Philosophy of God.

By DragonGrim · Jan 1, 2010 · 1.9K · 5

Hey, I’m posting my essay in my blog just in case anyone wants to comment on the content. I hope you will.

I had a difficult time with the concept of God for a long time. Mostly because the Zeus-derived image that you’ll see in church, or the emotional god that you’ll read in the bible, didn’t ring true to me. I spent most of my life an atheist.

What could possibly change my mind? I wish I could say that I drove my car off a cliff and plunged into the ocean far below, and at some point a winged figure, robed in blinding light, saved me, but I can’t. It may seem insignificant, but the philosophies of some dead guys named Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle brought me over to the other side.

It all comes down to causation and the problem with infinite regression. One reason I never understood these things is because I’ve never run across any substantial effort to explain their meaning in common terms – probably because it’s not very easy to. I’ll attempt to do so.

Why do things need a cause? If you placed a rock out in the furthest reaches of space, away from all outside forces, and after its own feeble gravity rearranged its atoms until they would move no more, the rock would never change. In order to turn that rock into a moving or dynamic object, you or something else would need to give it a push, hold a heat source up to it, basically, provide it with some sort of energy.

Since we live in a dynamic universe, our existence needs causation. Our world formed from the afterbirth of our solar system. Our solar system is an offspring of the massive spiral of churning mass we call the Milky Way Galaxy. Our galaxy originated from what was probably an expansion of matter that derived from energy. The Big Bang is now disproved, though the name has stuck. It should be called the Great Expansion (which actually continues to accelerate), but it just doesn’t have the same impact on the general population.

Here’s where atheists and rational theologians disagree. The latter will say this expansion was the result of God’s will. Atheists will say that since we don’t know what was before the “Big Bang,” it is irrelevant. Both are overlooking the significance of causation.

The concept of infinity is almost innate to people. We just seem to understand that there is no certain number of times you can go around a merry-go-round without reaching an end point. It doesn’t matter whether time is linear or cyclical; infinity is still an unavoidable nemesis. Therefore, whatever cause energy to become mass also had a cause, and that cause a cause. Infinity guarantees an infinite number of causes. This brings us to the problem of infinite regression.

You are on Earth. Not only that, but you are living your life in 2010 (if you are reading this shortly after I wrote it.) That’s not good. You’ve chosen both a location and a time to occupy. How could you exist? How many years have had to pass before you were granted the cursed gift of life? How about 100-trillion years. I like that number, don’t you? Still, there was a cause before that. Infinite regression will never end. 100-trillion years will be no more significant than an atom claims in our whole universe, and even less than that in actuality.

Earth in 2010 could not exist if cause were infinite. Years must pass in order to reach the twenty-first century. Infinite regression prevents time from ever reaching the present. There must be a beginning point.

I will end this chain of reasoning with what Aristotle called “Immovable mover,” the concept of God, a thing outside of normal existence. The name isn’t important. The religion isn’t important. But the concept is.
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Comments

Dragongrim,

Having read your essay, I think you would enjoy reading Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity. He has a chapter (Chapter 11) dedicated to discussing the same issue you're tackling, along the similar lines.

It's out in paperback, but I suspect you could also get a copy in the local library.

Terry

TWErvin2, Jan 3, 2010
I'm still not sure if you're trying to argue for theism with this essay. What you're saying is that with our current knowledge and capabilities, the universe appears to be a paradox. Concluding that there must be a god, based on this, doesn't really make more sense than concluding that thunder and lightning is the product of Thor's cart and hammer. In olden days, people didn't understand electricity, because they couldn't perceive it. There's most likely many things we haven't yet perceived about our universe, and so many things appear to us as paradoxes when they actually may be totally plain and simple.

Or...we may never be able to understand how the universe works. It could be like trying to explain to a dog that 2+2=4. No matter how many times you explain it, the dog will never understand it. It may be the same with us and the mechanics of existence, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't atleast try and look for clues, rather than falling back on backwards beliefs fabricated in a time when electricity was thought to be the wrath of god. "It must be the will of God" is a statement of resignation and failure in my oppinion.

HorusEye, Jan 3, 2010
@ Terry: thanks, I will check that out.

@ HorusEye: Hey, thanks for reading.

Really all this argument says is that the concept of God is not easily dismissed, especially since the universe is a paradox. In addition to it though, I think the only thing able to create a paradox is an imagination (that we know of.) such as this: Or I can create a paradox image by saying, “The world is a flat sphere.”

Our physical existence always plays be the rules – though I’ll admit that very small particles act weird, but I think that is because we don’t understand them yet. If the rules somehow didn’t follow logic, then I would still say it is a construct of an imagination. No matter how much we do not understand the workings of the universe, we understand the concept of infinity, and there’s no way around it, even if time is nonlinear.

God doesn’t have to be a creature out of any holy book. But if there is something with an imagination that can create, it is not far off from that.

DragonGrim, Jan 3, 2010
You say that what isn't apparently logical must be created by an imagination -- what you forget is that logic is the product of our imagination. Logic isn't absolute. I can easily provide a logical argument for a six-sided triangle. Just imagine the triangle on the chalk-board is hollow, and voila, it has six sides. Or cut it out of a piece of paper, and suddenly it's a 2-sided triangle. The logical fact that a triangle has three sides only holds water as long as we all decide to perceive it the same way. In any other case, logic falls apart. That doesn't prove the existence of a god, though. It merely proves that logic is flawed, dependent on perception and that nature doesn't necessarily have to be subject to it. Logic is a limited tool we have invented through concensus. The universe existed before our logics did.

HorusEye, Jan 3, 2010
HorusEye, you’re providing me with some good morning brain-work! Thank you.

We can use imagination to break the rules of logic, but not show that it is flawed. A triangle is a product of imagination, whereas logic dictates that upon the condition that a triangle is defined as three (or whatever) sided, then it will have certain angles and whatnot. As organism, we adapted a mind that would deal with a physical world that follows logic. Our knowledge of time is both subjective and objective.

DragonGrim, Jan 3, 2010

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Philosophy of God.

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