Eternity (Origins)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 15:53 (4021 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I've started a new thread because it seems to me that the implications of "eternal" merit a thread of their own. To understand the agnostic viewpoint, we need to go back to a subject we have already discussed and, in my view, not resolved satisfactorily.
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> dhw: If first cause consciousness has existed for ever and ever and ever, the alleged 13.7 billion years of our universe do not even constitute a single grain of sand in the desert. What do we imagine the first cause mind will have been doing with itself for ever and ever and ever? Well, all we know is that it has created this universe. -All we can know and work from is a first cause created this universe. We can't know or even reasonably make suggestions, except the St. Thomas approach as the maker of laws and information seems very reasonable to me,since we find those laws by math.-Note I have removed your amorphous suggestions about how the First cause stayed busy for eons. Stick with us and how we are. Work back from there.
 
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> dhw: Of course eternity offers you infinite regress, and you can only end the retrospective cycle of effect-cause-effect-cause by settling on a first cause. But the notion of an eternal first cause is as open to atheism as it is to theism.-Not with St. Tom. Atheism simply says we don't know and can't know anything, so lets assume nothing and believe in nothing. That's easy. But atheism's reaction is in part a reaction to the pomposity of religions, the know-it-alls. Step back as I have and start afresh, no religious presumptions. What can we reasonably expect the minimal attributes of a first cause might be based on what we see exists? Intelligence. I can go no further.