"the cosmologists argument fails"
None of that changes the fact that something must be the fundamental thing from which macroscopic objects are composed. It might be fermions, it might be superstring, it might be quantum foam, or it might be something else. — Michael
how do you defend the claim that everything has a beginning and must have a cause? — Michael
there may be things in existence, which did not begin to exist, but do exist. — Punshhh
By asking you to name something that doesn't. — Wayfarer
You think that constitutes an argument?
Simples do not have a beginning — Michael
if you want to argue that the universe must have a beginning because everything has a beginning then you're back to the cosmological argument refuting itself, being that it concludes that there is a thing that doesn't have a beginning. — Michael
It is reasonable to consider that the universe is not eternal, we can see around us that the known universe began to exist. I know that this a vague and can't be proven either way. Perhaps the argument could be refined to "the known universe", "our world" or something. — Punshhh
Regarding the "agent causation" of a god, yes it is taking the rational on to thin ice, it is a quite rational conclusion in other circumstances. In this case though it only hinges on the conclusion of a first cause, which might not require agent causation, or a mind.
I can't see the contradiction though.
None of that changes the fact that something must be the fundamental thing from which macroscopic objects are composed. It might be fermions, it might be superstring, it might be quantum foam, or it might be something else. — Michael
Do you understand that the present exists as a boundary between the future and the past? But since we are existing in the present, yet still sensing things in the past, then don't you think that we are also in some way experiencing the future as well? Is your mind not in the future, all the time and this is what accounts for awareness? Your mind prepares you for what may occur in the distant future, as well as what is imminent and possible, in the immediate future.How is something that comes to us in the future, from some other source (Presuming that you don't assume that all things that exist to us are in the past)? — Punshhh
The cosmological argument contradicts itself. It can't use as a premise "everything has a
begining, and so a cause" and then conclude that there is a beginningless, uncaused first cause. — Michael
At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday – loftily titled “State of the Universe” – two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.
One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed. The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.
While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,” Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.
For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.
However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.
Wayfarer assumes that if it is not a thing, then it is not a being, and therefore does not exist. — Metaphysician Undiscovered
when Eriugena calls God ‘nothing’, he means that God transcends all created being, God is nihil per excellentiam (‘nothingness on account of excellence’) or, as he puts it, nihil per infinitatem (‘nothingness on account of infinity’). Matter, on the other hand, is also called ‘nothing’ but it is ‘nothing through privation’ (nihil per privationem). Similarly, created things are called ‘nothing’ because they do not contain in themselves their principles of subsistence (Eriugena is here repeating St. Augustine's view that the creature, considered apart from God, is mere nothing). ...God is a ‘nothingness’ (nihilum) whose real essence is unknown to all created beings, including the angels. Indeed, Eriugena argues in a radical manner, following Maximus Confessor, that God's nature is infinite and uncircumscribable, such that He is unknown even to Himself, since He is the ‘infinity of infinities’ and beyond all comprehension and circumscription.
This mode illustrates Eriugena's original way of dissolving the traditional Neoplatonic hierarchy of being into a dialectic of affirmation and negation: to assert one level is to deny the others. In other words, a particular level may be affirmed to be real by those on a lower or on the same level, but the one above it is thought not to be real in the same way. If humans are thought to exist in a certain way, then angels do not exist in that way.
Right! Another great book I read, years ago, by sociologist Peter Berger, 'The Heretical Imperative'. The gist was, in the olden days, you were told what to believe, 'heresy' means 'deciding what to believe'. Whereas nowadays we all have to 'decide what to believe' - hence the title. — Wayfarer
Whereas everything that exists, might not exist, a necessary being cannot not exist, so is therefore beyond existence and non-existence. — Wayfarer
...any argument for or against the reality of God not so understood—any debate over an intelligent designer, or a supreme being within time and space who merely supervises history and legislates morals, or a demiurge whose operations could possibly be rivals of the physical causes describable by scientific cosmology—may prove a diverting amble along certain byways of seventeenth-century deism or eighteenth-century “natural history,” but it most definitely has nothing to do with the God worshiped in the great theistic religions or described in their philosophical traditions, or reasoned toward by their deepest logical reflections upon the contingency of the world.
Like why can't we apply the PSR to existence without applying it to the concept of existence? And what does it mean to apply the PSR to the concept of existence? — Marty
Do you understand that the present exists as a boundary between the future and the past? But since we are existing in the present, yet still sensing things in the past, then don't you think that we are also in some way experiencing the future as well? Is your mind not in the future, all the time and this is what accounts for awareness? Your mind prepares you for what may occur in the distant future, as well as what is imminent and possible, in the immediate future.
So the point is, that you are not sensing the future at all, yet you know an awful lot about the future. Where does this information concerning the future come from if not from the future itself, just like information about the past comes from the past? So your mind must actually be in the future to be receiving information from the future, in order that you can know about the future.
You might wonder, if my mind is in the future, why can't I see, touch, or otherwise sense, the future objects. But that would be impossible, because sensible objects don't exist prior to the present, they only come into existence as time passes, at the present. It must be the case that sensible objects only come into existence at the present, because human beings have the capacity to make random changes to sensible objects at any moment of the present. So your mind is actually in the future, and it can't see any physical objects there, because they don't exist there, but your mind has the capacity to move and change physical objects as they come into being at the present, because it is prior to them, in the future.
At this point we are talking about the concept of "big", we have made "big" into a noun, to talk about it as a thing, just like the example of "existence" — Metaphysician Undercover
We are, in fact, talking about "big" as a different sort of noun, also termed an "adjective". — hunterkf5732
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