[Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???

[C. G. Estabrook]

Not how the universe is, but that it is, is the question.  The former is the 
subject matter of science; the latter, a philosophical question.

As I believe Mort pointed out, there's no philosophical or scientific reason to 
conclude that the universe hasn't existed forever.  But Stephen Hawking, who's 
thought about this for a while, wrote, "You still have the question: why does 
the universe bother to exist? If you like, you can define God to be the answer 
to that question."

We obviously have no answer to the question -- we don't know why there is 
something instead of nothing -- but you can hardly illegitimize a question just 
because you don't know the answer.  Ignoring those philosophical Puritans who 
insist, "You aren't allowed to ask that question!," we as it were paste a label 
on the answer (which of course we don't know) that says "God." (And that BTW is 
what Aquinas is doing in his famous Quinque viae, his five arguments for the 
existence of God.)

The following is from my aforementioned ghostly father. --CGE

==========

It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our ultimate 
question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able to exclude some 
answers. If God is whatever answers our question, how come everything then 
evidently s/he is not to be included amongst everything. God cannot be a thing, 
an existent among others. It is not possible that God and the universe should 
add up to make two.

Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything, it is 
clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of anything. Whatever 
creation means it is not a process of making. Again it is clear that God cannot 
interfere in the universe, not because he has not the power but because, so to 
speak, he has too much; to interfere you have to be an alternative to, or 
alongside, what you are interfering with. If God is the cause of everything, 
there is nothing that he is alongside.

Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; I mean by this that we do not 
appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way rather than 
that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the universe. For this 
reason there can, it seems to me, be no feature of the universe which indicates 
it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of 
nothing. [So no "intelligent design." --CGE]

I have said that whatever God is, he is not a member of everything, not an 
inhabitant of the universe, not a thing or a kind of thing. And I should add, I 
suppose, that it cannot be possible to ask of him, how come God instead of 
nothing? It must not be possible for him to be nothing. Not just in the sense 
that God must be imperishable, but that it must make no sense to consider that 
God might not be.

Of course it is still possible to say, without manifest contradiction, 'God 
might not be', but that is because when we speak of God by using the word 'God', 
we do not understand what we mean, we have no concept of God; what governs our 
use of the word 'God' is not an understanding of what God is but the validity of 
a question about the world. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws 
from saying 'God might not exist' even though it makes no sense. What goes for 
our rules for the use of 'God' does not go for the God we try to name with the 
word. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for the 
existence of God called the ontological argument does not work.)

...it seems to me that what we often call atheism is not a denial of the God of 
which I speak. Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not 
denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is 
anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a 
religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious 
people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, 
that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like 
Basil Spence [= a British Frank Lloyd Wright], only bigger and less visible, 
that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the 
rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being 
around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas 
Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too...

--Herbert McCabe OP, "God Matters"*, p. 6
____________________

*A rather elegant multiple pun.


Bob Illyes wrote:
> I give up. I see that the bellicose rhetoric thread has become the God 
> thread. Incidentally, all of the birds are in my yard, so don't get paranoid
> about the void in other parts of town. We even had a finch yesterday, which
> was rather late in the season for them.
> 
> When I was age 11 or so, having been told that God created the universe, I
> asked my mother who had created God. "God created himself", she answered,
> rather annoyed at my question.
> 
> Arbitrarily claiming that the universe as a whole requires a creator leads to
> infinite regress, as implied by my question to my mother (I didn't know the
> term "infinite regress" at the time, or I would have REALLY annoyed her).
> Arbitrarily claiming that God does not require a creator is no more
> satisfying than claiming that the universe doesn't require a creator.
> 
> But more importantly, it is not a question of any practical application. The
> practical question is not "who created the universe?" but rather "is there a
> personal god?". This can be answered only by the sort of personal experience
> that John just mentioned.
> 
> I just see that Laurie has replied to my Obama thread, so I was overly hasty
> in putting up the white flag.....
> 
> Bob
> 
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