PNagy wrote:
It also wouldn't sell, because the faithful base their beliefs on not reasoning, whatsoever, yet love to declare that reason leads them to the only possible conclusion: God had to be behind it all.Their basic reasoning is a popularized version of Thomas Aquinas' ontological argument. Everything had to have a cause, but causes cannot regress to infinity, because that is absurd, therefore there had to be an ultimate cause: God.
Never mind that the argument falls apart logically, because it exempts God from the very first premise. Never mind that postulating the absurdity of infinity is a judgement without sound foundation. They will cling to it nevertheless, only the ordinary faithful, being unaware of Thomas Aquinas, merely state that things are too complex not to have been planned by an intelligent Being. The intelligent Being, of course, being the greatest complexity of all, somehow does not need a cause. Now that is absurdity.
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The claim that everything has a cause remains an unsupported assertion based only on an argument from ignorance. It boils down to "gosh, I can't imagine anything coming into existence without a cause so, obviously, everything MUST have a cause." Argument from ignorance.
It also ignores the fact that the whole concept of causality was thrown out the window when quantum theory came through the door. Quantum mechanics shows that things happen - radioactive decay of an atom, the creation of virtual particle pairs and the whole concept of non-locality - without a cause. The old deterministic idea of causality has been replaced by a probabilistic one. A will not definitely cause B, but there is some probability it might.
What caused god? A fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. The same thing that might have popped our entire universe into existence.