As I continue my journey reading Thomas Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos I will pause here and there to make various observations. If it makes things more interesting, think of the book as a mystical land called Mindandcosmosia which we have come to by passing through a magical wardrobe. After squeezing between musty fur coats […]
cosmological argument
What place, then, for a creator? An important place, actually.
“In what way,” John asked, “does your god hypothesis account for a universe without a beginning?” This is a good question, not least because there are many people who think that if the universe is eternal then God doesn’t account for much at all. In an eternal universe what place, then, for a creator? It is […]
Can a sane mind believe in a singularity?
In the midst of our ongoing discussion of the origin of the universe and the role that agent causal explanations might play in accounting for it, Joseph Palazzo (in his amiable, diplomatic way) made the following comment: “BTW, do you understand what a singularity [is]? From the context of your post, it doesn’t look like […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Why is God necessary?
How many things do we just accept without ever reflecting on them? For instance, why do clouds, supposedly made up of water vapor, look like vast cotton balls floating in the sky? (Alas, I have discovered that a close up view looking out the window of a Delta flight does little to dispell the mystery.) As puzzling as […]
