Anyway, I wrote not that they or you “do”, but “can doubt” any of those thing, including logic and truth. (Basically any possible doubt has been tried in history.) So, for this discussion to be shorter, you let us know what you doubt and what you take as “true”, or “on faith”. If you “believe” in logic, that’s a good start.

Notice that Chesterton gave you the free choice of believing in whatever you want, proving it makes some sense when expressing the central idea of your belief. Having this belief, and professing to being logical, you can then proceed to evaluate and defend your idea. This, in essence, is what theology (”theo-logic”) is all about. Just saying that “I believe this or that” is meaningless in itself, unless your “idea” has some relevance and jives with logic & math, with the natural phenonema (science), with the spiritual experience of mankind, and with the expression of this in what we call social sciences, and in wider context with economy, politics, art, etc. You use some of these as the basis of your belief — you mentioned some “metaphors in other cultures or in non-Christian philosophies”. Neither Chesterton or I are trying to convince you about the invalidity or ridiculousness of your position, as long as it is your private belief.

Your belief depends on your conscience, but as soon as you take in into public, it legitimately becomes the subject of public’s or our criticism, because ideas have consequences and they affect the well-being of others. You have chosen to argue your belief here, and if you care, you can continue. There are many angles or positions from which we can tackle this, and I will let you choose your “battlefields”. But since you have professed to be logical, let me suggest Aquinas’ very first article in his Summa, whether the existence of God ought to be self-evident:

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm

However, I am tired of the fact that my posts take hours to get past moderation – I don’t know whether that is because I hold a minority view here or what – but this doesn’t make dialog very user friendly, so I’m going to quit trying.

It’s really ironic when you think about it. Consider the way humans use their creative faculty to deny the first creation, or the way they use their design faculty to fashion scientific paradigms and philosophical world views to deny the first design. Isn’t that what we are talking about here?

In effect, the multi-verse fantasy (especially the positing of “infinite multiple universes”) renders science irrational. To explain the “apparent design” of the universe that way is also to explain the “apparent design” of the Mona Lisa in the same way. In effect, it rules out explanations forever, because it proposes a permanent suspension of reason. One might as well use it to explain the dynamic of a sound wave or the reason that one person looks both ways before crossing the street while another person doesn’t.

In the same way, Kant’s idealism renders philosophy irrational. By denying the correspondence between the images in the mind and the corresponding reality of universals outside the mind, Kant reduced everyday observations to the realm of the subjective. Those who have been bamboozled by his convoluted way of thinking always end up ignoring reality and analyzing their own mind as if was the whole of reality. That is why I pointed you to the essay on Adler. Your response was to ignore the substance of his message and suggest that its contents were suspect because its theme supported my theme. That is not exactly what I would call a refutation.

In any case, my main point still stands. Because of the problem of infinite regress, the argument from contingency to necessity always leaves us with the uncaused cause, which, as it turns out must consist in a self-existent being. To be self-existent is to depend on nothing and to be the cause of everything else. Either you dispute the fact that an uncaused cause must be a self-existent being, or else you question the fact that a self-existent being must be the cause of all other being, or you think that a self existent being can be a “principle.” It should be evident that none of these objections are valid.

You write, “People dealt with this problem for thousands of years and the only logical conclusion is a creator. It is still the only logical conclusion. Other conclusions are truth impaired or logic impaired. Face the truth and deal with it. We will all have a better conversation.”

Your idea of a better conversation is for me to admit that your view is the truth and the only logical conclusion, and that my thoughts on the matter are illogical nonsense. Since I don’t think that it looks to me that we won’t be having a conversation.

“I am trying to establish that belief in God is not necessarily, either logically or via evidence, the best inference about the creating or sustaining principle.”

Absolute nonsense. Deal with the fine tuning in a way that is not gobbledegook wishful thinking. You postulate some unknown process for which you do not have a clue or an incredibly large number of universes from some speculative process and each will have “logical” problems.

You are entitled to believe in whatever fable you can concoct but don’t self righteously call the belief that an intelligence created the universe illogical when first, existence defies imagination and then this existence is incredibly so narrowly appropriate for life or anything meaningful that some unknown force/power/law etc could cause it to just happen makes belief in the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus seem almost a sure thing.

And if you postulate an almost infinitely large number of universes, then deal with the problem on how in our universe life came about and then evolved complex novel functional systems over time. As of now there is no mechanism to explain either so your so called logical approach is head in the sand speculation. You may be under the impression that evolutionary biology has established both of these but as of the moment they are clueless. All they have is “faith” that is not dissimilar to a religious person.

So you have to deal with the trio of the fine tuned universe, the origin of life and the evolution of complex novel coordinated systems in life. Have at it and when you have any decent answer you can criticize those who believe the evidence points to an intelligence who created all three.

People dealt with this problem for thousands of years and the only logical conclusion is a creator. It is still the only logical conclusion. Other conclusions are truth impaired or logic impaired. Face the truth and deal with it. We will all have a better conversation.

Hmmm. You write, “So how do we cut through the Gordian knot and convince atheists like Hazel?” In general, one way to have a chance to convince someone of something is to properly represent their position when you respond back them. You write, “Yes, the evolutionist atheist can doubt everything, including science, philosophy and even logic and “truth” itself when it comes to it.” Where exactly am I doubting “science, philosophy and even logic and ‘truth’” (and the subject of evolution hasn’t been part of this discussion at all.)? Yes, I believe that there are limits to what we can know, and limits to what logic unaided by empirically verified premises can provide, but just because I doubt the existence of God doesn’t mean I doubt all those things that you mention.

Leaving that aside, you quote Chesterton as saying, ““All descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal.” I agree with this. Our metaphysical ideas are ways of trying to structure our understanding of things that are not directly observable or empirically verifiable. We uses metaphors to help capture the sense and meaning of that which we can not truly or literally describe.

I think it is relevant that you then quote Chesterton about the fundamental Christian idea that God the creator is separate from his creation. This is related to the fundamental idea that I am arguing against: that the presence of a universe requires a willful Being who created that universe. This is a powerful metaphor that comes naturally from our experience as human beings (especially in our Western culture in which this idea has been embedded for centuries), but I don’t believe it is a logically necessary belief. There are other metaphors, more common in other cultures or in non-Christian philosophies, that structure metaphysically understanding differently. I am not trying to convince anyone that yo not believe in God: I am trying to establish that belief in God is not necessarily, either logically or via evidence, the best inference about the creating or sustaining principle.

We could, and perhaps should go all the way back to Scholasticism and Aquinas, and revisit what these “logicians extraordinaire” had to say about philosophy, logic and about the basic terms and definitions that constitute “valid” and “correct” human reasoning. Teachers of logic like Hazel ought to be able to follow it. But there is an easier and more elegant way to approach this. Here is Chesterton’s answer from his Orthodoxy, one that cuts through all this, and goes to bottom of the problem:

“All descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things. I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has “thrown off.” Even in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. …”

Hazel, if you are really honest and interested in this argument, read the rest of Orthodoxy, and follow it up with Chesterton’s “Thomas Aquinas” to get a better picture.

“I guess I should also state what I thought was obvious. Being cannot come from non-being.”

You are using two different forms of the word “being.” If you use “being” as meaning existing, then I’m willing to grant what you say for the sake of discussion.

But I have made it clear that I am arguing against the source of the universe being “a Being: a conscious, willful, intentional entity, capable of foresight, etc. That is a different meaning. Just because existing things can’t come from something that doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that the source of existence has to be a BEING.

You are conflating two uses of the word being and it is confusing the discussion. Perhaps we should use “existence” for the first meaning of being and “Being” for the second.

You write, “Because only in the ontologial realm can a causal chain occur. Your “principle” is a psychological construct and cannot be part of a causal chain any more than the products of your imagination could be part of a causal chain. Much less could they originate a causal chain. Only “being” can do that. That is why there is such a thing as cause and effect in the first place.”

No, my “principle” is not a psychological construct – you’ve said this before and I don’t know why. Consider the laws of nature that cause things to happen in our universe, such as the law of universal gravitational attraction. This is not a psychological construct. It’s a law that affects every bit of mass in the universe irrespective of whether there are any psyches around to understand and formalize it or not.

My idea of the source and ground our universe being a set of principles is similar – laws that within the domain of their existence, whatever it may be, cause universes to happen. These are neither psychological constructs nor a being any more than the laws which cause raindrops to form and fall are.

You can think of this in a Platonic sense if you wish. The laws exist as pure potentiality which inform the world as they manifest themselves into actuality.

So when you say that only a being can initiate a causal chain – “That is why there is such a thing as cause and effect in the first place” – you are merely re-asserting as true the claim I am disputing. How do you know that only a being can initiate a causal chain. Why does the course and ground of the universe have to be a personal being rather than an impersonal set of laws?

Also, you write that all the other qualities of the uncaused cause that you mention are inevitable. You write, “First you write, “[A] Eternal (do you uncerstand why it must be eternal), and [B] Self Existent (do you understand why it must be self existent and do you appreciate all that self existence entails).”

Of course I understand the arguments for these things, and I can agree with those two for the sake of this discussion. However I will say that “eternal” may not be a quality that even pertains: we know that time is a property of our universe and is inextricable bound up with the notions of motion and chance. It may be that time is not a feature of the ground and source of the universe, and that it is not particularly meaningful to say it is eternal. Calling it “eternal” could be thought of as implying that the world of time is something the ground of the universe is in, and that would contradict the idea that the ground of the universe was the ultimately cause and source of everything.

My bigger point here is one that has been made by many people from many religious and philosophical backgrounds: that any attempt to describe qualities of the ultimate one will be wrong, because qualities only come into existence after the one differentiates into the many. As someone has said, you can’t eff the ineffable.

I guess I should also state what I thought was obvious. Being cannot come from non-being.