Argument From Causation Or Just The Five Proofs For God In General

[dairygirl4u2c]

"God did not create the universe, says Hawking"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100902/lf_nm_life/us_britain_hawking

""It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.""

It looks like the title of the article might be misleading. "god id not create the universe" is different than "God is not necesssarily necessary".

hawkings said the later. ive been sayin that all along.
where's my big news article.

[rkwright]

[quote name='Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam' timestamp='1278822395' post='2141092']
Anselm's proof is very logical (I am also a fan of it). There is only one problem with it as near as I can tell. Anselm makes the jump from knowledge to being. "I can conceive of the best possible being in such a way that it is a necessary being. Since it is the greatest being and as being that must exist, it exists." The only being I know who in knowing something makes it real is God. Thus the only one who could make that logical step is God (since what God knows is and if it is God knows it). It is still a great proof but one can't really make that logical move of knowledge to independent being that does not exist as part of one's mind.
[/quote]

He makes the step from knowledge to being, simply because thats what the definition of God in the proof requires. If God is that which nothing greater can be conceived, and it is greater that that being have necessary existence, then God must necessarily exist. The logical jump as you call it, is the only logical conclusion from the two premises; its not that only God can make that logical step, its that everyone must make that logical step.

The argument against Anslem's proof is not in the "logical" steps - the logic is completely valid.

Edited September 3, 2010 by rkwright

[Ziggamafu]

Contemporary astrophysics supplies coherent theories that seem to provide eternal / infinite, generative cores of reality for a multiverse (or infinite universes) scenario, which would seem to knock arguments from causality and complexity out of the game. I think that the strongest argument for God is an argument from perceived transcendence, and it has certainly been the most affective argument I have used in conversations with atheists. "The heavens declare the glory of God" not primarily by means of their causation or complexity, but by their beauty, the Source and Standard of which may only be God. "The fool says in his heart that there is no God" when he ceases to believe in love as anything more than chemical reactions, in truth as anything more than a meaningless illusion of a meaningless evolution. Ultimately the two sides, atheists and theists, offer mere particles in motion on the one hand and the addition of transcendence on the other. Anyone honest with himself will admit that the perception of transcendence (meaning; love, beauty, awareness, freedom, justice, reason, etc.) is just as objective as the perception of the physical world. Could the God we experience in spiritual apprehensions be an illusion? Only with a probability and acceptance as reasonable as that of the claim that the physical world we experience is an illusion.

And that, my friends, is why I am no longer an atheist.

[dairygirl4u2c]

even without causaulity... if we assume an infinite chain. one could still argue that God is the uncaused caused chain, 'a fortiori'. the unending chain had to come from somewhere, even in and of itself. that's what even the catholic encyclopedia says. the chain is an uncaused caused.
it's not as strong as an argument, cause it's not an uncaused cause in the same way something would be with a chain with a beginning. but it's there, good argument

[dairygirl4u2c]

...

[MarkKurallSchuenemann]

Here's my reasoning of why God must exist -

In the history of me using this argument, I have never had someone ever argue any single point of it - and I believe it is simply they don't know how to do it. Does it convince people that God exists, no - but they can't convince me otherwise either.



I want to discuss one of the most important discoveries in recent history, and that is DNA. Before we knew anything about DNA, there could be much debate on why life is here, and whether it came up by a random occurrence or by design.

When we first found DNA and saw how it function, the idea that it was a code (the genetic code) and a blue print was used a lot - and when my biology professor talked about it, he used the idea of language and letters for base pairs.

Well lets look at the base pairs and language part.

D O G

That spells what is described in this picture.

[img]http://gawker.com/assets/resources/2008/03/puppy.png[/img]

Actually, puppy is a better spelling. Ain't he cute.

But does the letters puppy look anything like a real puppy? The answer is NO it doesn't. So all language is letters, symbols, pictures, sounds that look nothing like the real object they are describing.

Well, DNA is just like that, as it describes every biological process that goes on within everything that lives - but those base pairs don't look anything like the lifeforms they form.

The base pairs in a life form must be the exact same way as all other cells, just like we must use letters in the proper order to spell words out properly. If you change how those base pairs are arranged, you get cancer, just like if you splle thngis otu fo dorer tnah oyu nact mmunictae ffecitvley. (I just said if you spell things out of order than you can't communicate effectively).

Oh, random genetic change and evolution would also be extremely hazardous to a lifeform, because you can see how unreadable the above part is, imagine if you change one or more letters every single generation, nothing would be effectively communicated - i.e. the lifeforms would die, probably before birth!

And those form genes - the words of DNA - where base pairs are the letters, genes are the words - and if the genes are out of order, than there is troubles, because that can lead to a wide variety of genetic diseases that are in our genome. And that leads to the paragraphs, our Chromosomes. And the genes have to be in the proper order in those Chromosomes or any number of genetic disorders could happen.

But where the written language just describes, our DNA describes and creates - but in our industriousness, we have languages that do that to a limited extent - it's called programming languages.

DNA and programming languages also share some similarities - first, DNA and computer languages are a list of instructions. DNA forms RNA, which is used to organize our proteins to form us, just like the list of millions - even billions of instructions were used to make Mass Effect!

Like a programming language, DNA must have to have each part of the code in the right place for it to function properly. I don't know how many times I helped one of my class mates who put the operation code of take the input and multiply it by Y before they defined what Y was in their code only for them to say, Mark - why does it say undefined - DNA must be the exact same order too - or it could prove disastrous for the lifeform that just got mutated!

Now lets look at codes. A code is information that is organized in a way to change what is being conveyed only to be decoded later by someone with the decoder. The extreme example of this is many of you are probably listening to an MP3 right now. I'm listening to Bittersweet Symphony right now, great song. But for me to listen to that song, someone turned audible sounds into 0s and 1s into a computer, and then I have to open up Itunes and Itunes turns those 0s and 1s back into audible sounds. So every MP3 you listen to is an active code, which is why we talk about Codexs (AVIs, Quick Times, ect, ect, ect.) These are compression decompression codes in your computer for it to understand certain file types.

Well, DNA is just like that too, because the genetic information of your ancestors have been coded into a small molecule, which through protein synthesis, turns into you. So you were coded and are now being decoded on a continual basis!

So - with all those similarities between DNA and language, programs and codes - all things that are created by intelligent beings (us), than Occam razor says that the most simple explanation is usually the correct explanation. IOW, DNA was created by intelligence.

Here's the great questions we can ask after this.

Whose intelligence created DNA? For what purpose was DNA created? For what purpose was life created?

To me, if anybody expects me to believe DNA came up by random occurrence, is like saying one day the wind will create a game like Mass Effect!

BTW, like I said - DNA is a language, and the Bible itself says that all life was spoken into existence, let there be, and the Bible also says that Jesus Christ is the author (someone who writes stories) and finisher of my faith! That's pretty accurate stuff, imho!

[Laudate_Dominum]

I hear ya bro.

One of the big questions in biology is how the molecular machinery of life emerged in the first place. I see nothing unreasonable about abiogenesis, in principle. It was demonstrated long ago that amino acids can be formed quite readily under conditions that may have existed in the time frame in which life most likely emerged. The formation of nucleic acids through relatively simple organic chemical pathways is perfectly reasonable as well.

It is feasible that we'll one day have a pretty solid model of abiogenesis, one backed by considerable experimental evidence and worthy of serious intellectual assent; or perhaps we'll discover that there are many ways that organic chemistry can give rise to self-replicating systems. My basic problem then is that you're making a God of the gaps argument, and that category of argument doesn't have a particular good track record.

"Whose intelligence created DNA?"
What in the heck is intelligence?
I'd say that the machinery of life may be an emergent property of organic chemistry, which is, in essence, an emergent property of particle physics. For me these questions turn my mind towards pure mathematics, ontology, and bizarre vistas of philosophy of mind and metamathematics.

I've tried very hard to avoid pedantry but do forgive me if I've failed.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Ziggamafu' timestamp='1283788841' post='2168801']
Contemporary astrophysics supplies coherent theories that seem to provide eternal / infinite, generative cores of reality for a multiverse (or infinite universes) scenario, which would seem to knock arguments from causality and complexity out of the game. I think that the strongest argument for God is an argument from perceived transcendence, and it has certainly been the most affective argument I have used in conversations with atheists. "The heavens declare the glory of God" not primarily by means of their causation or complexity, but by their beauty, the Source and Standard of which may only be God. "The fool says in his heart that there is no God" when he ceases to believe in love as anything more than chemical reactions, in truth as anything more than a meaningless illusion of a meaningless evolution. Ultimately the two sides, atheists and theists, offer mere particles in motion on the one hand and the addition of transcendence on the other. Anyone honest with himself will admit that the perception of transcendence (meaning; love, beauty, awareness, freedom, justice, reason, etc.) is just as objective as the perception of the physical world. Could the God we experience in spiritual apprehensions be an illusion? Only with a probability and acceptance as reasonable as that of the claim that the physical world we experience is an illusion.

And that, my friends, is why I am no longer an atheist.
[/quote]
Great post Zig! I don't know if you're still around, but I feel like stirring the pot a bit, my intention behind a fascinating discussion and possibly honing my own ideas on this.

"[i]I think that the strongest argument for God is an argument from perceived transcendence[/i]"
I'm inclined to favor some sort of transcendental arguments as well. I've often intimated an epic transcendental argument within myself, just out of reach of my conscious mind, and am naturally at a loss as to how to articulate it. Props for making an attempt.

"[i]he ceases to believe in love as anything more than chemical reactions[/i]"
I think that an atheist may believe that love is more than chemical reactions. For example, high-level mental phenomena such as love may be supervenient on the electrochemical processes of the brains involved, thus being "more than chemical reactions" in a strongly emergent sense.

"[i]truth as anything more than a meaningless illusion of a meaningless evolution[/i]"
It would be pretty useless to accept such a definition of truth. Straw man?

"[i]Ultimately the two sides, atheists and theists, offer mere particles in motion on the one hand and the addition of transcendence on the other[/i]."
It is possible to have a transcendent understanding of reality as an atheist. It wouldn't involve a person or persons as the ultimate basis of the universe, and probably no concept of life after death. I have a number of beliefs about transcendence that I think an atheist could adopt without at the same time acknowledging a personal God, or even the category of the supernatural in any conventional sense. In any case, your statement strikes me as a false dilemma.

"[i]Anyone honest with himself will admit that the perception of transcendence (meaning; love, beauty, awareness, freedom, justice, reason, etc.) is just as objective as the perception of the physical world.[/i]"
I see this as a completely unfounded statement... Reading between the lines, I imagine you're saying that your metaphysical point of view is self-evident and that anyone who explicitly disagrees must be deluded. Also, it bothers me that you've lumped together classical abstract concepts, such as justice, with phenomena which are clearly of a different kind, such as awareness and reason (I assume here you mean personal self-awareness and the human faculty of reason). Perhaps you'd be willing to clarify what you're saying here?

"[i]Could the God we experience in spiritual apprehensions be an illusion?[/i]"
Possibly. There is the perennial problem of contradictory spiritual experiences. Also, neuroscience sheds a lot of light on just how prone to illusion the human mind is. Then there is the less mainstream research into mystical experience, such as the notorious God Helmet, which raises some interesting questions at least.

"[i]Only with a probability and acceptance as reasonable as that of the claim that the physical world we experience is an illusion.[/i]"
This has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction, to put it mildly. Even if this were substantiated it would not be all that consoling to me since illusion and misapprehension plague our perception of the physical world.

[Papist]

[color=black][font=Arial][size=2][b]What I heard most often is, “But why do bad things happen?”[/b][/size][/font][/color][color=black][font=Arial][size=2][/size][/font][/color]

[color=black][font=Arial][size=2]So where isthis supremely good, personal and just God in our world? Why so much misery andsuffering? This is a fundamental mystery for which human reason cannot fullyexplain. Although we can reasonably conclude to the existence of God we cannothope to fully fathom the infinite and divine intellect of our creator withfinite human minds.[/size][/font][/color]

[color=black][font=Arial][size=2]However, we canreason that God has decided to endow us with free will, a tremendous gift thatgives humans the freedom to choose between love of God and hatred of him. We [i]can[/i] choose between good and evil. So whydid he decide to give us the freedom to choose evil? It is enough to say thatGod created us as human beings and not as preprogrammed robots. In his infinitegoodness he desired the free love of humanity over forced obedience to hiswill. For love cannot be forced, it must be given by desire and choice.[/size][/font][/color]

[color=black][font=Arial][size=2]Because of ourfree will, some people have embraced evil and selfishness to satiate themselvesat the expense of others. True evil is a result of desire of oneself over thatof God, and thus sin and evil is a rejection of God. Because God is of infiniteperfection, beatitude, and justice, he cannot allow sin to go unpunished.Neither can he allow sinful people to embrace him in his fullness in heaven.Thus our world, tainted by sin, is racked with much sadness and suffering. Sinseparates us from the all-pleasing and loving God.[/size][/font][/color]

[font=Arial][size=2]As emphasized before, the simultaneous existence of good and evil is amystery to human intelligence, but it in no way proves that God does not exist.It only points to our own finite and limited existence. Our God is infinitelygood and just, and thus as the source of our lives we are created to be hisfriends and children. We are called to live in goodness and justice as aresponse to our love of God. God loves us, but it is up to us to return hislove.[/size][/font]

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' timestamp='1296464586' post='2206963']
I hear ya bro.

One of the big questions in biology is how the molecular machinery of life emerged in the first place. I see nothing unreasonable about abiogenesis, in principle. It was demonstrated long ago that amino acids can be formed quite readily under conditions that may have existed in the time frame in which life most likely emerged. The formation of nucleic acids through relatively simple organic chemical pathways is perfectly reasonable as well.

It is feasible that we'll one day have a pretty solid model of abiogenesis, one backed by considerable experimental evidence and worthy of serious intellectual assent; or perhaps we'll discover that there are many ways that organic chemistry can give rise to self-replicating systems...
[/quote]
Saw this recently and thought it was kind of cool and somewhat related to this thread.

[url="http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2010/04/peptides-may-hold-missing-link-to-life.html"]Peptides may hold 'missing link' to life[/url]

[i]Emory scientists have discovered that simple peptides can organize into bi-layer membranes. The finding suggests a “missing link” between the pre-biotic Earth’s chemical inventory and the organizational scaffolding essential to life.[/i]

[Laudate_Dominum]

Came across this today and it reminded me of this thread. The point being that there is a lot going on in scientific research that makes the idea of a compelling theory of abiogenesis quite plausible; this is just one of many examples.

[url="http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.4711"]Semi-permeable vesicles composed of natural clay[/url]

[i]Biological cells are compartmentalized by semi-permeable phospholipid membranes that separate an aqueous interior from an aqueous exterior. How Nature arrived at compartments composed of complex phospholipids as the ubiquitous container of living cells, and if life began from self-organizing molecules compartmentalized in simpler structures formed in the environment, are some of the fundamental questions for the scientific rationalization of the origins of life . . .[/i]

[tinytherese]

For someone who rejects or is hesitant about believing in God because of suffering in the world, I recommend that they read "Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer." It is a compilation of 10 stories from real Catholics who give their personal stories of they have gone through great suffering such as having been a victim of incest during childhood, being born paralyzed, having one's daughter murdered, and one man who was falsely accused of crimes which there was no evidence for (even circumstantial to my understanding) and spent years in prison, just to name a few. They really are outstanding and inspiring stories with profound insight regarding why God allows bad things to happen.

[MarkKurallSchuenemann]

Another good book on why God allows suffering is the Case of Faith. It is, oh my goodness, written by a Christian (who is a protestant) who was an atheist with a Christian wife. He wanted to prove that God didn't exists and Christ as a fairytale. A year later, after all the research he conducted, he could only accept that the Bible was the word of God and that Christ is who he said he is, and he has never gone back!

Edited February 12, 2011 by MarkKurallSchuenemann