My brother says that the famous “first cause” proof for the existance of God is incorrect because it equates the word “exists” with “creates” when the meanings of the two words are not the same. How should I answer?
I’m not sure if I understood the question… in what way were “exists” and “creates” equated? But doesn’t it follow/imply that if it is established that God
creates, he must
exist first in order to create?
On free will…
much better one is the concept of activities stemming from our free will. If our actions are “caused”, then they are not “free” in any sense of the word. If they are truly “free”, then they are uncaused, so we have examples of uncaused events. Therefore the assumption that everything that has a beginning must be caused is simply false.
- There is free will and then there are uncaused events.
- There is no free will and then our whole justice system, the concept of sin, etc… are all based on an incorrect assumption and thus they are meaningless.
I think the problem is that you misinterpreted the meaning of the word “free” and was instead taken in absolute terms. It means free in the sense that a man’s action can
immediately and directly be attributed to his own will which is free from any other
immediate influence (in other words, man is the
only immediate influence). So that, whatever he does, he is the only one culpable for its moral implications. In this manner, we can see that
man is the immediate cause of his actions. God made it so or allowed that a system of free will exists – that man be the immediate cause of his actions. Any action “freely” done
by the man has a cause – the man who acted. Therefore, this is not an example of an uncaused event.
On existence and causes…
I think that
every existence presupposes an intelligent cause.
To explain the point, I wish to illustrate several things. First, let us consider what existence is.
Existence is a property, by which a thing exists if it is brought into reality. I said
brought into reality to distinguish an existent object from other
possibilities not brought into reality. Now, if we try to make an
intelligent description of what reality truly is, we are stating
truth.
So we have four ideas – existence, reality, possibility, and truth.
By analogy, let us imagine a certain stage play, let’s say Romeo and Juliet. There are three actors auditioning for Romeo – Peter, James, and John. They are the
possibilities for the role of Romeo. Reality, in this analogy, is the stage on which Romeo would be “brought into.” After the audition, it was determined by the director that Peter should take the role. Later, the audience observes that Peter appears on the stage to
become Romeo, and
truthfully comments “Peter is the Romeo.”
Trivial as this looks, something important happened here. Consider a man just entering the theater and has not yet examined the stage, but hears the crowd commenting that Peter plays Romeo. Contemplating what he heard, he says to himself: how was the audience able to arrive at the truth that Peter is playing Romeo?
The first necessity for a statement to be true is, fo course, that the statement should be translatable to truth or intelligible. This requires that the reality being described is in accordance with truth. But can reality be truthful and intelligible by itself, considering all the possibilities of what can be reality? In order for reality to be truthful and intelligible, an external (
and [pre]existing, in case we forget) intelligent being/cause must reconcile which of the possibilities must be real, for truth dictates that not all of these possibilities can be real or true at the same time. Also, after this being intelligently decides which possibility should exist, he must have the power/capacity to make them existent or to will that they exist. It takes intellect and will to discern how reality should be.
Going back to the analogy, Peter has been made Romeo because there existed a director who intelligently picked Peter as the Romeo to be brought into that certain stage. Let’s say that this “directive” is the absolute Truth. Incidentally, the audience who perceived this intelligible observation translated it into an intelligible statement, which is truth because it matches with what reality truly is. (otherwise, it is a falsity. In the example, that James or John played the Romeo is a falsity.)
