Asking "What caused God" is special pleading.

[Mr Skeptic]

Well if you want special pleading, I think assuming God exists in the first place, would be the main example.

 

Thinking is a chain of events, and assuming God is intelligent, he can think. This really is no different in this respect than any other theory that proposes a start to our universe, started via an external object (eg branes colliding). They all either have infinite regression or uncaused causes.

 

Perhaps a more interesting question is, given infinite time, would a god that decided to create a universe not also create infinitely many universes? As far as I know all the non-god universe creating entities do end up making many universes. Can there be something that activates only once after an infinite time? I don't think a Touring machine could.

[Hawkin'sDawkins]

When and where did God happen?

 

I think I can see what you're getting at Mr Skeptic - that god is not an event and so does not require a cause. However, by that same logic it could be said that the universe is also not an event and so it did not require a cause.

 

Common sense however denies that the universe had no initial cause because we see events all around us. Each event was caused by something that was caused by something ..... and on and on and on, leading to the search for the ultimate cause. The solution that theists would posit is that the ultimate cause of the events that make up the universe was the act of creation by God.

 

Now you are right, God's existence in itself is not an event, any more than the existence of the universe is an event, but the second he creates, then there is an event - creation. An event does need a cause and so we must ask what caused that act of creation. Now, if we accept the god hypothesis we must start examining the mechanics of God. When he created, what exactly was happenning, as in, what events? What events caused those events and what events caused those events.

 

So he may exist without cause as long as he has no effect. As soon as he has an effect on the universe then we must rightly ask for a cause.

[michel123456]

The fact that energy cannot vanish (conservation of energy) should show us that energy cannot be created from nothing either. The question is not the cause of creation, the question is about the concept of creation itself. If you suppose that creation is a wrong concept, admitting that actual observations are about transformation (opposed to creation), than there is no mystery.

[Sayonara]

The fact that energy cannot vanish (conservation of energy) should show us that energy cannot be created from nothing either.

However, if you are going from "nothing" to "universe full of matter and energy", then surely it had to have been created at some point. One must be mindful that the Law of Conservation of Energy is a physical property of the universe in its current state. Right?

[ponderer]

So, for quite a while I've been annoyed at the number of people asking "What caused God?", as if they found some really clever argument. But really, it is no more than special pleading. They way they figure seems to be that they take the rule "every event must have a cause" from the Law of Cause and Effect to mean "everything whether event or not must have a cause". Then they apply that to God, asking "what caused God?"

 

Now, most people, I would assume, are familiar with the concept that God supposedly has always existed. Even if not, when made aware of this fact they don't drop the argument. Now something that has always existed does not need a cause, since there is no event (no change from before to after). Asking what caused no change when nothing happened is rather silly.

 

But, if one does not accept this, then it is only fair to ask the same of other things that have always existed. What caused numbers, for example? Claiming that numbers don't need a cause while claiming that God does, is special pleading.

 

Oh, and I don't believe in any First Cause, as infinite regression makes more sense to me.

 

It's turtles all the way down sonny.

 

The simplest explanation you can possibly have for anything is 1 and 0, where 1 is exists and 0 is does not exist, pertaining to one thing.

 

That appear's to be the limit of Occam's Razor.

 

For all of reality to exist you have to start with at least one thing.

[Kyrisch]

I thought the fact that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that energy conservation can be violated as long as the product of the total energy with the total duration through which the conservation is violated is bounded by Dirac's constant, and that recent observation puts the estimated energy content of the universe to be approximately zero allows for a violation of energy conservation on the order of the age of the universe and creation compliments of the same mechanism that causes virtual particles to pop in and out of existence without any deterministic cause could theoretically occur?

 

Wow... What a sentence.

[Mr Skeptic]

I think I can see what you're getting at Mr Skeptic - that god is not an event and so does not require a cause. However, by that same logic it could be said that the universe is also not an event and so it did not require a cause.

 

Indeed, the universe itself does not require a cause for the same reasons. The Big Bang, however is an event (it happened a few billion years ago throughout all of our space) and so needs a cause. Some models of the universe do not posit the creation of the universe, and for those the universe does not need a cause.

 

Now you are right, God's existence in itself is not an event, any more than the existence of the universe is an event, but the second he creates, then there is an event - creation. An event does need a cause and so we must ask what caused that act of creation. Now, if we accept the god hypothesis we must start examining the mechanics of God. When he created, what exactly was happenning, as in, what events? What events caused those events and what events caused those events.

 

Indeed. I wonder where thinking about the mechanics of God would lead.

[mooeypoo]

I have to say, at first I didn't understand the issue at all (as was probably quite evident) but Mr Skeptic's post #43 finally drove it home, and I think I got the point. Something didn't add up for me, though, but I couldn't put my finger on what bugged me about that logic. But it did get me thinking, which I think is the point of a good debate. I even repped Mr Skeptic on that post.

 

And I thought about it yesterday, trying to think of the examples of 'numbers' and other 'non-events' and are they comparable to the concept of God. Numbers, however, are definitions we created to describe the world around us. So, they might not be an event, but they do have a 'cause' -- us. We use base-10, but the Mayans are believed to have used base-8 (or 12? i am not sure, but not base-10). Same goes with the concept of "minutes" and "seconds". Those are *units* describing a phenomenon - time. They started by us; we are the cause of minutes, but we are not the cause of time. That doesn't mean time doesn't have a cause.

 

I am not sure if I managed to convey this thought well enough, but I at least understand what Mr Skeptic is going for, and I have to say it's a good question. I think Hawkin'sDawkins' post summed up quite nicely the crux of what doesn't quite add up for me.

 

~moo

[Mr Skeptic]

And I thought about it yesterday, trying to think of the examples of 'numbers' and other 'non-events' and are they comparable to the concept of God. Numbers, however, are definitions we created to describe the world around us. So, they might not be an event, but they do have a 'cause' -- us. We use base-10, but the Mayans are believed to have used base-8 (or 12? i am not sure, but not base-10). Same goes with the concept of "minutes" and "seconds". Those are *units* describing a phenomenon - time. They started by us; we are the cause of minutes, but we are not the cause of time. That doesn't mean time doesn't have a cause.

 

We created the definitions, of course, but numbers themselves existed before that. Animals have their own concept of numbers, and can count small numbers of items. Numbers by any other name would still compute. Mathematicians discover; they never create. When a mathematician comes up with a brand new mathematical proof, the proof was nevertheless true before the mathematician came up with it, will always be true, and cannot be anything but true. Likewise with numbers, regardless of how we describe them, or if we don't describe them at all, nevertheless have all the intrinsic same properties they ever had and ever will have. I'm thinking something along the lines of Universals or perhaps Essence.

 

I guess not everyone agrees on the existence of such. However, the same applies to any thing that was never created. I gave before the examples of the static universe (an unchanging universe that has always existed), and a cyclic universe (a universe that has always existed but cycles between expansion and collapse). For these, asking what "caused" them is also an ill-formed question as one of the attributes of them was that they never started so can't have a cause.

[VedekPako]

I came across this when I was reading, The Devil's Dictionary, which defined "Logic" as interpretations through misunderstanding or something similar to that. That human logic is not prefect. We are a species. Our understanding of the universe may be through our own mind's ability. That is, out brains, which evolved to problem solve on the plains of Southern Africa, are now analyzing logic and events, in which we have not evolved to do so. We may have to realize that there will be secrets to the universe, we will never be able to understand, like how the Big Bang occurred; how something came from nothing.

 

Likewise, given my background in Anthropology, God seems to be a human invention. To answer the question, "What caused God", is simple. Humans created God to answer the questions in which they can not.