Posted: Jul 16, 2010 1:05 am
Maryann Spikes wrote:San Francisco's atheist blogger Greta Christian retorts, in her May 4 Atheist Meme of the Day,
"'Everything has to have a cause, therefore there must be a God' is a terrible argument for religion. If everything has to have a cause -- what caused God? And if God either always existed or came into being out of nothing -- why can't that be true for the universe?"
In short, "everything" refers to "everything which needs a cause". The "uncaused cause" is not physical, therefore needing no cause. Daniel Dennett in "Breaking the Spell" conjures the straw man reply that God is self-caused. God cannot "come into being" or he is not God, leaving the alternative that he always existed and is the necessary being from which all contingent being derives its being.
Do people really take this sort of stuff seriously? What dreck.
So "everything" needs a cause. God is not part of everything, because everything needs a cause, and if God needed a cause, then he wouldn't be God. So God is not part of everything. But "everything" is, well, everything. If something is not part of "everything", then it's "nothing"; it doesn't exist. So either God doesn't need a cause. but is part of everything, and therefore the axiom "everything needs cause" is no longer true. Or God needs a cause, by virtue of being part of "everything", and therefore isn't God. Or God simply doesn't exist.
How's that for some high school stoner philosophy?