Kim Jones writes:
>Then in making that assertion it follows surely that we (x) are all God
>(y) and God has no particular attributes that we do not possess, being in
>some sense equivalent.
>
>God would then be equivalent to Life.
>
>Stathis may have unwittingly "proven" the existence of the big G
>
>Kim Jones
>
>
>On 31/10/2005, at 12:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>> to the quest for a first cause applies to the quest for ultimate
>>meaning: you can always ask, if the meaning (or cause, or purpose) of x
>>is y, what's the meaning (or cause, or purpose) of y? If you assert that
>>y is special because it is the "ultimate" meaning (or cause, or purpose),
>>then why not make the same assertion of x?
Teasing this point out further, the obvious response to the Argument from
First Cause is, if God made the universe, who made God? The theist's
comeback is that nobody made God. Well, why not then say that nobody made
the Universe? The answer is that the universe is a type of thing that
*needs* a maker, as evidenced by everyday experience, and the only way to
get around the implied infinite regression if everything needs a maker is to
postulate a completely different kind of thing - an unmade maker, a
"necessary being" which contains within itself the reason for its own
existence. (Thus, the Argument from First Cause reduces to a form of the
Ontological Argument).
Just a few of the problems with the above: it is by no means necessary that
all the attributes of the elements of a set (the contents of the universe)
must apply to the set as a whole; it is not clear that an infinite
regression is something that can't happen; it is not clear that causality
has any meaning when considering what happened "before" time and space
existed; and it certainly isn't obvious that an extra-temporal cause of the
universe, if such a thing could exist, would be any closer to a traditional
picture of God than the big bang, or any other theory of cosmogony is.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Mon Oct 31 2005 - 05:19:56 PST