Why you should think that the First-Cause has to be an Intelligent Cause

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God is not composed of three persons, and God is not three beings.
I thought that God was three Divine persons, the Father, the Son and the holy Ghost? While on earth, God the Son, prayed to God the Father.
 
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Wesrock:
God is not composed of three persons, and God is not three beings.
I thought that God was three Divine persons, the Father, the Son and the holy Ghost? While on earth, God the Son, prayed to God the Father.
God is three divine persons, or hypostases.

But he is not composed of persons or hypostases.
 
So the Christian monotheism is not the same type as the Jewish or the Islamic monotheism.
Metaphysically speaking it is. God has one divine nature. We all agree on that. However, because of Jesus, we are now aware through his revelation that God is also 3 persons. In other words, the God of Judaism has revealed himself as 3 persons. The Jewish man who has not accepted Christ would not agree that God’s one divine nature has revealed itself as 3 persons. But never the less we all believe in the same God. We simply disagree about what God has revealed.
 
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And I also believe that we should always be asking why. But there is a point, as I explained in the post above, where we must just accept some things as brute facts.
Sure. And one of those brute facts is “there seems to be a God”.

I’m sure you see the problem with appealing to “brute facts”. The phrase itself exists only as sales puffery.
 
Let’s consider water again. Is it in any way valid to ask why two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen combine to make H2O? Not how, but why?

If we go where this leads, then God designed that particular combination to give us water. So is it also then valid to ask if God meant it to be that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides? Did circles happen without God or did He design them? Would one plus one one make two without God? Does He use the maths that He didn’t create to design the chemistry that He did? Is He contrained by mathematical rules? Or did He arrange it so that one plus one will always make two?
These are all unable to be tested and I think you know that. Otherwise you’d have to prove that God exists and then be able to recreate some part of creation outside of the influence of that God in order to begin your examinations. I don’t see how any of that is possible.

From what I understand about the fields, these questions/tests would then be rationally and scientifically irrelevant. Akin to noise.
 
Now imagine rolling those two dice and getting two sixes. Now we can invoke as many scientific principles and crunch the maths and determine all the physical conditions that will tell us how that happened. But there would be no reason or indeed any explanation, in the sense of the word that we’d all understand, why it happened. It just did.
If you tossed the dice with the exact same speed and direction relative to the table and the dice left your hand with the exact same yaw pitch and roll, they’d come out as double 6’s every time.

Just, you know, good luck actually controlling all that. The inability to do it is what injects the requisite randomness.
 
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But never the less we all believe in the same God.
That is what you say. But that is not what a jewish rabbi might say. I think that the rabbi would say that he believes that God is One Person. In fact they have a prayer affirming that God is One. The rabbi would not accept the divinity of Jesus.
 
Just, you know, good luck actually controlling all that.
No. I do not believe that good luck controls anything. i know a lot of people believe that. At the local Catholic Church, during the celebration of the Chinese New Year, there was a dragon zig zagging his way throughout the church as part of the celebration. We were told that if you are able to touch the dragon as he comes by you, you would get good luck. I am afraid that I cannot go along with this new teaching as my personal opinion is that touching the dragon will have no effect whatsoever upon your life.
 
Therefore the reason a triangle has 3 sides must be true because of the nature of that which necessarily exists.
I don’t think so. I think it is simply a matter of definition, where you define a triangle to be a polygon with three edges and three vertices.
 
Would one plus one one make two without God?
That was a question given to a computer science major. He was asked to find out what is one plus one according to his computer. He went home and worked all night long and in the morning he came back to class with an enormous stack of papers. The professor asked him if he had solved the problem of what is one plus one. The student answered that he had worked all night on the problem and he was not able to get an exact answer, but he did get something as indicated by the enormous stack of paper that he placed on the desk of the professor. So the professor said, What is 1+1 ? The student answered I got that 1+1 is 1.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999…9.
 
I am not going to argue with you except to say it is irrelevant. If there is any truth that is eternally true, then my conclusion follows and is correct.

We know a triangle by definition is 3 sided. What difference does it make that we can change the definitions of things? Whatever you call it it has 3 sides and it doesn’t have four. If you add two irreducible numbers together you will always get a specific answer that never changes. If that were not the case, mathematics would not work.
 
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Bradskii:
Let’s consider water again. Is it in any way valid to ask why two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen combine to make H2O? Not how, but why?

If we go where this leads, then God designed that particular combination to give us water. So is it also then valid to ask if God meant it to be that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides? Did circles happen without God or did He design them? Would one plus one one make two without God? Does He use the maths that He didn’t create to design the chemistry that He did? Is He contrained by mathematical rules? Or did He arrange it so that one plus one will always make two?
These are all unable to be tested and I think you know that. Otherwise you’d have to prove that God exists and then be able to recreate some part of creation outside of the influence of that God in order to begin your examinations. I don’t see how any of that is possible.

From what I understand about the fields, these questions/tests would then be rationally and scientifically irrelevant. Akin to noise.
The question is: Would one plus one equal two without God? If it does, then to ‘design’ water He would be compelled to add one hydrogen atom to another to get two. Or did He first arrange it so that one plus one equals two?

If everything exists because of God, then He ‘designed’ circles. Let me know when you have got your head around that (incidentally…spoiler alert…the discovery that circles have actually been designed by…someone… is the closing paragraph of ‘Contact’ by Carl Sagan).
 
If it does, then to ‘design’ water He would be compelled to add one hydrogen atom to another to get two.
There is nothing about this combination that deductively necessitates what we experience to be water; we simply find it to be the case that the result is water. Maybe in another universe, it would require a different combination. It’s not logically necessary. However, even if it was a logically necessary combination in order to have water, it would only be true because of the nature of the uncaused cause. God’s nature makes it necessary and could not be any other way because of God’s nature.

However, it would still remain true that anything existentially-unnecessary (the hydrogen atoms “existence” is not necessary) cannot exist because of its own nature. And therefore if the ultimate reality does not have knowledge or a will to create, then only that which is existentially-necessary would exist.
 
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For those who do not believe in the uncaused, intelligent cause, consider the observable, scientifically measurable and natural phenomenon of entropy. Intelligence does not proceed from non-intelligence.
 
There are facts and there are theories that explain them. No-one observed the evolution of Man but it is an accepted fact. And the theory of evolution describes the process.
The theory of evolution plausibly explains variations in men – skin, hair, eye color, etc. But the theory does not explain the first instance of “man” as a rational animal.
And the PSR doesn’t hold for all things.
If PSR doesn’t hold for all things then where does one draw the line? What principles determine what things are above (explainable) or below (inexplicable) that line? If one may claim on an ad hoc basis “brute fact” or “emergent property” then what real value is the scientific method? The resulting dampening of the motivation to do scientific research would be tragic.
And unless I’m mistaken, o-mlly is using the second definition in regard to the PSR.
A proposition Q is a sufficient reason for a proposition P if, and only if, Q explains why P is true rather than not. No coherent question may be asked about why P is just so and not otherwise that is not already answered by Q.

P = intelligent beings observed.
Q = why intelligent beings exist.

PSR → Intelligence as a property in any contingent being must find its cause outside the collection of all contingent beings. If not so then the effect (contingent intelligence) would pre-exists its cause (contingent intelligence) which is false. The fact that contingent intelligence co-exists in many beings does not explain the first instance of an intelligent contingent being. Therefore, the first cause must be necessary and intelligent.
 
I’m afraid I think all the discussion about triangles, circles, and what 1+1 equals are largely irrelevant. Their meaning was defined by humans, based on our observations, and, if there was anyone in any other universe capable of observing a set of points equidistant from a centre, or envisaging lines joining three points, then they too could have come up with similar mathematical axioms.

However, the value of the gravitational constant (or any of the other fundamental constants) does not depend on observation. Other universes, if there are any, could have different values. Nor are many of the relationships that we observe between these constants necessary. Why the “square of the distance” that so many of our relationships depend on, why not the “square of the distance +1”? Obviously “our” universe has to have these values or we wouldn’t exist, but I cannot think of a reason why “our” universe had to exist instead of any others, or none at all. Unless, of course, we were were purposed.

Atheistic cosmologists, faced with this dilemma, (correct me if I’m wrong) suggest either that our universe is entirely fortuitous, or that in fact every possible universe in some sense does exist. One extension of that idea is that many, or all, of the other universes are inherently unstable, and would have collapsed into nothing again, so that in fact our own universe actually is the only possible one.
For those who do not believe in the uncaused, intelligent cause, consider the observable, scientifically measurable and natural phenomenon of entropy. Intelligence does not proceed from non-intelligence.
Some of us have spent our working lives considering the observable, scientifically measurable and natural phenomenon of entropy. It does not follow that intelligence does not proceed from non-intelligence.
 
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Atheistic cosmologists, faced with this dilemma, (correct me if I’m wrong) suggest either that our universe is entirely fortuitous, or that in fact every possible universe in some sense does exist. One extension of that idea is that many, or all, of the other universes are inherently unstable, and would have collapsed into nothing again, so that in fact our own universe actually is the only possible one.
Many, but not necessarily all? Therefore our own universe may not be the only possible one?
 
Many, but not necessarily all? Therefore our own universe may not be the only possible one?
Very true. May be not all other possible universes are inherently unstable. We have little way of knowing.
 
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Very true. May be not all other possible universes are inherently unstable. We have little way of knowing
It may even be that there are other universes with the same constants as ours? That they may be as stable (or perhaps ultimately unstable) as ours, and in some ways similar? (I don’t mean England have necessarily reached the semi-finals in all of them, but in a broader sweep similar?)
 
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