Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Nov 24, 2025 10:18 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 24, 2025 6:06 am
Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Sun Nov 23, 2025 8:54 am
Well, if you accept it's an hypothesis, we do agree.
Right. Wrong word. Let's just call it what it is: "the infinite regress of causes impossibility mathematics." Labourious, but much more correct.
I gather that Immanuel believes God is the single first cause that originally caused time, space, and force. Without time, space, and force there could be no
change from one state of reality to another state of reality.
Well, if time and space come before the Creation of matter, then we're not going back far enough. For time only exists when there are at least two particles of matter, plus a space between them that can become time. This interstice can be a physical one or a chronological one, but if there's no such interval, then neither can we speak of their being such a things as "time," I would suggest.
Moreover, if time and space pre-existed God, then we would have to say they were the 'cause' or at least 'preconditions' of God, which means we now are talking about a contingent, not necessary god, not THE God, not the First Cause, and not the Supreme Being, either. And the actual Supreme Entity would be time and space themselves, not God.
The Gnostics have a belief that would resonate with that, in that they believe in a contingent, fallible, dependent creator called a "demiurge." And behind him, they say, is only a great unknown thing called (various things and) "Abyss," about which nothing can possibly be said or thought.
But that's certainly not the Christian view.
This is not infinite regress but to the contrary implies that God is finality, Alpha and Omega, the transcendent unchanging Cause at the beginning and end of time, space, and force.
Yes, that is what the infinite regress mathematics would cause us to conclude: that "Something" had to be before all created things, including time and space. That "Entity" could not itself be contingent, dependent or caused, since that would cascade into the incoherence of infinite regressions again, and thus signal that we had no cogent explanation for origins at all.
Even the Gnostics grasped that there had to be a First Cause. They just thought it was something mysterious and unknowable, rather than a conscious, purposive, personal God.