{"href":"http://player.captivate.fm/services/oembed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fplayer.captivate.fm%2Fepisode%2Fe903177d-a49e-4084-b284-fd9af7dc9dfe","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Captivate.FM","provider_url":"https://www.captivate.fm","width":600,"height":200,"type":"rich","html":"","title":"Episode 248 \u2013 Does the Abrahamic God exist?","description":"
\nIn this episode, Hugh Harris and Matthew Su debate the existence of the Abrahamic God.
\n
\nAfter the podcast, Matthew kindly provided a transcript of his opening 10-minute address.
\nThe \u2018Cosmological Argument\u2019- a non-technical presentation
\nGood evening!
\nIntro
\nI\u2019d like to thank our host, Trevor, and my opponent, Hugh, for inviting me on the show tonight. The kind of God whom I hope to defend here is the God of broadly Abrahamic tradition: a single, all-powerful, all-knowing, \u200ball-loving \u200b creator and sustainer of reality. I think that this God\u2019s existence is accessible to reason, and these reasons can be shared even with those who do not initially accept the faith. Of course, if anyone has any questions about how distinctively Christian ideas about God relate to the broadly \u2018Abrahamic\u2019 God, I shall be happy to field them during Q&A.
\nIn this debate, I hope at least to show that belief in God as the Christians conceive of him, is backed by sound reasons, and that the arguments can withstand rational scrutiny even today, in the age of the internal combustion engine and the electric telegraph.
\nThe Cosmological Argument
\nSo I think we\u2019ll get the most bang for our buck by focusing on one argument: the Cosmological Argument, which looks out into the world for some general feature of things, in virtue of which they do not exist in themselves, but depend upon a single being which is recognisably what we should call \u2018God\u2019
\nThe Cosmological Argument as I will present it has two parts:
\n1. First, a \u2018cosmological insight\u2019, which points to a feature of reality which could only come from an independent thing or things.
\n2. Second, the \u2018The back end,\u2019 where we reflect on the attributes of the independent thing, which lead to one another and paint a picture of a single being we should rightly call \u2018God.\u2019
\nThe kind of argument I shall make is not what you might be used to. I will not attempt to trace the origins of things backward in time. Rather, I am going to look \u2018downwards,\u2019 toward a most-fundamental being here and now keeping things in existence, like a musician playing music. If there is such a being, then whenever the first moment of time was, God was its concurrent source- this argument gets at the source of the beginning, by a different route.
\nPart I: Contingency and Composition
\nNow, all cosmological arguments are ultimately arguments from contingency. By \u2018\u200bcontingency,\u2019 \u200b I mean that feature of things where they don\u2019t exist in their own right, but \u2018through\u2019 something else. Contingent things are \u2018contingent upon\u2019 something else. For example, \u200bI \u200b don\u2019t exist in my own right, since when you take away everything which isn\u2019t me, I wouldn\u2019t exist either. Just imagine it for a moment: The water in my body isn\u2019t me. You can tell that the water isn\u2019t me because when you take out all the water, you\u2019ll still have the water, but not me. I am dependent in part upon this water for my existence- take it away, and I die.
\nYet when we think about it, no individual part of me, is the same thing as me either: so if I were to exist truly \u2018on my own,\u2019 you would have to take away my organs and limbs, even the thoughts I have, and even the atoms which make me up. What we\u2019re left with, when we try to think of me apart from everything that isn\u2019t me, is nothing at all. It\u2019s precisely because I am absolutely nothing without other things, that I am \u200bcontingent \u200b , and at every moment where I exist, I can only be coherently said to exist \u200bin relation \u200b to other things.
\nNow, the things on which I depend might themselves depend upon further things. My organs depend upon my atoms, which depend upon fundamental forces, and so forth, forming a hierarchy of dependence.
\nWe might think of the hierarchy of causes upon which I depend at any particular moment, like a chain of borrowers, where each borrower has all their assets (that is,","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://artwork.captivate.fm/085762e2-797c-4ef4-9b10-434ecde61c07/logo2018v2.jpg"}