> It reminded me of a long run of visits I had from some JW's when I was > doing my finals in 1997 (a man needs some distraction when studying and I > hadn't found Perl then... Oh, and the woman was a babe). They wanted to > convert me to Christianity and I wanted to convert them to Atheism. Seemed > like a fair deal but neither of us got very far.
Atheism is just a crutch for people who can't deal with the fact that there's a supreme being. ;-) > I finally thought of the question that seemed to be somewhere near the root > of their belief. I asked them: > > "If God created the universe, who created God?" > That's one of the more interesting questions. The medieval theologians charactarised God as the 'prime mover', i.e. the first in a causal chain of events. It's not unreasonable to suppose that there was an initial cause - after all, infinite series can still have beginnings and ends. You quickly end up in a not-at-all religious discussion of what constitutes 'an event', and other metaphysical topics that are very much in the domain of analytical western philosophy and logic and not really much to do with the God of the bible, if you like. None the less, there is more cross-over between the domains than is popularly imagined. In particular the early Christian theologians took a very rigorous and logical approach to their discussions. Jon, who rarely gets to talk about medeival phiosophy any more.... P.S. The play Jumpers by Stoppard is on at the NT right now. Deals with just this topic in a highly clever and amusing way.
