A colossal accident?

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tonyrey said:
Do you believe persons are things? :confused:
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Yes. Persons are classified among the living things. They are certainly not no-things.

Is God not a person? I thought that He had three persons in one?

rossum
 
rossum said:
Yes. Persons are classified among the living things. They are certainly not no-things.
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They may be in your scheme of things! Things are generally regarded as material objects - which don’t appear in a court of law.
Is God not a person? I thought that He had three persons in one?
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Please refer to my post in the thread “Please explain why the first cause/necessary being must be personal.”
 
tonyrey said:
  1. Nothing need exist.
  2. Order needn’t exist.
  3. Complexity needn’t exist.
  4. Life needn’t exist.
  5. Consciousness needn’t exist.
  6. Intelligence needn’t exist.
  7. Self-control needn’t exist.
  8. Goodness needn’t exist.
  9. Beauty needn’t exist.
  10. Love needn’t exist.
To think everything exists for no reason is absurd…
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I surprisingly agree with John on this one - in that consciousness has a bearing on the stated beauty/love/intelligence/goodness/order/complexity.

Why should something exist is a major question anyway, regardless of challenging whether adding ‘beauty… [etc]’ is actually adding anything. My answer: But why not? How do you know it is absurd that things should be like this rather than otherwise?

If you start from a position of faith it is absurd to remove God and ask how life is comprehensible from a theistic perspective. But if you accept God, you can accept anything! Even abject suffering is ‘good’, which is probably just as hard to demonstrate to an atheist without seeming absurdity. From an atheist’s point of view, life/the universe is what we’ve got to look at, and so it is equally absurd to posit an answer (God), refer to it, hypothetically take it away and then say that the world looks different now.
 
tonyrey said:
You don’t have hindsight, insight or foresight? Nor grasp abstract truths and universal principles?
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Please indicate how “transcending time and space” implies hindsight. God does not have hindsight because to God everything is ‘present-sight’. I have hindsight because I do not transcend time, so I have to look backwards,in time rather than see all of time as an eternal now.

rossum
 
Your first premise is wrong – it is necessary for existence to exist.
 
Heuchler said:
God needs to exist to explain all of creation just as an author is needed to explain the existence of a book. What we call God, an atheist would call the first cause.
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I’m chiming in to qualify that not all of us that hold no belief in any gods subscribe to the cosmological argument. My stance is that we’ve never seen anything come into existence ex nihilo. We’ve only seen already existing matter rearranged to produce various forms.So this is something relegated to the unknown though people are free come up with a hypothesis. As humans our capabilities for coming up with explanations that we can validate is limited, though we try. The explanations for existence are in no short supply as a result.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
…we’ve never seen anything come into existence ex nihilo…
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Your misusing Creation ex nihlio. It doesn’t mean creation from a substance called “nothing”, an existent nothing is a contradiction after all. Ex nihilio is a negation of any previous cause to G-d. G-d is Actus Purus, the very act of existing, the negation of which is the act of not existing, which is a logical contradiction and thus impossible. Therefore there is no other possible state of reality other than G-d. Which is why G-d needs no cause Himself.
As humans our capabilities for coming up with explanations that we can validate is limited, though we try…
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The corollary of course is the denial of miracles because we don’t know how they were done. A caveman would have said a light bulb were impossible and he was utterly wrong. A modern scientist is no different. As Clarkes First law demonstrates. **When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
**
 
warpspeedpetey said:
Your misusing Creation ex nihlio. It doesn’t mean creation from a substance called “nothing”,
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I think I was misunderstood. I wasn’t referring to any substance with the name “nothing.” That would be a variation of “ex materia” where the material involved happens to be labeled with the name “nothing” (sounds like creation as described in the Enuma Elish). To put another way my use of “ex nihilo” is to describe creation of substance though means that violate our understanding of the laws of conservation of energy and mass. For the most part that sounds compatible with how you are describing the meaning of the term
warpspeedpetey said:
The corollary of course is the denial of miracles because we don’t know how they were done.
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I don’t agree with that, but I don’t want to elaborate on it in this thread because it would go too far off the topic of existence.
 
warpspeedpetey said:
Your misusing Creation ex nihlio. It doesn’t mean creation from a substance called “nothing”, an existent nothing is a contradiction after all. Ex nihilio is a negation of any previous cause to G-d.
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And here we were thinking ex nihilo was a negation of any previous cause at all. I suspect what ThinkingSapien meant was not a ‘substance’ called nothing - certainly not in the way many theists apparently conceive of ‘substances’ called ‘goodness’ and ‘love’ - but actually a state of absolute nonexistence of which, it would be fair to say, we cannot conceive. The ‘nothing’ observed by quantum physicists is not a state of nonexistence, merely a state of instability, of no clearly defined object or substance. Thus we have never observed, nor have we any reason to infer, that anything came into existence from a state of absolute nonexistence. Which leaves the question open as to whether what existed before the universe as we know it was God or a quantum foam…
 
warpspeedpetey said:
The corollary of course is the denial of miracles because we don’t know how they were done. A caveman would have said a light bulb were impossible and he was utterly wrong. A modern scientist is no different. As Clarkes First law demonstrates. **When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
**
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The problem with this approach is that it taps in to the fact that physical explanations have, historically, always trumped supernatural explanations for observed phenomena. Thus, if we don’t know how something happens, it’s a fair bet that one day, scientists will discover a cause which will be observable through physical means, and therefore fall under the umbrella of physical causes. Clarke’s third law, of course, states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - if this is so, the corollary is that what may appear supernatural or somehow contrary to natural laws according to our present state of knowledge will, in the future, be revealed to have natural causes.
 
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