Why Life?
Those familiar with philosophical arguments for God's existence may be aware of the much-discussed kalam cosmological argument. Its premises and form are as such:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
The proponent then goes on to analyze the cause referenced in the conclusion. This cause is timeless, spaceless, unfathomably powerful and intelligent, immaterial, and uncaused. It is who everyone has referred to as "God."
Sometimes, oddly enough, premise 1 is challenged, as if something like the universe could literally pop into being out of nothing.
Apart from the many good responses I've read to that position, I add this: of all things that could've popped into existence out of anything (bizarrely granting this could happen, though I don't think it can), why would it be something that was so hospitable to conscious, apparently meaningful, human life? Why didn't some blob of matter or some inhospitable reality come into being from the void? It seems rather strange that precisely the sort of world suitable for life emerged instead of the seemingly endless alternate possibilities.
The only good explanation I know of is that the universe was brought into existence by a living cause who intended for there to be life in his creation.
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
The proponent then goes on to analyze the cause referenced in the conclusion. This cause is timeless, spaceless, unfathomably powerful and intelligent, immaterial, and uncaused. It is who everyone has referred to as "God."
Sometimes, oddly enough, premise 1 is challenged, as if something like the universe could literally pop into being out of nothing.
Apart from the many good responses I've read to that position, I add this: of all things that could've popped into existence out of anything (bizarrely granting this could happen, though I don't think it can), why would it be something that was so hospitable to conscious, apparently meaningful, human life? Why didn't some blob of matter or some inhospitable reality come into being from the void? It seems rather strange that precisely the sort of world suitable for life emerged instead of the seemingly endless alternate possibilities.
The only good explanation I know of is that the universe was brought into existence by a living cause who intended for there to be life in his creation.
posted by Tom Wanchick at 8:06 AM
4 Comments:
This is an excellent point. If we're talking empirical probability, this makes matters far worse for the naturalist. It’s easy to think that the empirical probability of (1) is just 1/n, where n is just some number that happened to be one among an infinity of other possibilities.
But the reality is that the only way we can estimate P(1) is with the empirical data we know to be true of our universe, which is further background information. So the question is more like, “What is P(U1)|(1)?” where U1 is a universe with all our specific laws and conditions. P(U1) needs to be contrasted with an infinite number of other possible universes, the vast majority of which would be >P(U1).
If that makes any sense.
What caused God?
The theist often says "god always existed and needs no cause."
But science says that the universe did NOT begin to exist, but has always existed (think: 1st law of thermodynamics). A singularity (aka moment before big bang) is not the beginning of anything. It is only the universe in a different state.
The universe never began to exist, and has no creator. Furthermore, matter and energy can never be created nor destroyed (1st law of thermo bites again), which means again that there is no creator of the universe.
God does not require a cause because he is eternal.
The universe clearly has a cause since that's what we see in the big bang, the universe coming to be. The universe needs a cause since all things that come to be need causes. that's the first premise of the argument.
merely asserting that you don't like the premise is not a poof against it.
asserting your opinion that things don't need causes is not an argument.
There are a couple fundamental problems with the argument in this post and in some of the comments. I don't think point 1 is the issue as the post states. Yes, everything that comes into existence that wasn't there before must have a cause, but...
First, that the universe had a discreet beginning is an assumption. Science does not confirm this even with the Big Bang. There may have been 'something' always there (the universe, or metaverse could in fact be eternal). Science is comfortable acknowledging the fact that we just don't know yet. And no one else can validly make the claim that they know, or else they are lying or deceived themselves.
Second, how is our universe so hospitable to life (much less conscious, meaning-driven beings)? If you shrank the entire known universe down to the size of a house, you'd never be able to find the tiny microscopic specs of dirt that support life. What you'd see instead was a huge expanse of radioactive vacuum that is totally inhospitable to any form of life we know in this universe. This argument that the universe was 'designed' for humans would only really work if the universe was confined to our earth or maybe our solar system, but that's not the case. Or if we saw an abundance of life on every celestial body, then we may assume that the universe was organized somehow for life, but again this is not what we observe.
Finally, the commenter Chad is assuming that this universe is the only one that has ever existed or will ever exist, bringing the probability of this specific universe forming in they exact way we see it next to zero. For one, there are valid theories in cosmology now that posit a multi-verse of millions of universes and that the multi-verse may very well be eternal (doesn't need a cause). Furthermore, this assumes that universes even have the ability to form differently than the one we see. It's perfectly reasonable to suspect that universes can only really exist in a way that creates a by-product called 'life', much like you can't escape the fact that 2 plus 2 can never equal anything but 4.
These arguments are interesting thought games, but I don't think that they can provide any real evidence of what happened billions of years ago when elements, molecules, and the complex structures derived from them were first formed.
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