Looking over the “recipe” again, I notice one thing I failed to notice earlier; at no point have you formally defined the uncaused cause as God. That’s a weak step, but if you actually want to use that argument to argue for monotheism (instead of merely the presence of an uncaused entity, nature unknown) then I think it’s a necessary step. Some of the assumptions necessary to eliminate multiple uncaused causes are a bit weak, but I think that you have a very good argument that somewhere in the history of the universe there must be at least one uncaused cause of some sort.
No, I omitted that step for reasons discussed in the earlier thread: this gives too weak a “God” to be any interest to anyone, and is downright confusing.
The only way I can think to get back to some form of traditional theism is to add a premise saying that “every entity not of type G has a cause” (insert your favourite G) and then perhaps to pull the modal trick of claiming all the premises are possible...
Looking over the “recipe” again, I notice one thing I failed to notice earlier; at no point have you formally defined the uncaused cause as God. That’s a weak step, but if you actually want to use that argument to argue for monotheism (instead of merely the presence of an uncaused entity, nature unknown) then I think it’s a necessary step. Some of the assumptions necessary to eliminate multiple uncaused causes are a bit weak, but I think that you have a very good argument that somewhere in the history of the universe there must be at least one uncaused cause of some sort.
No, I omitted that step for reasons discussed in the earlier thread: this gives too weak a “God” to be any interest to anyone, and is downright confusing.
The only way I can think to get back to some form of traditional theism is to add a premise saying that “every entity not of type G has a cause” (insert your favourite G) and then perhaps to pull the modal trick of claiming all the premises are possible...
Okay, that’s reasonable.