So......

Alright, it looks like I have to get into it. q:

The cosmological argument is this:

Either there’s an endless amount of stuff creating other stuff forever and ever into the past,

or else somewhere back there far enough in time there is Something that doesn’t follow those rules, exists without having been created, and is responsible for the existence of everything that came later.

If you take the second option, it’s your perogative whether or not you call that thing “God”. All we know about it (if you take that option) is that it’s the uncreated creator.

Whether or not this is the same thing as the Christian God, or whether or not there is such a thing as the Christian God, is completely besides the point. The cosmological argument shows only that there is something at the beginning. It establishes that something with a couple of the qualities of God does (or did) in fact exist.

Mr.Sun wanted to know why he can’t say the universe doesn’t exist forever, if religious people can say that God exists forever, and the answer is just this- science tells us that the stuff of the universe isn’t the kind of stuff that could have always been there. Things like rocks and stars need a cause. The very definition of ‘God’ as it relates to this argument is ‘the sort of thing that doesn’t need to be caused’.

Sorry for the confusion but I fully understand that, I was just wondering why my:

Wasn’t a proper substitute for his:

Because neither are relevant to the thing we’re discussing. Whether or not Odin is the uncreated creator is something we can discuss, but only once we’ve both accepted that there IS an uncreated creator and are willing to take that step.

I figured we already established that there is no defense to the arguement so I was just trying to branch the conversation.

No defense to which argument? It is true that God doesn’t need a creator, and it is true that the Universe does. It is false that you can claim the universe has ‘always been there’ just as well as I can claim that God has always been there. Are we accepting all that, and moving on? I’m a little lost again. (:

Hello Uccisore, or should you prefer “killer”?:

— So, we need to answer where the universe came from because ‘things come from other things’ is one of the principal behaviors of the physical universe. The only possible answer (the cosmological argument says) is that there is something that does not come from other things behind it all.

When arguing with the christian, for example, we can from a common acknowledgement of reality agree that effects have causes. This is an agreement nonetheless and not some experience into the root of all being. We could almost say that we feel that an effect “should” have cause.
Va Bene.
From there comes the idea of an either infinite regression of causes, or the arrival at an uncaused cause, and this, they say, they call God. But whether we call it God or Unmoved Mover, the fact remains that this is just an opinion into what reality should be like and not based on any experience. A belief in the necessity of a cause for every effect comes from observing nature. Where does the belief come for the end of this condition?
In any case, even if were to I posit that the universe has always existed (and some scientists favor this view, I believe the name is Ekpyrotic theory) or that God created the universe, in both cases I posit some eternal thing, be it God or nature.
Make a choice. What is clear is that it is not certain that a root cause is necessary in itself and that God becomes necessary in order to restore the standard eternity some take from nature.

=D> we are accepting that and moving on.

The Italian is more elegant (and that’s the point), but to each their own. In a related thought, if you Google "Uccisore’, ILP comes up as the very first hit!

I think the important parts of the opinion are already agreed upon by entertaining the question in the first place. If a person feels the need to take that step and [i]ask[/i] where everything came from, there's a tacit admission there that it wasn't all just here for no reason, or here forever. I think that comes from a scientific background- we like to know where stuff comes from.  If a person's background is such that the question of where things come from isn't compelling to them, if it seems plausible to them that planets, stars, and so on have just [i]always[/i] been around, then the question doesn't get asked, and the cosmological argument is very uncompelling to them. 
Also, there's this business of treating the Universe as though it were one thing. Certainly we can speak of it that way, but is it useful to do so? If we say "The Universe has always existed", it's tempting to believe that we're pointing to one thing- The Unverse- and saying it's the eternal thing in place of God. However, what we're [i]really[/i] doing is is pointing at a myriad of things in a set, and saying that the relationship between those  things can be extended back into an infinite regression. It's the notion of infinite regression being impossible that gives the cosmological argument any punch in the first place, ain't it?

Hello Uccisore:

“If we say “The Universe has always existed”, it’s tempting to believe that we’re pointing to one thing- The Unverse- and saying it’s the eternal thing in place of God. However, what we’re really doing is is pointing at a myriad of things in a set, and saying that the relationship between those things can be extended back into an infinite regression.”

Everything is both whole and divisible, though not infinitely. The best description, in my opinion, of the universe is organic. An organism like myself may have cells that are created and then die, but I, the whole to which they belong, transcend them.
Using the word “Universe” can be problematic because in some cosmologies we are talking about a multi-verse. Yet rather than complicate an otherwise simple debate, I have used “Universe” as-if it refered to all we’ve so far surveyed.
That does not mean that the sun is eternal, but that that which contains it is. If we say that this universe had a parent universe in the multi-verse, then that which contains the universe–the multi-verse in this case-- in turn becomes eternal.
Hmmm…is this similar to Cantor’s argument of Sets?

“It’s the notion of infinite regression being impossible that gives the cosmological argument any punch in the first place, ain’t it?”

Absolutely.

Even in the case of organic systems, we don’t have any examples that persist forever, or don’t come about without a prior cause. The Universe would be unique in that sense. But of course, the Universe is going to be unique no matter what it’s like. There’s a question of simplicity here, too, and I’m not sure which way that points- it doesn’t sound particularly simple to say that a complex arrangement of finite things can somehow add up to one infinite whole- that seems to contradict experience. But it also doesn’t seem simple to say that there’s some Other kind of thing that doesn’t fit in with the natural, which is responsible for the active creation of everything finite. I do find it less plausible that a universe made up of the kind of matter I’m familiar with could be eternal.

Hello Uccisore:

— Even in the case of organic systems, we don’t have any examples that persist forever, or don’t come about without a prior cause.
O- That was an analogy. Of course organisms are different from the universe, but we can describe facets of the universe through the analogy. Indeed, every son has a father and every father is the son of yet another father who his the granparent of the other’s son. God being our Father we simply ask:“Who is his Father?” or “Who is our Grandfather?”

— it doesn’t sound particularly simple to say that a complex arrangement of finite things can somehow add up to one infinite whole- that seems to contradict experience.
O- The analogy of an organism fails just like any other analogy at the point of eternity. Eternity is not something we directly experience because we ourselves are finite,and so is every experience we have. But suppose we consider time for a moment. We have arrived here from a succession of other moments just like this one. Suppose we number each moment, (which is not too much of a sin, since we already consider them as units that are equal enough to warrant being called by the same “moment”) backwards. If this moment, say April 2006, is 0, regressively we could label April 2005 as minus 1, or -1, and continue along in this fashion, past the date theorized for the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, or the current cycle of the universe, or the date given by Christians, some 10,000 years, which would mean that we would be counting into the minus 10,000s. But at this point in our countdown, regardless of what we find, either God or a Singularity or a multi-verse, we still can keep counting back. No necessity can keep us from counting. (It is also at this momet that some tire and place God or some other symbol such as ∞).
The infinity of numbers is the infinity of moments. As it seems most natural for us to count, it also seems most natural, despite our lack of infinite experience, that the universe, or that which contains every moment in time we could possibly count to be infinite. Every number in the line, then, is a finite period but the line they form extends in either end infinetly. These moments, these finite things do add up to an infinite thing, an infinite string with no beginning and no end that we can conceive.

— I do find it less plausible that a universe made up of the kind of matter I’m familiar with could be eternal.
O- What stuff is that? To me it seems a respectable assumption. Many believe that matter is neither created nor destroyed: If that is actually the case, then why the need for a Creator? If matter/energy could not be created nor destroyed, then in fact all is eternal.

 I guess what I'm saying is that the analogy didn't apply to the heart of what I take the conversation to be- if the universe is organic, perhaps [i]especially[/i] if it's organic, it needs to have come from somewhere.  It still seems to me that to refer to the universe as one thing is more of a convenience of language than a true description of anything. 

 It depends on what we're counting, doesn't it? If time is it's own 'stuff', flowing forwards, than you might be right. But if time is a way that we measure the procession of events, then sooner or later we may reach a point back there where no more events take place- we reach the state before the first event. At that point, the only way we could keep counting back would be if you took the excerise to far, and made the mistake of actually writing us, the observer, into that point in the past, our minds cranking out new thoughts as events, and thus able to percieve time going by. 

  Matter and energy in it's purest form cannot be created or destroyed, unless you count the transition from one to the other. But anything sensible or even remotely complex that arises from matter and energy can be broken down into simpler forms, and progresses to that state naturally. We can't let any fantasy grab ahold of us here- to admit that there may always and forever be something that techinically fits the definition of 'energy' or 'matter' should not give us liscence to imagine planets and stars, rocks and trees, for ever and ever. A vast, cold, grey smudge is all we're granted from this. Also, to say that matter and energy will always continue to exist is not to suppose an infinity in the way that supposing it always[i] has [/i]existed does.

I was raised mormon, though I am not practicing any religion currently. In deeper mormon theology it is believed that our current god was created by another god, and that god was created by another god, and so forth. And that humans are gods in embroyo. That human energies and spirits may one day become gods as well, just like god was once a human as well.

so when did gods start existing. well mormons believe that they always have . . . and that is the only explanation that would satisfy the universal truth that has been talked about on this forum, that things come from other things.

However, since we know that all of our physics laws on this planet are not always the same in all of the universe, and that the study of physics has not found out everything or understood everything, I challenge the absolute truth idea that all things must come from something.

I propose a playful idea; our universe and few other million distant universes may all just be a part of a molecule like atom in another larger existance, and that we get our gasses and matter from them. The point is, who the hell knows? I have not found any satisfactory answers yet, so I don’t worry too much about it. It is much better to worry about what you “do know” like what is important to us in our little lives here on this planet.

But it is really interesting to hear people’s views on these things.

Hello Uccisore:

— I guess what I’m saying is that the analogy didn’t apply to the heart of what I take the conversation to be- if the universe is organic, perhaps especially if it’s organic, it needs to have come from somewhere.
O- In the first place we must define what is meant by organic and then see just what in the observable universe we can fit within it. But since we even need a word, we must admit that there are things in the universe that are inorganic. However, the whole investigation is in it’s infancy. For example, we are organic beings, true? But our bodies are made of particles, atoms, and subatomic particle, and these are debatable as to whether they are organic or inorganic. If inorganic, the the difference might just be in the level of perspective used. At a micro level the organic becomes inorganic and vice-versa.
Just because we could, for the sake of argument, consider the universe organic, as some propose we consider the Earth with the Gaia theory, it does not change the problem of being because we still have inorganic matter that forms organic matter to account for. We will not solve the riddle of life without also at the same time solving the riddle of stuff.
By that I mean that whether organic or not, it does not matter.

— It still seems to me that to refer to the universe as one thing is more of a convenience of language than a true description of anything.
O- What would you rather use? Language is a limited tool fraught with errors, but it is the best we got to communicate ideas in our minds. Besides, nothing is infallible.
But interestingly you bring up an idea to me. For example I could say:
“It still seems to me that to refer to God as one thing is more of a convenience of language than a true description of anything.”
If language fails us at a fair description of what we see through telescopes, how much more, or as much, with that called “God”?

— It depends on what we’re counting, doesn’t it? If time is it’s own ‘stuff’, flowing forwards, than you might be right. But if time is a way that we measure the procession of events, then sooner or later we may reach a point back there where no more events take place
O- Even the lack of an event is yet an event still.

— we reach the state before the first event. At that point, the only way we could keep counting back would be if you took the excerise to far, and made the mistake of actually writing us, the observer, into that point in the past, our minds cranking out new thoughts as events, and thus able to percieve time going by.
O- Thinking about the moment of creation involves our minds. Don’t ask me to imagine inflation, to imagine the temperature at the first billionth of a second and then snuff me when we consider the moment before all of this happens. Haven’t we writen ourselves already into the sequence? All of this have to occur in our minds. When we sit here talking about the universe, creation and what not, we do so in error already, from assumptions and presumptions, so don’t invocke some purity we have long left behind.
This Primordial atom, by the fact that it is an atom, is a thing and therefore exist in time, so my line applies. From what I have read, and it has been a while since I read about this subject, that atom had finite mass, but was infinitely small in volume and infinitely large in density. This is the idealization made of crunching what we consider as the universe. The finite mass of a penny crunched infinitely, would be reduced to an infinitely dense point. So far I am with it, but I am lost when all of the sudden we make that mass dissapear. How can it do that? Because we have no events to record? How do we know that? Seems intuitive that a given mass under such pressure is not inactive. The very fact that we have a Bang, proves the point. When something goes Bang! (and I know that we are still dealing in idealizations) it does so after not blowing up. Events occur that bring the condition to the point of explosion. My line persist, if so, beyond the actual Bang.

— Matter and energy in it’s purest form cannot be created or destroyed, unless you count the transition from one to the other. But anything sensible or even remotely complex that arises from matter and energy can be broken down into simpler forms, and progresses to that state naturally. We can’t let any fantasy grab ahold of us here- to admit that there may always and forever be something that techinically fits the definition of ‘energy’ or ‘matter’ should not give us liscence to imagine planets and stars, rocks and trees, for ever and ever.
O- So? The point was never to say that planets, trees and water are eternal, but that nature, the universe which contains them, in whichever form they might have been or are or might be, is. If I say that the universe is eternal, it does not mean that the universe has been without change or that I even the deny the Big Bang. I don’t have to. All that I have to argue here is that the Big Bang is not page 1. The Big Bang cannot prove the finiteness of existence. God cannot prove the finiteness of existence either. Milton is wonderful to illustrate this point. The rebellious devils call themselves sons of Heaven. Why? Because they suppose that it is Heaven and not God which is eternal and the Father/Mother of both God and Devil.
My mind is built in such a way that I cannot imagine true finiteness. If the universe is finite, then what surrounds it? Whiteness? Even God needs a Heaven! We don’t need God, Uccisore and that seems clear to me. When we add God all we do is add a coma in our story of eternity:
Eternity–>God, (Universe)<-- Eternity. We still agree that something is eternal, but while for some it is the process itself of causes and effects, others simplify that and put “God” which is still but a simplified process of causality that allows us to have our cause but also to stop looking for the cause of that cause. That is convenient, sure, but hardly a necessity. as sirswedishmike says, others have reverted the Greek Opus and returned to the process and imagine god as just another cause, which at the same time is the effect of another cause.

You Humans amaze me with your lack of imagination, understanding or creative thought for that matter.

Just why does somthing have to be created?..Because you say it must be? So it is. Ever looping, why must it start?, stop? live? die? can it not simply exist? Be? The Universe does not need a reason to exist, it does. It is hard to explain in word’s. Ever looping creating destroying chaotic,
Yes chaos that is its creation and destruction its beginning and it’s end. Though chaos is all thing’s beginning and end, never begining never ending. If you want to know what god is chaos would be him. Only haveing no conciousness and no will and yet haveing all conciousness and any will. Everything and nothing, alfa and omega, I am that I am.

Theres your answer.

Thats the best way I can explain it, hope you understand.

Human language is such a barrier to the truth.

Once you didn’t comunicate as such, once you used what you now call telepathy or true speach. Nothing can be missinterpreted or misunderstood. Exactly what you want is what you get. Complete understanding.

You lost it in babylon…Someone thought you got too close too soon. And you did.

Now that part of your physical make up has been disabled though your coporial forms are starting to evolve past the barrier that was set, finding new neural pathways and evolving those, in time you will regain it. Wonder if you will be able to stop them from doing it again. And the cause of this was your chosen path tword scientific understanding rather than metaphysical as it would have been, Your change in the evolutionary role of your species.

You have no idea the power at your fingertips, that this form is capable of. You will…one day.

In evolution, things start out small and simple then grow and evolve.

In creation, things start out holy and perfect, then slowly get worse and worse antil God comes and kills everybody who doesn’t comply to his old book of laws.

Evolution has too much proof to ignore, and it is standard science, but it is hard to research and understand so creationists mostly don’t know the details.

If there is a “God”, then he must have evolved also.

A god creating everything, means there has to be a being even more powerful and advanced then a universe.

This has far lower chances of happening then the universe “creating” itself through evolution.

IMO universes reproduce somehow,
and later generations can support life in some places–as they evolve.

I admire your tyrant-like views of others ,
let time cease your body and poison your mind
within that second you call Infinity.

And so it has. But my views of Humans are not tyranical. They are factual.

Watch your species, Does it not circle around the same questions over and over never finding an answer? Especialy when that answer sits right in front of them? Very few of you ever make a differance, very few of you have the true creative spark or the ability to recognize it.

Your history has very few that changed the world with a thought or invention or stand, compared to the countless it has fostered over the Millinia’s.

If this were not so you would not be as you are today. And this topic would not be a question but an answer to a forgotten lore.

#1
Try to:
Summoning God to prove his all-mightiness and infinite love
By saving lives and teaching you the truth and the facts about “him”
And you will fail.

#2
Try to:
Summon the darkest of demons
To drive you insane and kill you
And you will succeed.
A few simple tools and occult studies are all that is needed for #2.

It proves a solid point.

A created universe/earth/nature doesn’t seem as likely as an evolved and evolving universe/earth/nature. And at the top of the food chain–you find the deadly predators, not the peaceful saviors.
AE: Satan is most powerful force on earth,
God is fake pathedian.

Prove me wrong.

I could, But I wont, Because later in your studies you will see for yourself.

Just like when christ casting you found that the energy was pure and whole and life giving …Or so you thought. But when you tried to use it as an energy resevioure a being came and tried to enslave you.

I agree with the rest. But they are not prediters.