Thursday, August 16, 2007

The argument from infinite regress

As a practicing atheist there is one argument against the existence of God, very much favoured by the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, that has never really impressed me: Who created the creator?

It has always struck me that the question Why is there something and not nothing? is fully reversible. If you look closely at the structure of the cosmos, nothing is actually harder to explain than something.

In Spinoza's metaphysics God is literally everything. And that essentially answers the question.

I suppose the most fundamental difference between my kind of atheism and Richard Dawkins's kind is my recognition that any credible cosmology ultimately has to take a transparent view on the balance between physics and metaphysics.

It also strikes me as interesting that neither Dawkins or Hitchens give any real consideration in their respective polemics to the putative role of the Devil; and it is a significant ommission because both implicity blame the monotheist's God for all the evil in the world.

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