> My problem with all of Aquinas' arguments is that they all seem to go roughtly along these lines:
>
> 1) Something (be it order, or matter, or motion) cannot come from nothing
> 2) Everything was once nothing
> 3) But we have something now
> 4) Therefore, a Something caused everything
>
> It seems to me that (4) must violate either (1) or (2), and without either of those the proof loses its teeth. In any case (2) is somewhat suspect; it seems to come from the Aristotelian (and wrong) notion that there can be no motion without external force to sustain that motion (External forces are required for a *change* in motion, but a particle can go along its merry way forever if no force acts to slow it down or change its direction).
>

Er... Non sequitur. I don't follow. What does Newtonian mechanics (i.e. the first law of inertia) really have to do with #2, "Everything was once nothing"? Do you mean that Aquinas made a similar mistake to Anselm, and confused the concept of 'existence' with having motion?


> (1) only holds true if we take "nothing" to be something even less substantial than the vacuum of space; even the vacuum has some energy associated with it. Additionally, as far as I know, (delta E)(delta t) >= (h-bar/2), so something can come from nothing whenever it wants, as long as it's not a lot of something or it doesn't stay very long.
>

And also (delta x)(delta p) >= (h-bar/2). I guess, as long as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has now been invoked to give the Something-can-come-from-Nothing argument some 'teeth,' I wonder if someone could re-derive these equations for us, showing their proper relevance to the issue? (I would, if I hadn't sold my Addison texts years ago. :-)


> Besides, these arguments, ... they aren't inconsistent with God ceasing to exist right after the creation of the universe.
>

Good point. I suppose I have a secondary bias towards Payley's Teleological viewpoint ("the watch implies a watchmaker" argument) in order to buttress my Aquinian Cosmological bias. Even skeptics will often admit to experiencing a degree of awe with the way that the natural world apparently demonstrates synchronicity with itself; we can't help it. Actually, strong proponents of causal determination (like myself) have no problem with natural selection being the method used that produces organic design in living systems. Natural selection isn't as random and mindless as people typically picture it to be.

Wolf "still can't help think that serious determinism bears a striking resemblance to strong theism, though" spirit