Where the theists go wrong is in positing that the chain of causation has to have a beginning, an unexplained First Cause. But the chain is infinite. Of making many explanations there is no end; every successful explanation immediately poses the next question, and turtles. The ultimate mystery—why does existence exist?—lies beyond the realm of causal explanation: not merely unexplained (yet), but intrinsically inexplicable.
God is simply a convenient name for this unreachable, unknowable, transcendent Truth Beyond Understanding, outside the infinite chain of explanation. Our scientific endeavors add links to our chain of knowledge and understanding, but do not—cannot—put us any closer to explaining the Inexplicable. There’s nothing to do but shrug your shoulders and live with it.
We do have a scientific First Cause: the Big Bang. And when I ask questions like why exactly it happened 15 Bn years ago and not earlier or later, I am told we not only don't know the answer yet, but the answer is fundamentally unknowable, because spacetime did not exist before the Big Bang, so a cause before the Big Bang did not exist.
At this point we have three choices:
1) Swallow that an uncaused natural event happened, a huge exception from the idea of causality.
2) Assume a supernatural cause, supernatural things don't need to be caused themselves, only natural things need a cause, supernatural very much means uncaused, exempt from the laws of nature like causality, so it is kinda neat. (This supernatural cause does not need to be god-shaped. It does not need to be personal or judgy about people and so on. Call it Tao.)
3) Bring back Aristotelean causality. Our modern theory of causality accepts only the efficient cause, that happens in time before the effect. An Aristotelean final cause happens after the effect.
Theoretical physicists aren't content with the Big Bang as a final explanation, though, so they use exotic math to model what came "before" that event or to combine Einstein's theory with quantum mechanics. This shows science at work with the endlessness of natural causes.
Where the theists go wrong is in positing that the chain of causation has to have a beginning, an unexplained First Cause. But the chain is infinite. Of making many explanations there is no end; every successful explanation immediately poses the next question, and turtles. The ultimate mystery—why does existence exist?—lies beyond the realm of causal explanation: not merely unexplained (yet), but intrinsically inexplicable.
God is simply a convenient name for this unreachable, unknowable, transcendent Truth Beyond Understanding, outside the infinite chain of explanation. Our scientific endeavors add links to our chain of knowledge and understanding, but do not—cannot—put us any closer to explaining the Inexplicable. There’s nothing to do but shrug your shoulders and live with it.
We do have a scientific First Cause: the Big Bang. And when I ask questions like why exactly it happened 15 Bn years ago and not earlier or later, I am told we not only don't know the answer yet, but the answer is fundamentally unknowable, because spacetime did not exist before the Big Bang, so a cause before the Big Bang did not exist.
At this point we have three choices:
1) Swallow that an uncaused natural event happened, a huge exception from the idea of causality.
2) Assume a supernatural cause, supernatural things don't need to be caused themselves, only natural things need a cause, supernatural very much means uncaused, exempt from the laws of nature like causality, so it is kinda neat. (This supernatural cause does not need to be god-shaped. It does not need to be personal or judgy about people and so on. Call it Tao.)
3) Bring back Aristotelean causality. Our modern theory of causality accepts only the efficient cause, that happens in time before the effect. An Aristotelean final cause happens after the effect.
Theoretical physicists aren't content with the Big Bang as a final explanation, though, so they use exotic math to model what came "before" that event or to combine Einstein's theory with quantum mechanics. This shows science at work with the endlessness of natural causes.
https://tinyurl.com/5d5kbmar