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Questions about G-d: Who Made G-d?
I made a short series of videos considering questions about G-d that I have noticed get asked from time to time. Below is a rewriting based on the script for the first video, followed by the video itself.
I hardly know what to say about this question, but it does come up sometimes, and it needs a response. It seems to arise in response to cosmological arguments for the existence of G-d. The response “Who made G-d then?” seems to be a sort of “Gotcha!” response. Or maybe it’s an honest question.
Either way, it’s based on a serious misunderstanding of arguments like this. These arguments don’t say that everything needs a cause. They say that things that do need a cause have one.
G-d does not need a cause. G-d is the Uncaused Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the Uncreated Creator.
Now you can say that you think there is no such thing as an Uncaused Cause, and hopefully explain why you think that. But there’s no point asking who created the Uncreated Creator or who caused the Uncaused Cause. It’s a little bit like asking why 3 is a bigger number than 17, or who put all the right angles in a circle.
The first thing is just to understand what Christians (or other classical theists) are talking about when we talk about G-d as the Uncaused Cause. One good way of putting this is: Most things are caused, and everything that’s caused needs an explanation, and there is no explanation unless there is something that is not caused.
Another good way of putting it is: Everything needs an explanation. Most things need something else to explain them, but the First Cause or the Uncaused Cause is His own explanation.
And the second thing is to understand why we think this way. In terms of biblical history and ancient literature, the idea of G-d as the Uncreated Creator comes originally from the Torah. “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth.” G-d creates by speaking. He has that kind of power. “Let there be light. And there was light.” He is not creating out of any preexisting matter, like the gods in creation myths of the polytheistic religions of the cultures by which the ancient Hebrews were surrounded.
And He is not Himself a being who comes with a past, a beginning, a backstory like the gods of those creation myths tend to.
And in terms of philosophy, or philosophical theology, there are only a few ways we could possibly try to explain cause and effect.
There are chains of causality—me, my parents, their parents, and so on. We could say that these chains go on infinitely into the unlimited past. But then there’s no explanation for anything, because every explanation has to come from somewhere, and it can’t come from anywhere if it never begins anywhere. My parents can’t explain me unless they are explained. If there is no beginning to the chain of cause and effect, nothing is explained: Every supposed explanation is based on the link in the chain before it, but ultimately based on nothing at all, so that nothing is actually explained.
Let me try another way of saying this: My parents cannot explain me unless they are explained, and they cannot be explained unless their parents are explained, and so on. Nothing in a chain of cause and effect is explained except by an explanation that gets passed on from one link to the next. But if every link in the chain needs an explanation, then no link in the chain has one.
This is the sort of thing Thomas Aquinas is thinking of when he talks about G-d as the First Cause in the beginning of his Summa Theologiae.
It’s a little bit like changing some Hong Kong dollars for some US dollars, changing them for Pakistani rupees, changing them for Kenya shillings, changing them for Emirati dirham, changing those for South African Rand, and continuing indefinitely without ever expecting to change any currency at all for any gold, or even using it to buy a Coca-Cola.
And there are other issues with talking about infinite sets of causes, or scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning such that there was not an infinite amount of time for this to happen in anyway.
Those are all concerns with saying there is an infinite chain of causes.
What are our other options? Well, we could try saying that there is something which is the Cause of Itself, but this makes no sense either. It can’t be caused unless it is not there yet, but it can’t cause itself unless it is there. So nothing is the Cause of Itself.
And that leaves us with the idea that something is an Uncaused Cause.
Of course, that’s just a beginning. Proving there is a First Cause does not prove the existence of G-d as such, much less prove that an entire religion like Christianity or Islam or Judaism is true.
The next step might be to argue that the Uncaused Cause is a personal G-d, like my friend Andrew Loke does in one of his books. Or arguing for a MASSIVE amount of other information about What and Who the First Cause is, like Aquinas does in the rest of his Summa Theologiae. Or telling the story of how this Creator G-d interacted with his creation, like the Torah and the rest of the Bible does.
Please don’t misunderstand the beginning.
And please don’t stop at the beginning.
Published in Religion and Philosophy
Is there anything in, or any aspect of, the universe that we know about that did not begin?
So why did you give reasons to think we don’t know?
And did you not notice that I was trying to give you my reasons in response to yours? I told you I was, at least twice.
We aren’t talking about something in the universe or aspects of the universe. We are talking about the universe itself. One should not jump to conclusions here.
This isn’t jumping. We know a lot about the universe–about its parts, about how it involves time and space and matter, about physical laws governing or built into it. Some things we know are already about the universe as a whole, not just its parts.
Hence the importance of the question I’ve been asking HR and now you:
Is there anything at all about the universe that we know of that did not begin?
As I said, I’m listening. Please give me your reasons for claiming to know that the universe began.
I did. Perhaps you missed something on the last page.
Then yes, I missed it. To save you having to repeat yourself, would you please tell me the number of the comment that contained your reasons for believing that we know the universe began?
https://ricochet.com/1732291/questions-about-god-who-made-g-d/comment-page-3/#comment-7447700
Thank you.
Just so that we’re all on the same page: I’ve asked you to tell me how you know that the universe began. You’ve told me that we have “scientific knowledge” that the universe began.
Do you equate knowing with thinking it most likely?
Do you say “since I think it most likely, then, yes, I therefore know it to be so?”
It’s most likely that on any given roll of a fair die I’m going to roll a number less than five. Do I know I’m going to roll a number less than five? Would I say I know I’m going to roll a number less than five?
I think you made a mistake early in this discussion, asserting something with confidence that you can’t defend, and you’re unwilling to concede the point.
I stand by what I said. If you want to come up with a better argument, I’ll listen.
Yes, knowledge from science.
Of course not.
But those things do overlap.
Not counting the epistemological complication of something called “Gettier cases,” knowledge is warranted true belief. Belief based on good evidence is a typical form of knowledge.
Your writing aspires to the pellucidity of the Mississippi. I can only guess what you are referring to here. Please answer some of my questions about what you’ve said, or try saying it again.
Actually, I think I got it. You’re doing your “But we don’t know that!” thing.
I do not understand why you think we don’t know it. You’re not even responding to the evidence that we do.
So far all you’ve said on the subject that I could make heads or tails of is “We can speculate that the universe has something in it that we don’t know about.”
This was accompanied in #33 by two other claims and followed by my summary of your three claims and then three days of you refusing to say whether those three really were your claims.
The universe doesn’t need to have “begun” temporally in order for it to have been created by a creator. You don’t create the world within the world. You don’t create time within time. If there is a creator and if he created the world, creation can be thought of as occurring equally throughout the entire temporal existence of the creation. No moment of the creation, even a dramatic beginning like the Big Bang, is any more “created” than any other.
Not that I pretend to understand much other than the overall concept, but Roger Penrose has proposed an idea of Cyclic Conformal Cosmology. It implies that something existed before what we know as the Universe existed. To me, that is a simple “So?” The real question is whether nonexistence, that is, nothing, not even empty space, is an impossibility.
Given that matter pops into and out of existence, could be.
Mark,
Your argument in support of your it-seems-most-likely-therefore-I-know-it-to-be-true conclusion makes these two assertions:
Fair enough, as long as “began” doesn’t mean “came into being.”
I have been using the word “began” to mean “came into being.” Your statements are known to be true only if “began” means “became arranged in a particular way.”
Every bit of matter and energy in the universe has, to the best of our knowledge, existed in some form for as long as we are able to measure. Put slightly differently: we don’t know that there was ever a time when any bit of the matter and energy in the universe did not exist.
It’s continually being rearranged, but we don’t know that it came into existence. What we know is that it is constantly rearranged.
Did the stars “begin?” Well, yes, in the sense that vast clouds of hydrogen and helium coalesced under the force of gravity to form them. But nothing literally came into existence in that process — nothing “began” in that sense. Rather, the atoms of hydrogen and helium arranged themselves differently, and began fusing together, changing some of the matter to energy in the process. (Fusion is a change in state; matter and energy are different forms of the same thing, as Einstein told us in his most famous equation.)
I’m not sure what you mean by your third point, about “aspects,” but I suspect it’s referring to changes in state of what already exists: the universe is getting larger (aspect of size changing), more diffuse (aspect of density changing), more entropic (aspect of energy density changing), etc. That isn’t the same as coming into existence.
So that’s what you’ve got? Your argument is that everything in the universe changes, and you’re going to call that change “beginning,” and make the leap from that to saying that the newness of continual rearrangement is some kind of evidence of a creation event that we have never observed and have no scientific evidence to support?
Hank
Or maybe it doesn’t, in the sense of arising from a state of true nothingness. So-called “vacuum energy,” (and I assume that’s what you’re talking about) is believed to be a product of existing quantum fields; the matter that comes into being results from a collapse of those fields. Quantum theory says that quantum fields are present everywhere and have a value everywhere –and that that value may be non-zero anywhere or everywhere. They are a form of energy — and an insanely huge amount of energy, according to the theory.
So, as far as we know (and admitting that we don’t know for sure), this is another example of the kind of state change that SA is conflating with a creation event in his early posts.
Or maybe it’s true creation. Maybe particles really are coming into existence from nothing. We. Don’t. Know.
Which is really my only point.
Theories abound. The most entertaining is “Eternal Inflation”, the idea that space by its nature expands, and Big Bangs happen with Universes being created at random points. The Universes never interact because inflation carries them away from each other. Penrose’s theory is that if proton decay takes place eventually the Universe we inhabit will have only photons. With no matter, there is no way to “build a clock”, and since photons travel at light speed there is no sense of time or distance. A Universe one light year across is indistinguishable from one a billion light years across.
It’s a fascinating topic. I’m completely sympathetic to those who feel that there must have been a Creator, that it couldn’t be so precisely “tuned,” as people say, by chance.
My own sense of it is that, while I can just imagine that perhaps it did spontaneously arise from nothing, it seems likely to me that, if it did, then it probably happens continually, endlessly. I mean, it’s not as of nothingness was entirely filled by the universe, right? Where exactly is nothingness, anyway? How big is nothingness?
My bet is on either one eternally pre-existing universe or an infinite number of universes popping out of nothingness. But, one more time, I don’t know. No one knows.
If I could remember the name, I’d post a reference to a youtube video regarding “what’s eating the Universe”, phrased as a question because the presentation stated that something is doing so. Listed as possibilities: Black holes, vacuum decay, expanding regions of “no-space”, and so on.
EDIT: The most amusing anecdote about the cosmologists struggles was the response to someone who insisted that higher dimensions are necessary because the Universe seems to behave as a hypersphere. It was Feynman’s, IIRC, professor who pointed out that if the Universe wanted to behave as a hypersphere in the absence of an “embedding space”, no one was going to stop it from doing so.
To simplify the argument.
My television began to exist at a certain point in time. The cheeseburger that is on my plate began to exist at a certain point in time. And so it goes for everything in the universe. Therefore, the universe itself must have begun to exist at a certain point in time. Just as my television set has not existed eternally, the universe has not existed eternally.
Frank, we know that your television was assembled from pre-existing material — that nothing came into existence in the strict sense of the phrase when it was rearranged to be a television.
We don’t know that that is true about the universe. And if it is — if the universe was assembled from pre-existing material — then we probably need to admit that material into our definition of “the universe.”
Then what? All the way back forever?
Again, we don’t know.
PS
Simply put, we are talking about the difference between assembling and creating. SA uses the word “began” in the weak sense of describing the moment of assembly. But when we talk about the hypothetical origin of the universe, we are not talking about assembly of existing parts. We are talking about creation from nothing pre-existing.
The problem that I find is that unless one is a specialist, and I am not, he gets most of the information from popularized versions of the technical/academic articles. Those doing the explaining frequently use analogies that aren’t accurate, and honestly don’t seem to understand the subject any better than the layman. I once read an article speculating that space is granular. The popularized article made no sense to me at all because the analogy used was invalid. I finally read the actual paper and got lost on the proposed test to validate the theory. However, I understood the claim being made. I’m not sure it is a significant claim to say that a volume of space cannot be represented by any real number, but that there is a practical limit imposed by the granularity.
Going to youtube and watching the PBS Space Time series has helped me a bit, but all one has to do is watch videos claiming that the “Big Bang” was the beginning, and then watch a video saying it never happened. The academic credentials of all authors seem impressive, so how can they differ so strongly unless the real answer is that they are on the fringe of knowledge and seeking an answer? Unless they are observing the dictum “publish or perish” and just typing away full time?
I absolutely agree that there is a huge gulf between the popular accounts and the actual research. I also agree that most people can’t read and understand the actual research. I certainly cannot.
I think the topics of edge-case cosmology and physics are different from much of science in that we’re dealing with aspects of nature that are intrinsically difficult to observe, measure, or model. Whether it’s hidden behind the event horizon of a collapsed object or the opacity of the first 380,000 years of the Big Bang expansion, we just have a really hard time getting any information.
Some of the particles that we think are out there would require so much energy to create in the laboratory that all the power generated in human history and all we’re likely to generate in the foreseeable future can’t begin to run a single experiment.
And the math is really hard. I don’t mean only for me, with my layman’s grasp of mathematics. I mean for anyone. Those chasing the possibly quixotic goal of unifying gravity and quantum theory end up dealing with multidimensional models that are truly daunting.
I suppose the good news is that the layman’s understanding of bleeding edge cosmology, however incorrect, is probably as close to right as that of at least half of the professionals in the field.
We do know there wasn’t–if time existed, so did the rest of the universe.
No.
The universe is structured by time, space, and some number or other of the laws of physics–there’s no universe without those things. At least the first two of those began.
Nothing comes from nothing.
There is no “where” without a universe. There is no energy without a universe.
Is your point that energy and quantum fields might be able to exist without time, space, and matter and that time, space, and matter might all themselves come from energy or quantum fields?
That’s less than half of the argument.
Try thinking about the space your cheeseburger is in. It began.
No, I really don’t.
Maybe you got the wrong impression from my use of some simple least-common-agreement phrasings, as in “The universe, or portion of the universe, that we observe in its current state has not existed eternally in that state.”
But even if you are right, that the space the cheeseburger is in began, it does not necessarily follow that the universe began. Maybe the universe always existed in one form or another. You know, sort of like G-d. If we can hypothesize about G-d never having a beginning, existing eternally, then perhaps we can hypothesize about the universe never having a beginning, existing eternally.
Indeed.
Hence the importance of the observation that we do know some things about the universe–and that not limited to information about its parts. And the importance of the fact that everything we know about the universe, including space and time, apparently began!
What else is there that might be part of the physical universe?
And while we can speculate about anything we like, exactly why should we be speculating about this?