Could A Priori Knowledge Prove a God Exists?

joseph January 15, 2012

This is a very serious article for me; I take logic and critical thinking as a thing of great import. Unlike some other articles where I write it from a perspective of teacher to student, this topic runs in the realm of students talking over a topic with no teacher in the room. Let’s all be honest, no one knows if a god exists or not, NO ONE. People might believe and feel they have good reason to yet they cannot produce empirical evidence. Non believers or atheists might have no belief in a god yet they must leave room open for the chance of a god existing (barring very specific definitions of god of course).

I am not a Believer

I have no belief in a god. This is a position I have arrived it with no light hearted effort. I have studied Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in depth. I am not a self proclaimed atheist because this label is ridiculous in nature. My opinion on the label “atheist” is too detailed and deep for this article. We just needed to establish where I am on the idea of a belief in god. As of yet no person on the planet has given me reason or evidence to believe in their god.

A Priori Knowledge

A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be logically deduced from other knowledge alone. We can best understand it by making an example with fake words and subjects. Let’s use Glipglop as a noun and Riggley as an adjective:

“All Glipglops are Riggley”

It is a necessary quality that a Glipglop be Riggley. If a Glipglop was not Riggley then it would no longer be a Glipglop.

Could A Priori Knowledge Prove a God Exists?

Let’s look at all the above requirements and see what conditions would have to exist for this scenario. A priori statement concerning god would have to be a statement that would make the existence a necessary condition of the premise. As an example let me make up a statement:

“All matter is dependent on god”

The problem here is that while if it is true it would be a priori we have not made a sound logical statement. That is to say, we have not proven the premises. In the above statement we also have no prior reason or evidence that matter has a dependency on a god. Let’s look at another a priori statement:

“All bachelors are unmarried”

This is an a priori statement in that from this we know that being unmarried is an essential quality of being a bachelor. Now back to the god statement…we would have to prove the essential dependency of matter on a god. The reason the bachelor statement is so easy to discern as a priori is that human beings have created the term bachelor and we are the sole determining factor on the condition.

God as an Adjective

If god is an adjective of matter it would be a quality of matter which makes matter what it is. Most believers think that a god would be sentient and really this idea is kind of what makes a god a god. So then back to the sample a priori god statement; a god would have to be a sentient state of being. This god would be the necessary attribute of matter existing. I am not saying that this is proof or that this is a real a priori statement, I am just exploring the qualities of a sample statement that may or may not be true.

Invitation to Believers

Any believers out there want to take a swing at this? I would be very interested if there are any convincing a priori statements involving a god existing.

Thinker
I think the following is strong evidence for the premise that everything that begins to exist must have a cause:
If we reject the idea that everything begins to exist has a cause, then we are asserting that:
Everything that begins to exist has no cause
Then
we will be saying that everything begins to exist out of pure
randomness. If we say that things happen out of pure randomness, we are
saying that all the infinitely many possibilities that exist in the
universe, are all equally possible (that is, after all, what randomness
is). It is sort of like a fair dice with infinite sides. With an
infinitely-sided die, no matter how many times you roll it, you will
never observe a pattern. Even if you have a million infinitely sided
dice, and you roll each a million times, you will still NEVER have a
pattern, no matter how macroscopic you go. And if a pattern is observed,
it MUST be concluded that the die is not fair. This is just based on
the rules of prior probabilities (a priori). However, the world we live
in has patterns, from our breathing to the rotation of the planets.
Therefore, the universe is not random, and the premise that holds that
everything that begins to exist must have a cause holds true.
It is still possible to achieve patterns in a random universe (at the macro level) if there is a restrictor, who restricts the number of possibilities to a finite number. In such a case, the randomness that occurs within each restriction at the micro level becomes irrelevant, for it is the restrictions that shape the occurrence of reality now. Either way, we will need a cause. Either way, a universe without a cause is IMPOSSIBLE.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_G3MYQV4BJCQIQNBMQENBQLCMIE nmstevens
  The alternative to “Everything that begins to exist must have a cause” need not be that “everything that begins to exist has no cause.” It could simply be that, “Some things that begin to exist have a cause and some things don’t.”
  This is especially true because the Kalam argument conflates the form of “begins to exist” when describing those things with which we are familiar and the universe.
  All things with which we are familiar that begin to exist (which is, of course, the basis of the broader inference) do so only in the sense of their *form* beginning to exist. The “cause” (in the sense of “causing to exist”) works upon some pre-existing material to bring about a change, producing the existence of something new. And all of this occurs within the universe as part of nature.
  “Cause and effect” — of which this is a description, is a natural law, that operates “within” the universe, as all natural laws do.
  Yet for this larger inference to work — that is, that the *universe* itself, was caused to exist, we have to alter our usage of the term. Now we have to believe that causality works in the absence of any pre-existing material upon which to bring about a change. We have to believe that it works in the absence of time and space.
  We also have to believe that “cause and effect” — a natural law which, like all natural laws, is strictly an aspect of the universe, somehow pre-dates the existence of the universe and was in operation, operating before there even was a universe or any other natural law, acting, in the absence of time, space, matter, or energy, somehow upon — well, upon what? — to bring about its creation.
  I’m afraid that this simply doesn’t make any sense.
  NMS
  - B
    It doesn’t make sense unless you assume the existence of God as the foundation of your worldview. If one does this, there is a possible explanation that cause existed outside of the world ‘as we know it’. Without first positing God’s existence, I propose that every attempt to explain the existence of the universe and everything in it is inadequate.
- smile:)
  I don’t think randomness also means that all events involved are equally likely to happen- why should they be? Randomness is just things happening for no reason. You could look at the event of rolling a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 on a die as an example: the outcome is random and there is no reason for it to happen, but it is more likely to occur than rolling a 1.
- Lucas Procee
  Everything that has a beginning has a cause, I think that is obvious. We have never observed anything coming into existence without a cause, and even if something had come into existence without a cause in the past, we cannot determine that it did because it is not repeatable or observable.
:D
Just here to give my penny of opinion on this. I am not an english nativ so excuse any typing errors ;D
You said there is a need for a what you called a restrictor, but if you do not need such an assumption. You said the beginning was random and there are a great many scinetist who think that this could be true, as that the naturelaws are for each universe random.
But now you said because you can see a pattern in the universe someone must have made it so that you can be and observe thet pattern. That is wrong you can see the pattern because the naturelaws are so there is a pattern that that allow for live like us and so that you can observe the pattern :D
Let me give you an example. If the strong interaktion of the nuklear cors were just a little bit stronger the first stars could not start the fusion from hydrogen to helium. Instead there were just really big gas balls and where they would be big enough a black hole. But you had a universe with no elements heavier than Lithium. And so no live like we know. There would be a pattern but you could not observe it. There is a restriktion in the combinatination of the nature laws so that there is a working system.
And there is no need for an restrictor to achive the universe we can see. The strong and the weak core force, the gravity and the elektromagnetic force can do this just fine. The gravity holds the planets in theire orbits, the strong coreforce holds protons and neutrons inside the cores and so on. Ok there are some things we can not properly explaine like how the dark energie and the dark matter influence the accelerated expansion of the universe but we will understand some day :)
And there is not always the need for a cause. The Quantenmechanik allows in the pure vakuum (that is a simplification such as pure vakuum does not exist) for the random emergens of elementar particles and theire sudden destruktiuon short after. I am just a novice in this but belive me the Quantenmechanics are craisy. But what I want to say is there is a lot we just not understand jet and things like infinite systems are expacially hard to discribe.
Believe Romans 623
The proof that God exist is that without God you cannot prove anything.
Visit ProofthatGodexists.org for a logical proof that God exist.
- thanatoid
  In other words, Something is a circle if it is round because if something is round it is a circle.
saj
Joseph, I think your thought process, although intelligent, is based on empirical evidence. You believe in what is apparent, what you cab see and touch. But there is also ‘feeling’ something Charles Darwin didn’t have ‘time’ to explore, because ‘time’ itself is a rule.
Putting that aside for a moment, throughout history, we had people from different parts of the world, who had different cultures and lifestyles but came with the same message of God and that message was documented in books. The fact that they never knew each other but knew the same message makes one wonder how?
These miraculous scriptures are now empirical evidence and just as an example there is mentions of over a hundred and thirty thousand messengers and prophets.
The message is clear and even the likes of Aristotle questioned First Cause and there is no real answer for that today. And the ‘something for nothing’ theory is flawed by its very nature. Let’s say for arguments sake something did come from nothing, how can so much chaos and violence create perfect order. An example for this would be that if I broke your mobile phone into hundreds of little pieces and then placed them in a carrier bag and shook that bag for eternity, or placed it under extreme heat or exposed it to different gases or baked it, it would never form a functional phone in exact uniform.
peace. (disclaimer: there is complusion in Islam, if you choose to believe then good for you, if not then prepare yourself for a roasting! lol just kidding. God gave us all free will I will respect your beliefs if you respect mine! peace and love to all)

Logical & Critical Thinking

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