I was reading Darksyde's
diary and I thought I might add an essay into the fray.
When I was an undergraduate, I taught myself a little trick to remember the five ways that Thomas Aquinas proved the existence of God. They are:
Motion
Efficient causation
Necessity
Perfection
Intelligence
The trick was that the first letters spell the beginning of the sentence "Men Piss Me Off!" There's no point to that: I just thought it was funny and it helped me remember.
Now, here's each one in turn:
Motion: This is the "Prime Mover" argument. The argument goes like this:
(1) Objects are in motion.
(2) If Objects are in motion, then something accomplished the original "bump".
(3) Obviously, the first mover was not itself moved.
(4) Therefore, it is a self-mover.
(Conclusion) We call this self-mover "God".
Please notice what a strange argument this is. It claims nothing about God except that (s)he is a primary cause in some kind of elaborate contraption. As far as this goes, "God" could be an accident, a ketchup bottle, anything at all. "God" is the name of the first cause, and that's all.
Efficent causation: "Efficent" here just means "most recent". So if we ask, "what is the efficient cause of this diary?" The answer is just my fingertips on the keyboard. You might want to say, "But Lithium, it has to do with your intention to write a diary!" Fair enough, but the efficient cause is just my fingertips. The argument for God goes like this:
(1) Every event has an efficient cause.
(2) That cause, iteslf, has an efficient cause.
(3) This backward-chain either goes on forever backward or there is a first uncaused cause.
(4) The backward-chain cannot go back forever. That is absurd.
(5) Therefore, there is a first efficient cause.
(Conclusion) That "first efficient cause" is God.
Notice, again, how strange this argument is. The only claim is that "god" is some sort of "cause".
Necessity: Every existing object (for example, you and me,)exists contingently. Your parents might have had a different child, or no child, and so on. But it makes no sense to say that everything is contingent. So there must be a being that exists necessarily. That is God.
This argument makes no sense. Of course there might have been nothing.
Perfection We can imagine perfect things. Perfect circles, perfectly straight lines, and so on. This is true even though no one has ever seen such things. Therefore, we have transcendent perceptions of things never experienced. The only possible perfection, we call "God". Therefore, God exists.
Again, this makes no sense. The argument goes from our capacity to imagine to the existence of God. Next.
Intelligence: This is a precursor to William Paley's famous "watchmaker" argument. If you were walking through the woods and found a rock, you would not assume that the rock had been designed by anyone. It could be an accident. But if you found a watch, for example a finely crafted Swiss watch, you would assume that someone made it. But, how much more grand and well-designed is the pinwheel of galaxies that we see every night? Therefore, there is a designer. And therefore, God exists.
This is a classic "argument from ignorance". If you don't that term, you ought to. The argument goes likes this:
(1) I don't know how "x" could have happened.
(Conclusion) Therefore, I do know how "x" happened. God did it.
Look at that carefully. It's a flat-out self-contradiction. But people use it all the time. Many religious people find this argument annoying, too. They call it "the God in the Gaps" argument. Anything we don't understand at the moment is God's doing. This is an insult to human intelligence and also to faith.
Now we sometimes ask, "Why be moral, if there is no God?"
I will tell you why, by quoting this:
When you see a man who's broken, pick him up and carry him.
When you see a woman who's broken, pull her all into your arms.
'Cause we don't know where we come from.
We don't know what we are.
Is that Atheist? Is that Agnostic? Don't bore me with stupid questions. We have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. I'm in grad school in Philosophy because this drives me crazy. A lot of very, very smart people go nuts over this. If you'd like, I'll tell you about some recent philosophers who struggle with metaphysics, and what they decide. I'll tell you about David Lewis and Tom Polger and David Chalmers and Elizabeth Ansombe and Susan Neiman.
But more importantly, it's up to you. This is the most difficult question in the world. Why is there anything?