The 'Kalam' Cosmological Argument

[littlebabyjesus]

Questions don't have to be coherent to be valid.

The reason why a question cannot be answered is very often to be found within the question. If it is a badly formed question, it may be that cannot have an answer. Coherence is surely a necessary condition for a valid question.

In this instance, I would argue that treating the question as if it were coherent creates the mystery. Properly considered, isn't the answer that there is no mystery - there are certain things that we cannot say, and we can have a good idea both that and why we cannot say them.

At heart, this is a logic problem. Godel's incompleteness/Turing's stopping problem. Seen from inside, there is always necessarily going to be something about the system that we cannot prove to be true from within the system but that is nonetheless true - has to be true, even. That seemingly contradictory position whereby we can know something to be true without being able to prove it.

 

[Knotted]

The reason why a question cannot be answered is very often to be found within the question. If it is a badly formed question, it may be that cannot have an answer. Coherence is surely a necessary condition for a valid question.

Well the answer might reformulate the question and tell us something new at the same time. New data or understandings may transform the matter. I don't think this is a dead question in cosmology.

In this instance, I would argue that treating the question as if it were coherent creates the mystery. Properly considered, isn't the answer that there is no mystery - there are certain things that we cannot say, and we can have a good idea both that and why we cannot say them.

At heart, this is a logic problem. Godel's incompleteness/Turing's stopping problem. Seen from inside, there is always necessarily going to be something about the system that we cannot prove to be true from within the system but that is nonetheless true - has to be true, even. That seemingly contradictory position whereby we can know something to be true without being able to prove it.

Oh no I don't think this is a Gödel type problem.

 

[PTK]

What can't we all be more like the creator god? It started with nothing, and now it has a whole cosmos. Never let you lack of resources deter you from achieving something.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Even atheists get hidebound by Christian and/or Islamic and/or Judaic ideas about the creator. There may be no creator at all, quite likely but impossible to prove or disprove. Or there may be a creator, unlikely but equally impossible to prove. But the latter's unlikeliness becomes greater when you start to give a creator attributes, such as omnipotence, omnipresence, all-knowing, infallibility, everlasting and stuff like that. It's dead easy to envisage a creator with none of those attributes, or only some of them.

The idea of suffering is similarly easy to ignore. When earlier theists envisaged God they mainly had in mind the creator of human beings, and had no conception of the age of the universe (14 billion years or such?) nor its extent (fucking massive). If some creator-being knocked up the universe in his or her spare time why should it be bothered by something so insignificant as human suffering, any more than the suffering of amoeba?