Edward Feser, the Pasadena pyrotechnic philosopher, has a new post up about the ignorance of philosophers, scientists, and others who refuse to pay close attention to Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Leibniz and, of course, him. Nor will he deign to argue the point in a blog post, because all the metaphysics that is assumed by the cosmological argument is simply too complex to pack into the compass of a blog post; we will just have to read his books, Aquinas and The Last Superstition. The basic error that is made can, however, be stated simply, and that is, well, simply this: “The [cosmological] argument does NOT rest on the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and “‘What Caused God?’ is not a serious objection to the argument.“
And, strictly speaking, this is true. The purpose of the argument is to show that the existence of contingent beings demands the existence of a being which is its own cause (causa sui). It follows, of course, that asking what causes the being that causes itself is not a serious objection to the argument, even though many philosophers have taken this course. Of course, it does not follow that the argument succeeds in demonstrating the existence of a self-caused being, in which case it does make sense to ask about the cause of the being which underlies contingent being. Doubtless, if the supposedly self-caused being — which, as Aquinas says, ”all men call God” – has not been shown to exist, asking for the cause of this self-originating being is merely rubbing salt into philosophical wounds, and perhaps this is what they intend to do, though Feser takes the question as a total misunderstanding of the cosmological argument itself.
However, even though Feser says, in his de haut en bas way, that most philosophers and others who try to refute the cosmological argument haven’t taken the trouble to understand the metaphysical basis for the argument, let alone the structure and intent of the argument itself, it is perhaps worthwhile making a blog post stab at the argument anyway. (It is also worth mentioning parenthetically that Feser’s accusation of sleaze and dishonesty against those who have argued against the cosmological argument is unnecessarily personal. Saying that someone has misunderstood an argument is part of the argument. Saying that they did so as a result of dishonesty and sleaze is an inappropriate move — unless, of course, it is obviously true. As I shall point out below, there is a real sense in which, underlying the cosmological argument, there is the simpler argument that everything requires a cause. That the argument purports to stop the regress of causes by arguing that the principle that everything requires a cause — the simple version of the cosmological argument – implies the existence of a self-caused being, does nothing to change the structure of the argument which is, to quote Feser’s account of what he takes as inaccurate rendering of the cosmological argument: “Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause; so God exists.”)
Now, no doubt Feser would say, fizzing contemptuously, that it takes more than a quote from Aquinas to sum up the cosmological argument (or arguments), the heart of the cosmological argument, as he presents it in this post (which we understand needs to be supplemented by his two books and a lot of other stuff besides) is to be found in Aquinas’ Third Way in the Summa Theologica (Third Article [I, Q.2, Art.3]) But before we come to that, it is only fair to point out that Aquinas’ Second Way is essentially the argument that Feser dismisses as a misunderstanding of the cosmological argument, being the argument that “in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity …” Perhaps this depends on the other arguments, but Aquinas presents it as an argument complete in itself, and it is hardly fair to dismiss objections to it as misunderstandings.
But the bigger fish are swimming in the big sea of the Third Way, which is put by Aquinas as follows:
The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence–which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.
Obviously, we cannot provide a completely exhaustive refutation of the argument in a blog post. In this, at least, Feser is correct. But we can summarise the argument and ask ourselves whether the various stages of the argument are compelling.
First of all, the point of the argument is clear. Contingent things exist because other things cause them to exist. They do not exist by necessity. Therefore, they might not have existed. At this point Aquinas makes a very questionable move. He argues that, if everything that exists might not have existed, then there would be a time when nothing existed. If nothing (contingent) existed, there is nothing that could bring about the existence of anything unless that thing existed necessarily. And this, says Aquinas triumphantly, is what all men call God.
How good is this argument? Certainly, the leap from necessary existence to the being that all men call God is, just as it stands, illegitimate, though doubtless here is where the additional metaphysical assumptions make their appearance. The argument seems to be that, if what exists at one time did not exist, then only choice (that is, agency) can explain what exists now, and this points towards personal being of some sort, and it should not be hard, given that beginning, to spin out all the other characteristics of what “all men call God.”
Let’s leave that aside for the moment, because there are more serious problems here. Does it follow, we must ask, that, if everything is contingent, it is necessary that at some time nothing should have existed? This premise is essential to Aquinas’ argument, but it seems to commit the fallacy of composition. Does it follow from the contingency of everything that at one time there must have been nothing? No, it doesn’t. There may have been, but need not have been, a time when there was nothing, in the sense of no-thing, but even if there were it does not follow that the no-thing cannot bring contingent things into existence. Indeed, this is just what physicists now claim, when they suggest that “nothing” is in fact unstable. Consider the following excerpt from a lecture by Lawrence Krauss:
It might be argued (as William Lane Craig does in his response to Krauss’s response to Craig) that the nothing of which Krauss speaks is not “really” nothing, but it is, arguably, not something in the sense in which there exist casual chains of contingent particles or entities. As Krauss says, we simply do not know why it is there, nor, in a sense, then, do we understand what it “is”. All we seem to know is that, in any sense in which we use the classical language of being and non-being, whatever “it” (viz., “nothing”) is, it seems to be nothing, and yet this nothing can be unstable in such a way as to bring universes into being.
Now, I’m not going even to pretend to understand what all this means. Nevertheless, it suggests an answer to the questions raised by the cosmological argument. First of all, there is no logical reason why personal being should not have evolved from simpler forms of life, as, indeed, evolution presupposes; nor is there any logical reason why life should not have been the outcome of chance occurrences in the natural world, the right elements coming together under the right circumstances to begin the process of evolution towards more complex types of organic, and then of living, molecules. That this has not yet been explained — and may never be — does not make the search for the details misconceived or illogical.
Thus, the real question lies in how the natural world, the material universe, came to be. The cosmological argument depends ultimately on the assumption that actual infinities are self-contradictory. That is why Aquinas assumes that, if everything is contingent, there must have been a time when there was nothing. Otherwise, there is no reason to postulate a self-caused first cause, for, if an infinite regress of causes is possible, a self-caused first cause would be surplus to requirements, since there would then be no need of a first cause. Now, here’s the point of all this. In the universe described by Krauss we seem to have just what the doctor ordered: a mysterious universe which fulfils all Aquinas’ fears about the self-contradictoriness of an actual infinity, which in some unexplained, inchoate way “exists”, and yet which, in a way not yet (and perhaps never to be) understood, randomly “throws off” universes, which either grow in predictable ways, or revert to the “nothingness” out of which they came.
This suggestion is, I think, consistent with Lawrence Krauss’s account of what is now known about physics and cosmology. I don’t even pretend to understand what it all means, in any detailed sense, since that would take a degree of mathematical knowledge and aptitude which I do not possess. The important point here, however, is this. If this account is even in these broad outlines plausibly true, then there is simply no need to posit necessary beings of any kind. There may be an infinity of mysterious forces which underlie the existence of material universes, and perhaps even an infinity of universes, of which the one we find ourselves in is only one. The point was made a long time ago by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where he supposes that the universe we live in may be the discarded attempt at creating a universe by some young or superannuated god. There is simply no reason to think of this universe as either the best or the only one possible, and nothing but presumption can lead us to any other conclusion.
That is no doubt why, when we look out into the universe at night, and see the stars and galaxies receding into unimaginably vast and humbling distances, we might, like Pascal, seem so alone and insignificant. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal remarked in his Pensées. And surely his experience of cosmic loneliness and insignificance was just as revealing as his remarkable experience of religious fire:
Fire‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’
not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
‘Thy God shall be my God.’
The world forgotten, and everything except God.
He can only be found
by the ways taught in the Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
‘O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known thee.’
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.
‘My God wilt thou forsake me?’
Let me not be cut off from him for ever!
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.’
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day’s effort on earth.
I will not forget thy word.
Amen.
Sewn into the lining of his coat, these words were found after Pascal’s death, and were no doubt held onto all the more fervently, because in that experience he found the alternative to the frightening vision of infinite, barren spaces, the vision of modern science, which seemed so cold and bewilderingly impersonal. This is still true of many today, who resort to religious vision for comfort and reassurance against the threat of the vast impersonal universe in relation to which we seem so very fleeting and impermanent.
However, the fact that we may feel small and insignificant in a universe which, in a few short months, will crush us heedlessly, does not make the godless vision any less true, and no amount of toying with the logic of infinity or of causation will rescue the religious vision from a well-deserved rest. And this leads me to one last reflection on the cosmological argument(s). The reason why so many people ignore the detailed argumentation to which Feser refers, and the books in which this argumentation is so carefully laid out, is that, for many of us, there are simply too many other reasons for believing that such argumentation, no matter how elaborate, cannot be successful. For, after all the “proofs” of God’s existence have been addressed in their strongest form, the simple truth seems to be that there are too many other reasons not to believe. The fact that science has shown, repeatedly, that the god hypothesis is not needed in order to understand the workings of the world, or that the variety of different religious belief systems seems inevitably to argue against the assumption that any one of them is true, or that the manifold evils suffered, not only throughout the millions of years of evolutionary history, but built right into the process of evolution itself, seem convincingly to show that belief in a god or gods really contributes very little, if anything at all, to the sum of our knowledge about the world or of our existence in it. And for this reason alone, the classical “proofs” for the existence of God simply no longer have the power to persuade.
If scientists and philosophers over-simplify the arguments and so refute arguments which no self-respecting theologian or religious philosopher ever made, the reason is not to be sought in sleaze and dishonesty, as Feser, fizzing away with the high dudgeon of an outraged philosopher, suggests meanly; no, the answer is to be sought in the other reasons that atheists have for not taking such arguments seriously. It may also be the case that contemporary science, as I have suggested, includes all that is necessary to overthrow cosmological arguments for the existence of god(s), and that this is, however dimly, appreciated by those who confront these arguments in their weakest and least elaborate form. Feser must have other reasons why we should attend to these complex logical arguments, and just telling us that the arguments are not as simple as many people assume is not one of them.
All of this seems to flow from the flawed physics of Aristotle. Think of the analogy of running into a brick wall – you bounce off, but the wall is unmoved. Yet we now know that in collisions between these two objects – the wall does move. Aristotle used this idea to put an unmoving earth in the center of the universe. Things fall to earth because the earth is the heaviest thing – the earth as the unmoved mover, so to speak. My understanding is that other philosophers at the time could see the flaws in this argument (not to mention the better fit of cosmological data to heliocentrism) and that there was no need for a motionless body in the center. The cosmological argument is a further extension of this faulty analogy. If the earth “causes” things to fall toward it, but is unaffected by that falling, then why not a being that is an uncaused cause. Perhaps I am out of my depth here, but can’t see Aristotle and Aquinas as particularly relevant to questions of science and philosophy today.
Another philosopher arrogant enough to think that centuries of navel gazing trumps investigations into reality. Just because philosophers have comfortably divided existence into necessary and contingent beings doesn’t mean reality must oblige by providing them. The most current science does in fact suggest that some beings (in the sense being used, which does not suggest personhood) can be both contingent and uncaused–with necessary beings being, well, unnecessary. That is, we can imagine these contingent beings not existing, yet they do exist and apparently without being caused by anything.
Feser keeps exhorting unbelievers to retreat back into ancient texts because that’s the only place his version of reality exists. It’s not enough to understand the arguments, we must live with them long enough that they become our substitute reality; so long that we forget there is a real world outside our window that is under no compulsion to accord with our musings.
As I see it, everything that any philosopher before the 19th century said about infinity can and should be disregarded because the mathematical tools to reason about infinity did not yet exist, and the concept of infinity cannot meaningfully be discussed without them.
Furthermore, everything that any philosopher before the 20th century said about the nature of continuity, the existence or otherwise of a “first moment” in time, the concepts of boundedness and closure, etc., can be disregarded because the tools needed to discuss those concepts (which belong to abstract topology) properly likewise did not exist. (It wasn’t realized until the 19th century(!) that something as apparently simple as Euclid’s first theorem can’t be proved from Euclid’s axioms because it contains hidden assumptions about completeness.)
“But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not.”
That’s also a false statement. It makes no more sense than to argue that because it is possible for my car to be in Charleston, at some time my car IS in Charleston. Something can be possible, and yet never actually happen.
Exactly. The quantum foam that may constitute the ‘necessary’ element in the universe – or multiverse – may have, by random action, produced all we see and are, without any notions of ‘causality’. Feser’s ruminations perhaps can be summed up in the old word-salad:
That which is is; that which is not is not; that which is is not that which is not; that which is not is not that which is; is that clear?
I have no particular interest in the argument as such, but the level of snarky arrogance in Feser’s posts is very suggestive of someone in chronic denial. (I nearly wrote ‘Fester’, which may have been a Freudian slip).
As for theology, it occurs to me that one difference between real science and bogus disciplines is that science can be summarised. If I want to find out about quantum physics I can get a ten-word summary, a hundred-word review, a thousand-word article… all the way up to thousand-page books on some obscure subsubtopic. None of these contradict any of the others; they simply expand on the details.
Theology and other bogus sciences, on the other hand, operate on the principle that you have to swallow the whole kit and kaboodle before you can claim to understand even the simplest formula. There are obvious psychological reasons why this should be so — having done so much work one is reluctant to admit it has all been in vain — but I think it provides a useful touchstone for identifying fake science.
I saw the same phenomenon when I was a computer trainer in the 90s: after Windows came along some people spent years vigorously defending their continuing use of DOS, simply because they had invested so much time in learning it.
Thomas Henry Huxley lamented that many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. Theologians are those who refuse to abandon the corpse while desperately waving away flies.
It is interesting that Feser can only tell us that everyone who rejects the cosmological argument doesn’t understand it (because if they did understand it, they would agree with him that it is true), but he can’t tell us what the argument actually is or why it is true. How complicated can it actually be? If he can’t explain it in a blog post, shouldn’t this clue us in that he doesn’t understand it himself?
Yes indeed, Michael. You brought this up in your comment on “When I stopped being an atheist” http://choiceindying.com/2011/07/20/when-i-stopped-being-an-atheist/ and I thought it very interesting (though I’m out of my depth, too), because I also have a sense that to some extent theology is stuck in the age of Aquinas and his great synthesis of Christian thought and Aristotelian philosophy.
Aristotle’s views often seem like “common sense”, such as the idea that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones, and I think that theology is still trapped in that same way of looking at the world. For all their complaints that critics don’t engage fully with theological writings, theologians in general show a very poor grasp of modern science. On the other hand, “Things fall to earth because the earth is the heaviest thing” is very nearly a theory of gravity: it’s a pity Aristotle didn’t manage to work it out, but he saw this phenomenon in terms of things seeking their “natural place”, as though things have some sort of affinity by association, and he didn’t think of forces — well, how could he, after all? It always strikes me as utterly incredible that Newton managed it. It must surely stand as one definition of genius.
It is a fact that the earth looks bigger than everything else, and everything else looks as if it goes round the earth. But there’s no excuse that modern-day theologians should continue Aristotle’s erroneous and now-irrelevant “commonsense” arguments. Thoughts on “things look as if they are caused” to follow.
Eric, I think you are surely right when you say that the real question is how the universe came to be. I look at it like this (and I am no philosopher, so Feser can despise me with a good conscience). The problem of causality is that causality is dependent on us: specifically, it is our way of looking at things. In reality, there are interactions and changes of state. Something we define as a “rabbit” eventually becomes so much carbon dioxide and an increase of fat in a few happy worms. It isn’t true to say that the rabbit has completely ceased to exist, but only that what comprised the rabbit has ceased to comprise a rabbit. As a matter of fact, the “rabbit” is so far from being a discrete entity that it can be described as a process of gas exchange, metabolism, electro-chemical interactions and genetic information. Everything from a dandelion to a black hole is the result of the continual redistribution of matter and energy. The matter and energy are there, the conformations they take and the processes they undergo and which are expressed in those resultant conformations are what we take to be the contingent “things that exist”.
We spend a lot of time analysing the process by which a conformation comes about — a baby, a crystal, a solar prominence, a traffic accident — and call it “causality”. Aquinas’s arguments rest on the assumption that these contingent conformations are some sorts of discrete realities that are “caused”. So he can say that a thing has the possibility of either existing or not existing. He doesn’t take into account that the thing that exists or ceases to exist is a conformation of what has always existed (coextensive with the universe) and which continues to exist after the particular conformation-process has disintegrated. The conformations, then, are a red herring, ultimately to be explained by physics. So the question that remains is the existence of the whole business of matter and energy: what explains the universe?
My problem with putting this question in the form “what is the cause of the universe?” is that our notion of causality is limited to what we see matter and energy doing, and I am unable to see how it is meaningful when applied to the whole. It is as though we regard the universe as just another “thing” (conformation) like a galaxy or a broken egg. It seems natural to ask the question, but I do not see how it can really be right. I think this is a problem with how our brains work.
I suspect that this is the same perception that leads Aquinas and associates to postulate a being which is causa sui, “outside” the universe. But I see no reason to presume that the universe itself cannot have necessary existence. After all, if I am right, the universe subsumes causality. And I suspect that “necessary existence” means no more than “it exists, because it does”.
I like this. I think one issue, as you point out, is that common sense is not science. The whole issue over geocentrism is a case in point, the earth appears to be the biggest thing in the universe, big things are heavy, big things don’t move, things fall to the earth. It all makes sense, but it is all known to be wrong. When you read Aquinas, he seems to be arguing from common sense and making analogies to the way he understands the world works, but it is an out-dated understanding.
Another issue is that we don’t really know what people were thinking in the past and the farther back we go the less we know. Did Aristotle’s writings survive because they were the best thought of his time or because they were luckily preserved or because they were championed by someone in power? It is in a way like the fossil record and the tree of life – sometimes you’re good and sometimes you’re lucky – it is hard to reconstruct which is which. I never know how much my biases are intruding, but it always strikes me as odd that no one recorded experiments. At least, they don’t appear in the writing. Did they just not trust them? or not value them as highly as logic?
It seems to me that if you substitute the term “reality” for the term “universe” the problem with the causality question becomes even clearer. Now all the potential multi-verses, transcendent realms, and immaterial gods are perforce included in our Ultimate Being — an uncaused cause which all men do not speak of as God. God, if it exists and is real, would be a subset of “reality” (or even “Reality”) and might or might not be.
If it’s hard to see why the universe itself cannot have necessary existence, I think it even harder to see why reality itself cannot have necessary existence. In fact, the concept of reality “beginning to exist” makes zero sense, for the Big Bang is connected to a particular outcome — and “reality” is generously vague enough to be applicable to all potential states of affairs, regardless of whether they are the way they are because someone wanted them to be that way or not.
Yes, and still the ultimate problem for the CA is this:
There is no reason to believe that even if the CA’s premises are ALL true and can be proven by science (which is trivially wrong) that the “uncaused cause”, first mover, or whatever other metaphor you want to invoke is the Yahweh of the bible.
Why not the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Or invisible, interdimensional green alien monkeys? How does one LEAP to “baby Jesus” and the burning bush? Shiva, Osiris, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl and all the other gods are insulted by the instant usurpation of the god space by what was originally nothing more than a storm god of an insignificant civilization.
Why Yahweh? Prove Yahweh and ONLY Yahweh. If you can do that with “arguments”, I’ll convert. Fact is, you can’t. Because all of the evidence and historical and archaeological data argue in precisely the opposite direction.
What you’ll be left with are unsupported assertions of the type that Batman can beat up Spider-Man (or vice versa).
The reliance on Thomas, if I’m not mistaken, is nearly exclusively Catholic. I thought I’d read somewhere in Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy” (1945) that Aquinas is not otherwise taken seriously, but I couldn’t find it. He does note this: “In all Catholic educational systems that teach philosophy his system has to be taught as the only right one; this has been the rule since a rescript of 1879 by Leo XIII.”
You couldn’t ask for a better example of the Courtier’s Reply than Feser’s. Here is a man who has written two books on the subject who claims that you can’t be taken seriously unless you’ve mastered the original materials, but can’t or won’t explain why this is the case.
It’s trivially true that the usual summaries of Aquinas’s arguments and their obvious refutations don’t deal in detail with the reasoning behind them, but there’s no reason why they should. Galileo didn’t have to refute Aristotle’s metaphysics to show that his results were wrong. A case has yet to be made that any of the traditional arguments for God ought to be taken seriously in contemporary terms, embracing the entirety of scientific understanding.
Doesn’t Feser have any sense how old, odd, rusty and musty Aristotle’s musings about causes and contingencies seem in the light of our mastery of quantum theory? Has he any inkling of how flash memory works, to cite just one example of how far we’ve progressed in the last couple of millenia?
One nice phrase I picked up in my brief skirmish with philosophy was ‘carving nature at the joints’, which I am told comes from Plato’s Phaedrus. What you are saying, I think, and what I agree with, is that there ARE no ‘joints’ in nature. The decision to refer to a particular set of atoms in a particular configuration as a ‘rabbit’ is purely pragmatic; it’s wholly dependent on the fact that humans are a certain size, eat a certain diet, metabolise at a certain rate, etc… If we imagine ourselves at the scale of an ant or a bacterium, for instance, a lot of the things we regard as ‘objects’ would no longer fit that description. If we moved a hundred times faster or slower, our ideas of ‘events’ and ‘processes’ would be very different.
My overall view is a pragmatic one. Language ‘works’ when we use it successfully to get other people to do what we want them to do. Questions about what is ‘true’ or ‘real’ in the ‘world’ or the ‘universe’ are essentially misguided.
Here’s Russell’s conclusion to his chapter on Aquinas, with which I think we are bound to agree:
the concept of reality “beginning to exist” makes zero sense, for the Big Bang is connected to a particular outcome — and “reality” is generously vague enough to be applicable to all potential states of affairs
I think you make an interesting point, Sastra. I don’t think that I can honestly distinguish between the universe and all of reality, except that perhaps “universe” is a useful word when we mean “reality as scientists hope to measure it”.
I suppose I tend to go for words like “stuff” and “matter” because I worry about abstractions: it’s so easy for people to try to sneak god in through the back door when abstract nouns and adjectives (the Real, the Ultimate, etc.) come into play. On the other hand, I think your point is surely right. We can see enough of reality to know that it is simply “what there is”. As long as “Reality” means “what there is” and doesn’t become a super-receptacle or mystic “ground” for “what there is”. I am thinking of our incorrigible tendency to distinguish “matter” and “form”.
Reminiscent of Weinberg’s comment that ‘the universe is just something that happens every so often.’
One of the odd things about the defense of the cosmological argument is the claim that the argument is independent of science and empiricism. The whole argument follows from how Aristotle thought the world worked – motion, cause and effect, existence, form, and design. It was based on empirical observations. That his conclusions are now known to be incorrect is a serious defect in the argument. The inherent dualism – that life and mind have both material and spiritual components – is an assertion lacking empirical support, but plays an important role in supporting the arguments for gods.
The bit that I really have trouble with in the Cosmological argument is the notion of a necessary being. I just don’t know what that could be, since all beings we call and understand as beings are products of contingency. A necessary being makes about as much sense to me as a necessary bee – yet I don’t see theologians going on about the great honeymaker in the sky, just an anthromorphic deity instead.
The Cosmological argument, each time I hear a version of it, sounds like a bait and switch – it seems (at least superficially to this non-philosopher) plausible on the face of it, but then “This all men speak of as God.” comes out and I’m left dumbfounded. It feels like I’m missing something.
I think we are too polite to philosopher-theists. Their position can be re-stated as follows.
1. The existence (or occurrence) of X is puzzling and wonderful. (X can be anything from ‘The Universe’ to the inverse square law to a frozen waterfall.)
2. Therefore X is magic.
3. Therefore there are magicians.
4. Therefore there is a Grand Magician.
5. Who is the god I was brought up to believe in, except that my conception of it is deeply subtle.
6. So deeply subtle that this god never has to do anything verifiable, or be answerable to the 999 out of 1000 tadpoles whose destiny is to be eaten alive.
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http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/12/hume-cosmological-arguments-and-fallacy.html
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-part-of-nothing-dont-you.html
“Now, I’m not going even to pretend to understand what all this means. Nevertheless, it suggests an answer to the questions raised by the cosmological argument. First of all, there is no logical reason why personal being should not have evolved from simpler forms of life, as, indeed, evolution presupposes; nor is there any logical reason why life should not have been the outcome of chance occurrences in the natural world, the right elements coming together under the right circumstances to begin the process of evolution towards more complex types of organic, and then of living, molecules. That this has not yet been explained — and may never be — does not make the search for the details misconceived or illogical.”
???