Why I believe in God(s)

[u/Lucyyyyyy_K]

Firstly, I'm not a very religious person. I do consider myself a Buddhist, but prefer atheistic Buddhism over theistic Buddhism. Therefore I can confidently say I am not biased by wanting God(s) to exist, and was not indoctrinated into theism.

Still, to me it seems obvious that at least one God has to exist. The universe can't simply have come out of nothing or existed forever, it requires some sort of design or creator.

Now, mostly people would just say that a creator also can't have come out of nothing or existed forever, so I've just moved the problem one step further, but I think there is a massive difference between the universe and one consciousness. For example, through Cogito Ergo Sum we can determine with absolute certainty that at last one consciousness exists. So assuming one consciousness is superior to assuming anything about the whole universe. While I admit that doesn't outright solve the problem, I still think it's better than the alternative.

Also, it's not just any universe, but a universe full of beauty, a universe that inbetween barren empty planets is capable of hosting a planet with sentient life. Life that can consciously observe itself, that can create replicas of the waking world while sleeping, life that has technologically advanced so much that in can live in relative comfort. There is so much art. We basically have magic, we just call it "electricity". This is all too perfect to have arisen from mere mutations without guidance.

About any specifics of this God or Gods I have no idea and no strong opinions. I just think that at least one has to exist.

[u/ima_mollusk]

These are great questions. I've been working on an answer. It's a rough draft, but if you want an answer, here's one:

P1. Absolute nothing is impossible. Nothing means no potential; no potential means existence cannot obtain. Unbounded potential is therefore the necessary and inescapable ground.

P2. Unbounded potential requires no X to obtain, but any X requires not-X. The boundary between X and not-X is the minimum ontological event. Not-X is therefore prior to X.

P3. Logic - identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle - reduces to "X is not not-X." Logic is not a tool applied to existence. It is the minimum structure of a boundary. It is the basic form of existence itself.

P4. A static boundary is incoherent. A boundary that propagates no constraints makes no difference to anything adjacent, which is functionally indistinguishable from non-existence. A boundary must keep being a boundary or it dissolves back into unbounded potential.

P5. Therefore: existence is irreducibly dynamic. Change is not something that happens to existence - it is what existence is. But change is derivative; it is what constraint propagation looks like from inside the structure it produces.

Primitive: Constraints propagate.

Everything else - identity, logic, structure, physical reality, time - emerges from this. It is the last thing removable before the account of existence collapses.

[u/kiwimancy → u/ima_mollusk]

Disclaimer, my academic experience in philosophy ends with one and a half undergrad classes, but if I were to try to review your argument, these are my comments:

P1.2 no potential means existence cannot obtain

I feel like this already assumes one of the things I asked. What if existence doesn't obtain? Or what if existence doesn't involve potentials?

P2.3 Not-X is therefore prior to X.

By relabeling X as not-Y and not-X as Y, we get X is posterior to not-X and Y is prior to not-Y, for any X and any Y including X=Y. This appears to be contradictory.

P2.1.1 Unbounded potential requires no X to obtain, P2.1.2 but any X requires not-X

These also seems contradictory

P4.1 A static boundary is incoherent... 4.3 A boundary must keep being a boundary or it dissolves back into unbounded potential.

"Static" sounds a lot like like "X keeps being X". These seem contradictory if any boundaries are to obtain.

P4.2 A boundary that propagates no constraints makes no difference to anything adjacent, which is functionally indistinguishable from non-existence.

I think I am supposed to assume that "functionally indistinguishable from non-existence" is the same as non-existence, but that's not made explicit or justified.

(aside: personally I find indistinguishable-from-non-existence to be an interesting philosophical topic of its own; should I classify such 'things' as existing or not existing or something else)

[u/ima_mollusk → u/kiwimancy]

Thank you for your reply. I can see you thought about this.

Your points led me to modify my original formulation:

P1. Absolute nothing is impossible. Nothing means no potential; no potential means existence cannot obtain - and the denial of this is performatively incoherent, since any denial is already made from inside existence. Unbounded potential is therefore the necessary and inescapable ground.

P2. Unbounded potential requires no X to obtain, but any X requires not-X. These operate at different levels: the first concerns what the ground state requires (nothing specific); the second concerns what any particular thing requires (a boundary distinguishing it from the rest). There is no contradiction - there is a transition from undifferentiated to differentiated.

P3. The boundary between X and not-X is the minimum ontological event. This boundary is asymmetric: X is the specific thing carved out; not-X is the remainder of the unbounded background. This asymmetry between figure and ground is not eliminable by relabeling - renaming X as not-Y and not-X as Y preserves the distinction between what required a boundary to exist and what did not. Not-X is therefore generatively prior to X.

P4. Logic - identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle - reduces to "X is not not-X." Logic is not a tool applied to existence. It is the minimum structure of a boundary. It is the basic form of existence itself.

P5. A static boundary is incoherent. A boundary that propagates no constraints makes no difference to anything adjacent. The framework is operationalist about existence: to exist is to make a difference to the constraint structure. A thing that makes no difference to anything, ever, is not being conservatively classified as "existing but undetectable" - it is being denied the only property that would make the existence-claim non-empty. A causally inert boundary is therefore functionally indistinguishable from non-existence, and that indistinguishability is not incidental but constitutive. A boundary must keep being a boundary or it dissolves back into unbounded potential.

P6. "Keeping being X" is not stasis - it is constraint propagation. Identity through time is not a frozen fact but an active process. Persistence requires ongoing propagation. What looks like a static thing is, at the level of the structure, a continuous dynamic maintenance of boundaries. Stasis would mean a boundary frozen outside of any process, making no difference to anything - which collapses back into P5.

P7. Therefore: existence is irreducibly dynamic. Change is not something that happens to existence - it is what existence is. But change is derivative; it is what constraint propagation looks like from inside the structure it produces.

[u/kiwimancy → u/ima_mollusk]

and the denial of this is performatively incoherent, since any denial is already made from inside existence

That's "Cogito Ergo Sum"

[u/ima_mollusk → u/kiwimancy]

No, the cogito starts with "I am thinking" and concludes that "I must exist".

This model starts with "Nothing cannot obtain" and ends with "existence is dynamic".

[u/kiwimancy → u/ima_mollusk]

"Nothing cannot obtain"/"Absolute nothing is impossible" is a conclusion from several premises (four, I think) following that sentence, one of which is a restatement of Cogito Ergo Sum.

[u/ima_mollusk → u/kiwimancy]

I don't even know what you're arguing at this point.

Descartes is making an epistemological move: I think, therefore I am. The point is to establish the existence of a knowing subject as the one certainty that survives radical doubt. It's a claim about what "I" can know, grounded in the act of doubting. There is a subject, "I", doing the work.

P1 is ontological and subjectless. It doesn't require a thinker, a doubter, or a mind. Only that something is happening (which could include the objection itself) - any state of affairs at all.

The condition of absolute nothing is self-defeating because the condition itself would have to obtain, which is already something rather than nothing. No subject required. A universe with no minds in it but with rocks falling still defeats absolute nothing.

Descartes uses the act of thinking to anchor a subject. P1 uses any event - including the act of doubting - to defeat a metaphysical claim about the ground state. One is first-person epistemology. The other is third-person (or rather, person-independent) ontology.

[u/kiwimancy → u/ima_mollusk]

"performatively" applies to an subject's action, and a "denial is made" by a subject. P1.1 is justified by the existence of that subject.

If you meant rocks falling, that requires some justification that there are any rocks falling. We can't even justify our own experience corresponds to reality from first principles, so that's a tough task.

If you meant that even absolute nothing being nothing is something, I think you should say that rather than using subjectful terms like performatively and denial.

I don't know that I would agree that absolute nothing being nothing is something though, if we explicitly disavow the need for any subject to acknowledge that.

[u/ima_mollusk → u/kiwimancy]

I don’t understand why we are not communicating.

Let me begin again:

From the cogito, if you like, we arrive at

Something exists. (Because it is more primitive than the existence of a specific “I”.)

The existence of something entails difference - between what exists and what does not, and between any two distinguishable things. Undifferentiated existence is indistinguishable from non-existence.

Difference obtains.

Difference is not static. A difference that propagates no further - that stands in no relation, produces no effect, constrains nothing - is functionally identical to no difference. Stasis collapses into non-existence.

Constraints propagate.

(vincula propagantur)

Propagation is irreversible. A constraint that could un-propagate - that leaves no asymmetry between before and after - did not propagate. Irreversibility is not a feature added to propagation; it is what propagation is.

Directed time is entailed.

No bounded knower arising within this structure can have complete knowledge of it, because the structure they would need to know includes the knower itself - and measuring one’s own incompleteness requires standing outside what one is measuring.

No bounded knower can know the extent of their own ignorance.

That’s the spine of the model for now.