Jonathan Pearce made a comment in the discussion thread to “God or Godless and a Tippling Philosopher (Part 2)” which caught my attention. He said: “if you ascribe to the Kalam cosmological argument AND believe in free will, one refutes the other, since free will implies ex nihilo creation (or a causal chain), so there […]
agent causation
Verboten explanations
The other day I observed that the evidence supports the conclusion that the universe is not eternal. Joseph Palazzo shot back: “You have no evidence of that.” Notice the lack of qualification. I have no evidence to say the universe began to exist a finite time ago. Really? So then what does the evidence establish? Ray Ingles explains: “The […]
Three bad ways to defend agnosticism
So does the universe has a cause for its existence, and if so is the cause a personal one? It seems like a reasonable question, and one which would be open to the tools of philosophical and empirical investigation. For example, if the universe appears to be finite in existence (it does) and to be […]
If crime scene investigators reasoned like atheists
In my last article I observed how Robert Hayes proposes that the universe could possibly have arisen from a quantum fluctuation. From there he concludes that “science offers no reason to invoke the extra metaphysical baggage some would lay upon us with ‘god’ hypotheses.” Both Adam Hazzard and Joseph Palazzo are impressed with this kind […]
One of these causes is not like the others: Getting behind the personal incredulity of ‘skeptics’
Why is it, I wondered, that the minute you point out that agent casuation is a perfectly familiar concept (it provides a fine explanation of the sentence you’re reading, for example) and then add that it is thus in principle a concept worth considering as an explanation of the universe’s existence, some people make the leap […]
God and other not so strange causes
It is not uncommon in dialogues with atheists to hear the claim that invoking God as an explanation is something strange and totally foreign to experience. I call this the “foreign to experience objection” or F-TEO for short. The objection is that God is some kind of out of this world explanation (figuratively and literally I […]
The universe and an agent cause
The universe needs an explanation for its existence. It would need an explanation even if it had always existed, but how much more obvious is the need when we realize the universe has existed for only a finite time (approximately 13.8 billion years). I argued that the best explanation is a necessarily existent agent cause. Agent […]
Atheists in natural glass houses
Atheists living in their “100 percent natural” glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But alas, when many insist they don’t live in such a house, or when they can’t see the glass walls hemming them in on every side, I suppose it’s difficult to persuade them that they shouldn’t hurl that hunk of granite in their […]
