The contradiction screams to the skies (is that where God lives?). See, the entire premise of religion relies on a metaphysics that claims a soul: a metaphysical entity that is "attached" to our physical body and gives us our consciousness, desires, pleasures, agony and so on. In addition to that, religion claims that morality and the rules written in the scriptures were handed down to us from a metaphysical God.
Now, assuming your silicon-based model is conscious, the bundle of soul-spirit-consciousness falls apart at that very moment.
In general, religion, which is based on fabricated stories, is the last resort, if ever, for seeking morality.
Existence demands a metaphysical explanation. If you’re not a particularly thoughtful person then you’re not going to care.
“Religion” just means “set of beliefs”. Every person has some set of beliefs.
If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.
Yes I am saying the opposite of that, “atheism” is just a particular class of religions. Some religions posit many gods, some just 2 gods, some 1 god, atheism posits 0 gods.
Perhaps the only difference between atheism and the others is that atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.
This is related to the fact that in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses. Before that for a thousand years the default class of religion was monotheism, and before that polytheism. With atheism unlike the other classes of religions, you get a natural tendency to deny metaphysics whereas metaphysics is inherent in the others. This matters a lot when we’re talking about how the masses engage with things.
> If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.
> atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.
What, all of them? You don't think it might be possible, e.g., that someone might grow up holding some sort of theistic beliefs, and be more intentional about those beliefs than the people around them and decide that actually there are probably no gods? That some people might arrive at an atheistic position precisely by "assaying metaphysical truth"?
(Or does something only count as "metaphysical truth" if it's not atheistic?)
> in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "modernity" to make that true. Something like 60% of US adults describe themselves as Christian. Likewise for people in Europe. No doubt a lot of those people aren't very actively and enthusiastically Christian, but that doesn't seem to me to be what "atheism is the default class of religion" would look like. And the figures were much higher, say, 50 years ago, and if you're reckoning "modernity" to start after then then you've got a very eccentric definition of that term.
That there is G-d or at least Divinity (more than one god), is a direct logical consequence of existence. It can be reached and understood purely through logic, the essential “trick” being to recognize that when trying to understand the fact of existence, you always end up asking “ok so what came before that”, this is inherent to the structure of human reason. “Where does the world come from, it comes from the Big Bang, and where did that infinitely small point of matter come from? It came from universes in the multiverse colliding with one another (M-theory), ok and where did those multiple universes come from?” Etc
Aristotle’s Prime Mover is the first articulation of this, and there are others that take different tacts such as Thomas Aquinas and Descartes.
Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d I.e. that G-d is the god described in the Bible who wants particular things, has a particular relationship with existence and with Man. You cannot access that understanding or knowledge through pure reason, the only thing you can understand/know through pure reason is that there is G-d. This is the reason, by the way, that G-d created existence because G-d’s nature can only be understood/known by experience (as in experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition).
Notice that I am saying “that there is G-d”, not “that G-d exists”. G-d is “prior to” or “above” existence, existence “comes from” G-d. Understanding this and understanding Aristotle’s Prime Mover are the same phenomenon of understanding in the mind.
Also by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment, not just 50 years ago but post-Industrial Revolution/post-urbanization is another useful epoch to consider.
(I remark that my comment that's the grandparent of this one challenged a couple of specific claims you made about atheists, and that what you say here makes no attempt whatever to address those challenges, preferring instead to argue that atheists are wrong, which is entirely beside the point. What you claimed is that atheists are boorish, conceited, oblivious to metaphysics, and given to believing random things rather than "anything more intentional"; even if your first-cause argument for "Divinity" were perfectly valid it would not establish that any of those things are true about atheists.)
> That there is [...] at least Divinity [...] is a direct logical consequence of existence.
No it isn't.
The sort of infinite-regress argument you describe has, as you say, been around since the time of Aristotle. It's been a bad argument since the time of Aristotle too.
1. Obviously you can keep asking "OK, and what came before that?" or "why?" or whatever. Equally obviously this doesn't prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality, because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality.
It might be a different matter if there were some guarantee that we could sensibly always keep asking such a question, but there isn't. At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
2. You haven't actually made your argument explicit, so let me try to do so. "We can always ask what came before. This can't really go on for ever, so at some point we will have to land on something about which we can no longer ask that, quod dicimus deum." There are several serious problems with this.
(a) It could, in fact, really go on for ever. Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors when we ask "what was before that?" (including when we ask "what was before that whole chain of predecessors?" and "what was before that?" and so on). You might find that unsatisfying but, again, reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
(a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
(b) It isn't actually true that if we land on "God" as an answer then we can no longer ask "what came before that?". We might choose not to, but only because there's a tradition of not asking that question or of shutting it down as illegitimate when asked (as e.g. it commonly is by small children when they're told that God made everything). There are religious traditions in which gods were made by or born from earlier gods or earlier proto-gods. The "Abrahamic" tradition is very much not one of those, but just as you can ask "so where did the multiverse come from?" you can ask "so where did God come from?".
(c) There could be a point beyond which there is no answer to "so what came before that?" without that last (or rather first) thing being anything remotely like a god. For instance, maybe (i) when you keep asking "what came before that" literally, referring to time as we experience it, you eventually get to some point that's "earliest" in the same way as the south pole is "southernmost" and there is nothing "earlier" in the universe, and (ii) if you then say "so what came before the universe?" in some broader sense the answer is "nothing did". Then the universe plays the role of "first mover". Once again, you might find this less satisfying than putting a god in that role, but reality is not obliged to satisfy you. Or maybe you might say that in-some-sense-prior to the universe are the laws of physics but those are even less godlike than the universe. (But also less like the sort of thing that needs anything to have "come before". Yet again, you might find it unsatisfying for there to be laws without a lawgiver but yet again reality is not obliged to satisfy you.)
(d) No argument I've ever seen for why a god is a better candidate for "thing we stop asking 'what came before' about" than the universe has seemed any good to me. Maybe you've got a better one than I've seen, but that's not the way I would bet.
> Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d
(I remark that the paragraph beginning with what I've just quoted was edited into monideas's comment while I was writing this one, without any acknowledgement that anything had been changed. It's only by chance that I happened to see the change.)
That grotesquely understates how little any first-cause argument says about the nature of the thing it allegedly proves that there is. You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God" included, but calling something a god doesn't make it one.
(I reiterate that I don't actually think that any first-cause argument manages to establish the existence[1] of anything. But even if somehow it did, it would tell you far far too little about that thing to justify attaching a name like "God" to it.)
[1] I know that you prefer to use "exists" more narrowly and to say that "God is" rather than "God exists". Feel free to substitute "being" or some more complicated phrase; what I mean by "existence" here is "the thing that theistic first-cause arguments are claimed to establish about God".
> by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment
Then it is hilariously false to say that in modernity atheism is "the default class of religion for the masses". The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently.
> because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality.
Any fact at all has significance. That there is some fact that can be derived using pure reason is quite astounding and it's the essence of Descartes' Cogito. By the way, there didn't "need" to be any particular fact at all that could be derived from pure reason (or any fact at all of course but that's trivial), this itself is a gift from G-d and very clever.
I doubt you really understand what I'm saying here, if you did you wouldn't have written the rest of what you did.
> Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors
This is almost certainly the case. In terms of my personal aesthetic sense I find this to be good and pleasing because it matches various other phenomena, the fractal complexity of various phenomena in life (.e.g. designing a product, all the little details and the details of the details matter a great deal, this is why Apple is so successful compared to others). This type of endless complexity seems to be a divine quality (this is also why the Talmud is so long and it's commentaries and arguments about the commentaries and arguments on the minutia of various things). The moral structure of human affairs has this fractal complexity (in secular law this manifests as case law/common law).
> At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
There's no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that". You don't have a clear understanding of the structure of the scientific method or the "poverty of empiricism" (you should Google this phrase).
> (a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
"Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah (there is a basic 7000 year cycle mirroring the 7 days of the week, there is a broader 50,000 year cycle mirroring the 7 shmita cycles + 1 jovel/Jubilee). There are similar ideas about the cyclical nature of existence in the esoteric teachings of various other religions.
You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence. You still have to contend with "something from nothing", creatio ex nihilo. This is what Aristotle and others are talking about which you're fundamentally not understanding.
By the way, you see a scientific theory of this in Roger Penrose's "Conformal cyclic cosmology" which makes sense given that the inflationary universe theory is kind of illogical due to the inconsistent entropy regimes (this is something Penrose talks about frequently).
> You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God"
Yes exactly, you're close to getting it. We can call the "first cause" (or really, this idea/concept/understanding of the first cause) by any name we please, so for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".
> but calling something a god doesn't make it one.
Yes this is exactly what I'm saying. You cannot go from this purely logical knowledge that there's G-d (or that there's "First Cause" or "Prime Mover" or "Uncaused Cause", whatever name you want to use) to the god of the Bible or whatever the term 'god' means to you personally. You cannot assign any particular nature or character or qualities using pure reason/logic.
Do you get it now? You're actually very close to getting it I think.
> The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently
What I'm saying is accurate and what was meant when Nietzche said "God is dead", yes "in name" but in practice the Enlightenment destroyed this. And yes it wasn't something that happened immediately as a result of the Enlightenment, that was an intellectual and aesthetic movement by elites, these things take time to diffuse to the masses (decades, centuries), especially in times before mass literacy and the Internet.
> I doubt you really understand [...] You don't have a clear understanding [...] you're still fundamentally not understanding [...] you're close to getting it [...] Do you get it now?
I'm sorry, could you possibly patronize me a little harder? Thanks.
Yes, any fact has significance. No, that doesn't mean that one can get from "you can keep asking why like a toddler" to any deep truths about the nature of reality. Descarte's cogito is a clever bit of sophistry but not actually a valid argument.
(In your other recent comment in this thread you inform me that I am not smarter than Aristotle and Descartes. Probably correct. The advantage I have over Aristotle and Descartes isn't a better brain but centuries of progress in understanding made by countless smart people; it doesn't even particularly matter whether any of them were smarter than Aristotle and/or Descartes.)
[EDITED to add:] Oops, I didn't read carefully enough; your earlier comment was addressed to someone else. I'm fairly sure you intended to include me among "the other reddit atheists", but it wasn't me you were informing and it's technically possible that I wasn't one of the people you were saying it about. Anyway, obviously it doesn't particularly matter; I just don't like leaving something inaccurate uncorrected in something I wrote.
> There is no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that".
Quite correct; there isn't. Which is one reason why I never said that there was. What I said was that "literally nothing came before that" might be the answer to one of those questions, by which I meant it might be the correct answer, not that science would be able to prove it.
(Science is never actually in the business of proving things. Every scientific discovery is in principle provisional.)
I think you might be able to save some of the effort you put into being condescending[1], if you refrained from giving everything I say the stupidest possible interpretation.
[1] Of course I'm joking; I am sure being condescending to me is a source of satisfaction to you and you'd rather do it than not. But I like to maintain at least the polite pretence that my interlocutor is arguing in good faith.
> "Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah
Sure. And of Nietzsche and of the ancient Mayans, if I recall correctly. (I might not; I am not an expert on either Nietzsche or the Mayans.) That has little bearing on how plausible it is that everything actually is cyclic, of course. Anyway, to whatever extent you find cyclic cosmologies more plausible on account of the idea being found in Kabbalah (or indeed in Penrose), you should be a little less impressed by first-cause arguments.
> You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence
I assume the point you're getting at here is that even if someone gives a complete account of the temporal and causal structure of everything in the universe it's still possible to say "OK, fine, and where did all that come from, then?". (And so ad infinitum.) It's rather galling to be accused of obtusely failing to recognize this when in fact I explicitly acknowledged it more than once in the comment you're replying to.
> for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".
No, let's not. Because giving it that name smuggles in all sorts of completely unjustified implications. If any of these first-cause arguments worked (which, I repeat, they do not) there would be no justification at all for attaching any such label to the thing they purport to find.
Contrary to your earlier claim, no "first cause" argument shows that "God is". At most it shows that "some thing beyond which it isn't useful to keep asking why, is". And, as already observed, in fact it very much doesn't show even that, as evidenced by the fact that anyone can if they please keep asking "why" even if the last answer they were given is "God".
> there is no answer to "so what came before that?"
Obviously, it's turtles all the way down! :-) GGP here, just checking in to say I enjoyed your thorough response. Nicely done. Reading it brought back good times I had back in the day on r/DebateAnAtheist (~15 yrs ago now!). I admit I'm weak. I just couldn't summon the will to run through the "First Mover" yet again with a traditionalist apologist - even for old times sake. Athough a classic, it's so, so very... tired. Thank you for picking up the gauntlet.
I'll never understand why traditionalist monotheists love their first-mover so much (and why does it always have to be monotheists? Polys are much more fun). Traditional apologists have obviously played through ALL the standard 'moves' and variants of the first mover dozens of times and know it inevitably ends in an unsatisfying stalemate with anyone who's seen it or, "in modernity", consults their LLM. Maybe apologists keep trotting it out because they must still ocassionally run into someone who hasn't seen it? Or perhaps they just enjoy it, like singing an old, comforting hymn. Anyway, you not only get to play through an old standard, it looks like you're also in for non-responsive tangents and not-at-all-subtle dismissive condescension. Enjoy!
You and the other reddit atheists are not more intelligent than Aristotle and Descartes (understatement). A bit of humility goes a long way. Fundamentally you don't understand what is being argued.
Words are used but they don't create the same meaning-phenomena in the mind. Basically when you read these arguments from Artistotle, Descartes, and others you read the words but you don't understand. You kind of have to first understand to understand (Nietzche talks about this). In Kabbalah this is described by the interaction between Chochma (Wisdom) -> Binah (Understanding) -> Daat (Knowledge). Chochma/Wisdom being the initial flash of insight which then gets transmitted/nurtured into conscious understanding by Binah, a sensation/phenomenon everyone who has studied math or anything difficult conceptually will understand.
I say this as a former "reddit atheist" who first encountered these arguments from Aristotle and Descartes in college in an introduction to philosophy course. I didn't actually understand what they were saying and I dismissed it out of hand (I read the words but didn't actually understand). It wasn't until years later that I came to an understanding of it.
You can read my response below/above which I think nudges closer to inducing the flash of insight needed.
Thanks for the kind words! Arguably I'm weaker than you are. "Couldn't be bothered" versus "couldn't resist". Yours is probably the wiser option.
That depends very much upon the individual. Some people cleave to their atheism so strongly that I think it's fair to say it's religious fervor, or something very near it. Someone like Richard Dawkins isn't just a guy who doesn't happen to believe in God, he is dead certain that there is no God and makes it his business to belittle everyone who doesn't share his belief. Some people, though, just don't happen to believe in God and they don't really care if someone else does. I'm fine with saying Dawkins' version of atheism is basically a religion for him, not so much with the second category.
tzury · · focus · HN ↗
Now, assuming your silicon-based model is conscious, the bundle of soul-spirit-consciousness falls apart at that very moment.
In general, religion, which is based on fabricated stories, is the last resort, if ever, for seeking morality.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
“Religion” just means “set of beliefs”. Every person has some set of beliefs.
If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.
mrandish · · focus · HN ↗
Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps the only difference between atheism and the others is that atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.
This is related to the fact that in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses. Before that for a thousand years the default class of religion was monotheism, and before that polytheism. With atheism unlike the other classes of religions, you get a natural tendency to deny metaphysics whereas metaphysics is inherent in the others. This matters a lot when we’re talking about how the masses engage with things.
gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
> atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.
What, all of them? You don't think it might be possible, e.g., that someone might grow up holding some sort of theistic beliefs, and be more intentional about those beliefs than the people around them and decide that actually there are probably no gods? That some people might arrive at an atheistic position precisely by "assaying metaphysical truth"?
(Or does something only count as "metaphysical truth" if it's not atheistic?)
> in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "modernity" to make that true. Something like 60% of US adults describe themselves as Christian. Likewise for people in Europe. No doubt a lot of those people aren't very actively and enthusiastically Christian, but that doesn't seem to me to be what "atheism is the default class of religion" would look like. And the figures were much higher, say, 50 years ago, and if you're reckoning "modernity" to start after then then you've got a very eccentric definition of that term.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
Aristotle’s Prime Mover is the first articulation of this, and there are others that take different tacts such as Thomas Aquinas and Descartes.
Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d I.e. that G-d is the god described in the Bible who wants particular things, has a particular relationship with existence and with Man. You cannot access that understanding or knowledge through pure reason, the only thing you can understand/know through pure reason is that there is G-d. This is the reason, by the way, that G-d created existence because G-d’s nature can only be understood/known by experience (as in experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition).
Notice that I am saying “that there is G-d”, not “that G-d exists”. G-d is “prior to” or “above” existence, existence “comes from” G-d. Understanding this and understanding Aristotle’s Prime Mover are the same phenomenon of understanding in the mind.
Also by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment, not just 50 years ago but post-Industrial Revolution/post-urbanization is another useful epoch to consider.
gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
> That there is [...] at least Divinity [...] is a direct logical consequence of existence.
No it isn't.
The sort of infinite-regress argument you describe has, as you say, been around since the time of Aristotle. It's been a bad argument since the time of Aristotle too.
1. Obviously you can keep asking "OK, and what came before that?" or "why?" or whatever. Equally obviously this doesn't prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality, because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality.
It might be a different matter if there were some guarantee that we could sensibly always keep asking such a question, but there isn't. At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
2. You haven't actually made your argument explicit, so let me try to do so. "We can always ask what came before. This can't really go on for ever, so at some point we will have to land on something about which we can no longer ask that, quod dicimus deum." There are several serious problems with this.
(a) It could, in fact, really go on for ever. Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors when we ask "what was before that?" (including when we ask "what was before that whole chain of predecessors?" and "what was before that?" and so on). You might find that unsatisfying but, again, reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
(a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
(b) It isn't actually true that if we land on "God" as an answer then we can no longer ask "what came before that?". We might choose not to, but only because there's a tradition of not asking that question or of shutting it down as illegitimate when asked (as e.g. it commonly is by small children when they're told that God made everything). There are religious traditions in which gods were made by or born from earlier gods or earlier proto-gods. The "Abrahamic" tradition is very much not one of those, but just as you can ask "so where did the multiverse come from?" you can ask "so where did God come from?".
(c) There could be a point beyond which there is no answer to "so what came before that?" without that last (or rather first) thing being anything remotely like a god. For instance, maybe (i) when you keep asking "what came before that" literally, referring to time as we experience it, you eventually get to some point that's "earliest" in the same way as the south pole is "southernmost" and there is nothing "earlier" in the universe, and (ii) if you then say "so what came before the universe?" in some broader sense the answer is "nothing did". Then the universe plays the role of "first mover". Once again, you might find this less satisfying than putting a god in that role, but reality is not obliged to satisfy you. Or maybe you might say that in-some-sense-prior to the universe are the laws of physics but those are even less godlike than the universe. (But also less like the sort of thing that needs anything to have "come before". Yet again, you might find it unsatisfying for there to be laws without a lawgiver but yet again reality is not obliged to satisfy you.)
(d) No argument I've ever seen for why a god is a better candidate for "thing we stop asking 'what came before' about" than the universe has seemed any good to me. Maybe you've got a better one than I've seen, but that's not the way I would bet.
> Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d
(I remark that the paragraph beginning with what I've just quoted was edited into monideas's comment while I was writing this one, without any acknowledgement that anything had been changed. It's only by chance that I happened to see the change.)
That grotesquely understates how little any first-cause argument says about the nature of the thing it allegedly proves that there is. You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God" included, but calling something a god doesn't make it one.
(I reiterate that I don't actually think that any first-cause argument manages to establish the existence[1] of anything. But even if somehow it did, it would tell you far far too little about that thing to justify attaching a name like "God" to it.)
[1] I know that you prefer to use "exists" more narrowly and to say that "God is" rather than "God exists". Feel free to substitute "being" or some more complicated phrase; what I mean by "existence" here is "the thing that theistic first-cause arguments are claimed to establish about God".
> by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment
Then it is hilariously false to say that in modernity atheism is "the default class of religion for the masses". The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
Any fact at all has significance. That there is some fact that can be derived using pure reason is quite astounding and it's the essence of Descartes' Cogito. By the way, there didn't "need" to be any particular fact at all that could be derived from pure reason (or any fact at all of course but that's trivial), this itself is a gift from G-d and very clever.
I doubt you really understand what I'm saying here, if you did you wouldn't have written the rest of what you did.
> Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors
This is almost certainly the case. In terms of my personal aesthetic sense I find this to be good and pleasing because it matches various other phenomena, the fractal complexity of various phenomena in life (.e.g. designing a product, all the little details and the details of the details matter a great deal, this is why Apple is so successful compared to others). This type of endless complexity seems to be a divine quality (this is also why the Talmud is so long and it's commentaries and arguments about the commentaries and arguments on the minutia of various things). The moral structure of human affairs has this fractal complexity (in secular law this manifests as case law/common law).
> At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
There's no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that". You don't have a clear understanding of the structure of the scientific method or the "poverty of empiricism" (you should Google this phrase).
> (a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.
"Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah (there is a basic 7000 year cycle mirroring the 7 days of the week, there is a broader 50,000 year cycle mirroring the 7 shmita cycles + 1 jovel/Jubilee). There are similar ideas about the cyclical nature of existence in the esoteric teachings of various other religions.
You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence. You still have to contend with "something from nothing", creatio ex nihilo. This is what Aristotle and others are talking about which you're fundamentally not understanding.
By the way, you see a scientific theory of this in Roger Penrose's "Conformal cyclic cosmology" which makes sense given that the inflationary universe theory is kind of illogical due to the inconsistent entropy regimes (this is something Penrose talks about frequently).
> You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God"
Yes exactly, you're close to getting it. We can call the "first cause" (or really, this idea/concept/understanding of the first cause) by any name we please, so for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".
> but calling something a god doesn't make it one.
Yes this is exactly what I'm saying. You cannot go from this purely logical knowledge that there's G-d (or that there's "First Cause" or "Prime Mover" or "Uncaused Cause", whatever name you want to use) to the god of the Bible or whatever the term 'god' means to you personally. You cannot assign any particular nature or character or qualities using pure reason/logic.
Do you get it now? You're actually very close to getting it I think.
> The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently
What I'm saying is accurate and what was meant when Nietzche said "God is dead", yes "in name" but in practice the Enlightenment destroyed this. And yes it wasn't something that happened immediately as a result of the Enlightenment, that was an intellectual and aesthetic movement by elites, these things take time to diffuse to the masses (decades, centuries), especially in times before mass literacy and the Internet.
gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm sorry, could you possibly patronize me a little harder? Thanks.
Yes, any fact has significance. No, that doesn't mean that one can get from "you can keep asking why like a toddler" to any deep truths about the nature of reality. Descarte's cogito is a clever bit of sophistry but not actually a valid argument.
(In your other recent comment in this thread you inform me that I am not smarter than Aristotle and Descartes. Probably correct. The advantage I have over Aristotle and Descartes isn't a better brain but centuries of progress in understanding made by countless smart people; it doesn't even particularly matter whether any of them were smarter than Aristotle and/or Descartes.)
[EDITED to add:] Oops, I didn't read carefully enough; your earlier comment was addressed to someone else. I'm fairly sure you intended to include me among "the other reddit atheists", but it wasn't me you were informing and it's technically possible that I wasn't one of the people you were saying it about. Anyway, obviously it doesn't particularly matter; I just don't like leaving something inaccurate uncorrected in something I wrote.
> There is no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that".
Quite correct; there isn't. Which is one reason why I never said that there was. What I said was that "literally nothing came before that" might be the answer to one of those questions, by which I meant it might be the correct answer, not that science would be able to prove it.
(Science is never actually in the business of proving things. Every scientific discovery is in principle provisional.)
I think you might be able to save some of the effort you put into being condescending[1], if you refrained from giving everything I say the stupidest possible interpretation.
[1] Of course I'm joking; I am sure being condescending to me is a source of satisfaction to you and you'd rather do it than not. But I like to maintain at least the polite pretence that my interlocutor is arguing in good faith.
> "Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah
Sure. And of Nietzsche and of the ancient Mayans, if I recall correctly. (I might not; I am not an expert on either Nietzsche or the Mayans.) That has little bearing on how plausible it is that everything actually is cyclic, of course. Anyway, to whatever extent you find cyclic cosmologies more plausible on account of the idea being found in Kabbalah (or indeed in Penrose), you should be a little less impressed by first-cause arguments.
> You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence
I assume the point you're getting at here is that even if someone gives a complete account of the temporal and causal structure of everything in the universe it's still possible to say "OK, fine, and where did all that come from, then?". (And so ad infinitum.) It's rather galling to be accused of obtusely failing to recognize this when in fact I explicitly acknowledged it more than once in the comment you're replying to.
> for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".
No, let's not. Because giving it that name smuggles in all sorts of completely unjustified implications. If any of these first-cause arguments worked (which, I repeat, they do not) there would be no justification at all for attaching any such label to the thing they purport to find.
Contrary to your earlier claim, no "first cause" argument shows that "God is". At most it shows that "some thing beyond which it isn't useful to keep asking why, is". And, as already observed, in fact it very much doesn't show even that, as evidenced by the fact that anyone can if they please keep asking "why" even if the last answer they were given is "God".
mrandish · · focus · HN ↗
Obviously, it's turtles all the way down! :-) GGP here, just checking in to say I enjoyed your thorough response. Nicely done. Reading it brought back good times I had back in the day on r/DebateAnAtheist (~15 yrs ago now!). I admit I'm weak. I just couldn't summon the will to run through the "First Mover" yet again with a traditionalist apologist - even for old times sake. Athough a classic, it's so, so very... tired. Thank you for picking up the gauntlet.
I'll never understand why traditionalist monotheists love their first-mover so much (and why does it always have to be monotheists? Polys are much more fun). Traditional apologists have obviously played through ALL the standard 'moves' and variants of the first mover dozens of times and know it inevitably ends in an unsatisfying stalemate with anyone who's seen it or, "in modernity", consults their LLM. Maybe apologists keep trotting it out because they must still ocassionally run into someone who hasn't seen it? Or perhaps they just enjoy it, like singing an old, comforting hymn. Anyway, you not only get to play through an old standard, it looks like you're also in for non-responsive tangents and not-at-all-subtle dismissive condescension. Enjoy!
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
Words are used but they don't create the same meaning-phenomena in the mind. Basically when you read these arguments from Artistotle, Descartes, and others you read the words but you don't understand. You kind of have to first understand to understand (Nietzche talks about this). In Kabbalah this is described by the interaction between Chochma (Wisdom) -> Binah (Understanding) -> Daat (Knowledge). Chochma/Wisdom being the initial flash of insight which then gets transmitted/nurtured into conscious understanding by Binah, a sensation/phenomenon everyone who has studied math or anything difficult conceptually will understand.
I say this as a former "reddit atheist" who first encountered these arguments from Aristotle and Descartes in college in an introduction to philosophy course. I didn't actually understand what they were saying and I dismissed it out of hand (I read the words but didn't actually understand). It wasn't until years later that I came to an understanding of it.
You can read my response below/above which I think nudges closer to inducing the flash of insight needed.
gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
Physician, heal thyself.
gjm11 · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗