Looking back at the great philosophers in the last two thousand years
Again, this is a pretty failed argument, used a lot my many belief systems. Just because it's old doesn't make it right. For years people thought the earth was flat you know. But they were wrong.
My argument is NOT that everything every brilliant person has said is correct- in fact I directly stated that I think a lot of these people were wrong. However, we ought not to pretend that all great thought has sprung up unaided in the last 20 years. Are you going to argue that Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Freidrich Neitzsche, Aurrelus Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas were not great thinkers and that we are not today massively influenced by what these men said and believed?
What I AM saying is that there is nothing new under the sun. We have not evolved into greater thought that does away with the need for God. The things you are saying are thousands of years old and philosophers have been wrestling with them for centuries. Brilliant men have argued on both sides, Christians and non-Christians; Atheists and believers.
For years our society was poorly educated and needed structure, balance and moral guidance for the members of that group. Churches were formed to do that, as well as collect tax! But now we can (almost) see we don't need that anymore. So "God" becomes less and less relevant, just as Thor and many many other mythical Gods of years gone by.
You are standing on the shoulders of Neitzsche when you make this argument (whether you realize it or not) and I doubt he was the first to argue such. My point is that such thinking is not evolved or new- it is the re-engaging of ideas that believers and non-believers having been throwing about for as long as people have held beliefs about God.
As for trying to solve the problem of who created God, which is the big tumbling block of any creation theory, by saying he created himself! Are you being serious, or just attempting to wind me up ???
I did not say God created Himself- I said He was uncreated, which is a huge difference. And I did not arrive at this by saying "God exists and is the Creator, therefore He himself is uncreated." Instead I (or rather Aristotle, who historically first made this argument) started with the law of causality, that every effect must have a cause. Mill argued, as I believe you are, that God must have a cause if everything has a cause, but this is not quite the law of causality. The law of causality does NOT state that everything must have a cause; rather it states "every effect must have a cause", a statement which is self-evidently true. However, it does NOT say that everything is caused. For the world we live in to make sense, there must exist something that is not an effect- something that was not caused. This thing is not self-causing- it was never caused at all. While everything that surrounds us is an effect from some cause, we cannot go back indefinitely and expect to find every cause to also be an effect. At some point, we must reach an cause that was not an effect, and that is truly the beginning. That is also what we label the Creator, whether that is the God of scripture or a strange eternally existent singularity from which all that exists sprung.
So my logic is "There must have, at some point, been an uncreated being to explain how all the created stuff got here, and that is God". This has been debated through the ages, but I've not read a single convincing argument against the law of causality and the existence of an uncaused cause.
Previous Topic
Index
