Comment Re:Multiverse to Nadaverse to Omniverse (Score 1) 1066
Where did 'God' come from? etc
This is of course the famous retort Bertrand Russell gave this question, but it quite misses the point of almost all serious philosophical arguments for God's existence. This very question was what usually drove those arguments, which is why God was considered to be a 'necessary being' or self-caused. In other words, the basic argument for God's existence has always been of the following form: "for anything that exists there must be some cause of it's existence; therefore, there must be something that is necessary or self-caused, otherwise there will be something which is uncaused, which contradicts the first principle."
Ancient and medieval philosophers/theologians were not stupid. They realized that not to posit something that is necessary is to simply deny that everything has a cause, which for them is to deny the possibility of scientific knowledge.
This is of course the famous retort Bertrand Russell gave this question, but it quite misses the point of almost all serious philosophical arguments for God's existence. This very question was what usually drove those arguments, which is why God was considered to be a 'necessary being' or self-caused. In other words, the basic argument for God's existence has always been of the following form: "for anything that exists there must be some cause of it's existence; therefore, there must be something that is necessary or self-caused, otherwise there will be something which is uncaused, which contradicts the first principle."
Ancient and medieval philosophers/theologians were not stupid. They realized that not to posit something that is necessary is to simply deny that everything has a cause, which for them is to deny the possibility of scientific knowledge.
