Friday, April 3, 2009

What caused God?

This was a short, hopefully simple, post I made in reply to the question, "Ok God made the world. Who made God?" You may find the original discussion by clicking on the title of this posting...

Cindy, basically expressed, the answer to your question is that God is a conclusion based on two ideas, the impossibility of causing one's self, and the impossibility of infinite regression.

What this means is that, ultimately, there is "movement" into existence, by everything that we know is.

For example, you live now, but you haven't always lived. You "moved" into existence, you were conceived.

This movement into existence applies to every thing that is, including the universe. But we have to ask why these things move.

What results is a regression, a backwards progression, towards the original cause of this movement. Eventually we get to the universe itself, and see it moving, and ask why, just as we asked why to our own existence, and the Earth's, and the Sun's, and the galaxy's, etc.

We understand that eventually, this regression must terminate, because, if it does not, then there is no beginning from which we can progress, and thus we could not actually exist NOW. Because we exist now, we know that there is a finite amount of regression, and a definite beginning.

Likewise, we know that nothing can cause itself to move. So we cannot answer that the universe, or God, moved itself into existence. Why? Because this would mean that the thing moving itself existed before it existed, a contradiction.

Because the universe cannot cause itself, and because it moves in this way, we know it has some external origin.

And we know that, however far back these movements go, they must end. That end is considered to be a being, since it is not caused in any way, yet still causes the movement into existence of things, which demonstrates a will, a choice to act instead of being caused to act.

And this being we know exists always, without causing itself or being caused, thus is Eternal, etc.

It is to this Being that we ascribe the word, "God," and the idea of a being which has the properties of God, such as eternality, omnipotence, omniscience, etc.