inheritance with an external selection process, will create, from randomly generated letters, a coherent sentence.
Naturally this is not perfectly analogous to evolution, but it's better than yours, and better than "tornado through a junk yard", or any of the others that Creationists have come up with.
The core principle Creationists don't seem to grasp is that of natural selection: random variation becomes a powerful tool for creative change when there is a selection process preferentially picking beneficial traits over detrimental ones.
No random coincidences by accidents from nothing can create such Complex Intelligence, this earth is intelligent because it was logically created by... Intelligence.
