Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Cause and Effect

One of the more important aspects of logic is the idea of cause and effect.* In case you don't know, cause and effect is when one thing causes another to occur. For example, if I type the letter E on my keyboard, an E appears on the screen. If I play an E on my (musical) keyboard, the resulting sound will be the E note.

However, there's more to cause and effect than is commonly realized. Basically, it proves the existence of a god. Not necessarily any specific god, but simply that there must be a creator. It does that in this way:

In the above example, I press an E on my keyboard, and so it appears on the screen. Pressing the E is the cause. However, I pressed the E for a reason. This means that the cause had a cause of its own. For example, I want to finish the word "the." Why do I want to write that word? Well, because it's part of a sentence I want to finish, which is part of a paragraph, which is part of a chapter, which is part of a book that I want to finish. So why do I want to write the book?

This can keeping going further and further back, all the way to the beginning of time. This is the clue: "the beginning of time." All of reality had to have a cause. That means something had to intervene in the middle of all the emptiness in order to cause the world to exist. Several qualifications are required to do this.

1. that thing must have existed perpetually, therefore having no cause.

2. that thing must be powerful enough to be a cause

Coincidentally, these happen to be two important attributes of a god. So there must be a god. The question is, what god? Is it possible for us to begin to grasp this god, or does our perception make sense?

More on that tomorrow,
Mitchell


*If I get "effect" and "affect" mixed up, I apologize. Just go ahead and comment on it so that I can be publicly embarrassed.