What does "God needs to have a beginning" mean?

I haven't actually seen any prominent defender of ANY cosmological argument use the following premises:
1) Everything has to have a beginning
2) Everything that exists has to have a cause.

The premise "Everything that happens, occurs or changes has to have a cause" is different from 2) above. "Change" and "exist" are different categories of being in the traditional arguments IIRC.

Attacking arguments based on these faulty premises seems like straw men to me.

The Principle of Causality has been traditionally defended as follows:
A) The existent being to which existence is not essential exists in virtue of some action external to it. (Mercier, p540):
B) A being whose essence is not its existence necessarily demands for the explanation of its existence a cause which brought it into existence. Or The existence of a contingent being demands a cause. (Mercier, p375)
C) Whatever happens has a cause ; Whatever begins to be has a cause ; Whatever is contingent has a cause ; Nothing occurs without a cause. (Coffey. Ontology, theory of being ,p369)
D) Cause and effect being correlative, to say that "Every effect has a cause" is to state a truism. The principle is usually stated thus : "Whatever happens (occurs, takes place, begins to be) has a cause";. The axiom Ex nihilo nihil fit is a negative statement of the same principle. And another statement of it, "Whatever is contingent (i.e. whatever does not contain in itself, in its own essence, the sufficient reason of its actual existence) has a cause" shows the connexion of the principle of causality with the principle of sufficient reason. Being that is necessary and self-existent has no cause. It is itself the reason of its own existence; whereas all contingent being is caused. The principle of causality is evidently a necessary principle in regard to contingent being, i.e. it is essentially involved in our very concept of contingent being. Nothing can happen without a cause: whatever happens has necessarily a cause, i.e. something which brings it about, which makes it happen, whether this cause be free (i.e. self-determining) or not, in its mode of action. (Coffey, Science of logic II, p61)
E) Every thing must have a sufficient reason why it is rather than is not, and why it is thus rather than otherwise : The only sufficient reason for a real change is efficient causality : Therefore every real change has an efficient cause (Rickaby, General metaphysics, p319).
F) Axioms such as the principle of Causality that “Whatever comes into being must have a cause”, and the principle of Contradiction that “It is impossible for a thing both to be and not to be at the same time”, together with all the truths of Mathematics possess this higher degree of necessity. (Joyce, p238).
G) Another way of saying it is “nothing can be reduced from potentiality except by something in a state of actuality” (Feser, Aquinas, 2009, p65 from the Summa Theologica I.2,3).

See references here.
 
Last edited:
A being must have a beginning because it is complex and must be built up of parts. So, no God as fundamental, and a non-fundamental being cannot be God. Whatever is First and eternal with no beginning cannot be composite and so it must be the simplest state of all.
 
Techne said:
I think this is logically supportable. Sounds like classical theism.
Click to expand...

Yet classical theism "just says" simplicity is God, yet a being who thinks, plans, and creates is a system of mind and a system cannot be First. No using unproved God stuff merely pronounced as a result as an input to having God.

Consider that not even any thing could be First and forever, for it has specific and particular properties. That leaves nothing.
 
SciWriter said:
Yet classical theism "just says" simplicity is God, yet a being who thinks, plans, and creates is a system of mind and a system cannot be First. No using unproved God stuff merely pronounced as a result as an input to having God.
Click to expand...
Divine simplicity is just central to classical theism and thinking, planning, creating etc. are predicated only analogously not univocally or equivocally.

SciWriter said:
Consider that not even any thing could be First and forever, for it has specific and particular properties. That leaves nothing.
Click to expand...
Does something that is "First" and "simple" have being?
 
Techne said:
Does something that is "First" and "simple" have being?
Click to expand...

Not as in a Creator Being or a human being, since too complex.

As for a most basic thing there's nothing to make it of.

note: some eys on my eyboard have just stopped worng and have to cut and paste or sp those letters.
 
See you another tme; have to buy a new eyboard; leavng you wth ths:

The Theory of Nothing (TON)

‘Nothing’ is nonexistence, the lack of anything, which, of course, is different and opposite from existence, but seeming to have no other quantity or quality; yet, still, would this lack of anything be a stable situation, or is it perhaps more of a lawless realm? Obviously, it is not the state now, but if it were stable, it would have been, forever. No other existence-source of existence can be named as a possibility. No further things can be said to be the basis of things, else an infinite regress.

At any rate, we usually dismiss nothing as not being able to be any kind of cause, for we feel that nothing begets nothing, yet this always comes back to haunt us, for there is really and literally nothing to make the ‘elementals’ of. We may not like it, emotionally, but here it is.

It doesn’t help to say that the basic ‘elementals’ were around forever, what ever these would be, such as perhaps electrons, positrons, quarks, antiquarks, and photons, because not only are their types but a specific few and totally particular in their certain properties, but so too would be the overall count of their amount, as well as their individual and specific particulars such as their form, mass, spin, charge, location, size, matter/antimatter state, and whatever other definition they have. The same if we choose energy or any other thing as elemental.

The above strongly mandates that the ‘elementals’ must be created, for things cannot be already defined and made in their particulars without ever having been made and defined as such in the first place [that never was]. So, we return again back to the notion that there is nothing to make the basic elementals out of. Naturally this also precludes stuff being made of smaller stuff, all the way down, plus that idea leads to an infinite regress in which all effects would take forever to cascade on upward.

And, no, a God was not just sitting around forever, fully formed and intact as the ultimate complexity, for this supposed elemental fellow could not have been more fundamental than the make-up of His system of mind that does and did the thinking, planning, and creating of everything else. A theory of life or consciousness requiring Life or Consciousness behind it goes nowhere, for then all the more would that require an even higher LIFE or CONSCIOUSNESS behind the proposed Life or Consciousness of God. There is not even anything to make an electron out of, right off the bat, much less be some ultimate complexity of God. There is a special pleading fallacy inherent in the argument as the solution is exempted from the logical template which forms the premise.


Support:

I offer the support and evidence of a balance of opposites summing to nothing as being the conservation laws, the vacuum fluctuation of the QM emission/production of ‘virtual’ particles pairs of opposite polarity of charge and matter/antimatter state, the positive kinetic energy of stuff balancing the negative potential energy of gravity, photons being neutral in charge and therefore being their own antiparticle, as well as there being only two stable matter particles, the electron and the proton (and their antiparticles, of course), and that, as well, again, that there is literally nothing to make the ‘elementals’ out of.

I could also add that Infinity times Zero must equal unity (One), meaning that our finite realm must lie between the impossibles of complete solidity and total vacuity.

There is no other recourse than nothing as the prime mover, for not only can there be no other cause, but we further note already that simpler and simpler states more readily react, combine, and/or go through phase changes, hinting that the simplest state, nothing, must be perfectly unstable, and, indeed, we see nothing nowhere, for all is filled with field. The vacuum fluctuates, and so then it is no longer a true vacuum, of course. It seems that Nothing never sleeps, but is always up to something. Nothing must be the causeless, eternal and infinite basis, for which it greatly qualifies, as the one and only candidate.


Summary:

Boundless space, overall electric neutrality, and conservation of charge, momentum, and energy leads inexorably to nothingness. The zero-equation is the reason the universe is the way it is, the reason why the universe must be the way it is, and the reason why it is. It is the perfect zero-sum. All must operate with infinite precision.

Zero and infinity, the smallest and the largest, both lead to nonexistence, through dispersion and compaction, and so our finite existence cannot be there, but must be at its midpoint. Zero and infinity lead to many problems in algebra and cosmology, too. They are the same thing: nonexistence. Physicists are ever trying to reconcile the large with the small.


God Not Again

The deathly spiral of paradox ever follows the carving of wishes into the stone hollows of religious dogma forever blocked in its blindness from what really is. This believing dance grinds to halt of the non elemental of that Being who can never be fundamental. All such tales of original stuff made of love end where there’s nothing to make it of, not even quarks. This Theory of Nothing did not set out to disprove God, but it does, for nothing is not the everything of God, but is actually its opposite.
 
"Nothingness" cannot be described in any positive manner since it does not have anything. It can only be abstracted from what it cannot be. It has no duration, distance, temperature, energy, laws, change, fluctuation, emission etc."Nothingness" is not something that has existence or being or laws. To ask for whether nothingness has any of these attributes is simply nonsensical and illogical.
 
Air, earth, fire, and water can turn into each other, and that is about the level of Aristotle's science.
 
Assumption #1: Every effect or existence must have a cause.
Assumption #2: Infinite regress is impossible.
By A2, there must exist a single cause that caused everything.
By A1, there can be no single, initial cause.
Thus, nothing can exist.
QED, we don't exist, so what's the point of arguing? ;)

More seriously, though, I don't understand the point that God cannot be the Creator because he is not "simple" enough. If you're assuming that the "First Being" must be simple and that all things came from that first being, whether it was outside of time or not, then it's possible God "evolved" from that first being, and then created the universe we know today (within time). Or maybe the first being grew to become God. Or something like that. Not saying those are my views, I'm just trying to understand the point fully.

Also, please don't kill me for postulating that God evolved. O_O
 
Evolved life-forms are fine, as this has already happened, but they didn't create everything, such as what and where they came from, and so are not fundamental.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top