| > You can do that but once you say there are facts without causes it's hard to know what you're signing up for. Once you start inventing unjustified entities to satisfy an aesthetic preference for things (except the invented entities!) to have causes, you know what you are signing up for—a perception of reality driven by your desires rather than justified belief. That the universe exists is a fact. The question of whether the existence of the universe has a cause may not be answerable, and there's a pretty good argument that it asking what the cause of the universe existing is itself is as incoherent as asking what the color of 1+1 is. To assert anything as a prior cause of the universe is to assert an entity outside of the universe, which is just equivocation because the “universe” in the question is the sum total of all existence. > Uh okay, but if brute facts are possible, how can we do science at all? Quite easily. > For all we know, we're just surrounded by brute facts and attempts to systemize facts into theories is just a waste of time because a new brute fact can just come along and bite you in the ass tomorrow. Of course, that's the fundamental nature of science. It's always contingent, but we build on what has observed predictive utility, because if there are any systematic rules, that's the only even loosely objective way to discern them. Accepting that scientific knowledge is inherently contingent doesn't prevent doing science. > It's not a satisfying intellectual stance Satisfaction is subjective; clearly, it doesn't appeal to your aesthetic preferences. > and if you really poke at it, it just feels like motivated reasoning in which the conclusion (there is no God) That's not the conclusion. Rejecting a particular argument for the necessity of a First Cause (which, while it gets abused as one, wouldn't be an argument for the necessity of anything much like the image of God it is used to justify even if it was valid on its own terms) isn't the same as denying the existence of God (I'm, as it turns out, a Catholic who quite firmly believes in God, so the distinction is not merely theoretical.) > is leading the premises (some facts have no causes), That's not the premise, either. Rejecting as unwarranted the assertion that all facts must have causes isn't asserting the existence of uncaused facts. (Though the argument from First Cause is asserting the existence of uncaused facts, so it's kind of odd for someone defending that particular God-as-brute-fact argument to mock the—imagined, but not actually real—premise of others that brute facts exist.) Of course, St. Thomas Aquinas’ argument (and the similar though different previous effort at proving the logical necessity of God by St. Anselm) are the actual motivated reasoning in the debate, not the rejection of those arguments. |