(From a debate many years ago)
Who Made God?
Another “category error” blog I did is called Can God Make a Rock So Big That He Can’t Lift It.
John, you are basically saying that,
“if everything needs a cause, then so does God, in which case he would not be God. And if God does not need a cause, then neither does the world. But if the world needs no cause then there is no God. Hence, whether everything needs a cause or does not need a cause, there is no God.”
Did I sum up the “gist” of the matter? (Who made God, in other words.)
The criticism, “if everything needs a cause, then there must be an infinite regress” is built on a misconception of the principle of causality. Or better, it is a confusion of the principle of existential causality and the principle of sufficient reason. The latter affirms that everything needs a cause. That it would seem, as atheists observe, leads to a contradiction of God being his own cause.
Aquinas dealt with this long ago. He held that only finite, changing, dependent beings need a cause. This does not lead to a contradictory self-caused being but to a non-contradictory un-caused Being. For if only finite beings need a cause then one arrives at a nonfinite (i.e. infinite) being that does not need a cause. Hence, from Aquinas’ principle of causality the series would legitimately stop at the first, un-caused Cause of all finite beings.
The following is excerpted from Philosophy for Dummies, by Tom Morris, p.253 (emphasis added).
The most prominent objection that is ever raised against a form of cosmological argument like this consists in asking, “Then what is the explanation for God’s existence?” This is most effective when done with a smugness of tone and deliberate emphasis of the word “God.”
The objection usually means to imply here that the cosmological argument will generate an infinite regress of explanations. To explain the existence of God, by the reasoning just used, it would seem that we need to postulate the existence of a Super-God. But then that being’s existence would need explaining by the activities of a Super-Duper-God, and so on, ad infinitum and absurdum (to infinity and absurdity).
This objection seems to just assume that God’s existence does not have a scientific or personal explanation, then it is unintelligible. But it should be by now what a defender of the argument will say to this.
The existence of God is intelligible not because it was caused by anything or anyone, but because it flows from his essence. This was the claim that the ontological argument made about God. God cannot fail to exist. God exists necessarily. It is God’s essential nature to exist. And in this regard, God is very different from anything in the universe. God’s existence logically follows from God’s essence. No other explanation for God is either necessary or possible. Thus, we don’t have to worry about postulating (theoretically supposing the existence of) other deities in an infinite regress (or infinite mess) of explanatory postulations.
God, as the ontological argument told us, is fundamentally different from the universe. The very concept of God, it contends, precludes God’s not existing. So we cannot even imagine God’s not existing and know with full detail what we are imagining, without contradiction. But we can with the universe. It does not seem to be at all the sort of thing whose essence is to exist. Its concept does not logically imply its reality in all sets of possible circumstances. And that is different from the concept of God as a greatest possible being.
Notice that the conclusion of this version of the cosmological argument is not “Therefore there is a God.” it is just that, if we are rational, we should believe that there is a God. But this in itself is a surprise to many people who associate religious belief not with rationality but instead with the irrational side of life. This argument contends not just that it is rational to believe, but that it is irrational not to believe.
