The Failure of Causal Arguements for Theism

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The most common response to the causal arguments for the existence of God seems to be that if God can be a brute fact, so can the universe. I think that is a fine response, but it seems that we can go a bit further. For it seems to me that if God does exist, it turns out that there is as much if not more to be explained about the universe itself than there would have been had he not existed, all things being equal. God adds his own weight to our ontology, while at best only shifting our existing burden.

David Hume demonstrated that our notion of causality is born in response to our observations of the constant conjunctions between certain classes of events. We have observed regularities in the past, and we generally expect them to continue to hold into the future. Furthermore, we come to **count **upon a great number of them continuing to hold, especially those that have held for the entirety of human memory. This is quite reasonable, for after all we couldn’t plan anything; from getting a drink of water to building a computer, if we didn’t explicitly or implicitly assume that the future will resemble the past in certain respects. However skeptical one might be that inductive reasoning will in fact continue to be predictive, one has no other basis on which to deliberately act, and so one might as well accept induction for practical purposes. We should recognize, however, that this basic human belief could never be justified in a non-circular way. We believe that tomorrow will resemble today (in some respects) because today resembled yesterday, yesterday resembled the day before, and so on. Thus we justify our belief in induction by appeal to induction.
(cont…)
 
But, again, we do SO RELY upon these regularities. They are inductively verified everyday, and we seem to take them for granted in much the same way a fish takes water for granted. Perhaps unlike the fish, though, we *are *conscious of regularities because they are many, some are less confirmed than others, and we feel driven to look for new ones. We feel a vested interest in discovering new relationships and confirming those that have only been weakly established. In this way (in part at least) we add to our store of knowledge. Very well established regularities take on a special significance to us. We begin supposing almost that they MUST occur; that there is some reason to expect that they will occur quite apart from mere inductive reasoning, which we realize we can’t quite count on in the way that we can count upon these very well established regularities. Some of us even equate such regularities with formal necessities, but even those of us who do not quite make this error want to say that we have **discovered **something via induction that is more than a regularity, it is a “law” of nature. If it fails, we have either made some profound error, or some even more profound law is at work.

Many of us are willing to allow for the possibility that even these very well established causal relations will cease to hold. Some of us even believe firmly that they have ceased to hold in the past and will cease to hold again at some point in the future, for that is what a miracle amounts to, on most accounts. Generally people seem to suppose that if a law of nature has failed to hold it is because another “causal force” has intervened; there is another regularity at work, though perhaps human beings have had fewer occasions to witness the reliability of this intervening cause. This accords with our nature, and, again, it is very sensible. It is a good idea to suppose there are answers, for otherwise we are very unlikely to find any (or so experience has taught us). But the truth is that we have no good non-inductive, non-pragmatic reasons to suppose they are there. The laws of nature didn’t come with a warrantee. There doesn’t **need **to be any explanation for their ceasing to hold, just as there didn’t need be any explanation for there having begun to hold. Any such explanation would have to appeal to other real or supposed regularities, and these themselves would be ungrounded.

Causality is a practical, human notion. It is fit for folk living during a period of regularities, but it isn’t any good at all for telling such folk what, if anything, went on before (or outside of) such periods. Perhaps because it is so significant to us, we all want to apply the concept of causation whenever we can. Even though most of us recognize that you can’t ask “why” forever, we feel an urge to repeat our “whys” to just beyond the point of their being reasonable, insisting that there must be answers to why questions about realities that transcend the realm of our experience, the only realm where they ever made any sense.

This is one important reason why the standard arguments for God’s existence–those that presume that there needs to be an ultimate cause for (our universe’s) existence, movement, order, morality, etc.–fail. It isn’t that there couldn’t be some mind X such that there has been a constant conjunction between the contingent facts that that X has willed to exist and the contingent facts that actually do exist in our universe, but that even if this were so, we would just be left with another, LARGER set of constant conjunctions which can‘t be explained. Established regularities would conjoin with the will of God (Admittedly this conjunction would make more traditional causal explanations superfluous.) and EVERY additional event and non-temporal ordering, even those that might have been fully or partially undetermined as far as we could tell, would in fact correspond to the will of God, unless and to the extent that God‘s providence is limited. Now given how many unexplainable constant conjunctions we already have to explain, perhaps even orders of magnitude more don’t really matter, but they certainly don’t help. In summery, if the God of theism exists then, all things being equal, there exists as much or more order than otherwise would have existed and no fewer facts of any sort to explain. (This holds even if God himself is “simple“, as I believe most orthodox Christians claim.) While Iwould not claim that this counts as evidence *against *theism, it does seem to turn the tables on the causal arguments, given that such arguments seem motivated by a perceived need for an ultimate explanation of some set of facts. Those who use such arguments don’t seem to realize that they have taken causality outside of the sphere of its origin: the mind of an acting organism in what can only **happen **to be a world of regularities.

Thanks for reading through this,
Michael
 
Michael,

I apologize for not reading your entire pair of posts; I “applied my eyes” to the entirety of both of them, but a good bit of it went over my head.

I wanted to ask you about the possible effects on “arguments from causality” of the apparent breakdown of strict causality found by quantum mechanics. In case you are not familiar with that, let me explain what it is.

Consider a quasar in the fairly early universe, say, two billion light-years away. Light from that quasar that we are seeing now was emitted two billion years ago, give or take a bit.

Consider further a galaxy that lies exactly between us and that quasar and is one hundred million light years from us. General relativity predicts, and it has been observed, that mass bends light; in particular, the mass of the galaxy bends the light of the quasar. Some of the light from the quasar goes around one side of the galaxy on its way towards us and more of the light from the quasar goes around the other side of the galaxy on its way towards us. We see this effect as two distinct images of the quasar, one on each side of the galaxy.

Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave like a particle under certain circumstances and like a wave under other circumstances. Light from the quasar that behaves like a wave passes around both sides of the galaxy on its way to us; light from the quasar that behaves like a particle passes around one side of the galaxy or the other, but not both.

Here is where it gets deep: whether the light behaves like a wave or like a particle depends on the experiment we set up to detect its behavior. If we go looking for wave-like behavior, we see light waves; if we go looking for particle-like behavior, we see light particles. This means that the behavior of the light a hundred million years ago, as to how it passed around the galaxy, is determined by our selection of experiment now.

Thus we see that events in the past are apparently affected by events in the present and the future. Does this affect any “arguments from causality”?
  • Liberian
 
Liberian,
I suppose that supports backwards causality, which is still a regularity that we observe, if it is real. It isn’t obvious to me how that might be relevant to my critique of the causal arguments, though. Let me try to sum up briefly what I tried to express at length above:

–We observe all sorts of regularities in the world, particular sorts of events tend to be followed by other sorts of events. For instance, every time I drop a book I’m holding in the air, it falls. Every time a physicist runs an experiment of the sort that would detect particles, they observe evidence that light is composed of particles, etc.
–Our notion of causality is based upon nothing more than observed regularities like these
–We have only a pragmatic justification for our acting as if these regularities will continue to hold. We can’t argue that they have always held in the past, so they are likely to hold in the future, for in making that argument we rely upon the very inductive reasoning we are trying to justify: that the future will resemble the past.
–While we can justify the application of our notion of causality to an environment that exhibits regularities (as far as we can tell, so far the universe has exhibited many regularities), that notion’s applicability DEPENDS upon those regularities, and could never explain them (except when one regularity is explained in terms of another). So it makes no sense to speak of a “cause” of the universe or any of its nonreducable attributes. A Cause is not a power or force, it is just a description of some of the features of what IS over time and from a particular perspective. (ours)
–If God exists, his existence calls for an explanation as much as the universe does. If he willed the features of the universe to exist, and then they did, that calls for an explanation as well, because it is of no help to say that God’s willing the universe to exist and be the way it is CAUSED it to do so.
–I’m going to skip a few details, but hopefully I’ve at least shown why I don’t think that positing God as the origin of order, matter, movement, etc. is helpful at all.

I am sorry if I missed your point. Maybe now that I have tried to clarify mine you show me what you were driving at.
Thanks,
Michael
 
MichaelLewis said:
–If God exists, his existence calls for an explanation as much as the universe does. If he willed the features of the universe to exist, and then they did, that calls for an explanation as well, because it is of no help to say that God’s willing the universe to exist and be the way it is CAUSED it to do so.
–I’m going to skip a few details, but hopefully I’ve at least shown why I don’t think that positing God as the origin of order, matter, movement, etc. is helpful at all.
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Forgive me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the sum of your argument is ‘Sure, the universe apparently had a beginning, and you’d think that would imply a cause. But a cause is only implied because that’s what we observe in everything we investigate - it doesn’t necessarily have to be so. And besides, even if you assume God is the cause, you haven’t explained anything because you haven’t explained where God came from.’

My reply to the first point would be: Sure, the idea of the first cause for the universe is that all actions have a chain of causes behind them, and there must then be a first cause. Yes, if there’s no need for a first cause, then there’s no need for God in this plan. However, all reason and logic currently indicates that such a cause is needed - otherwise, ironically, you either have to posit an infinite chain of causes, or that the cause of the universe was… well. Miraculous.

Second, yes - if God was the cause of the universe, you still have yet to explain God’s origin and nature. God could well be infinite himself, an eternal chain of causes - though our universe certainly appears not to be. So yes, there are still questions about God that remain. However, that’s a whole other subject. If you find some strange markings on the ground and deduce they were made by an intelligent agent rather than by a chance force of nature, it doesn’t matter to that specific question (What made these markings?) that you still have a billion questions about said intelligent agent.
 
Nullasalus wrote:
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the sum of your argument is 'Sure, the universe apparently had a beginning, and you’d think that would imply a cause. But a cause is only implied because that’s what we observe in everything we investigate - it doesn’t necessarily have to be so.
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Not quite. In fact we never **observe **causes, we observe correlations between classes of events. Once we have observed that some correlations have, in our experience, always held we sometimes label the prior events “causes” and the later events “effects”. We expect that, all things being equal, when the cause is present the effect will follow. We reach this conclusion by induction; because regularities have held up in the past we conclude that they will continue to hold in the future. This is unwarranted unless you assume (as is natural for us to do) that inductive reasoning is warranted. But that is just what is at issue. Our concept of causation only makes sense if you ASSUME that regularities hold. It does not ultimately explain regularities.
And besides, even if you assume God is the cause, you haven’t explained anything because you haven’t explained where God came from.'
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That is true, but it is a common point, as I indicated at the onset of my initial post. I also argued that setting aside the problem of explaining God’s existence, his existence can’t explain the existence of the universe. Put it this way: I can grant you (for the sake of this argument only) that God’s existence isn’t problematic. You don’t have to explain it. So now you have God, how will you explain the universe? By appealing to his “causal powers” I suppose? But that is something else you have to explain, why should it be the case that if God wills that all the features of the universe come into existence, that they do? “causal power” is just an abstraction from the observed regularities which we can’t explain. They aren’t going to get you the universe upon who‘s characteristics they depend!
My reply to the first point would be: Sure, the idea of the first cause for the universe is that all actions have a chain of causes behind them, and there must then be a first cause. Yes, if there’s no need for a first cause, then there’s no need for God in this plan. However, all reason and logic currently indicates that such a cause is needed - otherwise, ironically, you either have to posit an infinite chain of causes, or that the cause of the universe was… well. Miraculous.
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*A major point of my posts was to establish that “all reason and logic” do not indicate that such a “cause” is needed. In fact, it isn’t even coherent to ask for an ultimate cause. The idea that the universe, or anything else, “just is” is astounding I agree, but we can do no better with or without God. God explains nothing because causation is a practical human abstraction that PRESUMES an ordered universe.
Thank you for your time,
Michael
 
MIchael,

Thank you for your clarification. It appears that the quantum mechanical phenomenon that I described doesn’t affect the arguments from causality at all because, as you said in your first paragraph, it simply a different kind of causality.

I think your argument from causality, now that I understand it a bit better, stumbles slightly. We observe that every event in the universe is caused by some other event in the universe, that there is nothing in the universe that does not have a cause. Since the “attributes” of the universe are deduced from observed events, we arrive at the conclusion that causation is one of the attributes of the universe. We do not observe this about God. This is a qualitative difference between God and attributes of the universe: we do not observe any “cause” for God. Thus “there is no explanation” is a tolerable statement about God but is not a tolerable statement about the universe.
  • Liberian
 
All of this really has nothing to do with God, but with the age-old argument between Nominalism and Realism. The Nominalist approach says that what we “perceive” is not the thing itself, merely an ungrounded “experience” we use to infere a reality that may or may not be there. The Realist approach is basically “what you see is what you get”, though it admits that sometimes our perception is faulty, and our errors in perception are based on our limits, not on the limits of the reality I perceive.

The fundamental problem with Nominalism is that it quite simply does not work. By this I don’t mean that it isn’t plausible, as it’s of course plausible that there isn’t really cause and effect but merely associations in the human brain between two things we’ve always just happened to see together. What I mean is that there is no such thing as “functional Nominalism”; every Nominalist must be functionally a Realist in order to even get out of bed in the morning. Ironically, Nominalism generally asserts that in order for a thing to be regarded as “true”, at least insofar as it can be utilized, it must function well, yet Nominalism fails its own test in this regard because Nominalism can not “function” at all. Nominalism can’t even lead us to the conclusion that we exist in ourselves.

Realism, on the other hand, passes this Nominalist test with flying colors. It gets us out of the bed in the morning, gets us a cup of coffee, and even explains why we would come up with non-sense like Nominalism while we eat our very real bowl of Cheerios. Realism not only passes the first test of Nominalism when Nominalism fails miserably, it’s also the only thing that ALLOWS for Nominalism to exist as a theory at all. Realism is the only non-circular explaination for Nominalism, the only “transcendental”.

In any discussion about such ideas as those raised by Hume, the methodology itself must first be evaluated, and in this case Nominalism falls on its own sword. There’s no reason to assume Hume’s, or any other Nominalist’s, conclusions when their methodology fails in the very first test.

Peace and God bless!
 
Liberian said:
I think your argument from causality, now that I understand it a bit better, stumbles slightly. We observe that every event in the universe is caused by some other event in the universe, that there is nothing in the universe that does not have a cause.
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Well, we haven’t OBSERVED that have we? We have found a great many regularities which we consider instances of causation, but we haven’t found a cause for every phenomenon we observe, much less for those events we do not observe. I grant you, however, that the universe seems pretty regular so far, QM aside.
Since the “attributes” of the universe are deduced from observed events, we arrive at the conclusion that causation is one of the attributes of the universe. We do not observe this about God. This is a qualitative difference between God and attributes of the universe: we do not observe any “cause” for God. Thus “there is no explanation” is a tolerable statement about God but is not a tolerable statement about the universe.
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Perhaps every event does have a cause in the universe itself, though this needn’t be the case. Even so, this is to say nothing more than that the universe itself is very regular. It does not follow that the universe is a result of a regularity. We certainly don’t observe a cause FOR the universe any more than we observe a cause for God. For to discern a cause is just to discern a sort of regularity. Also, as I stated in my last post, even if you require no explanation for God you still need an explanation as to why his will effects reality, otherwise you don’t just have a universe that happened to begin to exist and happened to exhibit certain properties, but it also happened to do all this in accordance with the will of God. The overall point I am driving at is that it makes no sense at all to appeal to God’s “causal powers” as an explanation of the universe or its attributes.
Thanks,
Michael
 
Ghosty said:
All of this really has nothing to do with God, but with the age-old argument between Nominalism and Realism. The Nominalist approach says that what we “perceive” is not the thing itself, merely an ungrounded “experience” we use to infere a reality that may or may not be there. The Realist approach is basically “what you see is what you get”, though it admits that sometimes our perception is faulty, and our errors in perception are based on our limits, not on the limits of the reality I perceive.

The fundamental problem with Nominalism is that it quite simply does not work. By this I don’t mean that it isn’t plausible, as it’s of course plausible that there isn’t really cause and effect but merely associations in the human brain between two things we’ve always just happened to see together. What I mean is that there is no such thing as “functional Nominalism”; every Nominalist must be functionally a Realist in order to even get out of bed in the morning. Ironically, Nominalism generally asserts that in order for a thing to be regarded as “true”, at least insofar as it can be utilized, it must function well, yet Nominalism fails its own test in this regard because Nominalism can not “function” at all. Nominalism can’t even lead us to the conclusion that we exist in ourselves.

Realism, on the other hand, passes this Nominalist test with flying colors. It gets us out of the bed in the morning, gets us a cup of coffee, and even explains why we would come up with non-sense like Nominalism while we eat our very real bowl of Cheerios. Realism not only passes the first test of Nominalism when Nominalism fails miserably, it’s also the only thing that ALLOWS for Nominalism to exist as a theory at all. Realism is the only non-circular explaination for Nominalism, the only “transcendental”.

In any discussion about such ideas as those raised by Hume, the methodology itself must first be evaluated, and in this case Nominalism falls on its own sword. There’s no reason to assume Hume’s, or any other Nominalist’s, conclusions when their methodology fails in the very first test.

Peace and God bless!
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I actually haven’t been advocating Nominalism, which I understand to be the belief that the only thing that objects in a class have in common are their names. I can certainly allow that objects can have other things in common, and that in fact they can reliably relate to us and each other in the same way. Certainly, like the realist, I don’t want to claim that we don’t observe the real attributes of objects, for relational attributes are quite real, though they are contingent. I confess that I can make nothing of truly non-relational attributes (as an aside, I challenge you to describe one for me 😉 apart from consciousness itself, but that really isn’t important to the present discussion, as far as I can see. I have been advocating inductive skepticism, and I tried to express why it is alright to accept induction for practical purposes, and a mistake to apply it to questions about the ultimate origin of anything. I’ll try to restate those points more clearly.

–We have no non-arbitrary rival method to use instead of induction; we are the sort of organisms that make plans, and one can’t plan without assuming some past regularities will continue to hold. Additionally, as you have implied, we simply won’t (if the future resembles the past in this respect) abandon induction for practical purposes. It has been in our nature to assume it.
–However, we can at least recognize that induction has no non-pragmatic warrant and that it serves us BECAUSE the regularities of the universe have continued to hold. We IDENTIFY these regularities and come to COUNT on some of them. Our notion of causality is dependent upon inductive reasoning. There is no inconsistency in recognizing this on the one hand and accepting induction for practical purposes on the other.
–If we understand that causality reduces to the regularities it describes, and that it is not possible to “explain” a regularity (except in relation to other regularities or sets of particular events) we should understand that we can’t appeal to causality to explain the origin of the universe or its features. Even if we grant the existence of some first (or perhaps “timeless”) mind, we have no explanation as to why the features of the universe it wills to exist should actually come into existence. Now this may in fact be a regularity, it may be that anything contingent that God (if he exists) has ever willed has come to pass. But that is just another regularity, and it calls for an explanation every bit as much or as little as the universe’s spontaneous existence would.
Thanks,
Michael
 
This discussion only applies to the argument from motion not the argument from causality. Once again another person has missunderstood the Thomistic understanding of causality.

Further, Hume is done away with Math. The objectivity of Mathematics by their very existence as true deletes Hume from the circle of viable thinkers.
 
mosher said:
This discussion only applies to the argument from motion not the argument from causality. Once again another person has missunderstood the Thomistic understanding of causality.
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It applies to 4 versions of the cosmological argument, as well as any argument that objective morality exists and therefore must have a cause. (It doesn’t apply to arguments that merely define morality as simply reducible to divine will, only those that maintain that moral truths exist independently of God’s will and that God created them.)

Four of Aquinas’ arguments appeal to God’s causal powers:
  1. The power to bring the universe into existence
  2. The power to initiate motion
  3. The power to bring harmony to the universe
  4. The power to keep the universe from ceasing to exist
I am arguing that God’s causal powers can’t explain anything in any deep sense. Now I admit I am no Aquinas scholar, (and I didn’t cite him specifically) and perhaps there is some subtlety I’ve missed. Where Aquinas isn’t attributing causal powers to God as part of an argument for God‘s existence, I’m not quarreling with him (at least not in this thread).
Further, Hume is done away with Math. The objectivity of Mathematics by their very existence as true deletes Hume from the circle of viable thinkers.
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This isn’t the first time that I have credited David Hume for ideas I’ve expressed on these forums, only to have someone respond by disparaging Hume. This is unfair to me because my argument stands upon its own, whatever its origin. It is unfair to Hume because even if he was mistaken on some point, it doesn’t follow that he never made good arguments. Anyway, Hume didn’t “do away with math” for it concerns the relations of ideas, the value of which he recognized. I suppose you mean that he didn’t believe in the Forms? Well neither do I, but I don’t see the relevance of that to my argument.
Thanks,
Michael
 
Michael, I think I would tend to agree with you–about how the concept of causality is insufficient philosophical grounds for establishing God’s existence. To get out of this mess though, I would argue that we need to take a step back and ask ourselves about the fundamental capacity we human beings have to reason. In short, I would say that God’s existence is not the end product of a long series of philosophical proofs, as is the case with the causality argument, but is actually established on the grounds of agrument itself; the mere fact that man is capable of arguing–meaning that he is capable of reason–proves that there exists a metaphysical reality that stands over and above the physical universe. If there weren’t, man would simply be a cog in the machine; in a non-theistic, naturalistic view of the world, we would have to assume that man reasons no more than clouds produce rain. So if we have any faith in our capacity to reason, we also have to acknowledge the existence of God
 
I actually haven’t been advocating Nominalism, which I understand to be the belief that the only thing that objects in a class have in common are their names.
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Hume’s entire philosophy is founded on Nominalism. To advocate Hume is to advocate Nominalism.
I confess that I can make nothing of truly non-relational attributes (as an aside, I challenge you to describe one for me 😉
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Absolute Being, or to use Biblical language “I Am”.
–We have no non-arbitrary rival method to use instead of induction; we are the sort of organisms that make plans, and one can’t plan without assuming some past regularities will continue to hold. Additionally, as you have implied, we simply won’t (if the future resembles the past in this respect) abandon induction for practical purposes. It has been in our nature to assume it.
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We’re not talking about planning, we’re talking about existing. Furthermore, we DO have a non-arbitrary method that’s called Grace and Revelation. You may not accept them or perceive them, but then neither does a blind person experience color. The blind would be quite foolish to tell those with sight that they couldn’t actually navigate by their visual senses.

This comes back to another area of Nominalism, when the Reformers replaced Grace with intellectual assenting faith. Catholic tradition, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, does not view Grace in terms of intellectual assent, but that it is actually another mode of experience, just as sight and taste. It’s not a matter of “I believe on faith”, it’s a matter of “through Faith, Grace; through Grace, I see”. You can not “inductively reason” yourself into having the stigmata. 😛
Even if we grant the existence of some first (or perhaps “timeless”) mind, we have no explanation as to why the features of the universe it wills to exist should actually come into existence. Now this may in fact be a regularity, it may be that anything contingent that God (if he exists) has ever willed has come to pass. But that is just another regularity, and it calls for an explanation every bit as much or as little as the universe’s spontaneous existence would.
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This is another example of the inherent Nominalism of your argument. St. Thomas Aquinas did not stop with the “five proofs”, he went on to explain how things come to pass by way of participation in Being, and how God is Absolute Being in His Essence. It seems like you stopped far too early in the Summa 😉

I won’t go into all of that because it doesn’t directly relate to the question of causality, but if you feel it’s important I’d be happy to 🙂

Peace and God bless!
 
mlcampbell said:
Michael, I think I would tend to agree with you–about how the concept of causality is insufficient philosophical grounds for establishing God’s existence. To get out of this mess though, I would argue that we need to take a step back and ask ourselves about the fundamental capacity we human beings have to reason. In short, I would say that God’s existence is not the end product of a long series of philosophical proofs, as is the case with the causality argument, but is actually established on the grounds of agrument itself; the mere fact that man is capable of arguing–meaning that he is capable of reason–proves that there exists a metaphysical reality that stands over and above the physical universe. If there weren’t, man would simply be a cog in the machine; in a non-theistic, naturalistic view of the world, we would have to assume that man reasons no more than clouds produce rain. So if we have any faith in our capacity to reason, we also have to acknowledge the existence of God
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MLCampbell,
I would like to clarify that I do not here claim that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, only that causal arguments must fail. That being said, I wonder if what you are describing is a sort of causal argument. I’m not sure I really understand it, though I have seen it before. I can’t see how consciousness itself, setting reason aside, could be produced by a physical process…but then I can’t see how consciousness itself could be the result of anything. We could consider consciousness primary and be idealists. That is, we could claim that only minds exist and all objects are just features of minds. If we go that way we need not postulate a God, because God’s causal powers can’t be evoked to explain the existence or coordination of minds. On the other hand, we could suppose that in some way we can’t understand from the “outside” 4 dimensional structures (brains over time) can be conscious. That is a practical assumption that explains our apparent ability to understand consciousness as it relates to brain science, and so seems to be a good working theory. Once again, we don’t need God to explain these structures because an appeal to his causal powers explains nothing.

I’m sure I’m missing something, though, because you picked out reason, not consciousness. I have seen “presuppositional” arguments for the existence of God before that claim that we implicitly assume that God exists as a premise to all of our arguments. Is that what you are driving at? I must say that I’ve never understood these arguments, they seem like bare assertions to me. I don’t understand the roll God’s existence plays in our arguments. Could you give me an example of how this works?

Perhaps you mean merely that the truth of determinism would somehow invalidate our reason. I don’t see why this is so, but even granting that it is, we don’t need God for there to be indeterminism in the universe. On the contrary, God’s providence seems to create problems for indeterminism.
Thanks,
Michael
 
Weird as it seems, I just got off of my knees, thanking God that I am not an educated idiot.
 
You (Ghosty) wrote:
“Hume’s entire philosophy is founded on Nominalism. To advocate Hume is to advocate Nominalism.”
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First of all, I’m not “advocating Hume”, I’m advocating an argument. I gave credit where credit was do, but I have no interest in getting side tracked into a discussion of Hume. Secondly, I don’t see how nominalism is essential to this argument. Would you agree that some concepts are reducible to others? I wouldn’t think a moderate realist would have a problem with our concept of ‘one hour’ being reducible to our concept of ‘sixty minutes‘, or our concept of ‘heat’ being reducible to our concept of ‘molecular motion‘. Does EVERY idea have to represent a non-reducible reality? I don’t know how close to believing in the Forms you are. If ‘causation’ captures something more than observed regularities under such and such conditions (The details discussed by philosophers of science are irrelevant to this discussion.) please, explain what it captures. Better yet, explained to me how one might learn to apply the term “causality” as you do. How would you teach it to a child?

I wrote:
“I confess that I can make nothing of truly non-relational attributes (as an aside, I challenge you to describe one for me ;-)”

You wrote:
“Absolute Being, or to use Biblical language “I Am”.”
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Those are not descriptions, they are labels or vague metaphors at best. Anyway, I have granted that ‘to be conscious’ is a non-relational attribute, and since each of us know there is at least one conscious being, we might coherently suppose there are more. Perhaps even one whose act of will corresponded with the rest coming into existence.

I wrote:
“–We have no non-arbitrary rival method to use instead of induction; we are the sort of organisms that make plans, and one can’t plan without assuming some past regularities will continue to hold. Additionally, as you have implied, we simply won’t (if the future resembles the past in this respect) abandon induction for practical purposes. It has been in our nature to assume it.”

You wrote:
“We’re not talking about planning, we’re talking about existing.”
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Inductive skepticism does not entail that there isn’t an objective world that has existed up till now (And YES, I know that Hume can be construed as denying that.). It is only the proposition that we have no deductive or non-circular inductive reason to suppose that the future will resemble the past.

You wrote:
“Furthermore, we DO have a non-arbitrary method that’s called Grace and Revelation. You may not accept them or perceive them, but then neither does a blind person experience color. The blind would be quite foolish to tell those with sight that they couldn’t actually navigate by their visual senses.”
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You’re justification for trusting revelation (if there is any) would be inductive and/or pragmatic, just as my justification for trusting my sight, hearing, touch, etc. is inductive and/or pragmatic. I wouldn’t deny that revelation could in principle provide a fine inductive and/or pragmatic reason to believe in God. In fact, I think that private and especially public revelation are the BEST reasons for believing in God, though even they can’t be infallible. I sometimes joke, truthfully, that I’m just a few good psychotic break-downs away from theism. Given sufficient unambiguous sensory evidence, tested to the best of my ability (If God is talking to me, chairs and tables better not be talking to me too, or I’ll be less likely to believe him. I might get an MRI as well.) I would become a theist.

I wrote:
“Even if we grant the existence of some first (or perhaps “timeless”) mind, we have no explanation as to why the features of the universe it wills to exist should actually come into existence. Now this may in fact be a regularity, it may be that anything contingent that God (if he exists) has ever willed has come to pass. But that is just another regularity, and it calls for an explanation every bit as much or as little as the universe’s spontaneous existence would.”

You wrote:
“This is another example of the inherent Nominalism of your argument. St. Thomas Aquinas did not stop with the “five proofs”, he went on to explain how things come to pass by way of participation in Being, and how God is Absolute Being in His Essence. It seems like you stopped far too early in the Summa.”
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That sounds like Panentheism to me, the belief that the universe is part of God. For the record, I’m not targeting Aquinas specifically, contemporary theists use causal arguments all the time. If Aquinas has a “patch” for his causal arguments, please share it. My immediate response is this: To the extent that we are part of God, God is complex; there is more to him that exists unexplained and unexplainable. To the extent that we are not a part of God, God created us, and the argument that I began this thread with applies.
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Thanks,
Michael
 
Michael Lewis

You indicate in your bio that you are now agnostic:

*Former Christian: I miss my faith, but honesty compels me to reserve judgement. *

I’m curious as to how this can be a logically tenable position.

How can you reserve judgment when you judge Christianity to be untenable?
 
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