Originally Posted by
ghollisjr
You are talking nonsense. Causality requires time to be there in the first place, which means that one cannot cause time to exist. Even apologists such as Dr. William Lane Craig attempt to address this issue. Granted, he usually does so by trying to say that causality in fact does not need time, but then we are playing the definition game. There are a few different senses in which we refer to causality. For example, x=2 causes the expression x+x to have the value of 4, and this does not need the idea of time to make sense. However, if an event x causes an event y, and if x and y are not at the exact same location in space, then it is impossible for y to precede x or even to occur simultaneously with x in any reference frame. Thus there is a temporal kind of causality and an atemporal kind of causality. You are claiming that God, being atemporal, caused the universe to exist. But exist in what sense? There are also two types of existence, temporal and atemporal, the atemporal sense being statements like "There exist infinitely many prime numbers", and the temporal sense being statements like "My cat exists." Saying that God caused the universe to exist, in the past tense, gives away your intended meaning: God caused the universe, specifically the physical universe, to exist in the temporal sense. You are thus assuming a very strong statement: atemporal things can cause things to exist in the temporal sense, and that atemporal things can exhibit temporal causality. This needs to be justified, and I suspect it may actually be self-contradictory. At the very least, it has never been demonstrated that atemporal things can exhibit atemporal causality.
And we have not already established and proven that nature could not have always existed. What we have is your refusal to provide a coherent argument stating WHY it is that an eternity of past events means that the present moment should have already happened. I don't need you to repeat your claim over and over again, I need to see your reason for WHY that is the case. You are probably resorting to some sort of intuitive understanding of infinity, eternity, and time which, as I said before, does not provide rigorous justification for your claims. You need to specify your definitions and axioms since they are not the standard ones used in mathematics which I have been referring to and using to justify my arguments. But I think you will refuse to do this since, as you said before, all you think you need is your simplistic intuitional understanding.
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