Carl wonders whether the gods "'...aren't just another story.'" (p. 96) Tom replies, "'Someone must have made the world...'" (ibid.) Carl is prepared to accept "'The great God that the time vault spoke of...'" (ibid.) but dismisses the other gods as nonexistent or at least insignificant.
Why must someone have made the world? Why could it not just have grown like a plant? Someone, a person, is a part of the world or at least of a world. A part cannot explain the whole.
Carl and Tom lack our knowledge of scientific cosmogony and natural selection but that information will also be in the time vault. Entropy winds down but how was it wound up? What was the origin of the concentrated energy that exploded into a universe? A quantum fluctuation in a vacuum? Questions that I had thought were beyond the scope of empirical science are now being addressed by theoretical physics.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but I simply find it so UNLIKELY for a "thing" like entropy or a quantum fluctuation to ultimately being eternal and uncaused. I believe that everything had a ultimate beginning or origin that we might as well call God. That seems to have been the basic thought of Plato, Aristotle, and their Scholastic successors (both medieval and modern).
Sean
Sean,
If, as I believe, the ultimate beginning or origin is not a person, then we should not call it God - if we want to avoid confusion.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But since I do believe the ultimate origin or cause of the universe is a Being, then that Being can and should be called God.
Sean
Sean,
Oh yes but I disagree with the phrase, "...that we might as well call God." An admitted origin or beginning is not necessarily a person.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I simply don't believe a mere "thing" can be un-caused or eternal, in the case we are discussing.
Sean
Sean,
Sure, although I don't see why not, but whatever force/energy/X causes things to exist is not necessarily a person. In fact, I don't believe that a person can be un-caused or eternal.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
IF God is GOD, then I don't think it's illogical to believe Him to be eternal and un-caused. Else He would not BE God.
Sean
Sean,
"...God is GOD..." is a tautology - but you have to write "IF" before it.
IF God is eternal and un-caused, then it is not illogical to believe that He is eternal and un-caused. But the same applies to the meaning of any word.
Paul.
Sean,
For James Bond TO BE James Bond, he must be promiscuous but that does not establish that he exists. The "For God TO BE God" argument does not take us anywhere unless you want to revive the ontological argument. I can summarize two ontological arguments in one sentence: the best possible being exists because existence is better than nonexistence and necessarily exists because necessary existence is better than contingent existence. However, existence is not a property like good/better/best but the instantiation of properties and, as ever, we describe or define a hypothetical being by listing its properties but we must still establish empirically whether that set of properties is instantiated anywhere.
We can describe many mythical and fictional beings, including the gods.
Paul.
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