The Uncaused First Cause.

The God of the Bible has some of the same attributes of Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” and many, if not all, of the attributes cited by great philosophers and theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm. In order to grasp that kind of God, you may need to renew your mind. If you are used to conceiving of God as a big angel or an old man in the sky, then drop the word God for a minute and simply think of the God of the Bible as the Source and Sustainer of all things. The Source and Sustainer of all things is:

• Self-existing: not caused by another; the foundation of all being
• Infinite: unlimited; the completely maximized or actualized Being
• Simple: undivided in being; is not made up of parts
• Immaterial: spirit; not made of matter
• Spaceless: transcends space
• Timeless: transcends time; eternal; had no beginning and will have no end
• Omnipotent: all powerful; can do whatever is logically possible
• Omnipresent: everywhere present
• Omniscient: all knowing; knows all actual and possible states of affairs
• Immutable: changeless; the anchor and standard by which everything else is measured
• Holy: set apart; morally perfect; is perfectly just and loving
• Personal: has mind, emotion, and will; makes choices.

― Frank Turek [Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God To Make Their Case]

[RaxxedOut]

thank you frank, you have helped me make sense of alot of questions i have had🙏

[switzerlandful]

Interesting... even though I admit that its impossible for a Christian, theist or deist to be purely objective (Everyone has some bias, even atheists)... you still have an interesting result when you think about time. Time can't go on forever into the past... if it did, then how did it arrive here in the present? Since the past is finite, the reason for time/space must logically be non-temporal & probably non-spacial.

[tomato]

YES, IT'S THE UNCAUSED CAUSE=mc2 of THE IMMOVABLE MOVER!

[thethage]

Excellent. Just excellent. I love your work and your books. God bless you and guide you.

[ps]

It's not really that atheists don't accept the idea of an eternal god but if something has to be eternal, why doesn't the answer 'the universe is eternal' satisfy you as a Christian. Also, the uncaused cause argument is a deist argument, not specifically a Christian one, any religion can pull up the same point

[VisinGamPlay]

Awareness/Consciousness comes first! Learned that without “God” outside of me!!!

[PBuffdaddy]

Awesome stuff! I love "Stealing From God." Fantastic book, Dr. Turek.

[msmd]

Turek is merely restating what Aristotle thought. And even If Aristotle was considered a genius in his time, he DID NOT have access to the method of fact-finding (SCIENCE and the scientific method wasn’t invented until about 500 yrs ago). So Aristotle may have been “smart” but the Argument Aristotle made for the “1st Cause” was Entirely a “logical” argument not based upon fact. And with the advent of Science just a few centuries ago Aristotle’s reasoning doesn’t hold water because science has revealed more about the natural world than religion EVER did.

Logic must follow certain “rules” in order to reach a conclusion that is hard to dispute. And the most basic rule of logic is… ALL the “premises” (reasons of an argument) must already be known to be FACT. There are NO possible logical arguments that can certify the truth of there being a “god” because god is not measurable or detectable since it is also claimed that such a being resides “outside” of the universe. So god can never be proven.

The way for god to prove itself (because god certainly is not “man”) god would not merely speak to people’s brains but would purposely present something that would be impossible in a physical universe. As an example; suppose one day the world awoke and as the Earth turned people soon noticed that up in the sky the Earth’s Moon turned into a solid CUBE instead of a sphere. No known physical law would allow for that because gravity pulls everything together in an equidistant accumulative sphere from the center of gravity (the core or any planet or star).
So to find the Moon drifting along as a giant cube would likely require some supernatural act. Unfortunately, no such planets, moons or stars have ever been found and astronomers have viewed thousands of stars and found non-terrestrial planets with moons and NONE of them are Cubical because of natural law - gravity.
So where exactly is there ANY empirical evidence for a supernatural god ?? There’s NONE, and it doesn’t matter if you’re afraid of the natural process of dying. Everything in the natural universe is in the state of “dying” and it doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree. Even the stars and other planets have a date with death. It’s a physical law that all things change over time. Because Your “creator” made the mistake of making EVERYTHING out of Atoms, physical matter, an imperfect medium into which all forms of life have emerged. And that evolution is also part of natural law because some elements in the natural environment are capable of having an “affinity” (like puzzle pieces) for other things in their immediate area. And those mergers and mutations is how ALL life over billions of yrs (which most humans probably can’t even fathom how long that is).

When one of you “god-worshipers” come up with Hard evidence of god, I expect immediately to see it in the world news & media. Until then, all you theists ought to shut up because your religious doctrine & dogma is nothing more than spewing horse manure.

[scotticus]

I dont know if there even needs to be an uncaused first cause. For all we know, chronological time doesnt actually exist, rendering the concept of first cause absolete. We dont know this for sure, but many metaphysicists and quantum theorists view the passage of time as an illusion.

[maylingng]

*Destroying the First Cause Argument*
The most prominent form of the argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, states the Kalam cosmological argument as the following syllogism: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.

“Craig, having decided that the universe does have a cause, then says ‘The cause of the universe has to be a logically necessary being, by which he means a being that had to exist, such that it involves a contradiction if it did not exist. But this means that to say ‘God does not exist’ involves a logical contradiction. But how can there be such a ‘necessary’ being? Who ordered that? (A question asked by a nuclear physicist upon the discovery of an unexpected new particle). This argument was invented by archbishop Anselm in 1077, called the ‘ontological argument’.” (From “William Lane Craig’s Eight Reasons for God” by Conway Hall, 30th March 2015)

It is child’s play to destroy this fallacious argument. Anyone with a basic education is physics knows that there are subatomic particles pop into existence all the time without any cause. In quantum field theory, particle-antiparticle pairs continuously pop in and out of existence from vacuum. These particles have a very short lifetime, at the scale of 10^-22 seconds. In Schwinger's theory, if you apply a massive enough electrical field to a region of space that is completely empty, that space's quantum field will seize some of this electrical energy and create particle-antiparticle pairs from nothingness. Also, photons—packets of light—can pop in and out of a vacuum.

Aspects of quantum theory can and have been tested in the laboratory, although much mystery remains to be discovered, still. Yet we can compare our knowledge thus far on the topic and contrast it with Craig’s abstract “hocus-pocus” for which he (and no one else) can provide any evidence, and just shake our collective heads at the ridiculous attempts by Craig to substitute the irrational, fictitious claims of the bible for science.

[ginokwick]

1. The assumption that every event has a cause, although common in our experience, is not necessarily universal. The apparent lack of cause for some events, such as radioactive decay, suggests that there might be exceptions. There are also hypotheses, such as alternate dimensions of time or an eternally oscillating universe, that allow a universe without a first cause.

2. By definition, a cause comes before an event. If time began with the universe, "before" does not even apply to it, and it is logically impossible that the universe be caused.

3. This claim raises the question of what caused God. If, as some claim, God does not need a cause, then by the same reasoning, neither does the universe.

[doomguy]

I need a debunk for this, what if singularity always existed, like what if it is timeless and eternal. Even if it is unlikely it's possible, you can't negate it.

[LogicAndReason]

How did an immaterial something, make something from nothing, if something from nothing is impossible? If space did not exist prior to our universe, where could a Being be? Where could you put a universe if there is no where? If nothing can happen without time, how did anything do anything without time? Note: "It was magic" is not an explanation. More questions/ no answers.

[DanRodriguezII]

"ALL THE EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE UNIVERSE HAD A someone help provide me with these evidences or help explain what they are? I don't quite know how to explain these things scientifically to Atheists!

[hamsandwich]

Turek, as usual, is making statements as if they are factual, when in reality they are purely speculative and guesses. Would Turek board an airplane about to be flown by a pilot who assures the passengers that the tank has enough fuel to reach its destination, when in fact the pilot has not even looked at the fuel gage? In this video, (and as is typical of Turek), without having any valid evidence to substantiate his claims about the existence of and the characteristics of a god, Turek is assuring everyone that what he claims is true, that the fuel tank is full. But in Turek's case, not only is he making claims without "checking his fuel gage, " there exists no fuel gage to check, he has no way to prove that his claims are true. When people like Turek are allowed to make claims without being held accountable for the accuracy of those claims, they can say absolutely anything that suits them, there is no limit to the claims they can make.

[YOSUP]

That's easy; matter gave rise to mind.
And in order for the universe to be caused, the cause would seem to have to be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial, that is to say it had to be nothing and never; that there existed any cause for the universe.

[mknomad]

Absolutely god is not the only first cause that makes sense, quantum fluctuation is a better first assumption

[bucmcmaster]

The claim of a timeless, spaceless, etc. etc. god as the creator of the universe has no foundation in fact, no evidence to support the position. In the absence of any evidence you claim your god as the origin of everything, a logically untenable position. "I can't think of any other reason so god must have done it." This is an unreasonable assumption. Science on the other hand is unafraid to say we do not know what was or was not prior to the origin of the does not assume it has an answer when confronted with an unknown. When you presuppose you have the answer to an unknown you stop looking for the truth.

[AhlusSunnahwalJamah]

All of this is cool, but the only problem I see here is that they worship a Prophet of God instead of God himself.

[kevr]

I love how he jumps right to an uncaused cause is GOD...not just "a God" but the God he believes in....lol