This is the fourth article I have written as part of an ongoing debate with Mr. Adrian Thysse on the reasonableness of Christian faith. Mr. Thysse raised some very potent objections to Christianity in his response to my first article. This is getting very good! (and providing me with plenty of blog fodder) I’ll attempt to address his objections below. Mr. Thysse’s full comment can be read on my first post in the series, The Faith of Reason. To make it easier to follow, I have cut his comment into sections and placed them in block quotes.
As to your point that “…Christianity is ultimately reasonable…”:
1. God is not a good explanation for the beginning of the universe. We do try to answer the question, but the origins of the universe is not “a question that you must answer.” Science may not know, but it is more honest to say “We don’t know” then to ascribe it to a God. We are then still left with the question – who created God?
I’m sorry if I came across as “you personally must answer this question, now“. I merely meant that the origin of the universe is a question to be contended with and that science is incapable of doing this.
I think it is more honest to say “we do not know” than to say that “there is no god” as in, the seven on the Dawkins Atheism scale. There is also a difference in knowing something through deductive logic and knowing through inductive reasoning. Almost if not, all that we know, we know through induction. Interestingly, much more emphasis was placed on inductive logic throughout the classical, medieval , renaissance/reformation, and the enlightenment ages. It is only in the last two-hundred years or so that deduction has eclipsed inductions as the primary means of proving something in philosophy. But that was a rabbit trail.
To ask “who created God” is to assume God was created. The reason you might assume God was created is that we have no experience (baring “supernatural” experiences that some claim to have) with anything outside of nature. In nature things have beginnings and ends, they are finite. God is by definition infinite and outside of the scope of nature. God is supernatural. It is logically possible that God was created but it is not logically necessary.
This is why I believe that the universe must have been created. It must have had a beginning in something outside of nature because nature by virtue of being natural and following certain natural laws, does not spontaneously create itself. The big bang points to a finite beginning and some have theorized that there exists a never ending cycle of big bangs and big squishes leading to more big bangs. This just leads us to an infinite regression of squish, bang, squish, bang, squish, bang, ad infinitum. This cannot be a natural process because all natural processes have beginnings. This leads us to a dilemma, either the universe and nature do not really exist at all, or they were created by something outside of nature, something supernatural.
Admittedly this argument does not immediately lead to the conclusion that that supernatural universe starter was Jehovah, God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. It does however, lead to the conclusion that there is something other than nature.