VVilliam wrote: ↑Thu Nov 23, 2023 5:46 pm
Q: Does this cosmology require a supernatural/unnatural/non-physical cause?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Nov 23, 2023 2:36 am
So let's imagine we don't know what such a cause could be: the right way to proceed, it seems to me, is to ask,
"At minimum, what qualities would a purported Cause have to have, in order to be adequate to the ascribed effect of having generated this universe, with all its complexity and subtlety, it's organization and its laws, its spheres and dynamics, its social and animal entities, and all the phenomena that a universe entails?" And then, when we've got the list of those qualities that would make a proposed Cause adequate to that effect, we can ask,
"What Entity would fit that description?"
Only then is the Cause we are thinking of
adequate to the effect we're wanting to explain.
Candidates? Suggestions?
You appear to have offered some, when you wrote;
"All our experience is from the contingent perspective, so we have no ability to imagine what existence would be, if it were timeless."
and then proceed to contradict the above by writing;
"God doesn't "enter into" time, except in the Incarnation. Rather, the traditional view is that He transcends time. Past, present and future are all equally known to Him, and His "experience" of them (if we can borrow that word at all) is simultaneous and complete."
Can you explain this apparent contradiction? To clarify...the "traditional view" you offer is an imagined idea of what existence would be like for a timeless "entity".
There isn't a contradiction there that I can see.
The difficulty is from our perspective, not God's (assuming, for the moment, such exists). Being time-bound creatures ourselves, we have no experience of what being outside time would be like.
It's like that you and I have no sense of what it would be like to breathe water, like a fish. We find ourselves relying on our own air-breathing experience of breathing, and have to use that as an analogy for an experience only a fish can have.
Of course, our limitation, in that regard, doesn't even remotely imply that fish do not pass water over their gills to breathe: it just means that having neither gills nor the means to extract oxygen from water, we don't know what that could be like. But we do know that fish do it: and there's nothing at all illogical or irrational about us knowing that they do. We can see that they do, though we can never actually understand that experience.
All "existing" as you and I know it is bound by time. It's all linear. It's all in a contingent and declining universe. It's as created beings, not as transcendent ones. Just as we have never breathed underwater, we have never been outside of time...so far.
If we can't even imagine what it's like to be a fish and get that right, then why would we expect ourselves to understand the "experience" of God beyond time?
So we're thrown back, by our own limitations, on analogies drawn from time-boundedness, if we want to think any thoughts about such a state.
But just as we can use observation to see that fish do something we cannot really understand experientially ourselves, so too we can know by deduction that there has to be some Entity that is beyond a contingent universe. Since the universe is manifestly not an eternal, self-generating entity, but rather a linear system proceeding toward what's called "heat death," when all the dissipated energies of the universe would reach a final and eternal stasis, we know it had a beginning and will not last forever. We can see, scientifically, that that is where we are, and (all things left the same) that is where we are going...to heat death. But because it is a contingent entity, one with a beginning, that is, we also know that it had to have a cause.
Since the universe did not create itself, something must have created it. To suppose it was simply another contingent entity would be irrational, because an infinite regression of contingent causes cannot exist -- such a chain never gets started in the first place, because the prerequisites for each causal stage are never met -- they "regress" infinitely, instead. So whatever it was, was an entity that was not contingent, but rather, necessary. It had to be a Causal Agent that did not itself need to be caused.
Since the universe is headed on a "downhill," as we can see from the Second Law of Thermodynamics in physics, or from the Red Shift effect in cosmology (or casual observation every day, for that matter) we can know for certain that whatever caused this universe to exist had to be capable of an immense injection of order. And from the interrelated dynamics of things like cosmological constants, biological complexity, and so forth, we can be astronomically certain (probabilistically speaking) that whatever it was was also capable of instantiating that sort of complexity.
Whatever Cause we select would also have to be capable of creating conscious agents...for that is what we are, as we can see. So the creation of things like personhood, identity, soul, self, intelligence, rationality, science, knowledge, thought, awareness and moral conscience would all have to be derived from this Cause, ultimately.
So I was just asking what sort of Entity would fit the logical entailments there. What could we reasonably posit as the First Cause in the chain of contingency within which you and I exist? And I'm leaving the field open to reasonable candidates, rather than dictating the answer.
