"Never" is a long, long time on which to place a bet that something will not happen. Never presupposes time without end; an infinitely long time. The nature of philosophy is work through difficult questions and cause them to be solved. That will most certainly happen within the time assigned to "never."
Or will it?
The 8 questions are described in this article. What do you believe, and based on what philosophical proof? Several of the questions, in my opinion have been (or can be) answered.
Question 4, for example: Does God exist? Thomas Aquinas developed a philosophical way for demonstrating God's existence in Summa Theologiae. Aquinas begins with the idea that every effect requires a cause, and that nothing that exists in the physical world is the cause of its own existence. This is known as the principle of sufficient reason.
When we encounter a chair, for example, we know perfectly well that it did not come into existence spontaneously. It owes its existence to something else: a builder and previously existing raw materials. An existing thing Z owes its existence to cause Y, but Y itself, not being self-existing, is also in need of a cause. Y owes existence to cause X. But now X must be accounted for, and X owes its existence to cause W.
We are faced with the following problem: Every cause of a given effect itself demands a cause in order to account for its own existence; this cause in turn requires a cause, and so on. If we have an infinite series on our hands, in which each cause itself requires a cause, then nothing could ever have come into existence.
Aquinas explains that there must, therefore, be an Uncaused Cause - a cause that is not itself in need of a cause. Aquinas says this it God. God is the one self-existing being whose existence is part of His very essence. No human being must exist; there was a time before each one came into existence, and the world will continue to exist after the last one perishes. Existence is not part of the essence of every human being. But God is different, He cannot not exist. All humans and all things ultimately track back to God. And He depends on nothing prior to Himself in order to account for His existence.
Which of the author's eight great philosophical questions can you tackle?
27 comments:
I think the one most likely to be answered scientifically, not philosophically: is there life after death. Well not really life, but consciousness. I think ways could be developed to sense energies, to receive messages, etc.
Deborah - have yo read the stories of people who have had 'near death' experiences? They are very compelling in terms of reporting an afterlife.
Aquinas simply engages in slight-of-hand -- he attempts to demonstrate that a thing must logically exist and then calls that thing "God", despite the fact that the sole trait it shares with "God" is shared with a literally infinite number of alternatives.
Really, though, his argument doesn't hold together long enough for that to be an issue. He starts with the axiom that everything has a cause and infers that there must be something that didn't. Therefore his initial axiom is wrong; not everything has a cause. Having established that at least one thing exists without a cause of its own, he then puts no effort into proving that one and ONLY one thing has no cause.
It certainly isn't demonstrable that everything has a cause. Plenty of stuff happens that has no cause we can definitely prove. Hell, plenty of stuff happens that has no cause we can even guess at. The fact that some things have causes does not logically imply that everything does.
Therefore his initial axiom is wrong; not everything has a cause.
Interesting. What things exist that do not have a cause?
Deborah - have yo read the stories of people who have had 'near death' experiences? They are very compelling in terms of reporting an afterlife.
Well, no, because none of the people actually died. They came close to death. That humans have reported similar experiences when their brains are in the process of shutting down does not imply anything about what happens after.
That people report similar experiences under similar circumstances suggests nothing more than that humans are similar to one another. Which we knew to begin with. :)
Interesting. What things exist that do not have a cause?
I don't think you followed my argument. :)
Aquinas starts with the hypothesis -- the unproven and unprovable hypothesis -- that everything has a cause. He then goes on to establish, correctly, that logically that cannot be true.
At that point, the hypothesis "everything has a cause" is disproven. At that point, Aquinas says "see? God!", which is pure silliness from a logical perspective. All he's established is that at least ONE thing has no cause. The number of things with no cause could be anything from "one" to "infinite".
I don't have to establish that two "causeless causes" exist. The mere possibility that they could is sufficient; it falls upon those who wish to claim that there is one and ONLY one causeless cause to prove as much, which Aquinas never did.
And of course, even if he did, slapping the label of "God" on it would be intellectually dishonest, since nothing about the existence of causeless causes implies concern with humanity, with good or evil, with morality, that the creation of Earth was in any way intended, and so on.
I don't think you followed my argument. :)
I followed it quite well, thanks. :)
Go ahead and prove Aquinas wrong. It will have taken some eight centuries for someone to do it, so I'm all ears.
Aquinas starts with the hypothesis -- the unproven and unprovable hypothesis -- that everything has a cause. He then goes on to establish, correctly, that logically that cannot be true.
You misread Aquinas - if you've read him. I'll ask you again: name a thing that exists and that does not have a cause.
Er, the logical flaws in Aquinas' argument were demonstrated centuries before I was even born. I'd love to claim credit, mind you, but it wouldn't be honest.
Many Christians still accept Aquinas' argument, of course, just like many Democrats still accept that Obama is a foreign policy genius who rescued the American economy while beset by racist Tea Partiers. :)
There are many physical phenomena that are not "caused," at least not as I understand the word (I am not a philosopher).
Virtual particles appear and self-annihilate in vacuum, randomly and unpredictably. To say that "it is in the nature of a vacuum to randomly produce virtual particles" seems to me an explanation, not a proposed "cause."
You misread Aquinas - if you've read him. I'll ask you again: name a thing that exists and that does not have a cause.
First of all, you should Google the phrase "argument from ignorance fallacy", Michael. Aquinas is the person claiming everything has a cause; it falls to him to prove it, and he didn't bother. He just claimed it was true.
But that aside, I'll be nice and answer your question. There is something we know didn't have a cause: the universe itself.
You see, we know now -- which we didn't back in Aquinas' day -- that time is a property of the universe. Without time there cannot be causation, because causes precede effects. There can be no cause to the universe, as we understand it, because there was no time for a cause to occur in. Aquinas assumed that time existed before the universe did. He was mistaken.
Anyway, tag out -- I know how long these arguments can last, and I have to get some work done in prep for tomorrow. :)
There is something we know didn't have a cause: the universe itself
Okay then. When you have time, please prove the inverse, that God does not exist, and that he did not cause creation of the universe.
I have read several of the theses that attempt to disprove Aquinas five points. All are based on the belief that Aquinas did not have access to the science we have today. None prove the inverse, however.
Rev, I appreciate the conversation. I hope FMF and Paddy O can contribute.
@Revenant,
Aquinas posits a first cause in order to avoid an infinite chain of causality. I don't see how your argument avoid the problems attendant on an infinite chain of causes.
I also don't see how claiming that there may be multiple uncaused causes helps your argument. So, like in Aristotle, there are multiple Prime Movers instead of one. While claiming there may be, e.g. six Gods instead of one doesn't help Aquinas, it sure as hell doesn't help you either.
"name a thing that exists and that does not have a cause."
A wife's anger.
"name a thing that exists and that does not have a cause."
Miley Cyrus's career.
I have always thought (presumably was taught) that God existed outside of time as part of His transcendence, that is, He surpasses the limits of all things, all matter, all space, all time. Add to that the fact He is immanent, existing within all things and you pretty much have everything covered.
So that nullifies Rev's particular argument, I believe.
I do not believe science will ever prove the existence of God because that would essentially eradicate the true purpose of life, the First Commandment.
One of, and perhaps the most essential, elements of faith is doubt. Without it you're a mere Neoplatonist or Gnostic, one who can learn the path to actual knowledge of God. It's the reason for the end-time myths.
If you buy the true purpose, Love, life becomes simple. Not easy mind you, but simple.Life also remains equally difficult for the person who doesn't buy it. Only they have fewer moments of comfort.
At Regis the thing we studied by Aquinas was his proof (!) that humans have souls and that souls are eternal.
It was much of the same sleight of hand.
That's the thing about being God, in a universe where things come before other things, you must first create yourself. Hence the trinity, creator, co-creator, thing created. You cannot even wrap your mind around it because you are human, but there it is, the philosophical basis of the trinity, from which the concept of father, son, holy ghost, is derived, that is Christianity's way of saying it.
And don't you hate the word "hence" before something is made clear or agreed upon? That happened like three times in two days so this my small-minded way of getting back.
Back in the 1980s I worked with a black guy named Truthy (his first name). He had a small motorcycle, maybe a Honda 150 or something like that. One day he was going down the road and had an accident with a car. Fell on the pavement and hit his head (sans helmet). Some time later after he healed, he went back to work. We asked him what happened and he said he couldn't remember too much of the accident, but: "I died and met God." Someone said: "What did he look like?" And Truthy said: "He's a motherfucking white guy." This was at the lunch table and people were laughing so hard that pieces of sandwich were falling out of mouths.
True story.
"2. Is our universe real?"
This seems like a good place to begin. The answer seems to be "We/I can't possibly know that for certain." That leads to some interesting possiblities for the conduct of our lives.
The Aquinas thesis is superior to the ontological proof that Anselm offered - the silly one about concepts of perfection. But it's still a self-swallowing logical abstraction, and thus suspect as being tautological. Or, to put it another way - it begs the question. Cause and effect are logical constructs - fingers rather than the moon. And a projection can be far greater than the object being projected. You can't use a cause-and-effect trick to conjure forth an omniscient creator, because it does not follow that the cause has to be greater than the effect. All you can do with this method is insist on a spark, not a God.
It certainly isn't demonstrable that everything has a cause. Plenty of stuff happens that has no cause we can definitely prove. Hell, plenty of stuff happens that has no cause we can even guess at. The fact that some things have causes does not logically imply that everything does.
I'm not rigorous enough of a logician to argue the proof, but I think this is incorrect, and relies on a false argument-from-ignorance. Just because we can't perceive the causes of all possible effects doesn't mean that the causes don't exist - they're merely computationally and perceptively difficult to identify en masse. They may, in fact, be impossible to identify except by divine omnipresence and omniscience:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Good questions, but it's a fair bit arrogant to say we'll never solve them.
The key point, which I didn't see, is these are 8 philosophical questions which we will never solve through philosophical reasoning.
Is there life after death, for instance. We'll solve it, for certain, just not by thinking a lot about it at the moment.
I've never really gotten the "why is there something rather than nothing" one. And I'm a professional navel-gazer. Maybe that's because I believe in God so think there's something because someone decided there's something.
It's also worth noting that, to my recollection, the philosophical proofs of God are more ways of making the idea of God fit into reason, rather than actually being proofs to convince someone who didn't believe. Almost all those saints and later thinkers started with some kind of mystical experience. Aquinas even stopped writing because of such an experience in which he saw the insufficiency of words in trying to come to terms with God.
That's the danger in systematizing theology too, it changes the conversation away from where God put it, so we say, in Scripture. From "I'm doing stuff" to "let's think about arguments for God." When the arguments are undermined, atheism results, which was the result in Europe.
I'm not a fan of Aristotelian theology, needless to say.
At the same time, even though we can't come to terms through thinking through these questions, it often opens up thoughts and ideas, spurring our brains and giving answers to questions along the way.
Like science does, sometimes the unreachable problems make way for answering approachable problems.
Haz, I've heard a lot about near death experiences, some give more hope than others. Allen's hilarious story points to a hallucinatory state, but I recently heard one about a woman who died of cancer, encountered a state of pure well-being or something, came back, and her cancer was completely gone. I think this was a documented case, and all. Might have been on a Sixty Minutes type show.
This BH segment is interesting (you also might like the first segment):
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2149?in=35:26&out=42:14
Deborah ... Barbara Hagerty is an interesting individual. You might get more of a grasp of her background if you click on the link to her Tylenol salvation from Christian Science.
A background in CS is going to modify your future concepts. My mother was CS and I can relate to Ms Haggerty. Unlike her, I never accepted the theology of CS (although she asserts Tylenol freed her?) and became an atheistic bastard by age 26 in a place far away.
On the other hand, if you read St Thomas Aquinas and Mary Baker Eddy, you will find much in common. If not for the cocaine of her day in NE, perhaps MBE had a point....if not an answer. Hard to say, but MBE's vei9w of life didn't see any after phase...it just was and is.
Me, I am still convinced that my soul is in the here and now, how I act now is all there is...until the next act comes to town. I realize that is hard to grasp.
Miley's career was caused by her father's career. And Billy Ray Cyrus' career was caused by Achy Breaky Heart, but what caused anyone to listen to Achy Breaky Heart is unknown nor what caused line dancing.
I listened to the whole thing long ago, and the two clips I directed Michael to were the ones that stuck with me. The whole thing is good, but I'll have to listen again to the Tylenol section for a refresher.
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