And now, after nine posts, the thesis:  If we are careful, there is much to be gained from the analogy of God as the author of creation.

I have drawn out this one attribute (omnipotence) via this one argument (the KCA) so that I would not have to draw out the introduction of the analogy.  Let’s see how that plays…

Let us consider an author, one just starting to write a book.  Let’s say you are the author, for the time being.

You are writing a love story, set in pre-Industrial America.  An upper class woman and a working class inventor, he working on a prototype for a steam engine.  They have a rendezvous in his shop, a secret appointment, and things start to get, um, steamy…

(Nice pun at the end there, you).

All of the evocative details aside, do you not have power, say, to have a giraffe walk through the shop during the middle of a long kiss?  Can’t you send stars crashing into each other in the rhythm of their heavy breathing?  Can’t you cut away the rest of the planet, so that they exist, in this shop on a small island of earth, with a 360 degree backdrop of the Universe?

We’re not talking about believability here (though we will eventually).  All I’m asking you is, what can’t you do?

Let’s ask one of the traditional riddles about God and omnipotence.  Can God make a stone so large that He can’t lift it?

Now, briefly, the implication is that if He CAN’T make that stone, then there’s something He can’t do; and if He can make it, but CAN’T lift it, there again is something He can’t do.  Thus, the dilemma is supposed to make absurd (and incoherent) the idea of omnipotence.  Therefore, there is no God, or else He is not omnipotent.

But what do we mean by “omnipotent”?  And how to answer this riddle in light of the present analogy?

One may get the feeling that I’ve been circling back a bit, and I hope that doesn’t induce any mental motion sickness (or too much tedium).  I’ve heard somewhere that a speaker must state a thing five times in order for it to be retained by the hearer.

Alas, we will take the KCA as a step in this process, and now discern where it might lead.  At the very least, I will now co-opt  William Lane Craig’s hard work and twist it for my purposes.

Craig points out that, if the KCA is successful, it gives us a cause for the Universe (all time, space, matter, and energy) which transcends the Universe.  He also notes that this cause must be unimaginably powerful.  Is not the creation of the Universe the mightiest act you can conceive of?

And, in what seems to be a later addition to his thought on the subject, Craig notes that the KCA may even give us a personal cause – that is, a cause that acts, when it could have chosen not to act.

To further draw out the distinction:  If the laws of physics really are responsible for the creation of the Universe, they would seem to constitute an impersonal cause.  If I understand correctly, even Hawking would say that the laws of physics were simply bound to create the Universe (by necessity, which is a heavy idea in philosophy), and so no choice would have been involved.

We have to ignore some of the metaphysical problems with this idea (why did they create the Universe at the “moment” when they did, and not “sooner”?  In what way were they catalyzed to create?  What about the constants and quantities of nature – did the laws set those, somehow, to permit the Universe we see?  How did they drum up elementary particles out of nothing?*) to come to our point without delay.

Rather, we have to consider what kinds of things stand outside of time, matter, space, and energy – those seem to include abstract objects (like numbers and propositions) and minds, says Craig.  And since abstract objects don’t cause anything, the only thing left which could act as the cause of the Universe is a mind.

And why not a mind?  This brings a certain satisfaction to many disparate features of reality:  A sense of order in the Universe, the efficacy of math and logic, the setting of initial constants and quantities, the coherence of reality (the laws of physics appear to be constant across space and time), our sense of beauty, the question “why?”, the plethora of features which convince us that survival is not the sole purpose of our existence.

Do you have to accept that it was a mind?  No.  But you do have to improve upon the explanation if you’re going to defeat it, which may be a particularly difficult challenge if the KCA is successful.  I, for now, accept that it was a mind, and this mind I call God.

Why call it God?

Well, one of the attributes typically ascribed to God is that of being “omnipotent,” or all-powerful.  As I asked above, can you imagine a mightier act than the creation of the Universe (all space, time, energy, and matter)?  Is there any logically consistent act you can imagine which this same mind could not perform?  Would you like to see stars exploding, or galaxies colliding?  Nevermind your earthly mountains and trees…

So this mind and “God” seem to have in common the attribute of being all-powerful.  The role of “First Cause” has also typically been applied to God, and this is the role filled by our mind from the KCA.  When it becomes appropriate to identify a “thing” as God is probably a good question, and I don’t want to be seen as attempting a sleight of hand.

Nevertheless, it would seem that the success of the KCA seems to add to (or not, if it is unsuccessful) the rationality of belief in God, and it does not seem to apply in this way to any other being.  There does not seem to be an entity competing with God for the attributes wrought from the KCA (and other such arguments).

And so, I’ll use “God” primarily, and you can stop me if I seem to be taking any unjustified liberties.

In the next post, we’ll explore what it means to be all-powerful.

*Some of these questions are leveled at God, which we may come to at length.  Suffice for now to say that I don’t believe I have all the answers, though the existence of God seems to provide a better grounding for those answers than His non-existence.

We concluded the last post with the question, “Are there objective moral values and duties?”

There’s some potentially treacherous sailing ahead.  It all seems clear to me, but when I’ve spoken to some atheist friends about this, a kind of confusion settles in that seems mysterious, surprising.  I might add “obtuse” if I wasn’t worried about offending them.*

First let’s ask:  Just what does “objective” mean?  Simply this – that a thing does not depend on opinion for its validation.  For example, 2 + 2 = 4, no matter what I think.  I could throw up the wildest, most protracted, Bill Maher-ish argument possible, and still have no effect whatsoever on the fact that 2 and 2 add up to 4, even if an entire studio audience applauded my effort.  Mercifully so.

“Objectivity” can be applied to empirical things, too:  The law of gravity is an objective reality.  No other reality has seen more protracted or violent protests as when a man is falling to the earth against his will, either from a short distance or a great one; still the reality holds.  This qualifies it as objective, even if every person on earth were ready to deny it.

So:  Are there objective moral values and duties?

The example quickest to mind for many – and one offered by WLC – is that of the Holocaust.  In other words, the mass genocide of six million Jews was right, wrong, or of no moral significance whatsoever.

If a person accepts that objective morality exists, she is left to answer either “yes” or “no.”  More on this in a moment.

If a person rejects the notion of objective morality, he is left to answer that the Holocaust was of no moral significance whatsoever, and neither is any other word, thought, or deed.  One could murder millions of people or mow the lawn, and neither carries greater moral significance than the other.

Now, this latter option seems, in all other circumstances, to be obviously false; the former choice likewise has an obvious answer.  You might deny, against all evidence, that the Holocaust occurred, and try to escape the question this way.  But that only seems to admit that there is an objective morality, and that the Holocaust was objectively wrong – else, why avoid the reality?

I suggest that the question of morality becomes confused only when the implications of a God are introduced.  Let’s look back at the argument.

Premise 2 – Objective moral values and duties do exist.

This seems obvious, especially in an extreme example.  Yes, of course they exist; yes, of course the Holocaust was wrong.  There is something about gathering people in a deliberate and discriminatory way, marching them through intolerable conditions along great distances, tearing families apart, forcing them to work long and hard and feeding them just enough calories to stay alive, performing acts of torture, painful medical experiments, and other humiliations on them, and finally killing them en masse and stacking their bodies like sandbags in mass graves – this strikes us as obviously and extremely wrong.

Moreover, if the Nazis has gone on to global dominance, and continued their program of mass killings, we might all have been brainwashed into thinking this was an admirable goal, one which must be supported by every good citizen of the Third Reich.  Perhaps every person would eventually believe the Holocaust was a good thing.  And still, we know it was not.  The answer doesn’t change, not even if all the world thinks it does, no more than it does in simple arithmetic.

This gives us Premise 2.  The examples could be multiplied; they are not difficult to think of.

The crux of the argument, then, rests with Premise 1, which we will look at next time.

*My tongue is in my cheek, lads.

There’s a TED talk in which Alain de Botton said (in effect):  I’m not here to discuss whether there’s a God or not.  We know there’s no God.  Let’s also admit that militant atheism doesn’t really get us anywhere.  Instead, let’s move on and talk about how we’re going to live our lives in a world without God.

His primary objective, to restate the paraphrase, was to envision an entirely secular culture, one that might even borrow from the “good things” he had seen religion doing.  An interesting perspective, if you’re curious.

In a similar fashion, my primary objective in this series is not to prove that God exists.  I did say that I’ve been studying the question, with all of the focus and spare time afforded to a father employed in a field far from Philosophy.  I do say, so far as I can tell, that God’s existence seems to me more plausible than not.  And not just by a little, but overwhelmingly so.

Further, as an autobiographical aside, I don’t believe my purpose is to go about proving that God exists.  I think there are minds at work which fare far better than mine, and their arguments range from simple (as we have seen with the Kalam Cosmological Argument) to quite difficult to follow.

So, as de Botton looks at life in the absence of God, and seeks fulfillment, I now take a contrary tack.  There is a God, a greatest of all possible beings, a mind so powerful and intelligent as to defy all comprehension except His own.  Now what?

The proofs for God’s existence are instructive for my primary objective, and that is why they will show up from time to time.  I do hope to give my agnostic and atheist friends exposure to them, to observe a depth of mind not often found in popular culture.  (EDIT:  There are similarly deep and profound insights offered by atheists and agnostics as well, and taken together with the theists’ insights, these represent thought far beyond what our televisions typically showcase).  I also aim to discuss the subject in such a way that it is not too pious for my A&A friends, though I have been guilty of that charge from time to time.

The very tip of the point of this series, then, is this:  To explore the nature of God through the analogy of an author.  More broadly, this might be called a “conceptual analysis,” which we have already done in brief:  If conditions are such that X exists, then what can we know about X?

In this manner, we learned what we did in 3.0.  In later posts, we’ll introduce the concept of “God as author” and begin to explore what this can tell us about God and how to live our lives.

In our last exciting installment, I said that skeptics (and believers) often have a view of God which is painfully small, especially for human minds.  I noted that those human brains are often seen as bearing no significance at all, none to speak of anyway, when compared with the size of the Universe.  What, then, could set the Universe in motion?  How much greater must that intelligence and power be, compared even with our wild imaginations?

I submitted that this power (whatever its source) is something beyond comprehension, whether it comes from God or else a natural cause.  I think we must say the same for that intelligence – this is almost easier to recognize, though still beyond comprehension – though I do not necessarily mean that we must therefore admit a God.

I don’t know what else you’ll say could manifest that intelligence, but I’m listening.

Even with a view toward modern science (let alone “God”), I am looking through the glass dimly, and still can appreciate what a startling display of intelligence has been required to understand the cosmos, to draw conclusions about its origins and to sketch out what are the laws of physics.  There are people out there inventing mathematics to explain it, and talking about equations so difficult that we might never solve them.

What?

This does not compute with a Universe tumbling into existence on the same mechanics as a roulette wheel.  That Universe would not require or condone complex, logical equations.  It would require a deck of cards and a lot of time.

But that’s not what smart atheists are saying now, so let’s do away with straw men.

Smart atheists are trying to find a way around this:

Premise 1 – Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2 – The Universe began to exist.

Conclusion – The Universe has a cause.

Again, the conclusion is not:  ”God exists.”  It is rather, “The Universe has a cause.”

The Big Bang theory does not quibble with this, but some physicists do.  Other physicists say the Universe began to exist, but without a God.

William Lane Craig, the contemporary champion of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, rightly points out that, since the argument is sound, the burden is on atheists to refute one or both of the premises.  If the argument is successful, it would seem to demonstrate a cause which transcends those things by which we define the Universe – space, time, energy, and matter.  It is further suggested that this cause must be personal (that is, a person) because the act of creation would have been a choice, and only persons make choices.

If you would, how would you refute them?

Before wrestling with what it means for God to be all-loving, we might find some benefit by shifting the emphasis.

Namely, we’ve focused primarily on God, appropriately so, in consideration of the analogy of an author.  We have seen, for example, how the human author shows herself to be all-powerful in the context of the story; so, by analogy and at least to that extent, we may say that God is all-powerful in reality, and there is nothing impossible or incoherent about such a notion.

But what about the story?  What about creation itself?

The first word I would offer is a word of caution:  The analogy should not be applied too stringently.  It is more of a guide, a way, an open door.  It is not a complete map, much less the journey itself.

So, for example, I think it would be fun to ponder the notion of “elementary particles” within any given story, and what, if any, significance there might be here.  Indeed, I do think there could be some.

However, it is important to see two things:  Whereas the analogy is metaphysical, elementary particles are proposed as simply physical realities.  The analogy will not teach us physics – we cannot observe the world of “War and Peace” and discover something about the force of gravity.  (At least not anything which Tolstoy had not already discovered himself, from…observing the real world).

The second is also a basic distinction:  God is the greater mystery, the more fundamentally real subject of our discussion.  The author is not an exact analogue to God – even if we can confirm a truth about the author, it might not necessarily show us something about God.  Rather, God is the One we are groping for, as if in the dark and cavernous space of the entire Universe, and we are hardly able to leap off our own pale blue dot.  The analogy may give us an idea of what we are looking for, perhaps how the search should proceed, perhaps even correct our course from time to time – but it is not the same as contact with the living God.

There is, rather, something wild and lonely and exhilarating about that journey, and it is never enough merely to consider the map in comfort.

So with that arduous caution in place, we’ll take up creation in the next post.

And so, what can be said about the Kalam Cosmological Argument in particular?

Some rather intriguing things, if you ask me.  The following exposition is heavily informed by what William Lane Craig has to say about this argument, in support of it and in anticipation of possible objections.  You may, without too much exercise of the mind, still find an objection; you may also depend on the notion that Dr. Craig has fielded it, or readily will.

Premise 1 – Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Another way of saying this is, “Nothing comes from nothing.”  In the last post, I linked to the Wikipedia page for Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist who authored the book, A Universe from Nothing.  In it, according to the NYT, he proposes a “deeper nothing,” from which even the laws of physics are absent, and out of this nothing the Universe was born.  But then, he doesn’t actually mean “nothing” – we might have been spawned by the multiverse, which even the layman realizes is a whole lot of something.

By “nothing,” Dr. Craig says, we actually mean “not anything.”

And this seems to be true, in the sense that Stephen Hawking (also linked last time) theorizes that there is a boundary to spacetime, beyond which there is really nothing…except that he also admits something, namely the laws of physics.  To these he ascribes potential creative power (namely, causal power) whereas they have usually been seen as descriptions of our observations, and not things existing as causal agents.

What’s interesting to note is that neither of these theoretical physicists deny Premise 1.  They have some strange ideas about nothing – which is to say, they identify something and call it “nothing” – and yet they try to extract something from that nothing in order to provide a cause for everything.

Premise 2 – The Universe began to exist.

Nevertheless, it appears there really is a hard beginning to the Universe, which theorem has stood against alternative explanations.  If the Universe began thus, and there is no explanation which space, time, energy, or matter can provide, what do we suppose could have caused it?

Nothing comes from nothing, after all.  We must therefore posit an “abstract” something, or as we have said, something which transcends the Universe.

Those last two links are tough.  I admit to reading only what appears to be standard English, having to look up some of the technical terms (geodesic!) and taking only a cursory glance at the geometry.  I admit that they appear less clearly stated than the way Craig employs them, but he understands the field better than I do.  Would love to learn more about this.

What I understand better are the philosophical arguments against an actual infinity, which we’ll look at next time.