A student once asked me the question that a lot of people wonder about: who made God? A few scriptures directly address this question, but I referenced Psalm 90:2 in my answer to the student and one might also consider 1 Timothy 1:17. Furthermore, I tried to reason with her concerning the difficulty of understanding how God could have always existed without being created by invoking concepts in physics that are hard to understand (i.e., they are comparable to understanding God's necessary existence). For example, most people do not comprehend the math for relativity theory. But two arguments for God's existence that seem compelling to me are (1) the argument from possibility and necessity or Aquinas' third way; (2) the need to avoid an infinite regress.
Regarding number (1), it seems reasonable to suppose that "if all things possibly fail to exist at some time then possibly there is a time when nothing exists" (Robert E. Maydole).
If it's logically possible that nothing finite once existed, then it is logically possible that if non-existent things did come to have actual existence instead of just potential existence, then a necessary being (one who exists without any other entity sustaining the being's existence) brought once non-existent things into existence. Nevertheless, I think Aquinas' third way (proof) only works if one modalizes it like Maydole does.
But my student objects that we can't see God or empirically detect him like we are capable of measuring or detecting physical entities (e.g. the wind, atoms, and gravity). While I grant this point, it does not seem that the objection is fatal to belief in God. Many things in physics are less than certain (to understate the matter) and science has even predicted the existence of some things that were not detected at the time, for instance, in chemistry, cosmology and with string theory. There are still some things that science has never detected but these things are widely thought to exist. Besides, to suppose that we must see/hear something (etc.) to believe it exists is a metaphysical position or an article of faith: the proposition itself is not a fact.
Quite frankly, it takes more faith to believe this universe arose from absolute nothingness without God than it does to believe in God, the ens realissimum and ens necessarius. Peter van Inwagen has a great point about the odds of the universe coming into existence from absolutely nothing, including no God. Try 0% on for size.
Of course gravity can neither be observed nor measured directly,but its effects can and the veracity of theories about it inferred by these observed and measured effects. In an attempt to explain away the fine-tuning of the various parameters of the universe that permit the existence of carbon based life some have posited the existence of a multiverse which is at least as unobservable and as mystical as any divine entity ever proposed.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Aquinas's third way absolutely works, even independently from modern modal reasoning, and even if the universe is temporally infinite in the past, to my mind this, and the various versions of it (Scotus's, Leibniz, Clark, Feser, etc), have shown how the argument works even better than Aquinas's original formulation.
ReplyDeleteFor 2, I have personally changed my mind on the Kalam cosmological argument, I think it works from a scientific standpoint, i.e. if it is true that that current standard cosmological models are correct that the Universe did have a beginning then a creator is necessary, but I don't think the arguments against a temporally infinite universe philosophically are problematic.
For me Agustine, and Augustine like, arguments from Truth, and transcendental arguments are also compelling, as are arguments from consciousness.
No major disagreement here. I'm on the fence about whether Aquinas committed a logical fallacy when he framed the third way in the Summa. Some have attacked it and other defend his move. I've got articles that insist Aquinas makes a misstep, but I'm trying to resolve this issue in my mind. I also love the Kalam argument.
ReplyDeleteCould you send me an article that insists that the Summa made a mistake? Generally I take Gavin Kerr's view that Thomas's arguments (from Essence et Essencia, to the 5 ways to the arguments in conta Gentiles) are downstream from his metaphysics, meaning the real work is in arguing for this metaphysical priors and the arguments go from there, that isn't to say that the argument form doesn't work with other metaphysical systems, but Thomas's own arguments are simply drawn from his scholastic metaphysical system.
ReplyDeleteBut the third way I've always thought of as basically true in form, of course it may require updating but I think the basics of it cannot be rejected without going down a kind of Kantian skepticism, or a Humean skepticism, or a Wittgensteinian rejection of metaphysics, but once you accept that we can actually do metaphysics (which is the precondition of accepting that science actually tells us about reality as it is), the basic argument seems unassailable.
Maybe I'm wrong, but many of the rejections of the classical natural theological arguments have been a rejection of metaphysics as a whole.
Roman, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/40012555
ReplyDeletehttps://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004311589/B9789004311589-s012.xml
I concur that many have attacked Aquinas' five ways based for other reasons, like Kant and Hume, but some of the criticisms I'm reading deal with logical form. Anthony Kenny offers a critique but Edward Feser replied to him and so have other Catholic thinkers.
I see numbers as infinite no beginning and no end and Zero "0" is in the middle. Also they breakdown infinitely in fractions. No beginning and no end. That is the same with God no beginning and no end.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I don't have access to those articles/essays. I saw on the preview of the second one that a specific connection between contingency and a moment of time was being critiqued, that's fine, I do believe that Thomas's formulation's need to be updated.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I hope to look closer. I'm actually reading Feser's 5 proofs to my wife at the moment (some bed time reading :P), I think she's just humoring me.
Philip.
Absolutely, Gregory of Nyssa has a notion of the infinite in a theological sense that, in my view, was brilliant, which was inhereted by thinkers such as John Duns Scotus and later by Hegel. But the important thing is to distinguish a mathematical infinity with a more metaphysical/theological infinity.
Roman, I will try to send you an article on my hard drive. I just have to find it, and I love the five proofs book.
ReplyDeleteYour wife must really be humoring you and she's got to be patient. My wife won't listen to me read even one sentence from Descartes or from Kant's Prolegomena :-)
Feser's 5 proofs is way more 'normal person' friendly than Kant's shopping list (I imagine).
ReplyDeleteCouldn't agree more. See also https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-kant-lexicon/dictionary/1DF31F61A8A887B8845B0BB3F0353043
ReplyDeleteThere are similar works around.