Replies

FJ,

How ‘bout y’all invest in a basic education in fundamental logic techniques. There you will encounter the concept of ‘logical fallacies’ and how they corrupt our thinking and the products thereof.

You have just provided a splendid example of

Begging the Question / Circular Reasoning

An argument is circular if its conclusion is among its premises, if it assumes (either explicitly or not) what it is trying to prove. Such arguments are said to beg the question. A circular argument fails as a proof because it will only be judged to be sound by those who already accept its conclusion.

Anyone who rejects the argument’s conclusion should also reject at least one of its premises (the one that is the same as its conclusion), and so should reject the argument as a whole. Anyone who accepts all of the argument’s premises already accepts the argument’s conclusion, so can’t be said to have been persuaded by the argument. In neither case, then, will the argument be successful.

For example —

(1) The Bible affirms that it is inerrant.

(2) Whatever the Bible says is true.

Therefore:

(3) The Bible is inerrant.

In case you missed it, your argument consists of —

Within an infinity of Universes, ANYTHING that CAN exist WILL exist.

GOD must exist somewhere within such an infinity of Universes.

If GOD exists anywhere, “ ... then NONE of the rest of those universes could or would exist!?”

St. Anselmo’s proof that God exists depended upon accepting the premise ‘God is Perfect’ and concluding ( after appropriate hand-waving ) that He could not be ‘perfect’ if He did NOT exist, therefore He MUST exist. See the fallacy at work here ?

St. Thomas Aquinas’s proofs ( there are many ) go something like this:

In the Universe, all things that exist are the product of other things that already existed. This progression cannot continue infinitely as there most be SOMETHING that existed as the first producer of whatever came next. This first producer ( ‘first cause’ ) we have all agreed to call ‘God’. Do you see the fallacy operating here ?

This form of the argument is grossly simplified. If you insist on more elaborate forms, they are easy to find.

In any case, your presentation does not rate a passing grade in terms of logic. I will refrain from passing judgement on the theological motivations that produced it — Coach always said ‘Piling-on don’t prove nothin’ except your lack of sportsmanship.’

One Man’s Opinion

21stCenturion

21stCenturion, you cite Anselm of Cantebury and Thomas Aquinas — both saints and doctors of the Roman Catholic Church — of providing prime examples of the fallacy of Begging the Question/Circular Reasoning. I have some doubt, however, that you understand what these two world-class thinkers were saying.

Moreoever, there is a fallacy that you may not have heard of — the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, so ably described by the great mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead — but it seems to me that you have committed it; and that it may be "corrupting" your thinking.

The tip-off comes in your remark, "GOD must exist somewhere within such an infinity of Universes." No He mustn't — no more than Michelangelo "must exist" in the Sistine Chapel, or in his magnificent sculpture, David.

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness which embroils you is your supposition that God "exists" as yet another existing entity within the universe we humans live in or within some other multiverse.

Yet when Anselm calls Him "Perfect," this must mean that God does not "exist!" Rather, it is an acknowledgement that He is pure, absolute, eternally self-subsistent Being and, that being the case, He is utterly perfect (in that He needs nothing from outside of Himself to Be what He IS).

God is not "IN" anything He made in the Beginning — including Space and Time (they are His creations too).

All existing things are finite and contingent. Man is finite; his life contingent on what happens around him and to him. The Fallacy you commit is to reduce God to what He is not — i.e., to just another existing thing within the Creation. A sort of superhuman after Feuerbach's "projection psychology," wherein the deity is thought to be nothing more than the fanciful projection of the highest desires and aspirations of mankind — nothing "real" in Himself, just an elaborate fiction designed to ease human existential anxieties.

Yet even the great classical philosophers (around 500–400 B.C.), pre-Christian though they may have been, drew the distinction between being and existence. They believed that all existent things were so because they were participations in divine Being. Because God IS, we are. Plato's God was a God utterly "Beyond" the Cosmos. As pure eternal Being, the source and sustainer of life, He could not be yet another denizen of the world of His making, the place designated for finite, mortal, contingent creatures to come into existence, and then to pass out of it in due course.

Moreover, the Greek word Kosmos refers to a single integrated, ordered system — and the order is there because of the divine Intelligence and Will that causes the world to be as it is, and not some other way; and to be something in the first place, and not nothing at all.... (Which answers Leibniz's two crucial questions.)

Materialism/scientism absolutely rejects a creator God in principle, preferring to believe the unbelievable — to wit, that the random motions of matter somehow have a "principle" conducive to the elaboration of ordered systems in Nature, including the principal ordered system of which they are parts and participants — the universe/multiverse itself.

It doesn't matter to me all that much whether there is one universe, of whether there may be many (multiverses). If they began in time, something had to kick-start their ordered processes.

And if they didn't have a beginning in time, then their existence is inexplicable.

This was the point Aquinas was making: you wrote —

In the Universe, all things that exist are the product of other things that already existed. This progression cannot continue infinitely as there must be SOMETHING that existed as the first producer of whatever came next. This first producer ( ‘first cause’ ) we have all agreed to call ‘God’. Do you see the fallacy operating here ?

No, I don't see the fallacy; I see logic at work. This is straight out of Aristotle, who reasoned that if there were not a "first cause," a/k/a an "unmoved mover," then the universe would have had to arise by virtue of an infinite regression of causes. But if that were so, then no particular thing could come into existence for lack of an organizing principle, a Limit (peras) — which is just another way of saying that purely random processes in nature are productive of nothing in particular, nor can they be.

Plus you can yell about random processes till kingdom come, and still not explain where the matter subject to such randomness came from....

And so if people have "agreed" to call this first principle God, I do not see how circular reasoning is at all involved. You could call this first principle "dandelion" if you wanted to — "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The logic of First Cause would not be disturbed at all, whatever you choose to name it.

Of course, we Christians are very glad to call it: God.

In closing, here's what Anselm wrote in Monologion 1:

If anyone does not know, either because he has not heard or because he does not believe, that there is one nature, supreme among all existing things, who alone is self-sufficient in his eternal happiness, who through his omnipotent goodness grants and brings it about that all other things exist or have any sort of well-being, and a great many other things that we must believe about God or his creation, I think he could at least convince himself of most of these things by reason alone, if he is even moderately intelligent.

Notice that Anselm nowhere in this passage says that God "exists." Rather he is saying that God is the very cause and ground of everything that does exist. Anselm does not conflate being and existence; he does not reduce perfect being to finite contingent existence — and thus he, unlike you, does not commit the Fallacy of Misplaced concreteness!

Notice he also says that man's knowledge of God comes via reason, intelligence. It must be that way, since God Himself is not a direct observable — the sort of thing required by the scientific method.

God is seen, not directly via sense perception, but in His effects.

I'll leave you with that clue, 21stCenturion.

Thank you so much for writing!