Examples of Things Beginning to Exist

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ClemtheCatholic

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Christians (including Catholics) will often invoke premises such as “Everything which begins to exist has a cause” in formulating metaphysical arguments for the existence of God. (This particular premise is taken from the Kalam Cosmological Argument).

My question is: How do we respond to the charge put forward by Humean philosophers and others who assert that we have no experience of things coming into existence from nothing, and so we are wholly unwarranted in assuming that such instances (including the instance of the universe coming into existence from nothing) have a cause?

Hope that makes sense. 😛 Cheers!
 
To be consistent in the belief that ‘effects always have causes’ doesn’t become somehow ‘unwarranted’ due to lack of experience.

It’s just simply applied to all the examples folks can dream up, as a foundation to the discussion for that side / person.

To think that one needs experience to have a ‘warranted’ opinion is a scary thought, when dealing with thinking.

Imagine batting away all thought related to something outside of your experience.

No don’t, because you haven’t experienced it, it’s not warranted, put the bat away.
 
ClemtheCatholic said:
Christians (including Catholics) will often invoke premises such as “Everything which begins to exist has a cause” in formulating metaphysical arguments for the existence of God. (This particular premise is taken from the Kalam Cosmological Argument).

My question is: How do we respond to the charge put forward by Humean philosophers and others who assert that we have no experience of things coming into existence from nothing, and so we are wholly unwarranted in assuming that such instances (including the instance of the universe coming into existence from nothing) have a cause?

Hope that makes sense. 😛 Cheers!
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It doesn’t follow from the fact that we have no experience of things coming into existence from nothing that **everything **comes from something. We do not have experience of every entity but we take it for granted that unknown entities exist because we know we are not omniscient. Nor is it self-evident that everything conforms to physical categories of existence. It is self-evident that materialism is false because it is self-destructive. If thought is simply - according to Hume - “a little agitation of the brain” there is no guarantee it’s a reliable guide to the nature of reality. It is reduced to a set of conditioned responses to stimuli which help us to survive. Insight and free will become illusions if we are just biological machines…
 
Everytime a child is miraculously born into the world it is the beginning of something that was not there before. But, not a beginning without cause. Nor should we assume that things begin without cause.
 
fisherman_carl said:
Every time a child is miraculously born into the world it is the beginning of something that was not there before. But, not a beginning without cause. Nor should we assume that things begin without cause.
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“things” is the key word. It doesn’t exclude the Supreme Being.
 
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