OK. I'll take a closer look at this, but for the meantime, time for another argument!
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Okay, stop right there. This is not true.
First of all, this "everything has a cause" is what led to the idea of the deterministic "clockwork" universe that the 19th century physicists were so fond of, and has been shown to be inaccurate. Yeah, it mostly works, much as Newtonian mechanics mostly works in everyday experience. But it's not
always true, much as Newtonian mechanics are incorrect at velocities which are appreciable fractions of the speed of light.
Consider virtual particles, which pop into existence for no reason, annihilate each other (they're created in pairs) and pop out of existence again. Nothing actually causes them to do this; it happens because there is no reason for them not to. Or why a radioactive atom decides to emit a beta particle at one particular time and not another. Yes in large numbers we can predict how many atoms will decay in a given amount of time, but there is no way of knowing when any one particular atom will decay.
Basically randomness and chaos theory invalidates universal causality.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. The universe has a cause.
1: Something can't come from nothing. The claim that something came into being from nothing is worse than magic! In order to deny this premise, you have to think that the whole universe came into being at some point in the past out of nothing, but does anyone sincerely believe this?
Yes, actually; me for one. As well as a lot of physicists.
Plus, if something can come into being from nothing, then why doesn't anything or everything else spontaneously come into being too? Why don't bicycles and Beethoven and beer just pop in and out of existence I'll the time?!
But what about God? Does he need a cause? Well things don't need a cause if they never begin to exist, simple as that. Something eternal wouldn't need a cause, since it never came into being.
So you're saying that God is eternal, and has always existed. Or, to paraphrase, God has existed for an infinite amount of time. We'll come back to this.
Another point: Common experience and scientific evidence confirms the truth of the first premise. Premise 1 is constantly verified and never falsified.
Common experience, and scientific evidence until near the end of the 19th Century, also confirmed Newtonian mechanics. Common experience confirms your first premise, but scientific evidence invalidates it.
2: This is the most controversial premise of this argument - why isn't the universe just infinite? Well first an infinite amount of things cannot exist. A man called Al Ghazali argued that an infinite number of things cannot exist. Now, this needs to be properly understood, a potential infinity can exist, but an actual infinity can't. What's the difference? Well when we mean that something is potentially infinite, it means that the infinity serves merely as an ideal limit that is never reached. For example, you could divide any finite distance in half, and then into fourths, and then into eights, and then into sixteenths, and so on to infinity (this has been mentioned in the philosophy theory thread, thanks for bringing it up whoever it was 👍 ). The number of divisions is potentially infinite, but you'll never actually arrive at an "infinitieth" division. You'd never actually have an infinite number of parts or divisions - infinity is an endless goal.
So motion is impossible, you're saying. Say you want to travel from one place to another. To get there, you first have to get to the halfway point. To get to the halfway point, you first have to go a quarter of the way. before you can go a quarter of the way, you have to go one eighth of the way, and so on,
ad infinitum. As a theoretical matter, we can take this infinite number of steps. By your logic here, as a practical matter we cannot because infinity is an endless goal and it has just been shown that an endless number of steps are required (do not confuse "steps" in this context with "footsteps", by the way).
So we don't really have a problem with the existence of potential infinites - for these are just ideal limits. But when we come to an actual infinite, we are dealing with a collection that is not growing toward infinity as a limit but is already complete: The number of members already in the collection is greater than any finite number. If actual infinites exist, then a number of absurdities would result.
So basically an infinite past is implausible, because it would take an infinite amount of time to get to the present tense (according to my useless mathematical skills
).
Okay, since God is infinitely old by your own definition, God is equally implausible (I said I'd get back to this).
But it's not just philosophy, all scientific evidence points towards an absolute beginning.
3. As I have explained above, we can now conclude that the universe has a cause.
Nope. It may have a cause, or it may not. Personally I feel we may never know, and this in fact may turn out to be unknowable. But I'm not comfortable with postulating the existence of a God to have done it; if anything, that just shows a lack of imagination as well as reliance on an ancient crutch that has been shown to be invalid time after time. "Mommy, why is it raining?" "Because God makes it rain". No, we can now describe in ponderous detail why it rains, and when it will happen. Yeah, too bad that sometimes doesn't quite get to the 7 O'clock News but oh well.
I suppose you're right that we really aren't all that logical. In a way we are failures with the basic survival mechanism. But I'd say it's because we've made it so easy for ourselves to survive that we've ended up at things like those which you describe.
