otseng wrote:"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
"At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
"The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
The first cause problem is often used as an argument against the existence of a god.
"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument."
"If God created/designed everything, then what created/designed God?"
For debate:
Is it infinite turtles all the way down?
Is it logical to use this argument against the existence of God?
First, I want to tell a funny story that deals with the topic, but really has no point. St. Augustine was asked what God did before he created the universe, and St. Augustine replied, "He was creating hell for people who ask questions like that!"
Second, in his speech, "Why I Am Not A Christian":
Bertrand Russell wrote:Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
Russell wrote these comments in 1927 while Edwin Hubble was still collecting his data on the Big Bang theory. I wonder if Russell would still hold this view today.
Atheists and theists must ask themselves about the First Cause. Perhaps God always was. Perhaps the Universe always was.
Heraclitus pondered this problem and theorized that the universe was both bound and boundless simultaneously: "The beginning is the end." Jesus offered: "I am the beginning and the end." St. Augustine proposed that God and his thoughts were infinite, while St. Thomas Aquinas tried to prove that it would be impossible for God to create anything infinite. Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, had an entirely different philosophy: There is no beginning, because the universe is Nothingness. Pythagoras believed nothing can be infinite, while Plato proposed the possibilities of "potentially infinite" vs "actually infinite".
I wrote a lot in this post without saying a thing. I wish I had a conclusion or opinion to offer you guys, but I don't. I just wanted to add my two cents and say that I've studied this subject, and I can't make heads or tails of it. But I am reading your posts and very much enjoying this discussion.
. but I will put in my two cents anyways.
