Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Today would have never arrived if there were infinite days and no beginning. All matter is constantly changing and thus entropy demonstrates that energy is becoming less usable. Causality affirms everything that began to exist has a greater cause. Therefore, the universe began to exist, and the universe must have a cause.
The Beginning
The universe is full of effects for which every effect must have a sufficient greater cause. The universe is mass and energy in motion. Mass is stored energy, and energy is the ability for motion. Motion is an effect that must have a cause because an infinite regress is impossible, and so every motion is set in motion and is not eternal, and therefore, all motion was set in motion. This is all to say again that the universe had a beginning as everything within the universe had a beginning.
Causality
The universe had a beginning with only three considerable causes. Either the universe exists by necessity, began by chance from nothing, or was created by a Creator. Does the universe exist by necessity? Nothing exists by necessity that begins to exists or that would have already existed and always existed. Furthermore, the universe is contingent and thus cannot exist because of necessity. Something could possibly exist by chance. However, the probability that the universe came to exist from nothing is impossible. Nothing comes from nothing. An effect cannot exist without a cause. Something cannot come from nothing. Could one cause have created all material things — the universe? Every effect has a cause and every material thing is changing thus showing that nothing material is eternal. Therefore, there must exist one great cause at the beginning of the great chain of cause and effect that consists of the universe. This cause must transcend matter to have caused matter to exist. Therefore, the cause must be metaphysical — supernatural.
Identifying the Cause
Is the cause of the universe something or nothing? There must exist something since nothing has no effect. Does the cause create an effect? The cause must create or there would be nothing. Is the creating cause mindless or a mind? Natural laws operate the same way repeatedly and only upon what already exists. If the cause were mindless, then it would operate repeatedly without choice. However, for the cause to create something unique, then the cause must operate as a mind and by choice. Since chance cannot create anything with complex order without intelligence, no creator can create with order without a mind. The cause must be personal. The Creator must be a being, an intelligent person. Must the creator have enough intelligence to cause the grand effect of everything that exists? This must certainly be true since no part of the universe can originate from chance. Can the Creator create without power? No. The Creator must have all power as the great original cause for the grand effect of the universe. The Creator must be all-powerful. This Creator is an all-powerful personal Being who caused the universe and transcends the universe. By definition, this is God.
Conclusion
The premises above leave one undeniable conclusion that all physical effects have one metaphysical all-powerful supremely intelligent Creator who is the great cause and genesis of everything in existence. This confirms Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Also Psalm 19:1 affirms, “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.” In Romans 1:20, the apostle declared, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
Nature’s God should compel more questions: “Would the all-knowing Creator contain and be all Truth?,” “Would He know all virtue and be the example of all virtue and the epitome of virtue?,” and “Would He be below and submissive to virtue or greater than virtue having created virtue, or would He be virtue in His essence?”
Read more: “Love Exists Because God Exists.”
Actually, you do have a point there. I’ve stumbled across your argument on the lips of so many Christians that I jumped to the conclusion that you were pleading the case for Yahweh without just cause. For that, I apologise.
However, my use of ‘Yahweh’ still applies in the sense of an intelligent creator.
Ha!
You’re actually telling me I’m arrogant because I acknowledge that there are some things beyond the ken of human knowledge, and that the origin of the universe is currently on the list of unknowables?
Do you actually read the things you type, or do you just fade in and out?
I acknowledge my weaknesses in the art of knowing what is true. I cannot yet know what the origin of the universe really was – or even that there was one – because as of yet I have no reliable evidence from which to draw that knowledge. This is not arrogance – it’s intellectual honesty.
And while it’s true I do dance in circles during argument (it’s more fun that way) the simple fact of the matter is that you’ve only been able to ignore my points by wilfully failing to understand them.
I’ve been trying to point out several errors in your logic.
You said: “It’s either A, B, or C. I don’t understand how A or B could be true, so C I know, without any evidence, that C must be true.”
I reply: “That’s silly. You don’t really know that A or B are false. Besides, you didn’t even consider X, Y, or Z. Sure, C could be true – but you can’t claim it must be true without any evidence. That’s special pleading.”
You reply: “I don’t understand options X, Y and Z, so that means that option C must be true.”
I reply: “But you don’t really understand option C either, so just because you don’t understand the others that doesn’t mean that they’re not true.”
You say: “But you believe option X, and that’s silly!”
I reply: “I don’t believe option X because I have no good reason to think it’s true. I just know its a possiblity for which I have no hard evidence to invalidate it. It’s just that you haven’t given any evidence for C either, so you haven’t shown why C is any better than X. So you can’t just dismiss X because you don’t like it. That’s special pleading.”
You reply: “But I don’t understand option X, so Y must be true!”
I reply: “Umm… We’ve covered this. You have no evidence for Y other than vauge metaphysics. We can’t claim to know things for which we have no evidence, and it’s arrogant to pretend you do.”
You reply: “Nuh-uh! I’m not arrogant – you’re arrogant! You’re telling me that there’s things you can’t know, and that’s arrogant!”
I reply: “Now you’re just acting like a 12 year old. I acknowledge that we can’t really claim knowledge of something when we have no hard evidence from which to draw that knowledge. At present, we have no hard evidence of the origins of the universe, so for the moment we can’t really know what happened, only guess. That’s not arrogance – that’s intellectual honestly.”
Are you really relying on your stubborn endurance in the face of apt criticism of your initial argument to outlast my tolerance for your inane prattle such that you can get the last word in and pretend you won the argument?
Have you even considered the very plausible possibility that the true underlying nature of reality could be so alien to human intuitions that no human being could ever conceive it, let alone understand it if they were informed of it? I’m not saying that this is the case – only that it could be the case. Once again, you have nothing to show that this could not be the case, so your logic that there must have been a creator because it is the ‘only’ option is highly flawed.
You’re dismissing a limited set of metaphysical claims without evidence of invalidation, and accepting the metaphysical claim you prefer without evidence of validation. This is special pleading, and it’s a bad argument.
Refutations really don’t get any simpler than this.
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Certainly to you, every man who confidently knows and argues anything contrary to you believing it is arrogant. How arrogant is the man who thinks that he cannot know something? How could you know that not knowing it? Do you live your life in such lies and contradictions?
Continue to argue in circles about creating nothings made by a Creator. at no time during this discussion have I mentioned a god, Yahwah, and I do not believe I’ve ever mentioned the God, but only the Creator.
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You don’t understand.
One of the differences between you and me is that I’m not so arrogant as to claim to know the unknowable.
I don’t believe that the ‘first cause’ was the atemporal void because in all honesty I don’t know because I can’t know. And neither can you.
What I do know is that the atemporal void answer to the first cause question is more plausible than the intelligent creator answer for the simple reason that the atemporal void is much more plausible as the only thing that itself would not have required a cause of its own. You can always make the claim that Yahweh is atemporal as well – but as it stands, the atemporal void is the simpler, more elegant question.
Also, the first cause argument states ‘every cause must itself have a cause’ as its first foundation, then winds up saying ‘so there must be a cause that is itself causeless’. It is self-contradictory. It could still be true – metaphysics alone has never been a particularly good predictor of experimental results – but the argument itself is automatically more dodgy than other metaphysical concepts that contain no such internal contradiction.
Also note that even if the atemporal void answer to the first cause question was true, this would not disprove Yahweh. The atemporal void could itself have cause Yahweh – you allow such a bizzare concept the second you claim that causality doesn’t apply in an atemporal environment – and that Yahweh then caused the universe.
So even if Yahweh wasn’t the first cause, that doesn’t mean that Yahwen doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t mean that Yahweh couldn’t have been the cause of time and space.
All it means is that the argument that Yahweh had to exist because the universe had to have a first cause is a completely bogus argument.
Your argument is a bad one. That is my statement – not that I am convinced that there was a first cause and that it was the atemporal void, because I am convinced of no such thing.
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By exactly the same logic, Yahweh is impossible.
If Yahweh is exempt from causality because he’s outside time, I can only point out that the atemporal void is outside time as well. And since you can’t claim to understand how Yahweh made the universe, neither do I have to claim to understand how the atemporal void could give rise to the ‘singularity’ that expaned into the Big Bang.
Reiteration of special pleading is not an argument.
Once again – I’m not trying to tell you that any of this proves that Yahweh doesn’t exist. I can no more prove Yahweh doesn’t exist than I can prove that I don’t have invisible fairies in my garden.
All I’m trying to do is show that your logic above that tries to ‘prove’ the existence of Yahweh is terribly flawed and unconvincing. This doesn’t have to matter to you: You can still believe in bronze-age fairytales if you like. But I’m not going to let you propagate this particularly terrible piece of logic as if it were a good argument without objecting to the flaws therein.
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