Thursday 26 May 2011

How Did It All Begin?

By far the best religious argument for a Creator is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It goes thus;
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. The universe has a cause.
There are several arguments that run parallel. For example, we, and everything else in the known universe could be described as contingent. By that, I mean that our existence depends on other factors. Something else caused us to be; in our case it was our parents. But now follow this chain back and back and back, right to the dawn of time. What then? How does something come from nothing? I mean, you can't just keep going backward into infinity. At some point a place of termination must be reached, and believers typically refer to this as God. Still with me? Ok then, they argue that infinity is impossible, and that this implies that something must exist that is timeless, necessary, and the cause of its own existence. Now ask yourself, how can anybody possibly know this? Well they can't, which makes this whole endeavor little more than a philosophical thought experiment, but make no mistake many very educated people hold this theory in some regard. Now they admit, as they must, that even assuming the existence of an uncaused first cause, this in no way shape or form implies that this first cause is a God, let alone the God of Abraham. The purpose of this argument is to establish a plausible platform for the existence of something beyond.  Now I freely confess that I cannot disprove such a possibility, but don't let anybody tell you that they can offer proof for it, either. For all we know the cause of the universe could be an omniscient, omnipotent, all powerful strawberry called Vera. We just don't know, which is the whole point of this very complicated post. It's a reminder that just because something sounds clever, or even intuitively correct, doesn't mean it is. Strange things happen at the quantum level, and there is simply nothing we can infer. 
I do apologize if I've just made your brain bleed. You know me and the big questions.

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