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12/18/08
Dear 1585:
I am a Christian Apologist. Have
you heard of the term? If
not, a Christian Apologist is someone who attempts to logically provide
the
reasons for what he/she believes.
I
didn't write to try to convince you that the Old Testament stories are
correct
or anything else about my religion you think is ridiculous. I just want to establish
the foundation of
the belief that the existence of God *is necessary* for the existence
of the
universe (and everything in it).
First, let's assume that there
is no God. Everything
in the universe has the potential
to not exist. If we
go back far enough
in the history of the universe, there was a time when absolutely
nothing
existed. This is
the part where I ask:
If nothing existed, how did you and I come into existence? Surely you'll agree with
the "out of
nothing comes nothing" principle.
If my argument is sound, then you should respond to
it. If my argument
does not convince you that God
exists, I will be content to be labeled "mildly retarded" as you put
it.
By the way, you may have heard
of the Jesus Camp
people? Although I
don't have any
connection to the group at all, I do feel ashamed of what they do
because they
carry the Christian label. They
are an
absolute embarrassment to my faith.
Also, they're bat-shit insane.
That is all,
--David P.
David:
I'm glad to hear from you.
It cannot be easy for a Christian to read The 1585,
and you must be an
incredibly strong person to deal with the things we write. I adopt the tone I do
because I want the
people who, as you put it, "embarrass your faith" to know how it
feels on the receiving end of rhetorical venom at the levels at which
they
consistently dispense it, and for what it's worth, I am sorry that
people like
you get caught in the crossfire. I
believe as strongly as I believe anything that you are mistaken about
the
existence of God, just as I'm sure you believe I am, but you seem like
a nice
guy.
Off the top of my head, my
answer is that we are dealing with
a causa sui (self-caused thing) in either case.
If you can say there must be a God because the
universe can't simply
always have existed for no reason, then I can turn that around on you
and say
that God itself can't simply always have existed for no reason, and
therefore
must have been created by God's God.
Who
in turn must have been created by God's God's God, and so on. No matter what, there has
to be something
that was just always there for no reason.
This brings us to the question
of whether it is more likely
that spacetime and matter always existed for no reason, OR that a
perfect and
all-powerful being possessed of both consciousness and intentionality
did. I think the
first scenario more likely. I
am not going to claim to understand why
there is something instead of nothing (although nothing would also be a
thing,
in the sense of "a specific state of affairs as opposed to any other
one," so I suppose it is just as unlikely that there would have been
nothing instead of something—and what would "nothing" even
consist
of, since even empty space would be the existence of empty space and
therefore
something, especially now that we know that spacetime is actual *stuff*
that
*behaves* in certain ways; so what would nothing be?
Spacetime minus the time?
Or plus a different kind of time?
Or plus the thing that there would be instead
of time if there were a thing instead of time that we can't name
because it
doesn't exist because time does instead?
Maybe there is in fact no such thing as nothing),
but the fact that I
can't explain it doesn't mean there is a God.
You say, “if we go
back far enough in the history of the
Universe, there was a time when absolutely nothing existed.” Is this an article of your
faith, or are you
under the impression that it is a scientific fact?
Because it absolutely isn’t. We know that at some point
all the matter was
compressed into an infinitely dense singularity (i.e., the Big Bang
definitely
happened—this is a settled matter at this point, courtesy of
background microwaves),
but not what the deal was before that.
Was there a point when all the stuff just
wasn’t there at all? Did
existence happen before and then compress
and happen again? And
even I don’t get
the relationship of the singularity to the fact that time is actually
kind of a
substance… Did
time not exist then? And
if it didn’t, then what does “then”
mean? How did
something happen after something
else if there wasn’t
time? Anyway, if
time has always existed
at least in its capacity as the possibility
of sequentiality, and time is actually stuff,
then there most certainly was not “a time when nothing
existed.” Plus,
as Sam Harris pointed out to Andrew
Sullivan in their blogalogue from a while back, the idea that the
Universe is a
“closed manifold”—i.e., that like a
Mobius strip it simply has no
“beginning”—is gaining currency. I am
sure I am garbling this, but you are certainly free to read
Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell
if you’d like
the non-garbled version.
More simply, I’ll
remind you that the “First Cause” argument
originated with ancient philosophers who were talking not about matter, but about motion—i.e.,
they theorized that a God must exist who set
everything in motion, because otherwise it would be standing still. This is a great example of
something that
must have sounded very persuasive to people 2,400 years ago, but that
is
laughably unpersuasive now. Even
a child
now understands that the planets etc. have not been pushed,
but that they are all sort of “falling towards one
another,” and that there is indeed no center relative to
which anything else is
“moving” in the sense that we perceive it on
earth, where it appears
that some
things are moving while others are standing still (obviously, I am
talking
about electromagnetism and gravitation, whereas the motion of living
things,
constructed machines, thrown objects, etc. is different). Much later, even Aquinas
gives the motion
argument equal standing with the matter argument.
And the motion
argument is rendered transparently ridiculous by elementary-school
level
physics. Eventually,
so will the matter one
be—to the extent that it even
makes sense; but as I have tried to show, our poor understanding of
what does
or doesn’t count as “stuff” may actually
render the question itself uselessly
inaccurate.
Finally, there is the
easy-to-forget but very important fact
that nothing had to exist. It happens to be the case
that there is
three-dimensional spacetime, and as a result of the fact that this is
what
happened to have happened (plus a bunch of other stuff that happened to
have
happened), here we are to have a conversation about it.
If it hadn’t, then we wouldn’t
be, but it
did. The Universe
as we know it didn’t have to
exist, life didn’t have to
exist, and humans didn’t have to
be a result of life
existing. You,
of
course, must believe
that we did—unless you think your God would have been equally
cool with
governing a bunch of bacteria or whatever, even though ethics are
inapplicable to lower life forms, and your belief in God compels you to
regard the existence of existence itself as an ethical playing field.
Now, perhaps most importantly,
I'll remind you that you
called yourself specifically a CHRISTIAN apologist, not merely a
*theist* one—so
why would the existence of something instead of nothing mean
specifically that
the Christian God exists, as
opposed
to the Muslim one, the Hindu one, the Mandaean one, the Zoroastrian
one, etc.
etc.? The fact that
matter exists proves
that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead after three days? Please.
And why would there necessarily even be a *God* in
the sense of a
conscious specific self-aware being, as opposed to, say, the mere
existence of
certain "divine forces," as in the Buddhist way of looking at
things? And if
you're one of those
people who doesn’t define God as a specific conscious
self-aware being, but
instead say "God is Love" or something along those lines, then I'm
afraid I have to ask you how "Love" caused the universe to come into
being. If you're
leading with the
argument that existence requires a designer, then you're pretty much
stuck
arguing a being who desires X to happen but does not desire Y or Z to
happen,
and chooses to make P happen but not Q.
If you think it is just a nebulous force that simply
behaves in a
certain way instead of "choosing" something, more like the Buddhists
do, then I would ask you, Why call this force "God?"
Why not just simply call it one of the forces
that makes the universe work how it works, like gravity or
electromagnetism,
and say it is a part of science that we just really, really, really
don't
understand yet? In
other words, what
needs to be true of Thing X for you to say that Thing X is "God/divine"
as opposed to "a scientific thing that we just don't get yet?"
You characterized yourself as
“someone who attempts to
logically provide the reasons for what he believes.” This implies that you are
a rational person
who has dispassionately examined the facts of the case and come to the
conclusion
that there must be a God, regardless of whether you want there to be
one. And, frankly,
I don’t think that this is
actually what you have done. And
I say
this not because of anything personal to do with you necessarily, but
simply
because, well… it is impossible.
It is
impossible that someone (possessed of sufficient intellectual ability,
as you
seem to be) could dispassionately examine the facts of the case and
come to the
conclusion that there is a God. This
is
because all—no exaggeration, all—the
“facts of the case” point to the conclusion that
there is not one, and there is
no fact—not one—that
is even slightly persuasive to the
conclusion that there is one, at least not to someone who is not
bending over
backwards in an attempt to reach that conclusion.
You are trying to convince yourself that if
we had some kind of infinitely logical, disinterested, unbiased
Sherlock-Holmes-ass machine, and fed it all the information about
existence,
the Sherlock Holmes Machine would spit out the answer that there must
be a
God. And I
don’t think you really
believe this. No-one
really can, unless
they are quite stupid, and you do not seem to be stupid (I am sure you
will
respond that Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis were not stupid, and you are
correct; they were not stupid—they were lying to themselves,
just as you
are). And, as I
have already implied,
this goes considerably more than double for any specific
God (e.g., the Christian one as opposed to any other
religion’s).
I really cannot stress that
last point enough: if your
position is that there is a deity,
period, of any kind, then the odds are already astronomical against
your being
right; but if your position is that there is a deity in some sense that
is
specifically Christian (or
specifically religion X as opposed to religion Y in any way), then the
odds
are—what?—astronomical
times astronomical
against your being right. I
believe it
futile for you to continue along this pseudological path, but if you
insist on
continuing to do so, for your sake I strongly suggest that you drop the
Christian and adopt the
designation
merely of theism apologist.
Thanks Again for Writing,
—S.G.
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