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You had way too much fun writing this. <br>
<br>
Damien Broderick wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:7.0.1.0.2.20080117110724.02210380@satx.rr.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">At 08:12 AM 1/17/2008 -0800, Ian wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""> Let's look at a real tower-of-turtles problem. If I
posit (the 'God' theory) that 'Something created
everything that exists, and x created the universe',
I've paradoxically placed x (at the level above) in
the set of things necessarily created calling for
something at a still higher level to have created x.
'So then who created God?' Now that's a genuine
tower-of-turtles problem
</pre>
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
No it's not. In the usual metaphysical analysis, the question and
answer go like this: We can see that everything in the world is
transient, contingent, causally dependant on prior states that were
or are themselves transient, contingent, causally dependant on prior
states. This can't be tracked back to infinity, because things are
running down. Some other class of explanation for a universe of
contingent existents is needed--and that suggests a realm of Being
that is categorically *unlike* the world we see and subsist in. That
Being must be necessary of itself.
The subsequent steps that attribute purpose, timelessness, ubiquity,
information processing, personhood, love, etc, to this disjunct state
of being can easily be questioned (especially if those attributions
appear to derive from states of being that are temporally sequential,
spatially partitioned, etc). But it's simply missing the point to
ask: Well, then, nyah nyah, *what created the uncreated*?
The way to get rid of an ontically necessary deity is to show how the
universe, surprisingly, *does at its root embody these
characteristics* and can be at once self-subsistent, entropic and
evolving. The temptation in trying to meet this challenge is exactly
to posit one kind of contingent turtle tower or another.
Damien Broderick
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