God most likely does not exist

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If God necessarily exists, you don't need a cosmological argument to prove his existence, because he already NECESSARILY exists. You're just begging the question to assert that God necessarily exists. If we don't assume that, then we can't put God's existence above the existence of any other kind of object in the universe, meaning that God doesn't solve a single freaking problem.


No it isn't. Gods are pretty contingent to me as well. I mean, seriously, how many different logically possible notions of deity can you come up with??? I can think of loads, meaning that EVERY notion of deity is not necessary. What this means is that God is really not on a higher footing than the universe. If you can prove that God is necessary, you don't need a cosmological argument. If you can't, then a cosmological argument can't save you.


You saw the same thing I did and used less words.

Sorry, I probably didn't make myself clear. I'm not saying that we use the existence of the world/universe in order to prove that God is a necessary being. You need to prove that God in a necessary being in some other way. You need the following ingredients:

(1.) A definition of "God".
(2.) A proof that God is a necessary being (and therefore exists).
(3.) A reason to think that God is the cause of the world's existence, either directly from the definition of "God" or by doing some kind of unpacking of the definition.

Once you have all of these ingredients, you no longer have an infinite causal chain.

These ingredients would be much more difficult to find if you replace "God" with "the world". How are you going to prove that the world necessarily exists? The usual definition of "necessarily exists" is "exists in every possible world". But if our particular world exists in any possible world, then there are no other possible worlds! This completely betrays the intuition that we can in fact imagine possible worlds that are not our own world. For example, I can imagine a world with fewer kinds of fundamental particles.

No, God is necessary, but the universe is contingent. This is a simple result of their definitions. God is "the greatest being imaginable", whereas the universe is "our particular world".

Here is an argument for God being a necessary being:



If we try to run this argument using "the universe", it becomes ridiculous:



In fact, here is a pretty solid argument that the universe is NOT necessary:



It's true that certain claims about what God has done in this world are contingent. For example, it is not necessary that God must have a Chosen People, or dictate books. But God's existence is necessary.

NOTE: I am not saying that God is "obviously" a necessary being. These arguments are very fussy and have lots of potential weak points, and people don't have to accept the underlying way of thinking. However, I am trying to say that God is the "sort of thing" that might be a necessary being, but the universe definitely isn't. If you accept the notion of a "necessary being", then you are automatically accepting the "possible worlds" version of philosophy. That's part of the machinery that is required to make sense of the concept "necessary being".

Last edited by Declension on 19 Mar 2012, 7:57 pm, edited 5 times in total.

The atheist does not say that God does not exist. The atheist says God is dead.

Well that's a new one.

My argument is against God. But I was explaining the mindset of Evolution and Intelligent Design. At least from one of the arguments in my philosphy class.

Well look at it this way. What is an ape compared to a human? Is not an ape a thing of shame compared to the intelligence of a human. So what then is a super human compared to a human? Is not a human a thing of shame compared to a super human? So what if a super human appeared before us ? Would we allow such an entity to live? Would we allow such an entity to declare itself smarter than us? Would we try to find fault with the super human? What would we think when we discovered that the morality of the superhuman was so far more advanced than our morals that our laws did not apply to it? The super being declares it can freely mate with anyone of its own kind, does not have to ask anyone for permission, yet declares that its sexual morality is higher than ours . A super being that declares that money is obsolete and that all resources are shared. A super being that considers love the ultimate weapon of combat. A super being that can travel through time even to places before it was born. A super being that has a teleportation machine that kills any astronaut that enters it only to reassemble the astronaut at the destination. A super being that declares that wars are morally wrong, soldiers are murderers and that no one has the right to defend themselves.

No, actually. Apes have an astonishing ability to learn, think, improvise when faced with new environments, learn and implement language, and participate in culture both native (chimp and gorilla clans come to mind) and foreign (human societies). You really picked a bad example here.



Oh please, please, please try dropping some quotes to 'prove' the morality of this super being. Go ahead. I'll fraggin' wait. I've got nothing but time and a passel of stories that are full of nothing but divine pettiness and injustice.

My phone is ringing... It must be a being!! !

Defining "atheist" would make for a super-long thread in itself. Suffice it to say that an atheist might say either one or neither.

You believe the ontological argument????? SERIOUSLY???????

First of all, existence isn't a predicate.

Second of all, have you never really considered the Gaunillo's island objection??? The logic of the ontological argument doesn't specify for God, it specifies for a great being, including a great island if we wanted, or a great pizza, etc.

Third of all, if you're using the ontological argument, why do you care about defending the cosmological argument? You're basically admitting that the cosmological argument doesn't stand without the ontological argument, so why do you even need the cosmological argument???


Who says it's not?? Who even says that "Greatest possible being" is a coherent framework? I mean, there is no reason why "greatest possible being" has to specify a single entity, so for instance, let's say that there are two properties that are both good and incompatible. This is possible, and if this is true, then no possible being could be the greatest.


The issue is that the distinction becomes kind of pointless, as the original argument was the first cause. So, there is no reason why a universe can't have/contain/be a first cause. Necessity is not necessarily the case with a first cause though, as while maybe having one is necessary, the nature of the cause aside from being the first one isn't.

To be, or not to be.

I disagree, I think that existence is a plain old first-order predicate. "x exists" means "there is a thing identical to x". I think that possible existence and necessary existence are plain old modal predicates. "x possibly exists" means "there is a possible world P in which "x exists" is true". "x necessarily exists" means "for any possible world P, "x exists" is true in P".



I suspect that there is something wrong with such an argument. But I can't tell you what is wrong with it unless you show me the argument!



I don't. I haven't defended the cosmological argument anywhere in this thread. I just jumped in when somebody claimed that using God as first cause creates an infinite causal chain. I pointed out that if God is a necessary being, then there is no infinite causal chain.



No I'm not. I am not claiming anything about the relationship between the two arguments.



This is one of the hardest ideas to make precise, obviously. But I'm not really interested in unpacking "greatest possible being". I am only trying to show why God is a good candidate for a necessary being, but the universe is a terrible candidate.



No, you can't escape so easily.

There are actually certain properties that a first cause must have, simply because it is the first cause. For example, it cannot have any of the properties that it creates. If it creates time, then it must be timeless. If it creates physics, then it must be non-physical. And so forth. You can actually deduce quite a lot using this "negative theology".

I bolded the part that seems silly to me.

I get what you are doing, but it's like speaking just to hear the pretty noises...self gratifying use of logic at best.

I subscribe to the notion;

"x possibly exists" means "given I don't have all relevant and necessary information to account for everything required for an assertion, I cannot rule x out, thus "x exists" is not blatantly wrong given the current data, but is not correct with certainty"

Or something along those lines...

I agree that it's really a terrible use of the word "possible", but it is standard in modal logic. When I say "x possibly exists", I mean "there is a possible world in which x exists".

In other words, I can say the ridiculous true sentence "Unicorns don't exist, but they possibly exist." This means that "unicorns don't exist in our world, but they do exist in some other possible world". Which is a terrible use of language, but there you go.

No, that was Nietzsche.

Atheists say that first sentence, if you define "God" as any creator of the universe.