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Hi DavidHenry and welcome to Olio,

Essentially you seem to be saying to me that I should accept what I outlined as the QRS answer and that I should be satisfied with "It just is". Well perhaps that satisfies you but it leaves me pretty cold: all of this existence around us and the best understanding that I can have of how it is that it exists is simply to accept that it does? What, no explanation is possible? I don't know how you can realistically expect me, a naturally curious chap when it comes to ultimate affairs, to be content with that state of (lack of) understanding.

That written, I have the feeling that probably there is no rational answer to the fundamental question, or at least that it's humanly impossible to discover one. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised, but it's been thousands of years since humans first started thinking about these things and no one has yet stumbled upon a generally accepted Final Answer, or at least none that has become widely known. Once upon a time (in my childhood and adolescence) I dreamt about discovering the answer purely through thought, but these days I'm skeptical that it can be done, QRS claims to have achieved this notwithstanding. I guess that you'd disagree with me though - you seem to be content with your thought-based answer.

There's plenty of fun in store for you in debating and disagreeing with QRS - a pleasure that has been denied to me since my banning although Dan has agreed to debate me here when we open up our debating forum - stay tuned, it should be a lot of fun.

I have a lot of respect for logic, so let me logically examine the three alternatives that you propose.

1. God did it. There is nothing less logical in proposing an eternal, causeless God (the fundamental component of reality from which all other reality sprung) than in proposing that the universe itself is eternal and causeless. The only thing to recommend the latter rationally (but not logically) is that it eliminates an apparently redundant step (the creator), in favour of a simpler scenario with the same end result (an entity with the properties of an eternal and causeless nature). On the other hand, the former can be recommended rationally by such observations as: this universe has physical constants that are highly tuned to the emergence of biological life resulting in conscious human beings. Atheists like to counter this observation by suggesting the possibility that there are multiple universes with different sets of physical constants and that in such a set of universes it is inevitable that at least one of them will be amenable to life's emergence with "specially tuned" physical constants. The problem with this argument is that it suffers from the same problem that atheists typically have with the introduction of God (and which I expressed in similar terms above): it is an extra, unnecessary and speculative step.

Can we definitively and absolutely say that God does not exist? Of course not. What is this infinite regress of which you speak? God is not typically required - by those who believe in a God - to have a cause any more than you require the universe to have a cause. No logic is violated in proposing a Creator. On the other hand I find several logical problems with the typical Christian conception of God, so please don't think that I'm willing to accept the typical properties ascribed to God, but I'm perfectly willing to entertain the notion of a prime deity of some form or other. Also, please recall that as I wrote in my thread-starter, I still believe that there's something unsatisfying about this "answer", which boils down to "God (and consequently reality) just is", without a real explanation of how He (and consequently reality) exists.

So yes, I'm one of those agnostic types, and yes, I "doubt the power of logic" when it comes to answering the ultimate question, but I'm willing to use logic as far as I can take it, which basically to me means using it to discover contradictions in models, and to make deductions and inferences.

2. Something came from nothing but God didn't do it{magic}. This does indeed seem illogical at first to the human mind, however there is a precedent for it in current scientific models where in quantum physics particles and anti-particles "magically" appear from "nothing". I'm not a quantum physicist and I may have expressed this less than accurately, but that's my best understanding of what happens.

The issue really is that our minds are trained to believe in certain processes as "logical" and in certain other processes as "illogical". We hold it to be illogical that a thing can arise without a cause, but when you look at it, isn't it really the case that you simply cannot imagine such a happening to be true? What is the basis of that belief? Could it be a combination of the way that your brain is hardwired and the fact that all of your experiences to date have taught you that everything has a cause? How can you know absolutely that that kind of magic is impossible?

3. the universe is eternal. By this I presume you mean, as QRS do, that the universe has no beginning in time - that it has always existed. I have several times explained on Genius Forum the problem with this view, and that problem is - ironically enough given that you champion this option as the most logical one - a logical problem. For the universe to have already existed for an infinite period of time means that an infinity of time has been traversed, whereas such a thing is impossible - infinity cannot be covered like that, its nature is that there is always more to cover. If you read the last link that I provided you'll find that one of the podcast guests, Matthew Slick, arrived at this insight independently of me so that might give you grounds to consider it more seriously. Also consider arguments such as those based on the laws of thermodynamics - a universe that had existed for an infinite period of time would already have reached heat death and there would be no life in it.

DavidHenry, you are unjustified in your certainty in any one of these three options, and just because I currently can't think of another more plausible one doesn't mean that one doesn't exist somewhere - perhaps we just need a more evolved logic to perceive it.