We have considered what presence might be (“the state of bringing one’s consciousness to bear” or something like that), and how, when we slow down time within a story, it is clear that an author is necessarily omnipresent in her story.  How might this translate to God, and his omnipresence in our Universe?

This might be messy.  I hoped by having the analogy of an author that it might clear things up; I also wish I had more time to precisely reference some other thinkers.  Moreover, this is only how we might think about God’s omnipresence – it is surely not a complete description of reality.

If we consider that the entire Universe, everything seen and unseen, is simply the result of God telling a story – “God said, ‘Let there be light…'” – it is not hard to see how God must, necessarily, be present everywhere in that Universe.  If every part of it depends on his “words” (some thinkers would say every part actually does depend on God sustaining it in his mind – if he stopped thinking about you, for instance, you would simply disappear), and if by “words” we imply that God’s consciousness is attending to the thing(s) he is speaking about – well, it’s actually kind of easy to see how that works.

All of creation is God’s story.

So we see, in a cursory way, how this is possible; in other words, the riddle of omnipresence is not impossible to resolve. A human author is omnipresent in her story – ergo – There’s nothing incoherent in the idea of a mind being omnipresent in the Universe.

What about the details?  We saw how our author might slow down time in her story, or speed it up, relative to her “real” time.  How is it that any consciousness could do such a thing in our Universe?  Does God speed up and slow down time?  Is there a “real” time for God, which stands apart from our perceived time?

H0-K.  I should know better, and the pain is self-inflicted, but these questions would take far too long to answer here.  I did promise to look at it, though, and so I will give a rough (and probably imprecise) account of how the thing might work.  Time doesn’t have to work in the following way, but we only want to see how it might be feasible for God.

In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga considers quantum mechanics (QM) and whether the reality of QM does in any way cast doubt on God’s existence.  He concludes it would not; moreover, it may offer an elegant view of how God sustains the Universe.

Now, Plantinga is dealing with the “problem” of miracles; the objection being that for God to act in the Universe in an extraordinary way would force him to break his own “laws.”  Plantinga notes, as I would in light of the author analogy, that there isn’t any clear reason why God couldn’t or shouldn’t act in such ways (other than, perhaps, that it offends the sensibility of some people – miracles can be awfully inconvenient. I don’t see why God should care about that…but let this pass, as Plantinga might say).

Indeed, as I have come to appreciate with Plantinga, he lets the objection stand, for the sake of argument – then what?

Here is what applies to us:  He notes that QM features “collapse” theories, which I might describe as a kind of pulsating of the most fundamental particles and energies in the Universe. The heart pulsates – it pushes, then stops. Pushes, then stops at an average (healthy) rate of 72 beats per minute.

We may already be far afield of what the collapse theories intend, but let’s just expand it a little further:  Think of the frames in a motion picture.  When you watch a film, what appears to be continuous and fluid motion is actually a rapid succession of frames, around 30/second.

The fundamental particles and energies of the Universe – to follow the analogies – run at 10 million “beats” or “frames” per second.

In a film, the frames are all held together on the film strip – so one follows the other automatically, in a predetermined order.

Reality, Plantinga explains, does not appear to be like that.  We don’t have a naturalistic mechanism to explain why each “frame” of reality (some 10 million per second) follows the one before it, and precedes the one after it.

There is nothing in or about frame 11 which leads to frame 12.  One could imagine that, in a truly chaotic Universe, you could be standing one moment in your bedroom, and next moment, float a little too close to Proxima Centauri.  And the moment after that you might be reconstituted with six heads in completely white space, with no apparent ground or horizon. It would be zanier than the zaniest cartoon, and more painful too.

But those things don’t happen.  Plantinga suggests – it’s not required, but it’s a possibility – that when one “frame” ends, and might be completely altered in the next frame,* it is God who maintains the consistency between the two frames.  God keeps your head on, and your feet planted, and the earth moving exactly as we have come to expect it to move.  God is like the living film strip, keeping the frames together.  (This particular analogy becomes clunky fast).

So we speed it up – the frames flicker by, now resembling the fluid motion of reality – you see yourself running down the street in a stop-animation sort of way – then more fluidly, until it is concurrent with reality.

Yes – right now, the idea goes, you are flickering in and out of existence^ 10,000,000 times a second. And you remain you, you move and think in a continuous fashion, not interrupted by an interlude into white space, because something non-physical maintains the continuity. And this might be God.

And so, God is omnipresent like the author, in that whatever exists has its grounding in his consciousness. Can God compress and expand time, so that each ten millionth of a second (in our time) may endure for a greater or shorter period in his time?  Could it be that as each collapse happens, there is an “eternity” of time during which God may, at his leisure, prepare the next frame of reality?

I think, yes (in order), he probably could and he might very well do such a thing. But I’m not sure he even requires that power to accomplish his work. If his intelligence is also infinite – if, for him, the most complex equations we know are mere ephemera – I doubt whether he needs time to restrain itself for him. I suspect he can keep up just fine.

*Not only might the very next frame be non-cogent, it might simply fail to exist.  Reality might “collapse,” and not recover from the collapse.

^I interpret the “collapse” to be a coming into and out of existence, as my limited understanding of QM leads me to believe.  I could certainly be wrong, and am probably simplifying the idea to the point of being wrong.  But all I want is an illustration – the thing appears feasible for God.  Moreover, Plantinga notes that the science may change – what if QM changes significantly, or is completely overthrown? – but this need not trouble the believer.  We are not dependent on how God fits into a given scheme; we have other means for belief, according to Plantinga.

This helps us understand, at least as a start, how the author is present in her story. She brings her consciousness (complete with talents and passions, ideas and shortcomings) to bear on the story, and therefore is present in it. Can we extend her presence throughout the story? Is she indeed omnipresent?

It would seem that she is, and we won’t stop there; it would seem she is necessarily omnipresent in her story.

What does this mean? Let’s assume that she wrote a book with 32 chapters, and didn’t skip any numbers. We can start by saying – as she tells the story, perhaps – that she is present in the context of the story, during Chapter 11. After all, her consciousness is directed toward the telling of the story, and the story does not tell itself. Nothing happens unless she speaks.  If Chapter 11 was told, she was necessarily present as it was told.

Now, could she possibly skip Chapter 25 – just not tell it – and nevertheless have it exist? Of course she couldn’t, not in the context of her story. And so if Chapter 25 does not exist, she would not have been present for it. (We can’t, therefore, demand that she should be present to something which does not exist).

Conversely, if she does not speak Chapter 25 into existence, then it simply does not exist. Our imagined Chapter 25 depends entirely on the author for its existence, if it is to exist at all. (We, existing on the same plane of reality as the author, realize she has “skipped” Chapter 25. But in the context of her story, there simply is nothing there that was skipped).

Or, let’s consider the claim more closely. It seems to me that the challenge to omnipresence is not in location, but in time. That is, how can any consciousness – God’s or otherwise – not only be everywhere at once (easy to imagine, even for ourselves, if time stands still) – but everywhere at once, at every moment?

That is, I can imagine myself – if time could actually stand still – moving about and inhabiting every possible location in space. Then, when I’ve visited them all, we move forward one moment, and I make another circuit through and among all those same points. This, at least, is what we might imagine for the author.

Indeed, let’s slow down, so that later we can “speed it up.”

JRR Tolkien, for example, is omnipresent in Middle Earth. That is, he is present at every location where The Lord of the Rings is taking place, and wherever he is absent, that place simply does not exist. (If there is a location in Frodo Baggins’ mind – the Shire, for example – which Frodo might think about even if he can’t visit it, then it is Tolkien who permits and facilitates that thinking – so that the Shire exists inasmuch as Tolkien permits it to exist, and Frodo can no more imagine it existing than Tolkien permits).

We might say that, when the Fellowship is broken up, and Frodo and Samwise travel separately from the rest, that Tolkien might seem to have a hard time following them simultaneously. But he doesn’t; it need not stress the limits of his consciousness any more than telling a single storyline. And why not?

Because time itself, in Middle Earth, is subject to him (to his will, we might say). He may write Book One and then take a year off, in our time; this will not affect Frodo on his journey. When Tolkien picks up his pen again, not a moment will have elapsed in Frodo’s time (unless Tolkien wishes it to be so – but it need not be so).

Let’s try to lay this out clearly: An author may take 10 years to tell a story which lasts 10 minutes. In the context of her story, that author does not need to delay her characters or their sense of time one bit. Her characters will have no idea, none at all, that it took the author 10 years (in her time) to tell their story; for them, only 10 minutes have passed, and that is all. They are only 10 minutes older.

The converse could be done, as well – an author might, in 10 minutes, tell a story which endures for 10 years. That is, her characters will experience 10 of their own years passing during the course of the story, while the author has scribbled down the whole tale in a mere 10 minutes of her own time.

And back to that original challenge of being in multiple locations at once:  Tolkien could tell us about simultaneous events because he had control over time.  He could tell us about one event, then tell us about another, and simply explain that they were happening simultaneously; and exactly because he willed it, it would be so.  When those characters all meet in the same space and time, they will relate their stories and realize (and not suspect any disruption in the space-time continuum of their world) that their stories were occurring simultaneously.

This shows us how the author can bend and manipulate space and time in her story, and at least one way in which they seem to be related.  The author has existential control over all things in her story; nothing exists without her permitting it.  Moreover, she has control of all “space” in her story, in part, because of her control of time.*  In the next post, we will begin to “speed up” this analogy of space and time, and see how God might do likewise in our Universe.

*The interesting thing about our restrictions on time is that we typically expect time to pass in a story just like it does in our world.  That is, we borrow the mechanics of “our” time, and translate them to any story we read (unless we are otherwise instructed).

But we are seldom, if ever, instructed to completely abandon our sense of time.  An author may have her characters traveling through time, or traveling at warp speeds (which is the same thing), and yet the duration of their travel is supposed to have elapsed just as we expect time to elapse on our world.

I suspect there is too much work to be done in constructing a completely new sense of time, to facilitate the adoption of that new time by the readers, and then to make the whole gimmick useful and satisfying enough that the readers will have appreciated the expense of their efforts.  And so we borrow time, which makes my work with this analogy easy:  The author could create a whole new sense of time, but they typically use ours.  In that way, we can see how the author transcends that time (in the context of her story) and how she might compress and expand it, relative to our time, in order to serve her purposes.

We have said what omnipresence is not; let’s see if we can hone in on what it positively is.

What do we mean, for example, when the person we are speaking to is staring off in the distance and we say, “You look like you’re 1,000 miles away.”  (Or, “Earth to Suzy!” – but this is more obviously out of fashion).

Or again, think of the phenomenon of video conferencing. One party may be in New York, the other in San Francisco (or Tokyo, or Berlin). Yet we see and hear them – are they present? How would you explain your answer?

If so – take it back one step. Imagine you are only able to talk on the phone. Is the other party present to you?

Now both of those require communication, so let’s bring it back yet another step. Say you have an infant, and the child is now fast asleep. You walk in to enjoy the moment (and to make sure the baby is still breathing). Are you present to the child, who is unaware of your physical presence, and is not communicating with you?

So “to be present” seems to include (but not require) communication; it seems to include (but not require) physical proximity, or a representation of one’s self in physical proximity to the other; it seems to include (and perhaps require?) awareness of the other, even a kind of active observation. Perhaps other things besides.

You may even be thinking back to the last post, and saying to yourself: Well, I can be in multiple places at once. I might be in Peoria, and in a video conference with people in Johannesburg, Calcutta, and Detroit.

Perhaps you can; the wider the net, the easier to make my point.

Because we see that, while you can project a representation of yourself all across the world (think of television stars appearing on millions of television screens at once), this is a kind of loophole. Such images do not represent our full presence, our true consciousness. That, almost by definition, is a yes or no question – Are you fully present here? – and if it is “yes” in one place, it is “no” in every other place.

So, presence might be seen as a function of consciousness – whatever your consciousness attends to, there you are present.

I have one grizzly challenge to this idea, which may only serve as a distinction.  Let’s say you are stationed at a military base in a foreign country.  You are on the phone with your spouse, and so “present” to your spouse.  Your consciousness attends to that person, and not, say, to the grumbling person behind you waiting to use the phone.

Suddenly there is an airstrike, and you are killed.  How can we maintain that you were present somewhere else, yet vulnerable to death here, at the base?

It would seem that your body is the “host” of your consciousness.  Your consciousness might attend to anything at all – a person across the ocean, a person across time (if you are reading the biography of Alexander the Great, for instance) – but it depends, in the ordinary sense, on your body for its function.  The body is an “accident” of your consciousness, in the philosophical sense, and so is vulnerable to physical “accidents” of time and space.  (Your body is, itself, the “base” of operations for your consciousness).

The distinction here shows us how the author is free to be omnipresent; and it becomes all the more clear, I think, how this can be possible for God.

If God can be compared with an author, how shall we think of God’s omnipresence?

This may be one of the more difficult “omni-” attributes that we have to think about.  We’ve thought a bit about omnipotence, and we have omniscience waiting in the wings; these two are already “invisible” traits.

That is, if I say to you, “Superman is stronger than any human being,” you don’t have any trouble with that.  His strength is not necessarily apparent, but lies in wait, and we only see it when he’s doing something.  Then, we compare what he can do with what the strongest human beings can do, and we see that he is stronger than they are.

Or take the root of omniscience, intelligence*.  Let’s say I invite you into a room full of Stephen Hawking look-a-likes.  They are chatting amicably, and amid the computerized chatter I ask you to pick out the real Hawking, who is one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world.  You can’t easily tell which one is he – his intelligence lies in wait.  But a good way to find out might be to ask them all to give a quick exposition on whether black holes lead to new universes (they don’t, according to Hawking).

Now ask either Superman or Hawking – where are you?  The answer will be a single location in three dimensional space.  You can only be in one place at one time.

Presence as an attribute, in other words, does not lie in wait (unless you’re a ninja).  It is the obvious thing about you, that you are somewhere, and only there.  It can be an alibi or a damning piece of evidence – but it can’t be both at the same time.

How then is God omnipresent?

We are often – I am often, even until the present moment – tempted to imagine a vast ghost of a being, invisible to us, perhaps like a really thin gas.  This ghost permeates the Universe, though we have trouble with this, and not just because it’s eerie.

For a start, can this ghost see?  Where are its eyes?  Is it entirely composed of “spiritual” eyes?  Or, are its eyes focused on us, and the long train of its flowing being extends from here out into space?

Or would we insist that God is not in space – therefore not omnipresent – because we don’t have any direct empirical evidence of him?  The opposite is a bit jarring to think about:  Some exterior physical presence existing in such a way that you are always and constantly aware of it.  (I imagine the body of a nondescript white male in 19th century clothes multiplying himself along the streets of, say, London).  This would make us all speak and act as though we were paranoid, no?

If the being has to be imagined “in” space, that is, as part of physical space, then maybe we have the wrong idea.

Rather, I suggest that the author is omnipresent within the context of her story, and we might take our cue from her.

Now, the author is something completely apart from her story and even our human authors are not made of up of the same “matter”  as the content of their stories.  So there is an implicit – shall we say necessary? – separation between the author and her story.

In this sense – as we saw with God – the author does not maintain a “physical” presence in her story.  I am grateful not to have to misconstrue her in such ways (I’m a married man, after all).  Isn’t she, nevertheless, present in her story?  If so, in what way?

*Here I use “intelligence” to mean something like “an ability to know.”  Of course it can also connote “an ability to learn” or something suggesting that the objective of learning has not been achieved, but could be.  This distinction will enjoy (or suffer) more treatment in future posts.

(Not going to lie, it took me three tries to type out that subject.  You might really be in for it this time).

In our last post, I compared God to a common author, and applied the analogy to the classic riddle, “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”  This, of course, is a challenge to the coherence of a property like “omnipotence” (being all-powerful).

William Lane Craig gives us more to think about, however, than omnipotence alone.  If the KCA is successful, it also gives us a God who transcends space, time, matter, and energy.  Furthermore, God is the “First Cause” of the Universe, the one who brought it into being.

How does this comport with our analogy?  “Nicely,” it would seem.

Who or what else, for example, can be said to bring a story into existence except its author?  The story does not write itself…

We quickly run into a kind of obstacle, perhaps only a matter of scope.  In our world, it is obvious that any given author is not THE first cause, but has a prior cause (the author’s parents, for a start).  So, for the purposes of our analogy, we are speaking of the author and her story as a kind of closed system.  In the closed system, the author simply exists.  Then, she begins a story, and she is indisputably the first and only cause of that story.

So the author speaks (or writes), and with mere words, a new world comes to exist.

And she may write of men and women, for example, animals of all kinds, trees and rivers and mountains.  Her story may follow the passage of a few moments, or days, years, even eons.  It may take place within a single building, or span continents, planets, galaxies – even other dimensions.  The driving forces of her story may be merely physical (the classic “man vs. nature” kind of story), or else she may tell of great movements in human civilization, or hitherto impossible technologies, and have in motion all manner of interests and objects.

That is, she speaks into existence the kinds of matter, time, space, and energy she wishes.  (And she might create other realms as well).

Does she not, then, transcend all of this?

To borrow some biblical ideas – are not 1,000 days like a single day for her, and a single day like 1,000?  Can’t Chapter 1 take place over the course of a single minute, and Chapter 2 the course of a century?

Hasn’t she called the sun into existence and commanded it to shine?  Whatever animals exist – hasn’t she also called them all up?  And the characters – hasn’t she fashioned them herself and, we might say, in her own image?  (Can an author ever create a character she cannot, in some part, relate to?  A good psychologist might have something say about this).

Is it any actual effort at all for her to be present at all places of her story at once?  (She does not even need to multi-task – after all, the story goes nowhere without her, and by necessity must wait until she attends to it).

This is enough to set the mind reeling, and perhaps your mind is doing better than mine in seeing the potential usefulness of the analogy.  But come humor me and my tortoise’s pace.   You may have noticed, for example, that I give a few examples of omnipotence, which we have already introduced as an attribute of God, and here at the end I switched to the attribute of omnipresence (being present everywhere).

The KCA does give us the impetus to think of God as transcending – rising above or going beyond the limits of, says Webster –  the Universe.  This would seem to get us started on omnipresence; we’ll consider it at greater length in the next post.

This is a brief addendum to the last post, which I hope was easy enough to follow for anyone still reading the series. I’m sure I don’t always make it easy, and I’m hoping by the exercise of writing these things out that I will become better at articulating them.

Moreover, the subject of infinity is challenging enough, and I find myself in a peculiar position of understanding somewhat more than I used to, and yet not very much at all. There are things like “infinite set theory” that are beyond the scope of anything I have studied, though I hope to approach such things in the future.

But what can be said now about infinity as it relates to God and the large stone?

In the last post, I am essentially describing a “potential infinity,” a series of ever larger numbers that can be supposed to go on forever. One never reaches the number “infinity,” because it is impossible to count to infinity, but the fact that the series can go on forever is what makes it “potentially” infinite. For all we know, there is no end to the series, just as, for all we know, there is no end to the future.

To ask whether, in the end, God was either unable to make the rock or unable to lift it is like asking whether the last number you count before infinity is even or odd.  There’s no answer to the question – we might say the question is the “wrong” question.

In this way, I offer that the theist has escaped the riddle. But, then, what about an actual infinity? Couldn’t the skeptic say, “Well, God, create a rock that is actually infinite in size – then, can you lift that rock?”

In the post on Hilbert’s Hotel, I give a well-known argument against actual infinities. The argument stands on the basis that an actual infinity leads to logically absurd conclusions. Rather than accept those conclusions, we instead reject that an actual infinity could exist.

So, our author (and God) might reject outright the challenge to build an actually infinite rock. The existence of such a rock would lead to logical absurdities which are not useful to the telling of a story.

They might, of course, be useful to the telling of a particular kind of story – science fiction, for a start – and that’s an interesting subject to explore. Again, we are not saying that an actually infinitely sized rock is logically impossible, or that the conclusions are logically contradictory. Rather, we are saying that the conclusions are absurd, not seeming to have any relation to the world we find ourselves in.

If it is possible to create a rock of actually infinite size (residing, as it surely must, in a Universe of actually infinite size), then the answer whether it can be lifted is probably only known to an all-knowing creator (he says with sheepish grin). I do suspect that such a Universe is only a possible one, and not necessarily one God has or would actually create; at least, it seems not to be possible in this Universe, and just as well, since the story of that Universe is probably far less useful to God’s purposes.

In any event, even with this caveat, it would seem that a consideration of actual infinities renders the riddle absurd, and therefore it does not fare better here than it does with potential infinities.  Even if we have to retreat to the notion that God only do one thing or the other, this simply means there is one less thing that any one can do, and God can still do all things that can be done.

Last time, I introduced the analogy of God being related to his creation like an author is related to her story. Since we have dealt primarily with the attribute of God being all-powerful, I raised one of the classic challenges to God’s omnipotence, and proposed that we address it with our analogy.

The challenge is this: Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? As we saw, if God cannot make a stone that large, then there is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent. Likewise, if he can make the stone, but can’t lift it, there again is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent.

How does the theist escape this?

I think I have one vague way leading to one clear way.

Let us first suppose an author, whose abilities within the context of her story will (hopefully) help us see the way out. She is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to be all-powerful in the context of her story.

So let’s ask the question a different way: Can an author create a rock, within the context of her story, which is too big for her to lift?

The vague answer is this: The question makes no sense. We see, clearly, that she can create and destroy galaxies, entire Universes, with mere words. Can she not create a rock any size she likes? What does it matter if she can “lift” it? Can’t she always lift it, no matter how big she has created it? Are we to suppose, in the context of her story, that she will ever strain against the weight of any rock, or that she will ever strain against the effort of building a still larger rock?

And this leads to our clearer answer, which harkens back to the posts on infinity.

Let’s say she sets out to create that rock (in the context of her story), a rock so big that she cannot lift it. She builds a rather large rock – a boulder, let’s say. She then describes herself picking it up and lifting it. She’ll need a bigger rock.

So she builds a rock the size of a mountain. Again, she can lift it without effort.

She builds a rock the size of a continent. She lifts it.

She builds a rock the size of a planet. She lifts it.

She goes on, building them to the size of a solar system, a galaxy, a supercluster of galaxies, increasing the order of magnitude of this rock by hundreds and thousands at a time. At no point does she ever strain to create the rock, and at no point does she ever strain to lift it.

Soon, compared with the original rock, she is building rocks beyond description, except by numbers. She builds a rock that is 1 x 10^100, then the 1,000^th power, then the 10,000^th power, then 1 x 10^10^123, which is actually beyond human comprehension of any kind except that we know how to read numbers. Still, there is no difficultly either in creating it, or lifting it.

In effect, I would venture, the answer to the question is – well, she is infinitely powerful in the context of her story. There is no finite end to this challenge. I see no point at which she could no longer create bigger rocks, nor any point when she could not lift the rock she has created. The question pertains to infinity, and so the answer is neither “yes” nor “no.” It is better to say, perhaps, that it is not applicable.

Or, if it is not enough to equate “infinitely powerful” to “all-powerful,” I don’t know what anyone can be looking for when they say “all-powerful.”

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.

Following the last set of posts on the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), we have…well, what do we have?

Suppose you are skeptical – that may be fair.  Which premise do you object to, and why?

For the skeptic, that is the only course of action here.  The logic can’t be denied (unless you want to deny logic).  Even for a hobbyist of philosophy, that’s pretty easy to see.

Let’s just say, for the sake of explanation, that you don’t like the first premise, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.”  You think, vaguely (as I do),* that quantum mechanics must reveal some exception to this rule, or that somewhere down the line, we’ll find something truly astounding, which can’t be anticipated by this kind of logic.  Maybe in a Universe with different rules of physics, there are also different rules of logic.

Aside from taking the opportunity to use a phrase like “atheism-of-the-gaps,” what I would point to is the notion that we don’t need 100% certainty of the argument for it to be successful.  We just need the premises to be more plausibly true than their denials.

Is it more plausibly true, I would ask, that “Whatever begins to exist has a cause,” or rather, “Some things begin to exist without a cause”?  If you think the second statement is true, or just more plausibly true than the first, what example would you give?

If you can’t give an example, why think that some things begin to exist without a cause?  Why prefer this over the premise, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause”?

Suppose you can’t find any exceptions or successful objections to either premise.  Is this any reason to jump to the conclusion that you must believe in the God of the Bible?

No.  I am one of the two Catholic guys, but my aim here is not to make you a Catholic, or Christian, or Jew.  What I aim to offer is that belief in God is more rational than the absence of belief.  That, I think, is one of the fruits of the KCA – the conclusion, it seems to me, is much more rational than the denial of the conclusion.

Keep in mind, Krauss offers that the multiverse is (perhaps) more rational than the absence of the multiverse.  Nevermind that there’s no evidence for its existence^ – it is simply a hypothesis to make sense of the evidence we do have.  And I have no interest or need to deny that hypothesis, except that we may be able to explain things without it.

Though no objections have surfaced in previous posts as of this writing, I realize some may come up when there is time for various readers to comment.  I’m interested in that conversation.

However, for the sake of this series, I want to continue with this assumption:  The KCA is more plausibly true than false.  Now what?

*In a bit of permitted confusion, what I mean to say here is that I think vaguely about quantum mechanics, but not that QM will someday prove that things can begin to exist without causes.

^As far as I have read/heard.  I suspect we’ll all know it if any evidence does materialize.