At this point, quite honestly, you are insulting your own intelligence, and not mine.

I can't even make sense of this.

1. You are telling me that your god created my god, and yet my god is uncreated. Tell me when you want to get serious, dude.

2. You are assigning attributes, admittedly, at will. I have repeatedly stated that creation itself demands the existence of my creator, and therefore, the creator has explanatory value, and not just personal value, as such. You use the word "imagine" and I use the word derive. You are just erecting a strawman to beat up on.

3. You say that you don't need any evidence. But your proposed being has to be logically coherent, as mine is, which yours is not (see 1).

And as for your question, please rephrase it for clarity's sake.

I gave an example, no?

Furthermore, I am not simply asserting that the universe began to exist on philosophical grounds. Science itself leads us in that direction. This is no minor matter. It is not trivial, and in fact, it is itself a question as to the beginning of everything, including space and time. I don't even understand the objection, honestly.

We are talking about things "that begin to exist" and not things that "change form." The universe began to exist. I know this is an uncomfortable fact for the atheist, and since we discovered that the universe is steady-state and not going to end in a big crunch, atheists and scientists have been desperately imagining all kinds of fantastical and strange scenarios in order to duck the unwanted conclusions that stem from this fact.

Are we really at the point where I have to justify the claim that the universe began to exist?

If we are, then creationists such as GIG may be justified in believing that scientists and science cannot be trusted to be unbiased.

So in the other thread you point towards nuclear fusion as an explanation of how elements were created, i.e. began to exist, and now you tell me that this is "just re-arrangement of already existing stuff into a new alignment or structure" and therefore doesn'T count as "beginning to exist""?

Yeah. The fact that they are offering up examples of things that they say do in fact begin to exist in the same breath with 'we have no frame of reference for things that begin to exist' is indicative of the inherent weakness of their rebuttals. They are throwing everything and anything up against the wall and they hope to overwhelm you by the quantity, and not quality, of the information.

Look at zumby's wording:

They don't want to necessarily commit to any one disproof, so it is all neatly arranged together, so at to appear as the veritable mountain that cannot be climbed over. The whole idea is to bring the argument to a point where it is "in question," and that is all.

Yet, GIG is doing the exact same thing in his thread and they are fuming over there.

what? no......

He clearly isnt meaning created in the other thread as "appeared out of nothing", and I am clearly not meaning "nuclear fusion " to mean " appearing out of nothing", so Im not really sure what your point is?

If he is in fact meaning created as "appeared out of nothing", then obviously nuclear fusion does not count.

in this thread, dogg is asserting that he has seen many things begin to exist, ie " appear out of nothing", and I am saying " no, you havent seen that, ever"

It seems fairly simple to me.... nuclear fusion is the rearrangement of already existing things

ok, the universe began to exist. This is different from change form, and you have never seen something begin to exist in the way that the universe began to exist.

"Out of nothing" is your qualifier.

I am saying that the universe began to exist.

You shift doggs initial statement "everything that begins to exist has a cause." to mean "everything that begins to exist out of nothing has a cause."

You thereby shift the meaning of "beginning to exist".

I don't understand what you don't understand. Your god indeed was created, by my god, who was not created. My god explains everything and if you simply allow yourself to believe, if you open yourself to my god, you will find him.

Yes, and the existence of the creator demands a creator in turn, and that was my god, who had no creator.

Correct, I don't need evidence (even though the universe is full of it if you just look) I know it's true. Unfortunately I'm alone in this belief and may well be deluded. If I could get a few hundred thousand people to believe me, or maybe a million (I'm not sure what the threshold is) it would become a cultural norm and I wouldn't be deluded.

Let's turn my question on my god, not yours. If my god was the uncaused cause who caused your god, does my theory not rely on a derived premise, that the causal chain is non-circular and finite. If it is neither of those things then there needn't be a first cause.

More importantly, even if there actually was a first cause, why label it 'god' and begin to arbitrarily assign attributes and actions to it?

So you disagree with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas who both thought that it was possible for the universe to have always existed? Why do you think that it had a beginning?

Thomas Aquinas is probably best known for his five proofs for the existence of God. These include

Aquinas 5 Ways

So I'm not sure he's the best to state as an example

I asked you to rephrase for clarification, but you repeated your question almost word for word.

'If the causal chain is circular and infinite, then there is no need for an uncaused cause.' 'If the causal chain is non-circular and finite, then there is no need for an uncaused cause.' I see you do this a lot, where you argue from the conclusion down, and not from the premises upward. For example, you say that Christianity spread because the Christians were persecuted. You then say that the real reason Christianity spread was because it was made a state religion. You don't allow room for argument. You adhere to convictions and conclusions with a sort of mind-blowing passion.

You are simply trying to dummy-down theism so that it appears absurd. Instead of playing semantic games, why not attack the arguments being put forth?

Your first paragraph is very trollish, btw. It is ridiculous because, AS I HAVE POINTED OUT NUMEROUS TIMES to you, it is based on a strawman of your own making. You just consistently ignore the statements theists make here that our beliefs are not simply based upon philosophy alone, but an array of evidence from all the different fields of thought and science.

Furthermore, I stated that God is uncreated out of a logical necessity. You just asserted that he wasn't, and proposed a causal event where one is not needed. I'm not sure wtf you are hoping to accomplish.

If you are here just to frustrate, you are doing a good job. And, in fact, now that I look at your whole reply again, and its tone, it is clear to me that you just trolling. What is up with that?

Aquinas explicitly said that it was compatible with the universe having been created that it has also always existed ("Thus it is clear that there is no contradiction in saying that something made by God has always existed." On the Eternity of the World). Thus, while he believed in accord with the Catholic faith that the universe had a beginning, he didn't believe this could be shown through natural theology.

They believed that the universe had a beginning, but that the Christian doctrine of creation was compatible with the universe having always existed. Has Doggg contradicted this somewhere?

That's true though I'd still refrain from using him as an example of someone Doggg disagrees with when he is saying the universe began to exist. That said I didn't actually know Aquinas had argued that position so point taken.

ok, if thats the case then he is making the meaningless statement of

"everything that has a cause, has a cause", since you are defining "beginning to exist" as "having been caused".

For one, I didn't define anything. I took his statemtn and pointed out that you were employing a sceptical argument vs. a statement that he never made.

For two:

fyp

Don't weasel out of it. In that other thread you were understanding "having been caused" in just the same way he used it here. If you find that way of understanding the term leads to meaningless statements, then you are guilty of that as well. If you don't, you need to accept that there are meaningful statements under both usages.

For three, he didn't "define" it that way either. Saying "Everything that Bs has a C" doesn't mean that B and C are synonymous. Everything that eats has a stomach. That's obv. not synonymous with Everything that has a stomach has a stomach.

Ok , I am happy to agree with the statement,

"Everything that we have observed to start to exist, and by start to exist we mean transform from or change from previously existing matter and structure, has a cause."

Now Im interested to know how this applies to something we havent observed to start to exist, ie the universe, which is claimed, by both sides to a greater or lesser extent, to have "appeared from nothing", because this creating is nothing like the creating, or starting to exist, that I talked about in my previous paragraph.

They seem like 2 different "starting to exist" 's to me

I thought that Aristotle believed that the universe had always existed and Aquinas was able to make that compatible with Christian Doctrine through the logic of god having created the universe to have always existed. Many of the greatest minds throughout history have been unable to agree on this issue.

I guess I was implying that Doggg only thinks that the universe was created because he has been influenced to believe that by Christian doctrine and that he doesn't have a compelling argument to support his assertion, it probably came straight out of the bible.

Well, for one it applies in that it's simply a reasonable strategy to assume that a relationship we observe to hold true for all observable physical things to also hold true for the universe (also a physical entity) about which's beginning we can only speculate (but of which's beginning we do have circumstatial evidence (Cosmic microwave background radiation)).

Take a look at the article OrP referred me to; it seems that Aquinas was arguing was that it is logically possible for God to have created that which has always existed not that the universe didn't have a beginning. It seems he was regularly making Aristotlean philosophy compatible with the teaching of the church.

I'm finding it tough to read without it reading like a justification for the omnipotence of God but that's probably just be me.

So I disagree with Doggg on certain positions he holds pretty vehemently but I don't think this is a fair assertion.

I don't think it's accurate to say the universe is a physical entity. It is the set of all known and supposed objects. Besides, this seems like a composition fallacy either way

Yes that's how I understood it. My issue with this subject is that I'm pretty much on the fence with regard to the origins of the universe. I'm aware of attempts through Reason to show that the universe has always existed, further attempts through Reason to show that it actually had a beginning (although I just view that as religious wriggling) AND has always existed, and modern science presenting evidence of the Big Bang (although that doesn't disprove that the causal chain is in fact circular) so how can I possibly have any certainty on this? I'm no philosopher or theoretical physicist.

I think that the certainty of people like Doggg comes from religious scripts and the application of faith, not from any reasoning on their part. Dogg is simply believing what he's been told to believe.


Why not?

Because I think that Doggg has given it more thought than you are suggesting

If we didn't know better, we might think it was a reasonable strategy to assume that since hydrogen and oxygen are both gaseous in standard Earth-atmospheric conditions, the same should hold true for anything resulting from their admixture. But we do know better.

And I mean, hydrogen and oxygen are relatively simple substances. So the idea that something not true of them should hold true for them plus everything else in the universe is a stretch. It might be true, of course, but the intuitive appeal you're presenting isn't persuasive.