Proof for existence of God?

[JesuXPIPassio]

How do you see proof for His existence? Personally I feel Christianity has the most convincing answers. The universe is a good place to start for me. Something or Someone had to get the ball rolling at some point in time, Big Bang or not, something put things in motion. As St. Thomas said, in order for there to be an effect, there has to be a cause.

I apologise if anyone has already said what I’m saying in my post; there is a good number of replies, and I honestly haven’t bothered to go through all of them.

But, believe it or not, science actually already has proven that God exists. I’ll explain a bit below, but bear with me here.

Science is nothing to fear. Here in the US, the media often pits religion against science, but at least in the case of the Catholic Church, science and religion do not contradict. How can it?

Think of the universe as that book-turned-movie Primary Colors. The book was published anonymously, but political experts went through it and deduced who wrote it. Now, if God created the universe, of course the universe would only point back to God.

To me, it only seems as if it’s in the US where science and religion seem to contradict – it’s only in the US where fundamentalists translate the Bible literally. When scientists demonstrate that what the Bible literally says differs from the scientific evidence, a war between science and religion is created. We must not allow ourselves to be casualties of this silly war, because in truth, everything is in harmony. Birds, trees, rocks, atoms, stars – they all point to Heaven.

Now for the proof. In Europe, people used to think that life spontaneously generated from non-living objects. For example, they thought if you leave meat out, maggots would be born from it. Yes, our ancestors weren’t very smart people.

Scientists later discovered that these things just weren’t so. It was flies that created the maggots by laying eggs in the meat. Scientists later figured out that life can only come from other life. It cannot just suddenly come out from nothing. Of course, this implies that life in the universe must have only come into being from another life-form. They declared this finding of life only coming from another life as a scientific law.

And the funny thing is, this “new” scientific law wasn’t new at all. Saint Thomas Aquinas figured it out long ago and wrote about it!

Lastly, regarding the Big Bang theory, it’s pretty interesting how so much is banked on it and it is treated by some as the ultimate reason for the universe, as opposed to the universe being created by a God. I say it’s interesting because in truth, scientists don’t even know what the Big Bang actually was. I saw it on a documentary on the universe that wasn’t about religion at all and just focused on the scientific aspects of it all. Scientists don’t know *what *banged, *why *it banged, what caused it to bang, what happened immediately after the bang, what happened before the bang. It just isn’t much to bank by; it would seem safer to scotch-tape your money to the hood of your car than to stick it into that bank.

 

[Hastrman]

I’ve always found the relationship between a purely abstract discipline–mathematics–and the laws of physics is utterly miraculous. There is no reason the one should correspond with the other. Why, for example, do objects accelerate exponentially as opposed to some random speed? Why are gravitational pulls between objects the inverse square of the distance of their radii between their centers? And these relationships abound in every field of science. It seems to me that for that all to be a huge coincidence is itself a great leap of faith.

Actually they accelerate exponentially because they’re doing it the whole time–it’s an intrinsic logical relationship, no more miraculous than that 2+2=4.

Gravitational pulls are that way because gravity is itself a function of the geometry of spacetime–they’re the inverse square of the distance, the way that the area of a circle is the square of the radius times pi. There is no such thing as a force of gravity.

Now the fact that the laws of physics are consistent, I find fun…because any set of consistent laws, is not a complete set of laws. Therefore something nonphysical must be real.

Similarly, in quantum physics, no particle is wholly real–particles exist only as a set of potential outcomes. But once an observer takes a measurement, the probabilities collapse and one of those outcomes is measured. There must be something about the observer–specifically about what it is that makes it an observer–that is real, but not describable by the laws of physics, since if it was…it would only be another set of irresolvable probabilities, and we’d be in infinite regress.

Note that this doesn’t necessarily prove God, but it does disprove Materialism.

 

[Hastrman]

Scientists later discovered that these things just weren’t so. It was flies that created the maggots by laying eggs in the meat. Scientists later figured out that life can only come from other life. It cannot just suddenly come out from nothing. Of course, this implies that life in the universe must have only come into being from another life-form. They declared this finding of life only coming from another life as a scientific law.

That’d be a great achievement of Cartesian empiricism: autogenesis theory. Along with Body-Self Dualism, just…bang-up job, there, Rene.

And the funny thing is, this “new” scientific law wasn’t new at all. Saint Thomas Aquinas figured it out long ago and wrote about it!

But Thomas’ metaphysics have been discredited, didn’t Mansizedtarget tell you? Then again, he thinks Aquinas taught Body-Self Dualism, not like the great Descartes…though I wonder why that stance, for some reason later called “Cartesian Dualism,” was repudiated by Aristotle and Scholasticism?

Scientists don’t know *what *banged, *why *it banged, what caused it to bang, what happened immediately after the bang, what happened before the bang. It just isn’t much to bank by; it would seem safer to scotch-tape your money to the hood of your car than to stick it into that bank.

Well, they do know one of them: nothing happened before the bang, because there were no space-time dimensions, and therefore, no time (time is the fourth, although there might be more than one time-like dimension).

Which, by the way, Augustine pointed out.

 

[Aramis]

I am going to be leading a small group next month during Lent, so I am going to post some threads about some topics that I will cover during those sessions so I can get prepared to deal with them and others thoughts.

How do you see proof for His existence? Personally I feel Christianity has the most convincing answers. The universe is a good place to start for me. Something or Someone had to get the ball rolling at some point in time, Big Bang or not, something put things in motion. As St. Thomas said, in order for there to be an effect, there has to be a cause.

This is the proof that got me an A in my required philosophy course in my Bachelor’s program:

If we accept as axiomatic St. Anslem’s definition of God as a being whose very existence we can not conceive the nature of, and also Aristotle’s postulation that anything which can be conceived of exists in some form, we can show that God exists by the following logic:
We can conceive of limits to our own ability to conceive of things.
We can conceive that there are things beyond our limited ability to conceive directly.
Therefore, there are things which must exist in some form but which are beyond our ability to directly conceive of, and yet, by Aristotle’s postulation, these must exist since we can conceive that they exist, even tho we can not directly conceive them themselves.
By St. Anselm’s definition, one of these things must therefore be God.

 

[Hastrman]

This is the proof that got me an A in my required philosophy course in my Bachelor’s program:

If we accept as axiomatic St. Anslem’s definition of God as a being whose very existence we can not conceive the nature of, and also Aristotle’s postulation that anything which can be conceived of exists in some form, we can show that God exists by the following logic:
We can conceive of limits to our own ability to conceive of things.
We can conceive that there are things beyond our limited ability to conceive directly.
Therefore, there are things which must exist in some form but which are beyond our ability to directly conceive of, and yet, by Aristotle’s postulation, these must exist since we can conceive that they exist, even tho we can not directly conceive them themselves.
By St. Anselm’s definition, one of these things must therefore be God.

I don’t really find that terribly convincing. Anselm really needs to be put out to pasture.

Personally I’m partial to Adler’s argument from contingency:

From Wikipedia, because I’m lazy:

1. The existence of an effect requiring the concurrent existence and action of an efficient cause implies the existence and action of that cause

1. The cosmos as a whole exists

1. The existence of the cosmos as a whole is radically contingent (meaning that it needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence to preserve it in being, and prevent it from being annihilated, or reduced to nothing)

1. If the cosmos needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence, than that cause must be a supernatural being, supernatural in its action, and one the existence of which is uncaused, in other words, the Supreme Being, or God

Two of the four premises, the first and the last, appear to be true with certitude. The second is true beyond a reasonable doubt. If the one remaining premise, the third, is also true beyond a reasonable doubt, than we can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists and acts to sustain the cosmos in existence.

God’s existence is uncaused because he is Being itself, and it is the nature of Being, well, to be.

 

[Uranage]

Alvin Plantinga has written a lot on this.

ttp://www.leaderu.com/truth/3truth02.html