The Being of God
| “Nor do I seek to understand so that I can believe, but rather I believe so that I can understand.” (Anselm, Proslogion, Chapter 1) I have already shared Anslem’s argument for the existence of God in Proslogion here . However, this is only one version of the proof for God’s existence. Many people will argue that Christians a foolish lot because they believe. People scoff at the quote above and say, “See, there is no rationale to Christian belief.” They miss the point of the quote altogether. When we discuss the existence of God we had better do it with a humble heart and not with a “when-pigs-fly” attitude. So many people who write off the existence of God, do so from pride. They claim that there is not sufficient evidence for something you can’t see. Like the wind, the eye cannot see, but oh does it feel the effects of a hurricane! If you do not believe that God does not exist, you had better read these posts with a desire to believe. As Anselm said above, we need to have the disposition to believe rather than thinking that God’s existence is on the same level as believing a kangaroo has a pouch. I say all this as prologue because the existence of God is not the same as the existence of anything that is seen with the eye. First and foremost, by definition God must exist. He is eternal in being. Humans are not. Nor is the Easter Bunny. The answer to my dangling question: Where did the molecules come from that “produced” the Big Bang? Now I do not seek to deny a Big Bang. Rather, I want to show that God must exist. As has been said in the “Comments” section, something never comes from nothing. That is, being comes from Being. In order for something to exist, it must derive its existence from something that is not dependent. In other words, if you go back infinitely before any Big Bang happened, there had to have been something before even the beginning of this Creation. One would not find nothing as they look back into eternity. Otherwise, where did all this come from? Therefore, there must be something that has existed from eternity past. This is what English calls “God” and Spaniards call “Deos” and Greeks “Theos” and others another name. Something must always come from something else. Therefore, all things belong to and exist because God exists and created all things. If he does not exist, we cannot exist. This is the difference in speaking of whether there is soup in the fridge or not. All you would have to do is open the fridge. But with the existence of God, he must exist. We are dealing with apples and apples when we try to compare creation to the Infinite, Foundation of Existence. God must exist for there to be anything at all. Some Other Links: Tisthammerw Explanation Bibliography of the Argument Wikipedia Article Stanford's Philosophy Site Various Ontological Arguments |
posted by Matthew Wireman at 12:14 PM
Comments on "The Being of God"
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Curious Servant said ... (Thu Dec 29, 01:41:00 PM) :
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Matthew Wireman said ... (Thu Dec 29, 04:43:00 PM) :
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Paula said ... (Sun Jan 01, 03:52:00 PM) :
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Will and Olivia said ... (Tue Jan 03, 08:44:00 PM) :
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Matthew Wireman said ... (Thu Jan 05, 08:07:00 PM) :
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Curious Servant said ... (Mon Jan 09, 10:03:00 AM) :
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Matthew Wireman said ... (Mon Jan 09, 05:18:00 PM) :
post a commentWhen the background microwave variation was proven there was a lot of exciting talk in physics circles. One word that kept creeping up at symposiums was the word "creation". It didn't last, but it is interesting to note that even hard science folks such a theoretical physicists used the term.
I wanted to tahnk you for making your comment and noting the connection I was making between Santa Claus and Christ. I hope it sparks some conversations not only on the blog, but also in familes.
Thanks for the comment. You're right. It is interesting to see that physicists were using the word "creation". It is also noteworhty that many many biologists and physicists use the word "design" when referring to what they are observing. Stephen Hawking has gone so far to say that although the world looks as though it is designed, we must continue to believe it is not. Very confusing language don't you think? He is committed to evolution and attempting to explain away God. Like I said in this post, the existence of God is not a matter of believing if there is a cracker in the cupboard, because the entire world does not depend on this truth. However, because God is by definition necessary we must speak of his existence with fear and trembling.
Deep stuff!
I love knowing God exists. It brings such joy and comfort. And it makes nature such a treat! I look at the beauty and think! Wow! He did that for me!
in response to bleedingisaac's first point:
the universe is the sum of its parts. the universe is simply a name for everything that we know exists. if you were to apply your logic and say that the universe might not necessarily need a cause, then you'd simply be saying that the sum of everything that exists doesn't need a cause. which is to say that nothing in the universe needs a cause. what you say about the universe you also say about everything in the universe.
if the universe does not need a cause or did not begin to exist, then what is it--a supernatural being? how do you define the universe? is it not “something”?
in response to your second point:
i think what Matt means by "before" the universe is: before there was time; outside of time, if you like. in that sense, not necessarily before, during, or after the universe, but outside of it. in another dimension, on another level of existence. i agree that in our universe we have space-time. without physical matter there is no time as we understand it and live in it. but just because there is no space-time does not mean nothing can exist. i believe God exists outside of time. he can participate in time and space when he chooses to but his existence is not bound by them. he was the one who gave being to physical matter and therefore to space-time.
Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I am in the middle of preps for next week as I have a difficult class to cram into one week! Trying to get my readings done and working 50 hours this week. I share that so you understand my tardiness in response.
I have really appreciated the comments. Here is my reply to bleedingisaac:
Thank you so much for your desire to speak honestly and openly about this. It takes guts and I really appreciate that. I would love to continue the dialogue.
In my post, I am actually arguing for God's existence via the proof of Ontology. That is, nothing never comes from nothing. OR: something must always come from something. My contention with Darwinian macro-evolutionary theory, which has ballooned into some attempt to explain the existence of the world, breezes over the fact that there is something from which we can make observations. The theory merely posits the fact that proteins and molecules existed in history. It never explains where the physical molecules and entities came from. Sadly, our generation has bought the package without checking the contents.
When we speak of the First Cause, we must distinguish between two types of First Causes. Aquinas taught a First Cause that was Chronological. That is, God is the one who set things in motion. The problem with this is that 1) there can be many First Causes, like millions of particles colliding at one point in history and 2) once the system has been set in motion, the First Cause isn't needed any more.
The second type of First Cause is a Logical First Cause. That is, when we knock over a set of dominoes, the flick of the finger can be the chronological First Cause...
but the table on which the dominoes rest is the Logical First Cause. If there were no table in the first place, there would have been no falling of the dominoes. When we speak of God, we must understand him as being the Logical First Cause. As goodwillhiking has commented already, God is outside of space-time. He is not bound physically, nor rationally by our observable world. He is altogether other.
You spoke of the entire universe as being a ball that can expand and such. You are right...we cannot exhaustively understand that which is outside the ball. I contend that God is outside the universe, yet he is also intimately involved in every action-reaction within it (the Logical First Cause).
I sympathize with your concern with taking principles observed within a certain set and trying to apply them to another. For example, to say that each individual drink on the table tastes good, we cannot then conclude that if we mix all the drinks together that beverage will taste good. Ronald Nash gives an excellent answer to this foundational argument you have:
Though many objections look good at first glance, second and third glances have a way of showing that what may have appeared as a solid structure is really a house of cards. The fallacy of composition is what philosophers call an informal fallacy. In the case of informal fallacies, one must pay attention to more than the form of the argument (in this case, reasoning from the parts to the whole); one must consider the content of the argument.
Sometimes one cannot reason from the parts to the whole; but sometimes one can. It all depends on the case. Consider a new example. Suppose it is true that every individual brick in a wall has the property of being red. Given this fact, one would be correct in inferring that the wall is then red. Here is a situation where a property of each part turns out also to be a property of the whole. What this shows is that reasoning from the parts to the whole is not always mistaken. Anyone who claims that all reasoning from the parts to the whole is fallacious is committing a different fallacy known as hasty generalization. (Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).
I do appreciate your comments and look forward to your response. The existence of God is not a matter that we can just sit in our LaZBoy and talk over. It is something that will dramatically change our lives. My first premise still stands. All that is observable in our universe is dependent on something. If one says that they are dependent on things within the universe only, then he must answer the question of contingency.
Let me end this response with three bullets provided by Nash in Faith & Reason -
1. Due to the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) which is the belief 'that there is some explanation for the existence of anything whatever, some reason why it should exist rather than "not"' For anything that exists or is the case, the PSR states that there must be a reason or an explanation" (p. 126)
AND
2. "Contingent beings have their sufficient reason in something other than themselves." (p.127)
AND
3. "A necessary being...is the complement of a contingent being" (p.128)
As J.L. Mackie says:
Nothing occurs without a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise. There must, then, be a sufficient reason for the world as a whole; a reason why something exists rather than nothing. Each thing in the worldis contingent, being causally determined by other things: it would not occur if other things were otherwise. The world as a whole, being a collection of such things, is therefore itself contingent. The series of things and events, with their causes, with causes of those causes, and so on, may stretch back infinitely in time; but, if so, then however far back we go, or if we consider the series as a whole, what we have is still contingent and therefore requires a sufficient reason outside the series. That is, there must be a sufficient reason for the world which is other than the world. This will have to be a necessary being, which contains its own sufficient reason for their existence, and this must be found ultimately in a necessary being. There must be something free from the disease of contingency, a disease which affects everything in the world and the world as a whole, even if it is infinite in past time. (p.128)
There are a lot of good "head" arguments for the existence of God (and CS Lewis was excellent at using them), but I prefer heart arguments.
There is something within me that lifts at great beauty. Majesty is something I recognize, though it may be difficult to define. Biut I can share examples. A long walk in the Redwood forest will provide it. Or some sunrises, or cdertain vistas, or even a few things seen through a microsope.
The word is numinous. A sense of awe.
Why do humans have this sense?
There are other proofs as well.
It may be wise to consider that science, though I love it greatly, has an inherent flaw.
It works only on things that are measurable and repeatable. It may be that there are many things that are neither. Much of the non-western world thinks so.
On another note, I see you have a link to Credenda Agenda. What a great read!
bleedingisaac,
I am really enjoying our dialogue and I hope that it has been as helpful for you as it has been for me. I really appreciate your honesty. Here is my response:
The ontological arrgument and the cosmological argument overlap. This may be the reason for the confusion. I am arguing for the need of a necessary being based on the fact that all things in the visible universe are contingent beings. Everything in the observable universe is contingent. This is obvious. The burden of proof is on you to show an instance where there is reason not to believe that everything in the universe is contingent.
I think you might be mistaken regarding the fact that the ontological argument does not state that nothing comes from nothing. By virtue of being (existence) must originate from another being, this shows that all things in this contingent universe is dependent on the being of another. If you take the entire universe as a ball...there is Something that exists outside of the contingent...this is God.
Your statement, "something must always come from something." is the one I take issue with. That statement is a law derived from occurences within the universe. My contention is that it cannot be properly applied to the universe, per se (though it certainly can be applied to things within the universe).
I fail to see why you have such a problem with this statement. For you to write off the fact that everything that makes up the universe is contingent does not lead one to conclude that the universe as a whole is contingent does not make sense. One must draw up multiple hypotheticals that cannot be tested in order to say that the parts do not make up the whole (as pertains to the contingency of the universe).
Like I cited from Nash's book, we can conclude that if we know that every brick in a wall is red, we can rightly assume that the wall is red. You are right to bring up the fact that there are instances where the parts do not make up the whole - i.e. every drink on the table is good, therefore all the drinks mixed together will be good does not always follow. There is context that we must factor into the equation.
The reason I am bringing up the relationship of God's being with Darwinism is not so much due to the fact that I believe Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of the universe. It has to do with the fact that Darwinism pushes the existence of God to the side so that he is not seen as necessary. Although it does not attack God's existence head-on, it precludes it. A belief in Darwinism demands an unbelief in God. For more on this see this article and commentary (a href="http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/1371145.html") on it for further discussion.
With this in mind, I am also seeking to show that physicists have got it wrong as well when they seek to explain the existence of the universe apart from God's existence. This is why I ask the question as to where the particles and flashes of lightning they hypotesize for the creation of the universe came from. They have no answer. And this where the Ontological argument of God's being as necessary overlaps with the Cosmological argument. Where do the particles and lightning come from? They must come from something and we see this from that which is observable in our universe.
You seem to commit the same problem you have with Christians. That is, you place your faith in theories (not facts, mind you). You may say that God being the cause is a theory based on your presuppositions, but you still must concede that phycicists also theorize.
Like I said, the burden of proof rests on you. You continue to say that we cannot conclude something about the whole from the parts. I have shown that you can (red bricks). There doesn't seem to be a solid reason for you to marginalize and write off God's existence. You suggest a universe that operates on different cause and effect relationships. We must not try to hypothesize to the extent that we do not have from our own understanding of the universe around us. We are seeking to understand the universe we live in and not theorize about how the yniverse operates. From all the available data, where are we led to?
I am stacking bucketson top of themselves to point to the fact that there is sufficient reason to believe in the existence of God (go here< for more). There is no open-shut case for the existence of God. We have pointers...and prima facie belief from birth to death. I hope this response has made clearer my understanding of God's being and its link to contingency in the universe...and for the universe as a whole. Again, how do things come to be? Where did the material universe come from?
I will close with a quote from Stephen C. Meyer in Signs of Intelligence regarding what you call a "God of the gaps" [by the way, this book is wonderful! I recommend checking it out of the library or buying it!!):
Design theorists do not infer design just because natural processes cannot explain the origin of biological systems, but because these systems manifest the distinctive hallmarks of intelligently designed systems - that is, they possess features that in any other realm of experience would trigger the recognition of an intelligent cause. For exammple, Michael Behe has inferred design not only because the gradualistic mechanism of natural selection cannot produce irreducible complex systems, but also because in our experience irreducible complexity is a feature of systems known to have been intelligently designed. That is, whenever we see systems that have the feature of irreducible complexity and we know the causal story about how such systems originated, invariably intelligent design played a role in the origin of such systems. Thus, Behe infers intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of irreducible complexity in cellular molecular motors, for example, based upon what we know, not what we do not know, about the causal powers of nature and intelligent agents, respectively...
Design theorists infer a prior intelligent cause based upon present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships. Inferences to design thus employ the standard uniformitarian method of reasoning used in al historical sciences, many of which routinely detect intelligent causes. We would not say, for example, that an archaeologist had committed a "scribe of the gaps" fallacy simply because he inferred that an intelligent agent had produced an ancient hieroglyphic inscription. Instead, we recognize that the archaeologist has made an inference based upon the presence of a feature (namely, high information content) that invariably implicates an intelligent cause, not (solely) upon the absence of evidence for a suitably efficacious natural cause (Stephen C. Meyer, "Word Games" in Signs of Intellignce, William Dembski and James Kushiner eds. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 116-117; original emphasis).