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But perhaps the ultimate cause mentioned here is another universe? |
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| The weak point in this argument is the "must be God" assertion which no doubt could be challenged. |
As I said at the beginning of this post I've never been very impressed with some of the standard arguments for God's existence. In this connection my friend James Knight posted this blog on the Cosmological Argument. In commenting on his post I explained briefly to James why I have a reserved opinion on the Cosmological Argument....
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I suppose it started in the 1970s when I became enamoured of idea that the best we can do in science is describe the patterns of the world. In particular I focused on the subject of randomness as a particular form of pattern that was difficult if not impossible to describe algorithmically. Causation, then, becomes a problematic notion with randomness. As the Cosmological argument makes use of the notion of causation this argument loses it's intelligibility somewhat.
That's not to say that the Cosmological Argument does not express something deeply intuitively true and compelling
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The above explains why I was so obsessed with randomness at an early stage and why I was so determined to crack the question of randomness. (I'm sure professional mathematicians have done a better job, but my PDF on the subject was good enough for my purposes)
If we are intellectually looking for God it is ironic that blowhard atheist Richard Carrier should identify the area where to start looking; namely, that God is the mysterious logical necessity left when one subtracts out all apparently contingent things. Richard wrongly identifies his logical necessity as probability and randomness. In doing so he appears to misunderstand the ontology of probability.
And while I'm here let me say that I am also unimpressed with Anselm's ontological argument for the necessary existence of God. But I concede that if God is that mysterious logical necessity which Richard Carrier identifies then in that sense the ontology of God makes His existence a necessity. But I suspect that for finite beings like ourselves the true ontological argument for God involves infinities and is likely to be beyond our understanding. However, there is nothing wrong in trying to develop an ontological argument; you never know what you might come up with.
For me God is the kind of explanation one uses abductively; that is, it is the best explanation I can think of which makes human sense of an otherwise senseless cosmos. It gives us the "why" (rather than the mere scientific descriptive "how") of those astonishing empirical features of our cosmos such as its high organisation, the human compulsion for meaning, purpose & justice and the existence of conscious cognition as the cornerstone of both empirical science and morality. Theism is the crucial intellectual component of a worldview which makes rational sense of our scientific observations on a cosmos which otherwise is entirely absurd. In the beginning God.... (See also Hebrews 11:6ff)
