I shall address your points in due course. In the meantime you might ponder why people are saying that Alan Burns creates an infinite regress with his ideas of soul and consciousness and why they think it’s logically fallacious because it causes an infinite regress.
The fact that it creates an infinite regress isn't itself problematic, it's problematic for AB in that instance because he is citing the 'soul' as some sort of ultimate source of freedom without apparently realising that it suffers the exact same problem he's citing it to rectify. It's a problem for him because he, like you, is trying to justify a claim of an 'unmoved mover'.
It seems then you have no problems with non-physical existence then.
I have no problem with the notion of one - obviously it's not what we have here in our universe, though.
So he is just as crass as you but faster at it
Ad hominem noted and treated with the weary disdain that it deserves.
What is paradoxical about it?
There are three gods, but there's really only one god, but they are the same, but they do different things...
qualities and properties can be listed but God is not a physicomechanical entity with parts or severable bits.
So Jesus was, what, a projection? A piece of mental fudgery that people thought they were interacting with, physically, but weren't really?
I am using states as the better analogy of God than parts. Because Jeremy was looking at God with a narrow physicalists mindset he missed it...His oversight,I'm afraidIt is possible to overstretch an analogy and you have done that here by obviously overtaxing the same physicalist mindset as Jeremy.
Fair enough, analogies can be overstretched. You are suggesting that God is a thing that has multiple 'states' - so it isn't really a 'trinity' at all, it's just one thing. Which still brings about the question, if god is 'indivisible' in this way, can Jesus really be seen to have been wholly human during his manifestation on Earth? Surely, if you can't separate out the 'godness' he must have been divine, with all that that is alleged to entail, all of the time?
There is also some theology I can't go along with. The son is eternal and not just for christmas or temporary as you say. He is God.
I confess to not being a world expert on Christian theology, but I'm given to understand that's not the typical view.
Well let's run with contingency requiring time and time coming into being.
Then the universe cannot be contingent upon anything, time not being a factor at the point the universe prior to a certain point.
A non contingent entity does not require time for it's existence, since you've said contingency requires time. Time is required and indeed passes/is created in the actualisation of the very first contingent. In your own scheme then only a non contingent can actualise time and event one.
No, you could have elements between the non-contingent and the commencement of time, or you could have multiple non-contingent elements, or you could have a system of contingency predicated on some dimension other than time.
Whether I agree with your initial conditions is another matter. The arguments from contingency and sufficient reason work just as well with an infinite universe since they are about existence rather than coming into existence.
In the abstract, but since you are attempting to demonstrate a justification for claiming a creator god, it would seem that they are very much, from your side, about things coming into existence.
Explanatory failure.
If I were citing it as an explanation for anything that might be relevant, but I'm not: I'm citing it as an objection to your notion that there must be an unmoved mover. I don't need to explain WHY there might be an infinite regress, just that as a notion it undermines your claim that there must be a first cause.
It is what is known as a vicious argument which is why your colleagues reject Alan Burns arguments.
As I pointed out above, that's not why it's being cited against Alan, it's being cited against Alan not because he doesn't realise he's creating an infinite regress in an attempt to establish an uncaused cause. As to the notion that it's a vicious argument, in what way does it presume it's own conclusion?
It fails to explain why anything exists rather than not existing.
You've yet to establish that there is a 'why'. You're attempting to imply that there's a 'why', implicit in your attempt to deduce the need for a creator who might have reasons.
It assumes that everything has a cause and no that is not a Christian assumption.
What assumes that everything has a cause? Certainly not the idea of an infinite 'cosmos'.
One seems necessary if events and time coming in to being (your contention)is what you are saying happened.
In no way does the existence of a demonstrable start to time necessitate a hard 'beginning' for reality, or the cosmos, or whatever term we'd like to refer to the broader physics beyond our universe. Let's go with cosmos - our universe exists within a broader cosmos, and within our universe time began. We already have notional candidates for the beginning of that time (the universe, other elements in the cosmos) which aren't dependent upon time and are therefore not necessarily subject to our 'conventional' understanding of notions like cause and effect. Who is to say, and on what basis, that an infinite regress is somehow prohibited in that?
Given that we can demonstrate the conservation of energy quite reasonably within the universe, it doesn't take a great deal to extrapolate from that the idea that the cosmos is an infinite chain of recycling and reordering of energy.
O.
