Fanman wrote:DM:
I think it's difficult to theorise and impossible to be certain of why or even how there's something rather than nothing, but I think the existence of something means that there's a cause or causes. The major problem with initial cause or causes is infinite regression, since if we reason by way of cause and effect every cause for the existence of something must have been caused by something else. The way I understand things, which is of course limited, is that something cannot come from nothing, so because there is something, it is not possible that there was ever nothing. However, the fact that there may not have ever been nothing, does not automatically imply that God or a God-like being is the cause of something, as there's a knowledge gap between something existing and God being the cause of something that requires a leap of faith to bridge.
I agree.
I agree that the origins of the universe are a mystery, but for someone who doesn't believe in God the mystery is one that can be solved through continued empirical observation, rather than conceptions of an intelligent universal agent. So whilst I think that having God or a framework about God in one's considerations may be useful for personal development and perhaps in the purist sense even be enlightening in terms of realising human potential, I don't think that conceptions of God are useful in discovering the origins or mystery behind the origins universe.
It depends on what you mean by the word "God." In another thread I said:
Why is there something rather than nothing? What must be in order for what is to be as it is? The universe does not and cannot, even in principle, explain its own existence. Only the power of Being itself – which is itself not a being – can explain and determine all the contingent things of our ordinary experience. This is what serious theists of all of the great religious traditions mean by the word “God.” Used in this sense, "God" is not just different than the universe, but radically different.
Understood this way, it is ludicrous to deny "God."
We cannot know what the Power to Be
is, but through the power of reason we can know what it is not and, in a limited way, surmise what must be in order for what is to be as it is through observation. "Religion is not some subjective preference, like whether you like red wine or white wine; it is a reflection of our most basic understanding of the nature of reality. Therefore to engage it with anything less than full intellectual rigor is, well, illogical. In between the sloppiness of fundamentalism and the cluelessness of relativism lies the straight skinny on reality, which includes an engagement with the phenomenon of the sacred." (From
AquinasBlog)
If they are useful when applied on that scale why and how are they useful? If the cause of something rather than nothing is God, what knowledge apart from that fact would be imparted to us? How would we even know which God it was?
It very difficult to
unlearn the 'big man in the sky' idea of God if that's all we're familiar with. The question 'which God' is incoherent when it is understood that "God" does not refer to a being alongside other beings, but to the sheer Power of Being itself.