LOGICAL PROOF OF GODS EXISTENCE. WHO CREATED GOD .? F.A.Q BY ATHEISTS.......PART ONE THE ARGUMENT FROM SPEECH. It is premised on the following points. 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being. Grant the first premise. (Most people –outside of asylums and graduate schools – would consider it not only true, but certainly and obviously.) Is the second premise true? Did the universe – the collection of all things bounded by space and time – begin to exist? This premise has recently received powerful support from natural science – from so-called Big Bang Cosmology. But there are philosophical arguments in its favour as well. Can an infinite task ever be done or completed? If, in order to reach a certain end, infinitely many steps had to precede it, could the end ever be reached? Of course not – not even in an infinite time. For an infinite time would be unending, just as the steps would be. In other words, no end would ever be reached. The task would –could – never be completed. But what about the step just before the end? Could that point ever be reached? Well, if the task is really infinite, then an infinity of steps must also have preceded it. And therefore the step just before the end could also never be reached. But then neither could the step just before that one. In fact, no step in the sequence could be reached, because an infinity of steps must always have preceded any step; must always have been gone through one by one before it. The problem comes from supposing that an infinite sequence could ever reach, by temporal succession, any point at all. Now if the universe never began, then it always was. If it always was, then it is infinitely old. If it is infinitely old, then an infinite amount of time would have to have elapsed before (say) today. And so an infinite number of days must have been completed – one day succeeding another, one bit of time being added to what went before – in order for the present day to arrive. But this exactly parallels the problem of an infinite task. If the present day has been reached, then they actually infinite sequence of history has reached this present point; in fact, has been completed up to this point – for at any present point the whole past must already have happened. But an infinite sequence of steps could never have reached this present point – or any point before it. So, either the present day had not been reached, or the process of reaching it was not infinite. But obviously the present day has been reached. So the process of reaching it was not infinite. In other words, the universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being, a creator. Question 1: Christians believe they are going to live forever with God. So they believe the future will be endless. How come the past cannot also be endless? Reply: The question really answers itself. Christians believe that their life with God will never end. That means it will never form an actually completed infinite series. In more technical language an endless future is potentially – but never actually – infinite. This means that although the future will never cease to expand and increase, still its actual extent will always be finite. But that can only be true if all of created reality had a beginning. Question 2 How do we know that the cause of the universe still exists? Maybe it started the universe going and then ceased to be. Reply: Remember that we were seeking for a cause of spatio-temporal being. This cause created the entire universe of space and time. And space and time themselves must be part of that creation. So the cause cannot be another spatio-temporal being. (If it were, all the problems about infinite duration would arise once again.) It must somehow stand outside the limitations and constrains of space and time. It is hard to understand how such a being could “cease” to be. We know how a being within the universe ceases to be; it comes in time to be fatally affected by some agency external to it. But this picture is proper to us, and to all beings limited in some way by space and time. A being not limited in these ways cannot “come” to be or “cease” to be. If it exists at all, it must exist eternally.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:42:17 +0000
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