Bach was made of atoms. The ink he used in writing his music was made of atoms too. The paper the music was written on was made of atoms too. When the music was performed the sound consisted of waves of atoms too. The music had something in common with the “creator”, although Bach did not create something out of nothing. He merely rearranged something that already existed.
When Bach composed the music, were his thoughts made of atoms?
You may also have big trouble getting people to agree that in the B Minor Mass, Bach “merely rearranged something that already existed”.
*God is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, unchanging, necessary, and spiritual, among other things,
none of which has anything in common with matter, energy, photons,
“quantum flux” (
), “chance” (
) or anything in the universe.
All of this should have been instantly obvious as soon as I said, lonnnnnnnnnng ago, that only an omnipotent being could create something having nothing in common with itself.*
The argument has been disputed over the centuries, and will be long after this thread ends. For example:
*But the whole, you say, wants a cause. I answer that the uniting of these parts into a whole… is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the parts. (Hume 1980, part 9)
Bertrand Russell denies that the universe needs an explanation; it just is. Russell, following Hume (1980), contends that since we derive the concept of cause from our observation of particular things, we cannot ask about the cause of something like the universe that we cannot experience. The universe is “just there, and that’s all”
Critics of the argument contend that the Causal Principle or, where applicable, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, that underlies versions of the argument is suspect. As Hume argued, there is no reason for thinking that the Causal Principle is true a priori, for we can conceive of effects without conceiving of their being caused and what is conceivable is possible in reality (1993, IV).
Immanuel Kant objected to the conclusion of the cosmological argument that a necessary being exists. Kant held that the cosmological argument, in concluding to the existence of a necessary being, argues for the existence of a being whose nonexistence is absolutely inconceivable. But the only being that meets this condition is the most real or maximally excellent being, the very concept of which lies at the heart of the ontological argument. Accordingly, the cosmological argument presupposes the cogency of the ontological argument. But since the ontological argument is defective, the cosmological argument that depends on it likewise must be defective (Kant, A606; Smart, in Haldane and Smart, 36–8).
… it should be recognized that showing that indeterminacy is a real feature of the world at the quantum level would have significant negative implications for the more general Causal Principle that underlies the deductive cosmological argument. The more this indeterminacy has ontological significance, the weaker is the Causal Principle.
An event takes place within a space-time context. But the Big Bang has no space-time context; there is neither time prior to the Big Bang nor a space in which the Big Bang occurs. Hence, the Big Bang cannot be considered as a physical event occurring at a moment of time. As Hawking notes, the finite universe has no space-time boundaries and hence lacks singularity and a beginning (Hawking 116, 136). Time might be multi-dimensional or imaginary, in which case one asymptotically approaches a beginning singularity but never reaches it. And without a beginning the universe requires no cause. The best one can say is that the universe is finite with respect to the past, not that it was an event with a beginning.
If no scientific explanation (in terms of physical laws) can provide a causal account of the origin of the universe, the explanation must be personal, i.e., in terms of the intentional action of a rational, supernatural agent. One might wonder, as Rundle does, how a supernatural agent could bring about the universe. He contends that a personal agent (God) cannot be the cause because intentional agency needs a body and actions occur within space-time.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/*
No definitions needed there, unlike philosophy in which nobody’s definitions are ever accepted as having any resemblance to truth, never mind the ideas relating them.