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The cosmological argument for the existence of God is the strongest argument and is best expressed in the musical The Sound of Music:
"Nothing came from nothing.
Nothing ever could."
I just came across this clever remark on Twitter, by somebody called Glen Scrivener:
"Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Atheists believe in the virgin birth of the universe. Choose your miracle."
The way to prove existence theorems ("if so-and-so then there is that") is by construction. I construct what is required by the theorem and the fact that I could construct it proves its existence. Then there is something very "weird" in set theory that is called "the axiom of choice". It merely states that given a set with certain properties (I won't enter into the details) then we can pick an element from it. It does not tell us _how_ to pick it. To my knowledge it is the only gate in mathematics through which we can prove existence without construction, the so-called "non-constructive proofs". So we cannot say much about the picked element. It just exists, we know we can pick it, but we cannot produce it before the eyes of the examiner.
ReplyDeleteThe cosmological argument is somehow similar at first view, but I think it contains a fallacy. Let us assume that nothing can come from nothing. In my opinion this does not imply the existence of one or several gods. There is nothing in the statement "nothing can come from nothing" that could hint at the concept of god. It just implies that if there is something (and our senses tell us there is something) then it must come from something. Then this something must come from something else and so on. We would enter an infinite recursion and this does not help us further. So the maximum we can say is "I don't know" or "I cannot know". Yes, the existence of one or several entities with the power to create from nothing would render the recursion finite. But it is misleading. Why would be accept that that entity is not created itself (and restart the recursion)?
In this sense I say that the cosmological argument does not _imply_ the existence of one or several gods. This presumed existence would only _solve_ a logical problem for which we have no solution. It is a sort of artifice. One does not prove existence by exclusion of other hypotheses.
Then there is the semantics of "to exist". What do we mean by being? If we accept only manifestations in the physical world then there we did not measure "god" on any device. Or you could argue that we see it everywhere and at every minute, but this, what we see, what you would say is a manifestation of god, is not the god we are looking after, namely the one who would solve the infinite recursion of the cosmological argument. We could see desks and keyboard, life, trees, but I still don't see god-the-creator, it still remains hidden. In this sense we did never "measure" _that_ god. It is an exaggeration to deduce the existence of god from a the existence of anything, a wooden desk for example. Then why not assigning the creation capacity to the flying spaghetti monster?