It is flawed because point number 2) is a baseless assumption. Unless of course you know something about time that no one else ever figured out, in which case step up and claim your nobel prize.
It is also flawed because even if you are correct in the assertion you make with point 2) all you have proven is that the past is finite. You have not proven that the Universe was created by a conscious entity.
Your argument seems to be:
The past is finite therefore God exists.
That’s an absurd statement. It’s as ludicrous as a statement along the lines, I like red jelly-babies therefore blue motor cars are unreliable.
It’s amazing how no matter where you find critical or creative discussion pertaining to religion, you’ll eventually find an athiest who will reduce the level of discussion to what amounts to dogmatic negativity and doubt for the sake of doubt. They cannot contribute to the discussion, so they resort to harsh and narrow verbage as a cheap substitute for what they accept as logic, or a reason.
That path to reason doesn’t always require that everything that is said is clearly correct. I believe that this is why the original poster titled this “My proof for God. Critiques please”. The path to reason frequently explores seemingly illogical steps, or facits, as part of the elimination process. You see, sometimes, when we allow our thought process to openly explore possibilities based on a gut feeling, intuition, or consideration, we create new paths that may join seemingly unrelated elements that could not have been easily realized through linear deduction. Really tough problems are like this. This is why solutions to a problem are often realized after a certain amount of failure. All great geniuses have realized this as part of the path of discovery. Einstein was viewed as “absurd” and “ludicrous”, even towards himself because of self doubt. Sometimes his earlier assertions would later be proved to be correct, after he had given up on them. But I guess that’s why athiest appear to be so limited. Everything, apparently, needs to be obvious to them. Many of my own successes in life were because I was so naive as to not realize how absurd and ludicrous I was in thinking that I could succeed where others failed.
With regards to the ludicrous and absurd argument, I believe that a more accurate characterization is that a finite past is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for God to be the source of all creation (i.e., of the universe). I believe that what this thread has been about is the assumption that since there was a cause for the creation of something that did not exist at one point (i.e., the universe), that God must have been that cause. Again, according to quatum physics, everything in the universe is ultimately discrete and finite, and given that the fabric of the universe inter-relates space, time, and matter, that it’s likely that time itself must be finite. But there was a time when matter did not exist, and therefore, time did not exist in any meaningful way. I have stated before that God cannot be contained by our capacity to comprehend. God must exist both within, and outside, of our understanding of things like space, time, or even dimension, in order for God to be God.
If the argument that God does not exists is because we cannot easily observe Him, then that argument is flawed for many reasons. First of all, why would we assume that God could be made to fit some convenient paradigm? That would not be consistent with any reasonable definition of God. Second of all, such an argument, based on expectations of observability, would eliminate our belief in the existences of MANY things that we believe to be true. Scientist, for example, have been working to prove Einsteins hypothisis of the existence of gravitational waves. This has never been successfully proven in any lab, and NASA has attempted this in space. Proof of this, and a better understanding of this would be very practical for deep space missions. Our best models are not accurate enough for long term predictions necessary for these missions. Instead, more localized predictions are necessary to accurately perform these missions. Each experiment requires what are referred to as “predicts”. So we say that we know certain things about gravity, but we really can’t prove them.
As I said earlier in this thread, Catholicism (versus fundamentalism) and theoretical physics share one thing in common, namely, that they both accept that mysteries must exists. How much more difficult must it be to fully comprehend He who created everything, and who is not bounded by time, space, or dimension?
One of my best bosses use to always say, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!”. My thinking is that it’s better to try to add clarity or provide a specific correction, than to simply doubt or negate for the sake of negation. Resorting to words like “absurd”, or “ludicrous”, without a sincere attempt to actually add something to the discussion is not very constructive.
If Young were born before Columbus, he would have believed that the world was flat, and wouldn’t have believed that a surgeon should wash his hands before an operation. Just because we lack insight or vision, that doesn’t mean that someone who does is wrong.
I hope you’ll try to meet this objection. Discussing this sort of thing would be the next best thing to doing theology over cold beer.
