QUESTION God: Supreme Being or Imaginary Friend? - YouTube
In his opening to this debate, Trent Horn argues that the universe must have a beginning and a creator because he finds it illogical that everything is in motion without something to move it. He compares it to a line of train cars, which must have a locomotive to go anywhere.
However, I think that there is an issue with this reasoning, as the locomotive has to be strong enough to push/pull every car linked to it. If there were an infinite string of train cars attached to infinitely powerful locomotive, then the conflict between the mass of the cars and the power of the engine would be paradoxical. As the engine is more powerful there will be cars to stop it's progress, and as the cars are heavier the engine must have power to move them. Essentially, god creating the universe is the same as god creating a rock it can't lift.
In order to follow logically, god can only create a finite universe, which would make him non-omnipotent.
What are your thoughts?
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2 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Which gad are you talking about? There's so many to consider at the moment..like..Kali for instants.
Charlene
Level 9
Feb 1, 2018
0
My brother decided to convert from a Catholic to a Hindu/Buddhist. From what he has told me about the Hindu texts, all beings, including the gods like Kali, are fragments of an ultimate god.
Along a similar vein, I'd say any one god, pantheon of gods, or pantheistic god would fit where I referred to a god.
Whenever someone makes an argument for a prime mover, the uncaused cause, etc., it's generally this idea that something can't come from nothing. According to quantum mechanics that's not true, but the argument is made over and over again. Why? Well, one way we understand the world is through analogy. We recognize patterns in our daily lives and have an intuitive sense about them, and we apply these patterns to foreign circumstances. That often works because the principles that government in one area are generally universal. The problem with saying that the universe had to have come from somewhere, must have had an intelligent designer, etc., is that we don't know what exists outside the parameters of our universe. Time and space as we know it, as far as we can tell, likely came into existence at the big bang, when the physical laws and forces came about. This means that "before" and "outside" make no sense intuitively for the universe. But that's the trap theists of this stripe continually fall into: they assume a "before" and an "outside" that operates on the same logic, using our day-to-day experiences, so they believe there must be this infinite being who consciously brought about existence. Even if such a being existed, though, it doesn't explain anything about the universe. Not only is there insufficient evidence for this prime mover, but it doesn't provide any explanations. The answer might as well be "magic" or "unicorn farts" or any of the nonsensical babble from Deepak Chopra. It's all just meaningless conjecture that doesn't further our comprehension in the least.
resserts
Level 8
Feb 1, 2018
1
@AxeElf Very well, I take you at your word that you're sincere. The reason I thought you were trolling is because whenever I make a point and you have responded, you've changed my argument slightly so it no longer says what I intended — and it's a subtle shift in a way that made it seem deliberate. In the previous discussion, the issue of whether belief makes something exist came up and you shifted to the effects of belief through action to bring about change. Clearly I was talking about state of being, not whether we can put our minds to a task and accomplish something. And when I talked about "supremacy," you changed the meaning to "supremacism" — reframing my position so you're arguing against a point I wasn't actually making, which then forces me into a semantic argument. In this topic, I never said that the matter and energy of the universe started at the Big Bang, only that time and space as we know it is thought to have been defined in the Big Bang (along with the various forces and other natural laws). But your response again reframed my position ("the Big Bang happened when the universe sprang forth--not from NOTHING, you sillies"), taking the focus off my point about analogies. The other point you made about quantum mechanics borrowing and needing to pay back took some liberties, though a reasonable assumption because my point was more of an aside and I didn't elaborate on what I was referring to. (I was specifically referring to the idea that our universe is "flat" and that all of the matter and energy in the universe balances out, which is allowed by quantum mechanics, meaning that the universe can have the positive matter+energy emerge from empty space so long as it has the negative counterpart in equal measure.) My entire point wasn't about the specifics of quantum mechanics, nor on the forces and laws that emerged from the Big Bang, but merely pointing out that when our entire existence from that moment forward is unlike the conditions before that moment (in whatever way "before" makes sense, because the constructs of time and space as we know them likely didn't exist in any recognizable sense) — and it's because we don't (and perhaps never can) understand the forces independent of our universe since the Big Bang that any argument made about what must have happened before the Big Bang is necessarily hinging on laws and forces and conditions that may not exist in the same way outside our universe.
@AxeElf I apologize for jumping to conclusions. Now that I understand a bit more of your style, I realize that I was assuming disagreement with the entire argument and thought you were elevating a minor point to something far more substantive. I didn't recognize that you were just narrowing the discussion. That's my oversight, and I apologize for getting defensive about it.
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