All right, we are looking at the Thomistic argument. We are, I think, in our fifth session on this argument. So we're going along slowly, and we've been delineating the attributes of this uncaused cause that we've proven to exist. We've actually spent a great deal of our time, maybe most of our time, looking at the attributes that you can discern from this uncaused cause. And I'm going to repeat what I said last time we were here, because it's been a few weeks. On page 190, we were talking about the immensity of the uncaused cause. And given the simplicity of the uncaused cause, it's not like God's omnipresence is composed in any way so that his power is in one part of the universe and his knowledge is in another. So the immensity of God just means that everything that God is just is in, with, and through all of contingent reality. And one of my all-time favorite quotations about God is this one by Luther where he says, we deny that God is such an extended, long, broad, thick, high, low being. We rather contend that God is a supernatural, unfathomable being, but one at the same time as in every little kernel of grain, and also in and above the outside, and outside all creatures. To think of any limitations here is the false spirit, as the false spirit dreams, is out of order. For a human body is much, much too large for the Godhead, and many thousands of Godheads would be in it. On the other hand, it is much, much too small for only one Godhead. Nothing is so small. God is still smaller. Nothing is so large, God is still larger. Nothing's so short, God is still shorter. Nothing's so long, God is still longer. Nothing's so wide, God is still wider. Nothing's so narrow, God is still narrower and so forth. In a word, God is an inexpressible being above and beyond everything that may be said or thought. So what is the biggest thing in the universe? God. What is the smallest thing in the universe? God. Everything that God is, is in, with, and through the smallest particle that we could possibly fathom, like a quark, as well as in, with, and through the sun and the biggest star or the biggest supernova, the biggest thing in the universe, and he is in, with, and through all of the universe. Now that's a an amazing point to fathom. The uncaused being, given that this uncaused being is simple, we must conclude that the uncaused being is also altogether beautiful. One standard that people have for what is beautiful is simplicity. The simpler a thing is, the more beautiful it becomes to the beholder. Hugh Ross illustrates this by, he does a lot of talks where he'll start his talk off by saying, what's the most beautiful thing in the universe? And people will say sunsets, and they'll just start giving, you know, they saw a beautiful woman one time, and she was just above and beyond anything they could imagine, and on and on and on it goes. Well, he realizes, no, you're all wrong. And what's the most beautiful thing? And he'll put like Einstein's theory of relativity. on the overhead. Well, why do that? Well, the laws of physics for a physicist, they're beautiful and elegant precisely because they literally explain everything in our universe. You can put all of the laws of physics that are at least important and put them all on one page, all the formulas. It's amazing, isn't it, to think that the entire universe is sort of explained by the physics formulas on one page. That's a very simple and elegant universe. Well, that's why the physicist says the mathematical formulas, the elegance that they have, are beautiful. Well, we look at children. We love children. We think they're beautiful and attractive, mainly because they are so simple. So the more simple a thing is, the more beautiful it is. Well, if something is altogether simple, then it must be beautiful, and therefore, the uncaused cause must be beautiful. The uncaused being is also extremely happy. Happiness is the feeling of contentment one has. It is joy, pleasure, and gladness. The divine being needs absolutely nothing. He is wholly content with who he is, what he is, and what he is doing. We therefore conclude that he is altogether happy or joyful. The implication here is that the more we get to know this being, the happier we will be, at least in the long run. Of course, we live in a day when many theologians, like Opentheus and Panentheus, wish to do away with the divine beatitude and replace it with divine passibility. That is to say, a God who suffers pain and agony over his creation. The fear many have of the doctrine of divine beatitude is that God would appear uncaring and apathetic towards His creation. To allay such fears, we first of all remind the reader of Mueller's insight that the doctrine of God's impassibility does not entail a doctrine of divine apathy. Indeed, a God who is happy It's not necessarily a being who does not care about the sufferings of others. In fact, we must remember that the uncaused cause is all loving. And one way he is currently demonstrating his love for us is by sustaining us in existence. A being who does not care would never exert his power for the benefit of others. The point in emphasizing the happiness of God is, again, to emphasize his independence of the contingent order. His care for us is in no way dependent His care for us is in no way dependent upon us, and hence it in no way interferes with His infinite beatitude. A second point we need to make is that the very notion of an unhappy God is surely inconsistent with everything we've proven about the uncaused cause. Can we even imagine the eternal, uncaused, necessary, all-powerful, and immutable cause of the universe eternally unhappy about the way things are going? Do you see the problem here? You either say that God is joyful, slash content, slash happy, or unhappy. There's no third way. There's no, I'm happy today and sad tomorrow. Why? Because God is immutable. So if God is either going to be one or the other. Yeah. What could be the cause of God's unhappiness? Himself? Then he is not perfect. Something in his creation? Then he is powerless to stop it. It is true that God may not be pleased with quite a number of certain or specific events that transpire in our world. But his omniscient mind, which sees the end of history from the beginning, is able to discern how all events in time will be consummated. It's as if the consummation of all things has already taken place. Like a father who, though he is displeased with the pain of his child's vaccination shots, is nevertheless pleased with the good accomplished by those shots, God, the father, although he is displeased with the evil and suffering going on in the world, nevertheless exists in undisturbed tranquility in light of all that he is and all the good he is going to accomplish by his own power and in his own time. To the reader who is still disturbed by such a God, consider the opposite. Imagine that there is a God who suffers pain every time a tragedy hits the life of one of his creatures. The only kind of God who could suffer such pain is one who did not anticipate the tragedy. He did not see it coming. Thus, a God who suffers with us, feeling our pain and lamenting the tragedies of history, is a being who lacks the foresight to see these events coming and or the power to prevent them. If such a God does exist, we should not worship Him, we should pity Him. In the words of Jean-Pierre Tourelle, if we really wish to implicate God in His creation, to make Him share our sufferings, for example, as many theologians try to, do today, we would only be making an unnecessary idol, nothing more. That God would not be God. Or perhaps more eloquently, there are the words of Chesterton, I can hardly conceive any educated man believing in God at all without assuming that God contains in himself every perfection, including eternal joy, and does not require the solar system to entertain him like a circus. We may be able to love a God who suffers, but we can't trust Him. On the other hand, we can both love and trust a God whose eternal joy is undiminished by the hardships of this world. For only such a God has the power to end all suffering. And I wanna say one more thing, and then I'll let you ask your question. I think I told y'all that a few weeks ago, I rewatched The Lord of the Rings, and in the, Return of the King at the very end, I mean, while Sam and Frodo are trying to make it up that mountain to destroy the ring, and I mean, they're going through little hell. Sam looks up in the sky and he sees a star. And he says, look, nothing down here can touch it. That beautiful star, that beautiful star is undiminished by the suffering we're experiencing here in this world. And that's a good perspective to have in the midst of suffering, to know that there's a being who's undiminished by the sufferings of this world so that that's a being that I want to go have fellowship with. That's a being that I want to inspire me. What if Frodo and Sam looked up in the sky and they saw a star getting dimmer and dimmer because of the sufferings that are going on now? They would have nothing to live for. They would basically be surrounded by a universe in which all is being wiped away by the vicissitudes and contingencies of this world. And so I can't imagine not only that God could be unhappy, but why you would even want God to be unhappy. Go ahead, you have a question. The only thing I would say as I kind of read through this, and it might just be a point of clarification too, there is the aspect of God's compassion, which inherently means that there is a degree of God sharing in suffering. Like by definition, compassion means to enter into the suffering of others. Now I hear what you're saying here, which is that The statement you're making is that God's suffering does not diminish who he is, and it does not diminish his joy or his power, even though he might be willing to share in it with us. But even as Paul says, like in his Gospels, he says he has learned the secret to joy in all circumstances, including suffering. And that's the joy that comes from God. So God does have a joy that is undiminished by suffering, but there is a degree to which he does willingly enter into the suffering that we are experiencing as creatures? How do we reconcile? Well, I think that you're right in that the immensity of God entails, and his love entails, that there's an analogously speaking kind of compassion he has for the creature. Not compassion in the sense that he actually suffers, but compassion in the sense that he understands exactly what we're going through and is drawing good out of the evils we experience. but not compassion in the sense that he himself is suffering pain for all eternity. Now, I will also say that a lot of the theologians that Torrell is alluding to and others, open theists, what they want to do is they want to say that I know God through Christ and Christ suffers and therefore God suffers. And so what they're really doing is that they're confusing categories in theology. It's one thing to have a Christ who experiences passion, who suffers. That is a passable Christology. But you can't have a passable theology proper. Your theology proper has got to be different than your Christology because it's precisely that person who decided to become one of us and take on another nature. But notice that the natures themselves are not intermingled. So the person who is Christ suffers. But the nature, the essence that is divine doesn't undergo any diminishment whatsoever. So all of the things that the open theist and the panentheist want in terms of experiencing suffering, I think that the classical Christian can supply with the doctrine of the incarnation without giving up a theology proper that is classical in the sense that God is holy and diminished by any of the sufferings going on. He doesn't suffer in any way, shape, or form and so forth. In other words, we're getting the best of both worlds with a classical Christian and I think that that is an advantage that classical Christian theology has over Islam and Judaism. Because on their model, they embrace this view of God, at least, and this is what most theologians, even among the Jews and the Muslims, excuse me, I got cut off, but the Jews and the Muslims have a similar view of God as Christians have traditionally had. And so if you follow them, they don't have a doctrine of the incarnation that would allow God to suffer. But having said that, I Obviously we have to wait later before we talk about the incarnation and defend Christianity But anyways, that's that's kind of how I look at it. I Got God Loves everyone as we pointed out before and that is a kind of compassion towards everyone he understands the suffering and he he feels a love for the people that are suffering and therefore he wants to draw a good out of the evils that he allows and that sort of thing. And all of those things would be compassion. And therefore there's a direct analogy between the compassion I feel for someone who's suffering and the love he feels for someone who is suffering. But it's certainly an analogy and I wouldn't want to take it so far as to say that he actually, his emotional disposition is contingent upon the vicissitudes of life. So. Oh yeah, and I should clarify, too. I did not, in no way did I think that suffering would change who God is. I think that's kind of our key point, is that the immutability of God is not something that is susceptible to suffering. And I can see the kind of issue where it's like, oh, well, if that kind of pain enters into the unchanging God at any point, either he has changed, or there is an eternal pain. and so I grasp that. I think to an extent, too, I also see from a scriptural standpoint, I'm in full agreement with the idea that God is undiminished by suffering, he is unchanged by it, but yet suffering can still occur to his people and still did occur to Christ. In that event, God is unchanged by suffering, but suffering still occurs to him and his people. Is it not further revelatory of his glory to see that in the midst of suffering, he is unbowed and undiminished before it? How even in the presence of great suffering, the greater and greater the suffering, the more and more impressive it is that he remains unchanging in the face Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um, in fact, a lot of people, a lot of people will say, uh, well, you know, one of the reasons why we need to change our view of God is because we've changed our understanding of politics. You know, um, we, we are, uh, we are a people who believe that our leaders should arise out of us instead of, exists sort of independent of us and impose a law upon us. And so our leaders are all diminished. They, they too are just normal people like us. And so we don't have a monarch. Okay. And if you, I've been watching episodes of the crown, you know, and, and it's clear that the royal family, the Windsor family sees itself. as set apart from the common people in Britain and they actually serve as the inspiration for the British people. So there's a scene where Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth, is posing for photos and she's in a wedding gown and she's posing for a magazine apparently. And she was actually getting ready for her own wedding but that fell apart. She's not really happy with this whole photo shoot. She's bored with it. She doesn't want to do it. And the photographer begins to talk to her about, imagine a woman is flipping through a magazine and sees you, and sees you untouched by all the things that are going on in this life. That gives her a pep in her step. That gives, for a moment, she can fantasize about being you. And that will actually mitigate whatever problem she's facing that day. And you know, kings, at least during the 16th century, I don't know if this is, I don't think this is still true, but the king, the monarch did not go to the funeral of anyone because he was not associated with death. Long live the king. You know, it's why, why have that view of that, that, that, that view of politics Created a view of God. This is the argument that the open theists and the panentheists are giving the the view of God that we have is reflective in our politics and just like In a day where you have an emperor and he's untouched by the vicissitudes of life Well, how much greater is that God? But in a day where we have democracy and and we have this kind of interaction, then your good view of God is going to reflect that. So now we have a changing God, a God who depends on us as much as we depend on him. That's the God of panentheism. And the open view of God is a kind of a halfway house between panentheism and neoclassical theism. And so I would just want to say to people, well, that's great. When was the Bible written? in a monarchial context or a democratic context? Well, really clearly a monarch was put in there. Well, some people might say, well, that's just my point. The Bible was written at a different time and therefore is irrelevant for us today. Okay. But now we're just talking about something totally different. We're talking about a totally different approach to theology altogether that does not take into account biblical norms at all. But if you want to be a classical theist who is also an Abrahamic theist, and that's kind of what we've vindicated in our Belt on Trunks series, and we're developing a natural theology in light of all of that, then it seems to me that at least the broad biblical norms have to be in place so that when we come to an understanding of God, it is at least congenial with that. Constantly, the king is set on high as the paradigm in the Psalms and in the historical narratives, only to be trounced by the God who is even greater. I mean, look at Isaiah's vision in Isaiah 6. I mean, the robe is filling the temple. The robe reflects the glory of God that touches everything. So anyway, I'm going on a tangent, but... That's true. That's true. But, you know, it takes us back to should our language about God be dominantly masculine or dominantly feminine? And I'm convinced that one is going to win out over the other. And I gave you that argument of Fazer's a few sessions ago, where Fazer gives a very strong argument as to how the theistic God has to be conceived in masculine terms. rather than feminine terms. And this is all analogous, of course, but it affects the way you view God. It really does. And so, you know, I guess I could go on and on, but there's no way to present any of this material without deciding what kind of language you're going to use. And the kind of language you use shapes the way people think and worship and even interact with their fellow humans. What is it that inspires you? Well, I'm inspired by the God who is eternally blessed and joyful despite all of the sufferings that are going on in this world. In fact, I'm convinced that only He can bring an end to the suffering. A God who is suffering with me is not going to be able to bring an end to it. Or at least I have no reason to think he would. Could you imagine going to heaven and seeing God crying? Oh my gosh, I just don't know what to do. That would really upset me. It's discouraging, as you said, kind of when you're experiencing personal suffering on your own and you're wondering, will the suffering ever end? Yes. If the answer to that is no, then heaven is hell. Yes. Yeah. So to repeat your point, if the suffering never ends, heaven is hell. And if God is suffering, that means the suffering never ends. If there is an afterlife, then we just go to the next plane only to suffer more. So here's the final point I want to make about this uncaused cause that we've proven to exist. He is incomprehensible and yet knowable. He is incomprehensible in that no finite creature can penetrate his essence and exhaustively understand everything about him. But this in no way precludes the fact that humans can know him. Our contingency argument makes that clear. He can be known truly, but not exhaustively. Also, this being may very well know things that appear contradictory to us, but are not really contradictory to him. He is, after all, transcendent and thus able to comprehend what is incomprehensible. We apprehend him through the things we see and experience, but we do not comprehend him. He is not an illogical being. He does not go against the laws of logic, but he is supralogical. He is above and beyond the laws of logic. He is our greatest thought, and yet he is greater than our thoughts of him. All right, so those are the attributes of the uncaused cause. And I do want to make a brief word about the consistency or internal coherency of these attributes. If you think about it, once you conclude two things about reality, that there is an uncaused cause and that uncaused cause is sustaining the world we live in, then that uncaused cause automatically becomes all of these things that we're talking about. And so just to give you an example, or just to repeat or give a quick overview of what we've already said, this cause is pure actuality, right? With no potentiality, meaning this cause cannot change. Another point we made is that the good is equal to being or reality. So the being is good and the good is being. Those are interchangeable terms. All right, so the more real you are, the better you are. If I could use improper English, the gooder you are, right? So the more real you are, the better you are. Well, therefore, he who is pure act must be absolutely good and perfect. Well, if perfect, He can't change. So even if I first proved that the uncaused cause was perfect, I would have to prove that the uncaused cause can't change, right? Because the uncaused cause is either gonna change from perfect to imperfect, in which case he's no longer perfect, or from imperfect to perfect, in which case he's no longer perfect. So in other words, change implies imperfection. And therefore, the only way you can be absolutely perfect is to be unchanging. So these are just a couple of illustrations of how all these attributes cohere with each other. They fit together like a hand fitting in a well-fit glove. So yeah. Oh, you're not asking a question. OK. That's fine. Questions about that? The Uncaused Cause is everything the God of classical monotheism is. We now know, if we didn't before, that One, Uncaused, Personal, Immutable, Necessary, Unlimited, Eternal, Independent, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Immaterial, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, Living, Truthful, Loving, Impassable, Simple, Perfect, Happy, Beautiful, Immense, Transcendent, Imminent, and Incomprehensible Being exists in reality, and we have concluded that this being is the sustainer of the universe. The universe, then, is radically contingent upon the will of the uncaused being. If this being did not exist, and if he did not freely choose to sustain the cosmos, then the cosmos would not exist. Is this being appropriately called God? Now, I've been using the word God even before I got to this premise and I explained that to y'all. I tried not to. But by the time I was talking about the omniscience of the uncaused cause, I had a hard time just resisting using the word God because, well, it's just hard to resist using the word God. But a lot of people will sit there and go, well, how do you know it's God? How do you know I shouldn't just call this the uncaused thing, right? So how do you know it's God? Are we allowed, and so this premise basically addresses the issue of whether we are rationally allowed and or compelled to use the word God and say that God exists to describe this uncaused being. What exactly does the word God even mean? And I give the definition of the word God by Benjamin Warfield, and this is what he says. He says, the English word God is derived from a root meaning to call and indicates simply the object of worship, one whom men call upon or invoke. The Greek word, theos, which it translates in the pages of the New Testament, however, describe this object of worship as spirit. And the Old Testament Hebrew word, ruach, which this word in turn represents, conveys as its primary meaning the idea of power. On Christian lips, therefore, the word God designates fundamentally the almighty spirit or omnipotent mind, as I say in the note, who is worshiped and whose aid is invoked by men. The primary idea of God in which is summed up what is known as theism is the product of that general revelation which God makes of himself to all men on the plane of nature. The truths involved in it are continually reiterated, enriched, and deepened in the Scriptures, but they are not so much revealed by them as presupposed as the foundation of the special revelation with which the Scriptures busy themselves." So what Warfield is saying is that the revelation of God does not come to us in Scripture. And what he means by that is that the revelation of that, the fact that there is a God, does not come to us in Scripture. Rather, the Scriptures presuppose that God exists. The question, to back up what he's saying, the question among the ancient Hebrews and the ancient peoples of the Middle East where this text was written, was never whether there was a God. That was never the issue. The issue is who is God? Who is God? And so the prophets gave arguments to the effect that Yahweh is God. Well, what is God? Well, it's the Almighty Spirit that created and sustains the world. That's what the Hebrews would say. And clearly, Yahweh is God. In fact, that's what Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are all about. Genesis 1 never uses the word Yahweh, it just says Elohim. And then in Genesis 2, we have this Yahweh Elohim, this dual word. And so what is the author of Genesis 2 trying to say? Yahweh is Elohim. Yahweh is God. Yahweh is that very God that put all things in motion in Genesis 1, Yahweh is the being who, for example, called things by name, showing his absolute sovereignty over them, called the sun by its name, the moon, the stars, and it says they will regulate seasons and times. Well, what does that mean? That means that he who calls the regulator of time by its name transcends time, transcends space, because he creates the space in which these spheres of movement operate. The very fact that he creates man in his image is an indication that he is personal. So what we're dealing with in the contingency argument is we're concluding that a being exists that is very much like, if not almost exactly identical as, the kind of God spoken of in biblical revelation. I point out this, as we reflect more on the attributes of this being, we come to the conclusion that everything monotheists, mono, one, theist, God, everything that monotheists have wanted to say about God, can be and must be said about the uncaused cause of the cosmos. In fact, one Christian creed describes God in almost exactly the same way we have described the uncaused cause. And what I do is I go to the Westminster Confession of Faith and I simply read what it says about God. What does the Westminster Confession of Faith say about God? It says this, it says, there is but one living, or one only, living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself, and is alone in Okay, I'm starting up again, and I apologize. We may have gotten caught off, so I'm going to go back and simply repeat some of the things that I've said with the understanding that the readers on the tape may have to hear what I've just said. pointed out that this being has to be called God as God is understood by classical Christians. And I'm not going to repeat the Warfield quote, although Warfield does give a kind of etymology of the term God. But on page 194, I quote the Westminster Confession of Faith, which says this about God. There is but one only. living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, and most absolute. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessing in and of himself, and is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in and by, unto and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, and hath the most sovereign dominion over them. to do by them, for them, and upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth. In his sight all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent of the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain." Now if one were to read the first 26 questions on the existence and attributes of God in Aquinas' Summa Theologica, or Moses Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, or Al-Ghazali's On the 99 Beautiful Names of God, one would find important differences, but one would also find more than a few similarities. Indeed, the best representatives of the classical monotheistic traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have wanted to describe God in the same way we've described the uncaused cause. Therefore, the God of classical monotheism exists. This conclusion logically and inescapably follows from the preceding premises. If an uncaused being exists, and if that being just is what classical monotheists have always believed God to be, then there is no substantial difference between the uncaused cause and the God of monotheism. Which is just another way of saying that the uncaused cause is God, as he is understood in the monotheistic traditions. God exists, therefore this is a theistic universe. And that is the argument. After five sessions, we finally come to the conclusion of the matter. So we've come a long way, and we still have a little while to go, because we have to look at the objections to this argument. But do you have any questions about this argument before we take the next step? All right, well, here's some objections. This chapter is going to look at a few objections, and then we're going to look at all the rest of them. And you will look at every single objection that I've ever heard of of this argument in the next couple of sessions. But we're going to look at some objections here. What I'm going to do on page 195 is I simply analyze some objections given by John Loftus. John Loftus. John Loftus is a former student of William Lane Craig. Studied apologetics under him. Became an atheist several years later. I think he became an atheist in the early 2000s. And he wrote a book called Why I Became an Atheist. And so I read the book, of course. When I was actually undergoing my own struggles with faith, I gave him a shot, I gave him a chance to prove himself and I certainly was not convinced. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to look at his objection to the Thomistic argument because looking at his initial objection is a good way to kind of clear the air with with respect to what we've already just proven. And then we can go on to look at some of the more substantial objections in the next chapter. But here's what he says in the middle of page 195. He says, St. Thomas really thought of his five ways as variations on a single idea, which is the substance of all of them. We know from experience that the world is contingent. That is, it depends on something outside of itself for its existence. And this would be true even if the world has always been here, for an infinite collection of contingent things is no less contingent than a finite one. But there must be some unconditional ultimate being upon which the world depends, otherwise it would have no final basis for existence. Now this summary of the argument, which is fair, is given by Ed Miller, and he's just quoting Miller in his book. And this is what Loftus says in response to this argument. He says, there are many things that could be said in criticism of Aquinas' Five Ways, especially in light of the Big Bang Theory, which has shown our universe began to exist, along with the concept of inertia, which does away with the need to explain motion as requiring either a regress of causes or an unmoved mover. Nonetheless, Michael Martin argues that Aquinas gives us no non-question-begging reason why there cannot be a non-temporal infinite regressive causes. A first cause or unmoved mover is merely assumed as self-evident in his argument since it finds no support in experience. Martin offers a history lesson as an analogy. He says any appeal to obvious or self-evident evidence must be regarded with suspicion for many things that have been claimed to be self-evidently true, There are many things that have been done so, like the divine right of kings, and the earth is the center of the universe. And those things that have been considered self-evident have turned out to be not true at all. J.L. Mackey wrote, the greatest weakness of this otherwise attractive argument is that some reason is required for making God the one exception to the supposed need for something else to depend on. Why should God, rather than anything else, be taken as the only satisfactory termination of the regress? According to John Hick, the family of cosmological arguments does not compel us to believe that there is a God, for one may opt instead to accept the universe as a sheer, unexplained fact, because we are accordingly faced with the choice of accepting God or accepting the existence of the physical universe itself as a given unintelligible and mysterious brute fact. Hick rhetorically asks, why, however, should we not take the physical universe itself to be the ultimate unexplained reality? Do you all understand his objections, first of all? I'm going to answer these in the order they were given. To Loftus' statement that Thomas' proof does not take into account the Big Bang Theory, which proves the universe had a beginning, thereby making Thomas' argument irrelevant, we note that first of all, if Loftus grants that the universe had a beginning, then what caused this event? Indeed, whatever begins to exist needs a cause, but the universe began to exist, therefore it needs a cause. In the nature of the case, the cause must be something beyond the cosmos, and this fact mitigates if it does not destroy Loftus' metaphysical naturalism. I have no idea why Loftus would bring in Big Bang cosmology here. I find that strange. Aquinas, and I go on to point out that Aquinas would welcome, he would have welcomed an argument for the beginning of the universe since he believed in the classical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. He believed that. He just didn't think he could prove it. And so he is not arguing in an irrelevant way because he believes, let me back up and just read what I've written here. Thomas' argument is not irrelevant in a world that has seen the rise of Big Bang cosmology because first of all, it demonstrates the existence of God while accepting a major traditional atheistic premise, the universe is eternal. Sort of like arguing against atheism with one hand tied behind your back. That's why it's not irrelevant. And if you look at the reactions to Big Bang cosmology that people have often given, they're constantly trying to come up with substitutes that would allow the universe to be eternal. I mean, Sean Carroll, for example, wants to believe that we are a bubble off of a baby universe, we're a baby universe It kind of is a bubble off of a mother universe. So we come from another universe. Our whole universe itself evolved out of that one. And it just goes on forever ad infinitum, right? But you see, if our universe is that, then it is changing and therefore it is contingent. And therefore the question still remains, what is sustaining it right now? Not what kicked it off. I'll give you eternity. The question still is, what is causing it right now? And that's the problem. And then, second of all, Thomas proved does what few other arguments are able to do. It demonstrates that our universe requires an eternal sustainer of its existence and not merely a creator. Now, Thomas spoke of eternal creation, and I think that that's just a manner of speaking. I don't think that that's very helpful for us. We make a distinction between preserving the universe in being and creating it or bringing it into being. And what Thomas' argument does is it mitigates if it does not totally destroy deism. Deism is the belief that God made the universe and just sort of left it to evolve on its own. By the way, think about how spatial concepts enter into that picture of God anyway. So you have a God who exists in a pre-existing space creating the universe and then walking away from it. That's incoherent, right? If God created space, then he couldn't really walk away from the universe anyway, right? But in any case, what you have in this argument is a refutation of the idea that God is indifferent with respect to the universe. He's sustaining it right now. And therefore, this argument is extremely relevant to other philosophical theisms that are floating around out there. Questions about that? Regarding inertia, we grant that Thomas's ways were originally cast in what is often regarded as an outdated Aristotelianism. Newton, according to many, has shown us that motion can be taken as a given and hence does not necessarily require a cause. Our response is that we have already taken this kind of criticism into account in our reconstruction of the arguments. We start not with the phenomenon of motion, but with the fact of contingent being, which, as we have seen, even Kant A proponent of Newtonian physics says it needs a cause. Phenomena in motion may not require a cause, but anything that is contingent does. But then again, we submit that anything in motion suggests its contingency, and so, while Thomas' favorite argument needs to be modified in light of modern physics, we suggest that his basic point is sound, hence our reconstruction. We observe that we live in a world that is constantly in motion, but motion is a kind of change, which is a fundamental feature of contingent beings. Also, these motions we observe are of only finite duration, and they could have been otherwise, suggesting that they actually are while having the potential to be other than they are. Now, things or events or processes and so forth that are changing, finite and mixed with actuality and potentiality, just are contingencies. And anything contingent needs a cause. Thus, all that is in motion, since it is contingent, depends upon that which is unmoved. And this all people call God. Yeah, go ahead. is that, okay, sure, maybe things in motion don't need a cause, but anything that does exist need a cause, and anything that happens to be in motion does exist, therefore... The only thing I would say about that is you're going to have to modify the existent, because if you say anything that exists needs a cause, then of course the question would be what causes the uncaused cause. Or, to put it another way, if everything that exists needs a cause, then there is no uncaused cause. I mean, the argument just is a refutation on the idea that everything needs a cause. It's the atheist who says everything needs a cause. And the theist says, no, not everything. There's one thing that doesn't. And since motion is, by definition, a contingent state of affairs, you see something in motion, you're seeing something that could not be. unless you're conceiving of an eternal motion. At some point, it's something that's just always been. Well, even the universe, if it is an eternal motion, I would say needs a ground. So I would say that the uncaused cause is wholly unmoved, if you want to use the language of motion. There's no movement in the one that is necessarily eternal. The one that is contingently eternal can be eternally in motion. And that infinite motion would be contingent upon the uncaused or unmoved mover. I mean, if you want to look at it another way, think of, think of, you can look at the unsustained sustainer and its relationship to the universe in two ways. Think of a clock. Think of, you can imagine or at least conceive of a clock with an infinite number of parts all in motion. Right? But then there's that, That one crank, that one thing that sets everything in motion, but it never started setting it in motion, it just has always been in motion, right? Another better analogy might be music. The relationship between God and the universe is like music. The instrument plays a note, and as long as the instrument is playing the note, the note exists, right? Stop playing your flute and there's no notes to hear. Well, imagine God is the ultimate cause of the universe and the fact that he sustains it in being and it stays in being like music is staying in being. It's a grand concert. Well, if that was going on from all eternity, like notes in motion from the instrument, you would still have to have a ground for all that motion. Does that help? One of the things that Ed Fazer has pointed out, and now I'm going to quote from his book on Aquinas. He's pointed out that you have to make a distinction between the illustration of a point and the point that you're trying to prove. To put it another way, what Aquinas is doing is he's actually trying to prove a metaphysical theory, okay, that there's a real distinction between existence in essence and all contingent reality. And therefore, contingent beings do exist, and therefore, they're dependent upon an uncaused cause. That's what he's trying to prove. He uses Aristotelian physics to illustrate his point. But the illustration is not to be confused with the proof. So just because Thomas used Aristotelian physics to prove his arguments or to illustrate a point he was making, that does not mean that his metaphysics stands or falls on Aristotelian physics. So even though we generally think that Newton removed the need for Aristotle, that doesn't mean that Thomas's argument is invalid because Thomas's argument is not dependent upon Aristotelian physics to work. Why? Because he was just using it as a illustration of his point. I just gave the illustration, for example, of a musician playing a note with their instrument. Does my metaphysical theory depend upon there being instruments that can play notes? Does it? Wouldn't my theory be totally valid if music didn't exist? Isn't the fact that I can conceive of a universe, a very drab, bland universe, where music doesn't exist, isn't that proof that music is contingent and needs a cause, right? So in other words, just because you use a point to illustrate a point doesn't mean that the illustration is the grounds upon it, so that if you refute the presuppositions of the illustration, you thereby refuted the whole system. If the illustration is the point, then the illustration is the argument. But an illustration and an argument are not always the same thing. And here's a quote from Fazer. He says, it is also sometimes thought that the findings of modern science, which have refuted various assumptions of Aristotelian science, thereby refute Aristotelian metaphysics. But that is a non sequitur. Aristotelian physics is one thing, and Aristotelian metaphysics is another. And they do not stand or fall together. Even if some of the scientific examples in terms of which Aristotelians sometimes explain their metaphysical notions have turned out to be false, such as the idea that the Earth sits motionless at the center of the universe, there is no essential connection between the metaphysical notions and the scientific examples, and the former can easily be restated in terms of better examples. Nor is the possibility of empirical science advanced nor was the possibility of empirical scientific advance denied by the scholastic thinkers as if they thought that science of their time was infallible. Now here's what Aquinas says. As Aquinas himself says, and this is very important, with respect to the Ptolemaic astronomy accepted in his day, he says this, the suppositions that these astronomers have invented need not necessarily be true. For perhaps the phenomena of the stars are explicable on some other plan, not yet discoverable by men." So Aquinas himself agreed that there may be a time when his scientific assumptions about the world would be shown to be false. But that did not perturb Aquinas at all from stating his metaphysical views because his metaphysical views are independent of those scientific assumptions. All right, any questions about that before we go forward? On 197, I continue, Michael Martin is wrong in his analysis. Thomas does not take the existence of God as a given, nor is the existence of a first cause self-evident for Aquinas, as we saw in chapter 2. In other words, Aquinas rejects the ontological argument. The reason Martin thinks it is, is because no experience has yielded the existence of a first uncaused cause, but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we are able to validly infer the existence of an uncaused cause from experience, and that we can, for we know that contingent things exist, hence we know that they need causes, or things need causes. There cannot be an infinite regress of caused causes, for every member of a contingent series is caused to exist by another, and so the whole series of contingent causes must be caused to exist by another. The cause of the series is not contingent, for then it would just be a part of the series and not the cause of the whole series. And the cause of the series cannot be self-caused, for that is impossible, and therefore your only option is to say that the cause is uncaused. Hence, we do have a non-question-begging reason why there cannot be a non-temporal infinite regressive causes. So while appeal to self-evidence may very well be looked upon with suspicion, Our argument does not make such an appeal and hence should not be looked upon with suspicion for that reason. As for Mackey's insistence that some reason be given for why God is the exception to the need for a cause or why God is the termination of the regress, we reply that first of all, it's not as though we asserted the existence of God without proof and then claimed that he's the only being who is uncaused. Rather, we started with the existence of contingent beings, inferred an uncaused cause from that fact, perfectly open to the idea that there could be more than one uncaused cause, and then deduced the attributes of this being on the basis of purely rational considerations. But these attributes just are those of the theistic God, therefore God exists. Nor are we saying that God is the exception to the need for a cause. For if he were contingent, then he too would need a cause." In other words, if I were saying that God is the exception to the need for a cause, what I would be saying is this, God is a contingent being and he just so happens to not need a cause. He's the only contingent thing that doesn't need a cause. Now, if I said that, y'all would rightly look at me and go, well, why is God the exception? Right? But I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that God is a contingent thing that needs a cause. I'm saying that he is a necessary being. And that is precisely why he does not need a cause. Right? Necessary beings don't need causes. That's what makes them necessary. And God is the quintessential necessary being. In fact, I think he's the only. necessary being. He alone is pure actuality with no potentiality. Does that make sense? This is why I tried not to use the word God through most of the argument until I got to the attributes and even then not until I got to omniscience. Does that make sense? We proved the uncaused cause first and then said, well, is this God? We didn't say, huh, I can't explain everything. Well, I guess there must be a God that explains everything. Well, what explains God? Well, he's the exception. I didn't say that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it depends on what you mean by that, I guess. The principle could be an idea that whatever is contingent needs a cause. In which case, that idea is eternally resident in God's mind. Right? But if by contingency, if by the principle of contingency, you simply mean the fact that contingent things need causes, like there are contingent things and they need causes, well then yeah, he would be the cause of that fact itself. Yes. He is the originator of all truth. And our study of the Trinity should help you out here because we don't say that God is the cause of his ideas. He just is one with all of his ideas. Remember, he's simple. Yeah, exactly. All right, Hick suggests, I'm on page 198, Hick suggests that the universe may itself be the unexplained or uncaused reality. But we have seen that the universe just is the sum total of contingent existence, thus it cannot be the uncaused cause. However, some may object to our definition of universe. And some people, this is, I alluded to this when we were arguing, I said, just go with this, we'll get to it. But I said that the universe is the sum total of all contingent existence. But some people might say, well, why should we define the universe that way? You're being arbitrary, right? Perhaps we can simply stipulate that the universe is the sum total of all that is. Incidentally, the very first essay I ever wrote on this issue, I took a course on Thomas Aquinas my very first year in seminary, and I wrote a paper on this argument. And I went against the argument. And why did I go against the argument? Because I was convinced by JL Mackey's notion, and even John Hicks' notion and others, that you're being arbitrary by defining the universe as the sum total of contingent reality. If you define the universe as the sum total of all that is, the atheist slips through the net of the contingency argument. And so I'm going to go ahead and read what I've written here, but I will just go ahead and tell you that years later, I read R.C. Sproul's book, Not a Chance, and he got me rethinking the argument. And so it was R.C. Sproul that kind of forced me to go back and think, well, maybe there's more to the argument than I originally thought. So here's what I have to say. I said, perhaps we can stipulate the universe as the sum total of all that is. Maybe there are some parts of the universe that are caused while others that are uncaused. Why don't you say that? Hence, it could be the case that a series of contingent causes exists that is being caused by an uncaused cause. And maybe that uncaused cause is within the universe rather than beyond it. Or in Davies' words, Paul Davies says, in a sense, that contingency argument falls a victim of its own success. For suppose we enlarge the definition of universe to include God. What then is the total explanation for the total system of God plus the physical universe of space, time, and matter? In other words, what explains God? So we're back to that question, what is the cause of God? What explains God? Now I point out this, I say if one wishes to define the universe as the sum total of existence, one must still conclude that the entire series of contingent beings that currently exist depends on an uncaused being for its existence. For as we have seen, even an infinite series cannot be a sufficient cause of itself. Thus, even if the cosmos is the sum total of all that is, God would exist within the cosmos, but he would still exist. Are y'all catching that? It doesn't matter how big you draw your circle. If your circle includes contingent things, those contingent things need causes. And so even if you put God in the circle, he's still going to be the cause of all those contingent things. So you're not escaping God by drawing your circle bigger. Now, if we define the universe in such a way as to include our understanding of God, must we conclude that God is somehow bound to the universe? That's the next question. That he is not transcendent with respect to the cosmos? No. For as we have seen, transcendence is not a term theologians have traditionally used to refer to either God's physical stature, for he is immaterial, or location, because God is omnipresent and immense. So when we say God is transcendent, you can't use spatial ideas to communicate or convey that idea to yourself. Remember, all knowledge of God is analogous. It is not univocal, and therefore transcendence is not a spatial location up there, out somewhere. So putting God in the universe does not make God less than transcendent. R.C. Sproul writes this, he says, when theologians say that God is a transcendent being, they mean that he transcends every created or caused thing ontologically. He is a higher order of being precisely at the point of his being. The specific point is that he is self-existent and eternal. He's the eternal power of being, and he has the eternal power of being unto himself. He is uncaused, he is self-existent. I mean, is God in the universe? Of course, God is omnipresent and immense. And therefore, Sproul goes on to explain this. He says, if we speak of the universe in these terms and seek to locate something within the universe that is self-existent and uncaused, the ultimate source of causal power from which every effect in the chain derives its existence, then we must be careful to define what we mean by within. Such a self-existent being may be contained within the concept of universe, if we were using the first definition of universe, all it is, but it still must be regarded as ontologically transcendent to all that is contingent upon it. It is within the concept of the word universe, but it is not within the concept of the created or cause universe. If we postulate some arcane, unknown, pulsating source of the power of being within the universe, we are still speaking of something that is beyond the rest of the universe in terms of its being. Its location may be within, its being is above and beyond everything else. In each sense, God is immense. All that he is is in, with, and through the universe. We can only wonder why this sort of objection could ever bother anyone, let alone a theist. Of course, theists tend to define the universe simply as the sum total of contingent existence. Thus, God is broadly understood as the uncaused cause of the whole universe. But regardless of how one defines the word universe, it is appropriate for one to understand God as transcendent in his causal relationship to everything else that exists within the cosmos. He causes our contingent, Cosmos, to be. This is my conclusion of the argument. Our man in the cave, Thomas, knows very little. His world is dark, with few, if any, distinguishing tastes, sounds, smells, or sensations. But, as we illustrated in chapter three, Thomas can know one thing about his circumstances, namely, that he is a being dependent upon others for his existence. But it is irrational to think that any series of dependent things can go on infinitely without any ultimate ground. Therefore, there is something upon which the whole chain of contingent beings depends, itself independent of all else. This independent being is either free to choose, whether or not to cause the existence of every dependent being, or it is not free to cause them to exist. If the latter, then it is obviously not wholly independent of all else, and hence it's merely a part of the chain of dependent reality. If the former, then the absolutely independent being is personal, for impersonal beings cannot make genuine choices. It will not be long before Thomas will ascribe all the properties upon his independent and personal cause that we know are true of the God of classical theism. Hence, Thomas, despite his circumstances, has all he needs in order to know that the God of classical theism exists. St. Thomas Aquinas was a man who asked all intelligent people to get in touch with their senses. and to simply trust what they are communicating to all of us. It is undeniable that something exists, and our senses reveal to us a world of change, finitude, and dependency. The things we see admit of a composition of actuality and potentiality, but since all such things require a cause, the changing and composite world we see must be sustained and preserved in being by He who is pure act, lacking any and every form of passive potency. Extreme rationalists often get locked in their own ideas, dwelling on truths far removed from this world, and hence are unable to interact with the changing cosmos around us. There is little wonder that so many rationalists become pantheists. Radical empiricists will only admit what they can sense is real, gluing their faces to the ground, and hence are unable to infer anything beyond what they see. There is little wonder that so many empiricists become atheists. Tomism gives us the balance that we so desperately need. It neither launches the mind into the stratosphere of universal ideas which can never see the truth, nor does it chain the soul to the soil of concrete things which can never reach the skies. It insists that our ideas have a reality to them because they subsist in he who is. It also grants that the concrete things we can sense are real, and it is precisely because we know them that we can know their uncaused cause. As Chesterton once wrote, Thomas teaches us that man is not a balloon going into the sky, nor a mole burying merely in the earth, but rather like a tree whose roots are fed from the earth while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars. Thus we commend Thomistic theism to the reader, a worldview which begins the search for truth in the soil of our undeniable experience, ending in a knowledge of the one who infinitely transcends our changing, finite, and dependent existence. Now our lesson, we have about 20 more minutes or so. But that's basically the argument in a nutshell. And I really think that you guys are going to look at these objections that we're about to give an overview for. I'm handing them out to you right now. You're going to look at these objections. And I think that in looking at the objections to the domestic argument, you can only increase your faith in it. So there are three of you, so there are three chapter fives to hand out. But before we do, anything you'd like me to answer in terms of shifting gears or what have you? I'm the only one that I know that's gone through all these objections like this. And what I mean by like this, I mean not just stating the objections, but actually giving you the quotations of the scholars who articulated them. I did find myself. I did find myself going, well, why? I did ask myself, why are we, why don't I look at this critic and this critic and this critic? Why don't you look at Schopenhauer? Why don't you look at, and as I was looking at these atheist critics of this argument, I became more and more aware of the fact that I was just repeating myself. So after I got to a certain point, I was like, there's just no more arguments for me to look at. And so I just kind of stopped where I did. I think I looked at 25 objections to the domestic argument here. So again, before we start, any questions? Let me start with a quote by Immanuel Kant. He's the greatest critic of the argument, and this is what he says. In this cosmological argument, there are combined so many pseudo-rational principles that speculative reason seems, in this case, to have brought to bear all the resources of its dialectical skill to produce the greatest possible transcendental illusion. You're deluding yourself into thinking that you can reason to an infinite being this way. And so I'm going to go through these arguments. First, no thorough and unambiguous version of the contingency argument has ever been given. It is sometimes objected that the contingency argument is too vague or lacks a number of premises that would make it sound or does not really give us the God of classical theism. The words of Gordon Clark are typical in this regard. And Gordon Clark, arguably the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century, at least before the coming of Alvin Plantinga and people like that. Gordon Clark was a presuppositionalist of sorts. He was a pure rationalist. And he hated Thomas Aquinas. He thought, Thomas, if hell has a hall of fame, Thomas Aquinas may very well be the gatekeeper. And a lot of this arises out of the fact that Clark was very much a committed reformed theologian. And so this is why he held to the views he did. This is what he says. He says, those who today accept the cosmological argument will immediately deny that its fortunes are indesirably connected with its formulation by Thomas. There are other ways to state the argument, they claim, so as to avoid any error that Thomas may have stumbled into. If this were true, one would expect to find this unimpeachable formulation somewhere in the published writings of its defenders. But the fact of the matter is that no such formulation can be found. There are references to the argument or the cosmological argument, there are discussions of it, and there are summaries of it. But the full argument itself, with none of the steps omitted, seems never to have been put onto or put into print. By the way, that's the line, that's the quotation that inspired me to write that earlier chapter. But I do point out that this is just not true. It just isn't true. If you flip the page, Thomas, before he arrived on the scene, we have before Thomas Aquinas, Moses Baimonides, who based his proof in 26 propositions. Thomas himself gave a number of versions of the proofs in his various writings, some more thorough than others. And incidentally, Thomas, does not stop his proof with the proofs. The proofs actually carry on into his distillation of the attributes of God. And this is a false reading of Thomas. What happens is you open up some summary of his writings in an anthology somewhere, and it has just one little page of all of his proofs put there. And people roll their eyes and say, I didn't prove anything. Well, of course not, because you didn't get a chance to read everything that he has to say on the topic. The summa contra gantiles, Thomas gives a very thorough rendition of the unmoved mover argument in chapter 13 of volume 1. And in the rest of the volume, he goes on to explicate what this unmoved mover is. So this kind of exposition is in the original literature. I'm not the first person to do anything like this. Samuel Clarke gives anything but an unrefined and not so thorough rendition. John Locke, if you read his essay on human understanding, he is a pretty thorough rendition of this argument. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Stuart Hackett, and then after the publication of Clarke's work, we have Bruce Reichenbach's book, The Cosmological Argument of Reassessment. Mortimer Adler's How to Think About God, and we have Norman Geisler's Philosophy of Religion, and these are not exhaustive. This is not an exhaustive list of works. There have been plenty of books out there that have given a thorough, unambiguous rendition of the argument. I go on to give you the outline of the argument as I've already given it, and then on page 204, I say that Clark insists, with a host of others, that the uncaused cause proven in the argument is not the living God of traditional Abrahamic theism, since the uncaused cause has no qualities of transcendent personality. But notice that this is also false. Indeed, that the God proven here is a transcendent personality is shown in two ways. First, by elimination. Notice that the proof gives us a God. Therefore, atheism is false. The proof is a proof. Therefore, agnosticism is false. The proof gives us a distinction between two kinds of reality, necessary and contingent being, therefore pantheistic monism is false. The proof gives us a God who is independent of the universe, therefore panentheism is false. The proof gives us a God who is unchanging, hence it is false to say that everything changes, therefore Buddhism and all forms of process philosophy are false. The proof gives us only one God who is infinite, therefore all versions of polytheism are false. The argument gives us a God who is the efficient cause of the cosmos. Therefore, Aristotelian and Platonic versions of theism are false. Finally, the proof gives us a sustainer of the universe. Therefore, deism is false. The true God is our only option. But of course, you could reverse it. You could just look at the premise H. I give you the attributes of that God. Those attributes are not possessed by any other God. So what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to say, well, this is the living God of Abrahamic theism. This is what we've proven to exist. All right, any questions about that? We are now at what I'm going to consider the last objection we'll look at today. And I've said this before, if you scratch an atheist, he's gonna itch like a pantheist. Okay? Well, here's my argument for that. Here's an illustration of the point, if you will. Not an argument, but an illustration, right? On page 205, here's the objection. Matter is not contingent. Matter is not contingent. That's a first move that some atheists make. Now, remember I pointed out to you that atheism is the belief that all is contingent, and pantheism is the belief that all is necessary. However, once you start pointing out the implications of what it means to be contingent, and once you draw out the implications of contingency, and show that an uncaused cause must transcend the contingent realm, you are now faced with a very hard dilemma. And so what do most atheists do? They will almost always bite the bullet and go back and deny the original premise. The first premise of the argument is actually crucial. In fact, I repeat the words of Norman Geisler, if you think about it, it's easier to prove that God exists than that you exist. And I'll give this argument again several times, but just to go ahead and give it now. If you think about it, if something exists, then something is necessary. Because anything that exists is either going to be contingent or it's going to be necessary. And therefore, if you discover that there's a contingent, let's say that you say, well, if something exists and if something that exists is necessary, then guess what you found? You found God. But if you say, if something exists and the something that exists is contingent, then guess what you found? You found a way to God. Contingent beings have causes, and therefore God is the cause of them. So if you think about it, this argument is not really an argument for a necessary being. This is an argument for contingent beings. The crucial premise of the whole argument is not even D, that there's not an infinite regress of contingent beings. The crucial premise is premise A, that contingent beings exist. And to illustrate the point, look at what George Smith does. This first metaphysical objection attacks the first premise of the contingency argument when it says that matter is not contingent. Namely, at least one contingent thing undeniably exists. A few atheists, however, wish to deny this contingent, insisting that there is at least one thing in our world that is not really contingent, even if it appears to be. In other words, he's saying nothing is really contingent, even if it appears to be. George Smith tells us that the existence of matter is unconditional, for there is nothing else for it to depend on. He says, It is true that man would cease to exist if the sun moved away from the earth, but this does not mean that man would collapse into nonexistence, that the constitutional elements of his body would completely disappear. Rather, the chemical composites that form the entity man would decompose, and the functions of this entity, such as respiration and consciousness, would cease to exist. At the risk of sounding Aristotelian, We may say that the entity man represents a certain form of existence, and this form is contingent upon causal conditions. But the substance of man, the irreducible atomic constituents that compose man, do not depend on anything. They do not risk disappearance, nor do they exist because something else exists. They simply exist. Materialists have often contended that the substance of matter, its irreducible elements, is uncaused while the form it takes, like grass, trees, animal bodies, and so forth, is caused. This would mean that matter as such is unable to cease existing, though its forms can and do cease existing. Materialists would then say that this book, myself, oxygen, and so forth, are things that need not be. But we are merely forms of that which must be, matter. Thus matter exists uncaused and without explanation, while its various forms exist as caused things which require explanation. Indeed, the first law of thermodynamics states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Hence, matter is necessary. The implication of Smith's contention, of course, is not only that the first premise of our argument is not undeniable, it is not even true. Nothing is really contingent, therefore there is no real distinction between necessary and contingent reality. Now before we get into the answer, do you have any questions about that objection? Does that make sense to all of you? Yeah they start with that. Matter is neither created nor destroyed and therefore matter is our ultimate. Everything is reducible to matter. Sure, I mean, we would say, OK, fine, if matter is neither created nor destroyed, then the universe is eternal. Fine. So what? I mean, as far as this argument is concerned, so what? Anything else? All right, well, here's the response. First, let us assume that Smith is correct in everything he says. Let's just assume it. The substance of matter is necessary, and there is a distinction between the form and substance of matter. What would we have to conclude about matter, given this assumption? We would have to conclude that matter is uncaused and immutable. That is, there is nothing that causes it to be, and its form changes, though its substance continues to remain the same. Also, it is one, unlimited, and omnipresent reality. Matter is everywhere, existing in and through every form it takes. Matter is independent, for it is uncaused. So while the substance of matter, its irreducible atomic constituents, is necessary, its form is contingent, the forms of matter are actualized by matter itself. These forms in and of themselves need not be, only matter must be. Thus the form of matter is contingent upon the substance of matter. If the substance of matter were not, the form would not be. Thus there is one necessary and uncaused matter actualizing the potential of its forms. Notice also that the substance of matter is qualitatively different than or distinct from its forms. Why is it qualitatively distinct from its forms? Because from all eternity, the substance of matter has been necessary, but the forms of matter are contingent. Hence, from all eternity, the substance of matter could have existed without any of its forms. Hence, from all eternity, the substance of matter could have existed without any of its forms, and therefore matter substance is without form. It is necessary, it is one, omnipresent, immutable, and is the cause of every contingent form. From all this, we must conclude that material substance is invisible, for no one has seen matter at any time. We have only seen its forms. The one and only George Smith, who dwells in the bosom of matter, he has revealed material substance to us. Some of you see the illusion. That's John 118, by the way, so I'm being funny here. Why does the substance of matter cause its forms? The principle of determinism states that when two occurrences are equally possible and one obtains rather than the other, then the reason one obtains rather than the other is due to the actions of a personal and free agent rather than an impersonal and mechanical agent. But the possibility that material substance will cause its forms is equal to the possibility that it will not cause its forms. So why are the forms caused? The best explanation seems to be that the substance of matter is a personal agent who chooses to sustain material form and being. Hence, there exists one personal, invisible, formless, and uncaused matter that is necessary, omnipresent, and immutable. This sounds familiar. Indeed, if we say that matter is necessary, we begin to predicate all the attributes upon it, or him, that theists predicate upon God, and a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. And here I'm reminded of a line from Calvin's Institutes. He says, non-theists set God aside all the while using nature, which for them is the artificer of all things, as a cloak. that you can't escape God's existence, right? We're not sure how Smith or any other materialist would respond to this line of reasoning, but it seems that he has three options. First, he can insist that the form of matter is just as necessary as the substance of matter. Thus, he could say that while the individual forms that matter takes are contingent, it is nevertheless necessary that matter have some form. That is, while it is not necessary for material substance to take the form of stars, oxygen, people, and books, and so forth, it is necessary that it take on some kind of form. Hence, there is no qualitative distinction between form and substance. But we have three problems with this response. First, we do not think that a distinction between individual material form and general material form is a good one, for if any materials were to make such a distinction, it would be ad hoc. Two, even if we adopted such a distinction, we end up saying that general material form is necessary, while individual material form is contingent, and thus would entail that general form is qualitatively distinct from the individual forms it causes, which in turn brings us back to the theistic conclusion. And third, even if the first two problems could be overcome, we are still left asking why these individual material forms appear in the universe rather than others. Indeed, it is equally possible for matter to take on its present form as it is for matter to take on any other form. And if that is the case, then the principle of determinism would entail that general material form is personal. A second response that materials might give to the above argument is that the substance of matter is not qualitatively different than its forms, for it is so united to its forms that it cannot exist without them. This would either, A, take us back to the distinction we just discussed, that is, that individual material forms are necessary, even though it is necessary that matter take on some form. They are unnecessary, though it is necessary that matter take on some form. Or, B, bring us to the conclusion that the substance of matter is somehow dependent upon its forms. If the former, we come once again to the problems already discussed, if the latter, then we must conclude that the substance of matter is dependent, after all, and hence contingent, and therefore caused by something other than itself. If such is the case, then the necessary being transcends matter. A final response Smith could give is to simply insist that contingency is just an illusion of the mind. No form of matter is contingent or necessary, nor is the substance of matter contingent or necessary. Everything that exists just is, and that's all. However, we have already refuted the claim that the changing world around us is illusory. Also, if everything just is, then everything is necessary. And finally, the reader must see the irony in all of this. Here we have an atheist telling us not to trust our senses when they reveal a contingent world to us. While the theist has always known that one good way to arrive at a knowledge of God is to simply look around him and notice that everything is in flux. In this sense, the atheist walks by faith and the theist walks by sight. I'm going to stop here. I hope that's probably an earful for all of you anyway. But before I stop, do you all have any questions? Well, okay then, I hope we can meet tomorrow, not tomorrow, we are gonna meet tomorrow. We're talking about angels in Sunday school, but I hope we can meet next week and I'll see you guys.