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the Cosmological Argument
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The Tetragrammaton, YHWH, is a verb. The name God condescended to put into human language had a tense, was in the first-person, and wasn't a "person, place, or thing" but an action.
'I AM WHO I AM' is the translation of the Hebrew 'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh (YHWH is the transliteration). Ehyeh is the first-person, imperfect form of the verb "to be" while 'asher is a relative particle. English contains neither an imperfect verb tense or a relative particle
A central theme of this website is that it is more rational to believe in God than to not believe in God.Many of the posts will revolve around rational explanations for belief because the purpose of the website is evangelical: it seeks to address the concerns of atheists as well as Christians who have left the faith because of intellectual skepticism. In our postmodern world however, there are many other epistemological bases - foundations of knowledge or belief - other than pure reason. This thoroughly insightful post, was written by a friend and delves into such a view.
The biggest - and most valid - objection to the Cosmological Argument is the issue of the inevitable Infinite Regress it engenders. If everything had a cause, then what was the first cause? Christians or theists say “God”. Atheists then ask from whence came God? And where did the thing that created God come from? And so on, ad infinitum: ‘there are turtles all the way down’ so to speak (for those who get the reference).
Aseity is the concept that something can exist uncaused by anything else. The term itself was coined by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages but the concept exists in Judaism and Islam and predates Christ, first appearing in written history with the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras and Plato believed certain abstract, non-physical concepts or ideals existed outside of and independently of our physical world and are ‘uncaused’. These include things like numbers & mathematics (Pythagoras’ ‘forms’) and essences of things like ‘redness’ (Plato’s Forms). Parmenides simply argued that everything had a cause and ‘nothing could come from nothing’ and therefore existence itself had to be eternal and uncreated.
Aristotle observed that the world around him was in a state of constant flux – that everything was in motion all the time. He developed what has come to be known as the Cosmological Argument in Book 8 of Physics although elements that contribute to its understanding can be found throughout his writings especially Book 12 of Metaphysics.
Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic Priest, a Dominican Friar, that lived in Italy in the 13th Century. He was the best and most well-known philosopher in the Western Canon for 1,500 since the Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and Plato in 300 B.C.
2,500 years ago, around 525 B.C., Paremenides was one of the earliest great Greek philosophers. Pre-dating Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle by 200 years, his only known work is a poem entitled “On Nature” of which only fragrments survive.
In the Beginning was the 'Logos' and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God...All things were made through [the Logos], and without [the Logos] was not any thing made that was made. In [the Logos] was life,a and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.