Friday, July 6, 2007

The Existence of God/Cause and Effect (a point of clarification)

To state that "everything must have a cause" is to follow the error of Bertrand Russell. Taken this definition of cause and effect is to argue that even God must have a cause.
God does not have a cause. He is eternal!
To be correct in understanding cause and effect one should say, "every effect has a cause."
Evolution cannot answer the question of what put the world in motion apart from appealing to an absurd notion of an infinite regress.
An act of creation by God explains cause the cause and effect relationship that we take for granted every day. Evolution does not give an answer to this.
There are only two possibilities for us here. Either the universe is eternal or an eternal being brought our world into existence. To take the former position is to be caught up in eternal nonsense. We could never arrive where we are now if the universe is eternal. In our world 1 comes before 2 then 3 and so on.
On the other hand we can have our being in time and space if an eternal God created such a world of time and space. He is not bound to cause and effect as we are. He takes on the attribute of being a cause in itself or himself rather. Our world of contingency only finds intelligence and meaning by extension of divine eternal personality.
The objection arises: doesn't the same principle apply--that we cannot have our temporal being from the eternal even if it is God. Answer: Though this discussion is very abstract we can still make good philosophy with one approach but bad philosophy from the other.
God as eternal is able to give us a starting point. Apart from God as in a supposed eternal universe there is nothing outside of our selves/our world that is able to establish our current time space existence. Cause and effect goes on and on! The basic absurdity of the system causes it to collapse in on itself. How did the cause and effect sequence start is the question? If nothing started it then we are placing a blind faith in "nothing." This is ludicrous. Yet this is what atheistic "reputable" philosophers and scientists believe in rather than yield their intellects to God.
God is outside of our selves and though we do not know the details of how he does it, it is no violation of good philosophy to attribute to him our first cause we and our universe being the contingent effect. The alternative is absurdity!

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