Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Hey,
Has anyone here heard of the cosmological argument (in support of an externally existing supernatural entity)? I've found it to make a fair amount of sense, but it DOES leave out the fact that the original cause could be anything.

Here
I found a pretty good article detailing good ol' Cosmo in its many forms (as well as attempting to defend against attempts at refutation).

Thoughts?

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Wow....very long...I only skimmed bits of it, but got the basic premise. It seems to play off of the temporal paradox of finite time versus infinite time, since the universe is claimed to exist (with scientific support) in a finite amount of time, and God is claimed to exist in an infinite amount of time...hence the reason why God would not need to be "created," since God simply always "was," with no beginning nor end, as is popular dogma.

But what if the Creator of this universe in which we live was itself a finite being? What would be the cause of its creation into existence? Of course, this is merely challenging the author's initial minimalist definition of a God that exists outside the limits of finite time.

As I've stated elsewhere on this forum, science, due to its very definition, will never be able to prove nor disprove the existence of an infallible God. Some other definition of God, maybe, but as science itself must be able to be proven to be fallible, to prove the existence of something wholly infallible would be rather unscientific. And since it is impossible to prove a negative, we cannot ever prove that any God or Gods do NOT exist.

As for this particular definition of God, it would also be impossible to wholly prove its existence, since by this definition, God must be accepted as operating and existing outside the rules of our universe, wherein we derive all our scientific methods. We have no methods for gathering data or proving or disproving anything outside the confines of what we can understand to be true in our universe. Even though we can theorize and speculate existence and movement in a multiple array of spatial and temporal dimensions, this is still only one potential (and otherwise unproven) piece of a puzzle that we simply cannot fathom, because its very definition is created for the sole purpose that we could never fathom it. It's sort of akin to conspiracy theories that way, I guess, where the less evidence there is, the more it is "proven" to be a conspiracy.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

I never bought the First Cause argument. OK, so let's suppose that the universe must have a cause, and that cause is God. OK, fine. What caused God? God has to have a cause too, right? No? Why is there a special exception for God, but not the universe? Doesn't make sense.

The article, which I admit I've only skimmed, does address this complaint with (paraphrasing) "God has always existed eternally, and the universe has not". I still don't really buy it. I mean, I accept the possibility, certainly, but I don't think that the statement actually proves anything.

According to the Big Bang theory, what we call the origin of the universe is really the spreading out of the universe from a singularity. That singularity itself could have been enternal, always having been there. So while the universe as we know it hasn't existed eternally, what it came from might have. If we trace our current state backwards through time, we might find that we asymptotically approach an "initial state" of the singularity -- that is, we get closer and closer to that initial state, but we're unable to actually reach it. (If you haven't studied asymptotes yet, imagine taking a number and dividing it by 2 over and over. You'll get closer and closer to zero, but you'll never reach it.) So, then, it extends infinitely into the past. OK, that sounds kind of silly, but then, so does a supreme being that has no reason to exist.

I also don't think that the article took into consideration the possibility that the whole idea of anything "outside" or "before" the universe is meaningless. As Stephen Hawking once phrased it: "What lies north of the north pole?" Meaningless question, isn't it?

But In the end, I don't really care. I debate this stuff for fun, not because I take it too seriously. I mean, even if I take the cosmological argument as true, all it does is prove that there's some kind of deity, which tells me pretty much nothing practical.

- Kef

*sigh*..

The question would go on for enternity.

I just believe God created all of us. Who created him, i say no one.

Maybe he created himself, who knows.

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Uh.... No.

Kef, I think most of your objections would have been answered in the article had you not "skimmed" it,;) but I'll do my mediocre best to summarize for your convenience:

(I will refer to the first cause as "God" herein) By proclaiming that God would need a cause too, you imply that something must have caused that, and then that, so given that the universe had a beginning, the original cause would still have to be God; I think what you say here more points toward the existence of God rather than refuting it. The cosmological argument makes no claim that everything that EXISTS requires a cause, it merely states that everything which has a BEGINNING requires a cause. (Makes sense to me.) In perspective, these are two very different claims entirely. By this claim, it is easy to draw the conclusion that a God without a beginning would not require said creation. Think of it this way:
1)Everything that has a beginning and came into existence must have had an entity or force of some manifestation that either caused it to exist indirectly or directly (either way, something else must exist before it.)
2)The universe has a beginning and came into existence. This one is the most often challenged and difficult to prove, but I'll again try to defend it. Let's start off by establishing that if the universe has no beginning, this would also imply that the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time. Our universe is constantly oscillating. This means that that it is constantly and continuously stretching or increasing with size at an unwavering tendency of rate until it collapses. It can easily be said, then, that, at some point, the universe will, as aforementioned, collapse. This would take a finite amount of time to occur. Had the universe existed eternally, the oscillating panel would have always occurring for an infinite amount of time, and since it takes a finite amount of time to collapse, it would have collapsed by now. Thus, the very fact that we argue about this as we speak (unless we are naught but the figment of a nonexistent entity's imagination, then the universe does have a beginning. QED'd!
3)If everything that has a beginning and came into existence requires a cause, and the universe has a beginning and came into existence, it then requires an external cause which is not present or linked to the existence of the universe, directly or indirectly to cause it which did NOT have a beginning nor come into existence, lest we be forced in to an endless paradox of who created what which created what.

Many Atheists, however, DO believe in the cosmological argument's authenticity, but they simply believe that the original cause is still unable to be identified as the Christian God, or any God, for that matter (see The Snork.)

As far as my Christian beliefs go: I believe that since any given first cause that has no proof is one out of the infinite amount of first causes available, and 1 divided by infinity is 0, any entity with no proof has a 0% chance of existence, therefore it must not exist.

Many ancient civilizations/societies that came in no contact with each other, however, did have a tendency and common interest in god(ess)(s)(es). Since so many of these civilizations had similar beliefs (both in structure of their religious temples and their philosophy that the gods or godesses were in the sky), it is not ridiculous to draw parallels between the tendency of human nature and that of gods because this cannot be explained psychologically within the human mind.

One still might argue, however, that religion can be explained with the human mind because of the inevitable and instinctual desire of immortal life. This is partially true; we want to have everlasting life, but this still does not explain a belief in gods. If it was simply because all humans desired everlasting life, they would all believe in just everlasting life, not necessarily involving deities.

Yet all of these civilizations shared so many beliefs. I believe that, because of human nature toward God, it is highly likely that the first cause is, indeed, a deity from a religion supported with canonical and empirical evidence.

See Didymus for my opinion on the historical clarity of various religions to provide the last reason why I believe in the Christian God.

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He makes some good points, but I don't really trust using logic and reason to fathom things such as the beginning of the universe. It's possible, in fact, almost certain that there are things which we cannot comprehend. A brain is amazing, but at the end of the day there's a limit to what we can deduce.

Personally, if I were to adopt any theistic view it would be Spinoza's pantheism.

Hmm, I don't understand what you're saying here.



Yeah, I understood that when I started reading the article, but I was too lazy to go back and change the beginning of my post, which I began before looking at the article. Oops.

I should also say that people are generally convinced of whatever they believe before going into a debate like this, and they're too stubborn to change their minds. So they start fitting the evidence to support their argument, rather than changing their point of view to fit the evidence. I fully admit that I do this as well. I'm only human. My post there is pretty much an example of that... I started it while "believing" one thing, found my own argument inadequate, so I changed it a little while hardly reconsidering my beliefs.

Going back to the specific point... I still don't see why the universe couldn't just "eternally exist". It does consider the argument that the singularity the universe came from existed forever, but its refutation of that idea doesn't even consider my idea of a universe that asymptotically approaches, but never reaches, an initial state when you go backwards through time. I mean, yes, it is hard to believe, but, again, so is the existence of God.

Anyway, I'd like to argue more on this and other related points, but I admit I'm just not quite educated enough to fully consider everything the text says... I keep stumbling all over myself in trying to present a point. Maybe I'll try again later.



I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. It's not valid mathematical reasoning, though: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.



I don't find any particular significance in the widespread belief in a deity. It is natural for every civilization to wonder "where did all this come from?", and "gods created it" is an easy answer. People create things; why wouldn't someone create the earth?

As for the similarity of beliefs, one must be careful here. First off, beliefs may not be as similar as they seem at first. For example, are you sure the idea of "gods in the sky" is as universal as you think it is? Second, civilizations aren't necessarily as historically isolated as they may seem. There really are only a few major groups, and, really, all people can be theoretically traced to a single point of origin (even though we're not sure what that point actually is). I don't think it would necessarily take many different independent discoveries of the idea of gods for the notion to be spread worldwide.



I've always felt the beginning of the universe to be incomprehensible. The origin of the universe just does not make sense, and I am convinced that the Cosmological Argument, even if taken to be true, does not change that. It's fun trying to make sense of it, but I think the fact is, we can't.

- Kef