Q&A: God
God
Question
One of the proofs for the existence of God is the fact that the world was created, and if so, one must say that there was someone who made it (or, for that matter, exploded it into being). After all, we can plainly see that it is impossible for something to come into existence by itself (in our world, at least). My question is: if we are talking about a world that preceded this world we know, maybe there were altogether different laws there, and the fact that something was created does not necessarily mean that there was someone who created it. I would be glad for an answer, and thank you very much in advance.
Answer
I discussed these proofs at length in the booklets and in my book The First Existent. There I ruled out all these possibilities. Briefly: if there is something prior that created our world, then that is God. You call it a “prior world,” but that is only a name. This proof for the existence of God establishes the existence of something that created the world, and you too are saying that there is such a thing. It does not enter into the question of what it is or what its nature is.
Discussion on Answer
That too is discussed there. All things in the world familiar to us are not self-caused. Therefore it is implausible that they came into being on their own, or that they were not created at all (but rather always existed). The assumption of the principle of causality is not a result of observation (because observation does not really yield it, as David Hume showed), and therefore it is not part of physics. It is a principle rooted in our reason, and from there it also comes into physics. In any case, if things come into being or happen without a cause, then there are no laws of physics. Those would not be different laws, but the absence of laws.
But perhaps there was nothing there at all that created the world, and the world came into being on its own, because the only thing preventing us from saying that is simply the fact that we assume there must be a prior cause for everything; and perhaps our assumption is mistaken, and there everything operated according to different laws of physics?