Tag Archives: First Cause

Who Has Seen The Wind, Or Cause and Effect

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The first time I encountered this poem was when Yoko Ono intoned it, as only she could, on the B-side of John Lennon’s Instant Karma!, back in 1970.

I noticed at the time (because I always read such things, while playing the B-sides of singles) that the poem’s composer was someone called ‘Rossetti’. Back then I knew nothing about him or her. Years later, I came across Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist but it turned he didn’t write the poem either. His sister Christina did.

Christina Rossetti was profoundly religious. She set about helping fallen women: ‘fallen’ according to the sexual mores of the day. A number of these young girls may well have been ‘led into sin’ in the first place by her hell-raiser brother, Dante. Her poem Who Has Seen The Wind, written in 1847, is an allegory of the work of the Holy Ghost: as the wind itself can never be seen, only detected by its effects, so too the Holy Ghost can be sensed only by its invisible workings in the real world. It’s an old argument, hinted at in Psalm 19:1, which says the heavens declare the handiwork of the Lord. Modern versions of the argument exist, based on the philosophical assertion that every effect must have a cause, including one that equates God with a murderer, 

It’s a terrible idea in all its forms. First, we know the wind, and murderers too, exist. The wind can be measured and the processes involved in creating winds of various strengths are well understood. Likewise murderers (as tempting as it is to equate God with a callous killer.) The inference that the cause of any given effect must be supernatural – a Ghost, a god, an angel – is mere primitive instinct. Even more unjustifiable is the leap that says this supernatural cause is The First Cause, which itself has no cause. A further leap into the absurd is the assumption that this uncaused First Cause is a God who was first imagined by middle-eastern tribesmen and later reshaped by early Christians and the church.

Which brings us to God: The Science, the Evidence, a new book by a Christian scientist, Olivier Bonnassies and industrialist Michel-Yves Bolloré, proposing that because we don’t fully understand how the universe came into being, it must have been God. Bonnasaries explains how they arrived at this conclusion:

It’s the fact that this (piece of paper) exists. And that because it exists, it needs a cause, and that (cause) needs another cause, and at the end, you need what we call a primary cause in order that everything exists. Because nothing can exist by itself.

Except, apparently, that cause designated, without evidence, the First Cause: God.

It is this, Bonnasaries and Bolloré claim as a scientific hypothesis. Bonnasaries must surely know as scientist that it is far from scientific. ‘God did it’ is a conclusion, arrived at without evidence; there is nothing observable, testable or measurable about it. It is philosophical conjecture at best, theology at worst. Christina Rossetti put it so much better, all those years ago (but still she got it wrong).

 

Why God could not possibly have created the universe (pt 3)

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Sun

Posts here and here considered two reasons why Christians’ claim that their God created the cosmos is preposterous. A third reason is that –

God as creator leads to an infinite regress.

Christians like to assert that everything that has a beginning has a cause; the universe had a beginning therefore it had to have a cause. That cause – watch the unwarranted leap of faith here – can only have been have been their god. My previous arguments notwithstanding – that God needed to create everything from nothing (which according to Christians is impossible) and the immaterial cannot produce the material – the notion that god caused everything begs the question, as Richard Dawkins points out, of who caused his being. If, as Christians like to argue, everything has a cause then their god must have one too. Their assertion that he is the exception because, by definition, he has no beginning and consequently has no need of a cause is merely special pleading; why should he be different from everything else?

Christian apologists – William Lane Craig, for example – always assume that the first cause is their god, without a beginning and need of a cause. Their thinking goes as follows: everything that exists has a cause; the universe must have had a first cause; this first cause was somehow sentient; we are going to call this sentience ‘god’; this god must be our god, YHWH.

Yet they provide no evidence that there is, or was, a first cause; there could have been several contributory causes, including chemical, physical (gravity, for example) and activity on a quantum level. They then make the unwarranted assumption that this cause must have been sentient, again without evidence, and load this presumption with further insupportable connotations when they label it ‘god’. Finally, they make another leap of faith by claiming this ‘god’ is their god, YHWH.

This is all so much special pleading, insisting everything has a cause except the thing Christians don’t want to have had a cause. But God cannot be excluded; he too must have a cause (and indeed he does). So who or what caused him and gave him his start? And who or what created whatever it was that created god? Who or what created that? And on into infinite regress.

Those who offer such arguments put the proverbial cart 613.772 billion years before the horse. As Richard Dawkins says in The God Delusion, intelligence and creativity have only ever arisen as a result of evolution, specifically the evolution of the (human) brain. We know of no other means – there is no other means – by which intelligence and high-level creativity are produced. For a creative, super-intelligent mind to exist prior to the beginning of everything is, therefore, an impossibility. As I suggested in the second part of this series, the physical always precedes the immaterial; the natural world produced the advanced human brain about 200,000 years ago, and that brain has, ever since, projected its gods backward to the beginnings of the universe. This does not mean that a being without a beginning was actually there, much less that he produced the whole show. It means we know the cause of god. It is us.