I addressed the responses fully. The principal criticism was that the thing demonstrated (immaterial cause of material existence) does not suffice as “God”.
I thought you would have been keeping track of your topic. It’s post #45.
Too late.
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False: It’s all temporal priority.
Strawman: this move was never made, and demonstrates a misunderstanding, or intentional misrepresentation.
Material is ruled out because it is (temporally) prior to all material things. This criticism is based in the equivocation which you accuse me of, above.
I addressed this criticism already for days, maybe weeks, above. You can review if you are so inclined. Simply put, “immaterial cause of material existence” is sufficient for “God”, though an atheist wants “God” to refer to all sorts impossible, or incompatible ideas.
Let me address this one in a slightly different way, maybe it will make more sense to the atheists here. If a person believes in God, this does not mean that the person believes everything that anyone says about God. Nor does a proof of God require proving that everything anyone says about God is true.
That’s part of the problem. Not all causes are temporally prior to their effects. But these old Aristotelian arguments cannot deal with contemporary accounts of causation. And here “contemporary” is anything in the last two hundred years.
Folk may see for themselves. “Every potential requires some actual cause” doesn’t get to “there is one actual thing that is the cause of all potentials.”; from ∀x∃y(Cause(y,x)) to ∃y∀x(Cause(y,x)). Each actualisation can have a distinct actualizer. You need an independent argument against an infinite regress or a causal loop of actualisers to block this — the argument as stated doesn’t supply one. This is the same fallacy that infects the Kalam and indeed most cosmological arguments:
Again, this is reliant on a limited account of causation.
We might invoke Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal, but you can’t do limits, so you will not be able to follow that.
There’s also the simple, physical fact of apparently uncaused events, and as mentioned previously, what counts here is not whether or not there are uncaused events, but that positing them does not lead to contradiction.
There simply is no grounds to insist that every event have a cause.
And “material” cause is sufficient for a universe. But you want is to jump to there being an “immaterial” cause. Further, it remains unexplained an immaterial cause can have a material effect.
But thanks, all this is helpful in showing how the failures listed fit in with the cosmological argument; until now the focus has been on the ontological argument.
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That looks like an untenable premise.
As I said, this is a strawman. That move is not made. You are neglecting the part which demonstrates that potential cannot be prior in an absolute sense.
Again, more untenable proposals.
There are many ways to resist the argument, and reject the premises, I do not deny this. I will say that I believe I haven’t seen a rejection which is based in anything realistic yet. Therefore the argument is convincing to me.
There is an immaterial cause, necessarily, that’s what the argument demonstrates. That is unless you accept some unrealistic premise, like retro causation or uncaused event.
How it is, that an immaterial cause can have a material effect does not need to be addressed. The logic shows that it is the case that an immaterial cause had a material effect. And this is why we need faith, to accept the reality of what the logic demonstrates to us, even though we can’t understand how it could be like this.
A bowling ball causes the indentation in the cushion on which it sits, the tension in a spring occurs with its compression, and so on. Aristotle did not have the mathematics needed to deal with static forces. Now they are a commonplace.
Yes it is, exactly here:
“An”. One. There might be more than one cause.
Untenable to you, given your eccentric views on limits. Tenable to Hawking and others.
Faced with the critique, you now want to slide over to modal arguments, or if that fails,
Indeed.
I didn’t repeat myself. These are your quoted statements, copied word for word from post 258. I find your quoted statements misleading, so I will respond to your statements again.
Yes, God can eliminate evil, by destroying all flesh, but chooses not to because He chose not to destroy all mankind.
Yes, God can change His mind when He choose to.
Yes, drowning all flesh, to destroy all evil, is compatible with perfect goodness because otherwise evil could not be eliminated from the world.
Yes, the explanation is simply that God is perfect and not evil.
No, it is your misunderstanding that makes God appear incoherent.
Risible.
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Oh, you’re being silly.
“Ha ha”, I guess?
Why trust on the claim that something exists, when it cannot be seen with your own eyes? Why not just say banana is yellow, and post box is red?
Some invisible stuff called photons coming out from the objects, and playing games with your eyes sounds really silly. 
Another aspect to existence
In natural language, we say things like:
1 - “If we know about something then it must exist”
2 - “We cannot know about something that does not exist”
3 - “There may be things that exist that we don’t know about”
Therefore the words “know” and “exist” must have a meaning in natural language.
The question is, what do the words “know” and “exist” mean in natural language?
Words don’t have a meaning outside the sentences that they are used in.
Therefore, to know the meanings of “know” and “exist”, we must look at the sentences that they are used in.
In other words, the words “know” and “exist” must satisfy the sentences that they are a part of.
We “know” about “unicorns”, “God”, “tables”, “pain” and “Sherlock Holmes”, therefore, “knowledge”, “unicorns”, “God”, “tables”, “pain” and “Sherlock Holmes” must exist.
As far as language is concerned, any metaphysical ontological understanding of existence is irrelevant, as long as the concepts knowledge and existence satisfy the sentences they are part of.
As the sentence “if we know about something then it must exist” can clearly be successfully used within a social group of people as part of their common language, then it must follow that all the words within this sentence must have meaning to the users of the language.
IE, regardless of any obscure metaphysical ontological implications, if each word within a sentence, including the words “know” and “exist”, satisfies the sentence, then the words have meaning and the sentence is true.
Just an interesting construct from something I’m reading now. R.G. Collingwood’s ‘intellectual intuition’ of the nature of godhood?
“The ideal self which is the object of a hungry man’s appetite is a god. Being an infinitely strengthened man, it may be called an anthropomorphic god. Being the infinitely strengthened self of the man who worships it, it may be called an idiomorphic god.” New Leviathan, 8.26
Static forces are irrelevant to the argument, because it’s concerned with the cause of change. In your examples, this would be the cause of the release of the indentation, the release of the spring tension. You can say that the activity which follows from the release is “caused” by the potential energy which is contained, but the argument relies on the premise that the release itself requires an active cause, it cannot be spontaneous (uncaused). Concepts like “symmetry breaking”, and “random quantum fluctuation”, disrespect this requirement for an active cause. But such concepts can be demonstrated to be incoherent.
I don’t see the point “there must be a cause” does not exclude the possibility of a multitude of causes. The conclusion is “an immaterial actuality”. That actuality could be causal in many different circumstance, acting as a multitude of causes in different material circumstances. So I don’t understand the supposed problem you are pointing to.
Hawking is not realist, which is the case with most metaphysical speculators who proceed from a foundation provided by modern physics. The relativistic principles of modern physics do not support a realist ontology. So Hawking proposed what they called “model-dependent realism”, which is not a realism at all.
This is the beauty of the cosmological argument. It employs realist principles to dismiss the logical sophistry, which is built on the relativistic idea, that the usefulness of the model is more important than the truth about what actually exists. Notice the premise “we observe that there is actual existence”. This is the realist premise which carries the force of the conclusion. The non-realist metaphysicians who construct their systems from the relativity based discipline of modern physics, simply ignore reality, immersing themselves in possible worlds logic, and many worlds interpretations. This provides them with the principles required to designate what “is actual”, according to utilitarian or other subjective, or even arbitrary principles.
The falsity of this is the central premise which you are not apprehending. Matter is pure potential. Without any actual form it cannot be a universe. Further, it cannot actualize itself into “a universe”, because any such actualization requires an actual cause.
Consider this example. Matter without any actual form would be infinite possibility, this is often proposed as the origin in modern metaphysics. If there is such a situation of possibility, then none of those possibilities could be an actuality because that actuality would limit the existing possibility. And, for any possibility to be actualized, something must select it, that is the requirement of an active cause.
Ideas like random quantum fluctuations, and symmetry breaking are incoherent, because they assume that one possibility is selected out of the multitude, without anything which actually selects it. They tend to attribute the selection of a possibility to “chance”. But chance is not something which can act as a cause to actualize a particular possibility, because that would be a selection by an active agent, not an event caused by chance. "Chance’ just refers to our lack of understanding of the process.
I actually think you and Wayfarer are not so far apart on this. Don’t you agree that we can say all sorts of things about God – in poetry, ritual, personal testimony, art and exhortation in general – without also having to say logic-dependent things purporting to show whether God exists or not?
It’s true that the tone of the thread has depended on argumentation, which is just to say that – as we might expect on a philosophical forum – people want to see what can be rationally demonstrated. IMO this is going to fail, on the topic of God, and I think Wayfarer says the same. But we shouldn’t conclude that silence is the only respectable alternative. And we especially shouldn’t conclude that the unsuitability of rational argumentation around the God topic represents some sort of evidence that God must not exist after all. That would be singling out the God concept for special treatment, since we don’t require such argumentation for many “hinge-like” elements of our shared world. Nor do we require it to validate the experiences that poets and artists share with us.
But you’re right, this must begin with more clarity about what is possible, on the part of theistic philosophers.
Very much so. The narcissism of small differences and so on.
To my eye, Wayfarer adds more than is needed; where silence is appropriate he keeps talking. I pushed back on his epistemic moves, particularly his appeals to first-person experience as evidence. When he argued evidence is by its nature first-person, I countered that by that alone, it ain’t evidence. It’s opinion.
His love of transcendence risks mere ritual. While we both object to scientism, the wonder found in religion is also present in science, something Way tends to downplay.
Wayfarer says more about God than is justified. He slides from modest, defensible observations about the limits of physics and subjectivity, to substantive metaphysical or theological conclusions that the evidence or argument doesn’t actually support.
But he is interesting.
So far as this thread goes, it’s an attempt to avoid playing whack-a-mole with the many threads explicitly expressing arguments for God by placing the objections together.
What could it mean for a word to satisfy a sentence?
To be sure, logicians use “satisfy”, and by it they mean that an individual is one of the elements of the extension of a predicate; the individual “a” satisfies the predicate “f” if and only if “fa” is true.
But that is not what you are doing with satisfaction.
That is simply to stipulate an outdated notion of causation. We can ask what causes the bridge to stand, and an engineer can provide their account. You are indulging in special pleading.
Indeed; but you conclude that there is but one god. That is exactly the Quantifier-shift fallacy(∀x∃y Cyx ≠ ∃y∀x Cyx).
Try to stay on topic. Hawking presented an account in which an infinity of geometric points or transitions squeeze into a finite history. If space-time is closed, smooth, and self-contained, and so without a singular starting trigger, the universe simply is. It removes the need for a temporal “First Cause” or creator because there was never a moment in time when the universe did not exist.
And again, what is important here is that this suggestion is coherent.
You say this as if it meant something. It might have appeared helpful, a few thousand years ago, but it’s no longer something you will find in a physics text.
Yours is an anachronistic physics, misapplied.
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Ha ha, it sure looks to me like you are the one engaged in special pleading, attempting to restrict “cause” to a very specific meaning. That specific meaning seems to be ‘the reason for something not changing’.
As I said, the reason for something staying the same (the bridge to remain standing) is not the question here. “Cause” in that sense which you propose is therefore irrelevant. We know that the bridge has not existed forever, so we are questioning what caused the bridge to come into existence in the first place.
The first premise was, that we understand that the potential for the thing is prior to its actual existence. The bridge has to have come into existence before it obtains that status of “standing”, and prior to it coming into existence, the potential for it was necessary. This is what the argument is concerned with, the coming into existence of material things. The staying the same of the thing is not at issue. Besides, nothing stays the same forever anyway, so you are just making an irrelevant nonsensical distraction.
One immaterial cause (God) is what is required to fulfill the conditions of the argument. To conclude more than one would be an invalid conclusion. So I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.
The quantifier-shift fallacy is not applicable. The argument concludes that there is an actual cause prior to all material things, not that everything has the same material cause.
That is incoherent because “infinite” implies unlimited, and “squeeze into a finite history” contradicts this. So you are wrong to say that this is coherent.
But you and I will never agree on what is and is not incoherent, when it comes to mathematical principles. You seem to believe that just because a mathemagician can conjure it up, then it must be coherent. That just means you’re gullible with respect to magical thinking.
So I’ll repeat myself. The cosmological argument is easily refutable, when the realistic premises of that argument are replaced by the incoherent ones of magical thinking.
Did you know that “energy” is defined as the capacity to do work? That is “potential”. Anything which is pure energy is pure potential. And I’m sure we can find “energy” mentioned in every physics text.
This accusation is misinformed.
I’ve not presented anything that limits the use of cause; you have. I’ve just pointed out a restriction in your use - that you can’t apply your account to statics, but other accounts do work for statics.
Phrases such as “the potential for the thing is prior to its actual existence” are anachronistic folly.
Indeed, but that is not where your argument goes, unless you use quantifier shifting.
No, it doesn’t. But you have never been able to understand limits.
Did you find that surprising? Potential energy is one amongst many. You seem confused.
Good for the post count here, though.