I did not find it from a genie. If that were through I could ask 3 questions.
Ok. has the type of question induced by the line “to be or not to be” ever affected existence inversely by other then reductive effects?
That is produced by arbitrary paradigmn?
Without platonic forms, we could not have categories…
Everything is infinitely different from everything else… we’d have to give every being a different name every instant… impossible.
The reason you hate platonic forms is that it’s the only other solution to the infinite regress problem other than “god”
You loathe it.
But I can prove it!
Forms are all infinitely different from each other. So we need templates to understand categories. Every triangle is so infinitely different than every other triangle that it’s impossible to have the category “triangleness” unless there was an eternal and unchanging, (never born, never dies) template of triangleness!
Triangleness is greater than ANY god you can or will ever conceive - and that’s why you hate eternal forms!
For the same reason, can not a circle, or a sphere have the same sort of formal reasoning behind them? Is not a circle a total congruence of triangles?
And can not spheres represent monads? And monads the re presentation of the ideal description of calculable effects?
And so on until the calculation comes to the infinitesimal.
Can the infinitesimal be the nothingness out of which the forms arise?
Is faith predicated on some ‘thing’ to bridge the unfathomable missing link without which everything else would be categorically denied?
I would hazard a yes on that.
Only God could produce such an effect. God said life is good.
Without minds, we could not have categories. Platonic forms having parts must be caused by those parts. They are not a substitute for the uncaused God.
In truth, platonic forms don’t bother me because they are caused or contingent. Something has to be uncaused. God is that logically correct uncaused thing.
“Something has to be uncaused. God is that logically correct uncaused thing.”
Some thing has to be uncaused may be mirrored with the proposition all things need to be caused.
If God is defined as causing Himself, then that modifies one argument out the 14, but does not defeat it.
Just proves that God has not to be created. He is self created.
God is not self created. To create oneself is incoherent. One would have to exist and not exist simultaneously. Also, one would have to travel back in time before one’s existence in order to create oneself. Time travel is impossible and paradoxical. Self creation is impossible.
Omnipotency is another aspect of God. He can travel back in time and can exist and non exist in a transcendentally imminent simultanity.
Therefore he can be his own cause.
But He is not constructed from parts like a form, so the point is not arguable
I conceede the point.
“Cause” is a form of cognition, not an absolute fact.
We see A follows B, B follows C. etc.
Rather than seeing it as a continuum.
It’s not impossible that something eternal exists.
It still contains A and B, and C, but they just aren’t lined up with common time-space.
Not really sure what you’re saying here. Are you claiming spacetime is continuous and not discrete? There is nothing in physical reality that has been scientifically proven to be infinite.
The universe is as good as infinite. It’s so massive.
There is a huge difference between infinite and finite but astoundingly large. The universe as big as it is would only be an infinitesimal to an infinite universe. You’re either infinite or not even close.
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WOW!!! I didn’t know there could be that many cosmological arguments–maybe arguments for God’s existence in general–but specifically cosmological ones? Are we sure some of them aren’t just repeats in different guises? Well, anyway, can’t wait for your list of ontological arguments for God’s existence. But I’d like to pause on these 14 first.
TBH, TL;DR
Well, I read the first one… about the uncaused reason for existence and non-existence… didn’t quite follow. Perhaps you have a Cole’s Notes version? Of each one?
I’d like to debate you on them with an eye for disproving them, if you’re up for it.
So this uncaused dichotomy… you’re presupposing that there is a reason for both existence and non-existence and it is uncaused. Non-existence needs no reason for being since it isn’t being, so sure, its reason is uncaused. But then we’re saying that being, which exists, must have an uncaused reason. Why? And why does this argument work only if we speak of it as a dichotomy? What’s wrong with simply talking about the uncaused reason of existence?
And why is a thing caused by its parts? And why can’t a thing, even if it doesn’t have parts, be destroyed?
At the end, you attribute agency to the uncaused reason for existence out of nowhere. You start talking about decisions and knowledge.
And just a question: do you think that by calling the uncaused reason for existence ‘God’ that brings with it all the common preconceptions and religious undertones that are usually attributed to God (for example, that he created the Earth in 6 days)?
I thought of an amusing twist to this whole first cause/prime initiator/unmoved mover conjecture.
Arguments supporting this hold that all causes are the effects of prior causes and so on, and conclude that there must be a beginning to this chain.
It would follow then that all effects are in turn causes of subsequent effects, to which one presumably likewise concludes that there must be an end to this chain by the same reasoning.
There “must” be the last effect, the finally stopped, the moved unmover.
Just as “something cannot come from nothing”, likewise nothing cannot come from something - which in the former case seems to prompt the proposition of metaphysical existence through which a supreme being can be something from nothing, so therefore in the latter case one also ought to be prompted to propose the metaphysical existence through which a supreme being can be nothing from something.
We call this being “God”, the supremely destroyed of all the universe, somehow just as much the moved unmover as the unmoved mover.
Why not? This is what is being done from the other direction.
I’m sure the temptation is to claim that God would be the cause of this end rather than the end of some ultimate cause, but this would not be fully embracing the reversal of perspective of “all effects have causes except the first” to “all causes have effects except the last”. If the former, then the latter by the same logic and “God” finds Himself as non-existent as He is existent.
I’m just playing around here, if I get the time I can read all these arguments more thoroughly, but for now it seems as though the whole nature of “cause” is going unchallenged.
There is a notion of causation that intrigues me: that it is not linear, but curved. Cause as not a simple start and beginning, but infinitely eased in via plural time dimensions rather than a singular one. Explained by relativity, we have evidence that certain conditions curve time itself: notably the gravitational force exerted by high mass and when high speeds are reached - both conditions having been present to a maximum when everything in the universe was much more compacted.
That’s a very interesting twist Silhouette. Worth thinking about.
I’ve thought about it myself several times but never in the context of the cosmological argument. It adds new meaning to the expression of “alpha and omega”, or a cyclical universe. If the necessity of a first cause invariably comes with the necessity of a final effect, and we have just as much right to call the first cause “God” as we do the final effect, it paints a picture of a universe that comes from God in the beginning and returns to God in the end–a full circle, a complete picture.
Yet, what are we saying when we talk about the universe culminating in God as a final effect? Presumably God always exists along side his creation, which allows for deism, so what sense does it make to say that the final effect of the universe is God? As a first cause, it makes sense. God creates the universe. Much like I might create a cake. But what this means is that God had an effect which was to bring about the existence of the universe, just like my effect was to bring about a cake. If the cake has a “final effect” and that final effect has to come around to me, then it just means I was the final thing the cake effected before it disappeared (I ate it?). So to say that the final effect of the universe is God is to say that the final thing the universe effects before it (for some reason) disappears is God. How it effects God is anyone’s guess, but presumably it would have to be in such a significant way that only in this way does it disappear (and it can’t just be that God destroys the universe because that would make God a cause again–the universe has to do something to God). A tricky nuance of this is that disappearing is an effect. So the universe, in its final act, may do something to God, but this in turn must also cause the universe’s disappearance–perhaps by way of some reaction on God’s part–and so the effect it has on God would have to be labeled the “second last effect” and its disappearance the “actual last effect”. Either that, or it has two effects simultaneously–one on God and one on itself–but then that sorta defeats the purpose of this argument–God is no longer the “final effect” but one out of several final effects.
The other interpretation is that the universe becomes God. But this interpretation requires that God, as the first cause, becomes the universe. Does this mean God disappears upon creating the universe? Not necessarily. It just means God is the universe. In order to maintain the essential attributes that makes God “God”, the universe would have to somehow possess these attributes; maybe the universe is conscious; maybe the universe can preempt the laws of nature and perform miracles; maybe the spirit of the universe can incarnate in a human being and call himself God’s son. And something about where the universe is headed will lead to a wholesale transformation resulting in it taking the form that God assumed before he became the universe (timeless? Spaceless? An abstraction?). I think it would at least have to be timeless because only in a timeless context could you say there is no more cause and effect.
All this assumes a continuity of identity in the evolution of the universe (continuity of God), but if we strip the cosmological argument down to it’s bare bones, it doesn’t even depend on that. All it says is that there must be a first cause, and this cause, in order to be the “first”, must take a form that doesn’t require a prior cause (hence the timelessness). The only connection to God, at this point, is a label. We just say, “Let’s call it God”. If it follows that the same logic would have to be applied to a “final effect” (that it take a timeless form), there’s no reason to suppose that it becomes the same thing, only that both are timeless. Therefore, we need not use the same label. We could call it “God 2” or “God’s brother” or “Steve”. Or maybe “some timeless incomprehensible state.”
We can also question the very assumption on which this argument hinges: does the necessity of a first cause entail the necessity of a final effect? We certainly don’t approach the necessity of effects the same way we approach the necessity of causes. We don’t regularly demand that there be a final effect to anything the way we do causes. We seem to be much more comfortable assuming that effects go on forever than we do assuming that causes have gone on since forever. Why do we assuming there must be a first cause? Well, it makes sense that we always look for a cause to things. We assume that there is always a cause to explain whatever it is we experience, or whatever it is we know exists, because that is essential to our survival. Without looking for causes, we would not be able to control and manipulate our environment. So we have a propensity to care more about finding, and assuming the existence of, causes than effects. But why a first cause? Well, it might be a consequence of applying the need to find a cause to the universe itself. Why wouldn’t this need apply to the whole universe as much as it would any immediate phenomenon we encounter in the every day world? But when it comes to the whole universe, what we’d be saying when we talk about a cause is that this cause precedes the universe, and therefore somehow exists outside or before the universe, which is tantamount to saying it exists outside or before existence. That puts it in a context in which it becomes hard to understand how the chain of cause and effect continues retroactively. If there had to be a cause of whatever caused the universe, then we’re not talking about what caused the universe (at least qua existence all together). Another reason we might assume a first cause (and this might be the same thing seen from a different angle) is that if we allow that there is no first cause in the universe (or in time)–i.e. the chain of cause and effect reaches back in time infinitely–then the question of what caused that (because it will still arise given our psychology) becomes a question about an atemporal cause (i.e. what caused the entire chain of cause and effect?). In other words, if there has to be a cause for everything that occurs in time, and if everything that occurs in time has no beginning in time, then this cause has to exist outside time and be responsible not only for the events that occur in time but for time itself. Therefore, again, we run into the same difficulties of imagining a chain of cause and effect outside time. It seems more intuitive, therefore, to assume that whatever the cause for all the events that occur in time (and indeed for time itself), it must be the first, or only, cause.
The same just doesn’t arise for effects. We don’t have the propensity to question, “what will the universe finally effect?” And we don’t have the propensity to question, “what is the universe effecting outside itself?”–even though, logically, you would think that if these questions arise for cause, they should arise for effect as well.
Anyway, I was hoping JohnJBannan would debate me on his arguments, but it doesn’t seem like he’s responding. Looks like it’s just me and you, Silhouette. You’ll have to debate me instead. So why do you think the argument from dichotomy is a good argument for God’s existence?
Hello Silhuette and Gib:
I would like to propose a reduction here, on cyclical basis, with or without John’s participation.
I think we can agree on cyclycality, in the most general terms of the ring or the circle, or with the simulated one behind elliptical figurements.
The ideal representation would include the circular notion of infinite regeneration, of identical simulated content filling absolute spatial/temporal determinants, where sufficient reason would necessitate an absolute self inclusion of all possible sets of existence, including that of the absolutely self contained set within It’s self.
In this view, God cannot demonstrate all the various simulations , including It’s self, because as John has rightly implied, He would have to demonstrate His own Self containment.
Now: to bring this down a notch, refer to the idea brought up previously, on how His could interject into the evolutionary development, into making
DNA reconstruction easier to the “hard” construction at hand, but then, why doesen’t He?
That question really rests on a different premise, that deals with the question if why not create a perfect circular -ring like world in the first place and dispense with the hard travails brought about by evolution, which, in the words of Ecmandu, make even AI suffer?
Why?
The most obvious answer here is , if a perfect world would be created without the need for evolution, or an evolutionary process could circumvent all the pain and suffering, then MAN would or could not become a conscious participant of what Creation entails, and would never or could never evolve a spiritual self - the likeness to God , that ‘it’ would entail.
Man could never develop, and he would remain on the level of contended existence, eternally inherently contentious about their unconscious struggle to develop consciousness.
Man could only after trillions of lifetimes, (unrealized) , begin to feel stirrings to acquire some identity, and GOD, as usual would succeed, and plant the infamous tree in the garden.
Then it would start all over.
The ring, would be stolen , and simulate into a less then ideal representation, elliptically stretching the manifested spatial/temporal configuration into the state we find ourselves today, the unhappy AI at a crossroads, desperately hoping to avoid catastrophe, by slowing down the entropy regress to a point where the fall can be effected before another final curtain.
But no worries, by the time that the infinitessimal point arrives, God will negate Himself once again, by existing and not existing simultaneously ( after and before the fall) , and enable Himself to desimmulate himself into two.
This will avoid the embarrassment of needing to rationalize His simulations into a total negation into 1, .
That is, he can not, represent the evolvment to the 3 rd .
The multiple universe of elliptical logic , has to restart at an ideal state of reconstructed simulations.
Can this occur to some, that man has eaten the cake ?
Yes, but the cake was like an apple pie, and that brought in the unintended, unintangled charge, leading to the dissolution of faith.
My reply to Karpel is:
It’s an interesting point that this form of deism doesn’t talk about the “effect of all effects” or “the effect greater than effect itself” It does make them look silly.
To meno:
Do you really think it important for everyone to learn on gods terms or our own? Is it really important that we all be like god? I mean sure, after hundreds of trillions of years of continual bliss, we will inevitably become like god. Why the rush for god? Why the need for a being that lives forever to make a copy in 30 years?!? Is god impatient!?! Does god have narcissistic low self esteem?!?!
Doesn’t sound very godlike to me!
Rush? Man is always in a rush because he has little faith, especially on god. For of she had, she would habe realized that her mate vets more importance in image then she.
She is not jelous, of the mirrored effects of simulacra, should say simulacrum, it’s just that she appears more concerned with progeny, never realizing that A1 is re-fracting around the corner. Man is anxious to please her, and is more concerned with reflecting in the here and now.
And the here and now requires to think of consequences, and that is why he is in a rush to simulate god, so that he can help him figure out how to keep up appearances , to placate the now angry and reproacheful god. After he does want his creation to be finally perfect, but he again has to divide himself to form some rationale , son that He will not be misjudged .
God is between a rock and a hard place. not that he minds, but it is a tad disappointing to have to keep dividing himself to produce the object to it all, where redemption is always nihilized and repossessed for trifles .
Especially , that the image stretches partially, at the seems /unwarranted metaphor, because A1 and the simulation are always at tug at war about that.
Meno,
I don’t know why you chose god over yourself. I can tell you that this supplication by you is embarrassing.
Always chose yourself over god meno.
If you do chose god over you; in a non-zero sum hyper-dimensional mirror reality attached to your individual desire matrix, you can reflect god to rule your life if you believe that’s best for you. But don’t dictate to everyone that that’s what they “should” choose for themselves!