Concept of time and eternity - we are in time that flows in one direction, everything has a beginning and end. A being in eternity outside time views all moments of time all at once (like all individual pictures of a movie), hence no origin is necessary/defined in eternity.
Lately I've wondered... what if this flow of time wasn't true? at least not at universe scale? Messier than just gravitational affects but actual weird topography in time?
There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.
Believing in the existence of such a being implies that one is comfortable with the idea that something exists without having been created. People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
> People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
Cosmological arguments for God's existence generally follow this structure:
1. Everything having property P must have a cause external to itself which lacks property P
2. The universe has property P
3. By (1) and (2), the universe must have a cause C external to itself which lacks property P
4. Since C (by the above) lacks property P, (1) does not require C to have any external cause
5. Let us call C "God" (either simply by defining "God=C", or else by further arguments that C must have various God-properties)
Different values of P create different specific cosmological arguments. If P="has a beginning in time", you get the kalam argument. If P="is a contingent being", you get the argument from contingency.
Given this, I don't think your response is valid. It works against some unsophisticated caricatures (strawman versions) of the cosmological argument, but not the argument as defended by major theist philosophers.
That said, I personally find all cosmological arguments unconvincing, for a different reason. They have the burden of arguing that premise (1) is true (for whatever P they've chosen), without presuming God's existence in doing so – and I've never been convinced they've actually succeeded at that.
The set of people to whom I speak of does not contain major theist philosophers.
The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion. At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
> The set of people to whom I speak of does not contain major theist philosophers.
Intellectually sophisticated theists usually have some awareness of the arguments of (at least some) major theist philosophers. Maybe you never speak to intellectually serious theists?
> The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion
I think your criticisms are targeting the wrong point. That God "has no property which falls in the category of 'must have cause outside itself'" is true by definition, given the classical theist definition of God (and even by some non-classical definitions). If something has a cause outside itself, by definition it cannot be God; if it (somehow) turned out everything has a cause outside itself, it would logically follow that God does not exist.
I think it makes much more sense to target the premise "everything having P must have an external cause lacking P". For the Kalam argument (for example), that would be "everything having a beginning in time must have a cause lacking a beginning in time". The burden is on the advocates of the Kalam argument to convince people that premise is true, and personally I don't think they've succeeded, and I doubt you would think that either.
> At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
Yes, but they conditionalise that comfort. Many theists would say they are comfortable with changeless entities existing without cause, but not changing entities; or necessary entities but not contingent entities; or timeless entities but not temporal entities. As a result that comfort of theirs extends to God but not the universe. Is their conditionalisation of that comfort legitimate? How do we even begin to answer that question?
Myself, I believe in God, but I'm unconvinced that any cosmological arguments actually work in demonstrating God's existence. So I think you are right to reject them. But I think some of the specific reasons you give for rejecting them are misplaced, overly simple.
I haven’t rejected any arguments for god’s existence per se. I’ve rejected arguments that follow a pattern I mentioned. I think you underestimate the amount of simplistic reasoning people engage in on this topic. I could be wrong. Good luck in your endeavors.
Because we are arguing from the our experience in this universe.
In a sense, a self originating physical universe would have to have infinite intelligence for it to be plausible, which we don't see. What we see is intelligence in human, who period and scope of existence is but a very tiny part of the universe.
I guess this is why people think there must be something bigger than the physical universe out there, and I think it makes sense.
I think you miss my point. There are those that find the notion that a being can have always existed without being created as plausible but not the notion that another type of "thing" could have always existed without further elaboration on why that "thing" could not have always existed. That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to.
At any rate, you believe something can exist without being created and in this we are agreement. I too believe that something can exist without being created.
> That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to.
I don't think "the group of people" you are referring to actually have any significance. You are attacking a strawman version of the cosmological argument, which no philosophically sophisticated theist would defend – and if it so happens that a handful of philosophically unsophisticated theists actually believe your strawman (because they can't see the obvious holes in it), so what? There are philosophically unsophisticated atheists too, who argue for atheism on grounds that intellectually serious atheists find embarrassing. When evaluating any point of view, we ought to focus our attention on its most thoughtful defenders, not the thoughtless ones.
Everyone has an unsophisticated view about something. And most people lack sophistication in most topics. I’m not evaluating beliefs as such but rather pointing out the logical contortions that some theists engage in to rationalize their position. Of course there are unsophisticated atheists. When they engage in logical contortions that I notice I point it out. I hope people will point out flaws in arguments that I make.
> I’m not evaluating beliefs as such but rather pointing out the logical contortions that some theists engage in to rationalize their position
I don't think they actually are engaging in "logical contortions" or rationalisations.
Theists can be divided into three groups:
(1) Those who don't accept any cosmological arguments: either they believe in God purely on the basis of faith, or else they believe on the basis of some non-cosmological argument
(2) Those who accept some philosophically sophisticated cosmological argument – e.g. the kalam argument, or Thomas Aquinas' argument from contingency. They have a ready-made answer for "why if the universe requires an external cause doesn't God too?". I don't find those answers convincing myself, but I think it is unfair and intellectually uncharitable to just dismiss them as "logical contortions" or "rationalisations"
(3) The unsophisticates who engage in cosmological argumentation, but have never seriously thought about the question "why if the universe requires a creator doesn't God too?". Do they actually have "logical contortions" or "rationalisations", or are they just not thinking?
If you're the "being", and you're running a simulation of some system, you can absolutely create many parallel timestreams with different initial conditions. You can even return to some point in the simulation and try several intermediate conditions, resulting in different causal outcomes.
The many worlds interpretation would absolutely allow agency on the part of such a "being".
