Yet More Reasons I Believe in God

Contined from the previous three entries….

Alright, let’s move to the last of my more philosophically based reasons to believe in God before I get to the existential reasons.

9.  The impossibility of an actual, instantiated infinite.
This one can be a challenge to understand, but I think that the logical impossibility of an actualized infinite is proof for the existence of God.  In other words, there can be no such thing is a real infinite in the sense we know it, without doing serious harm to all of the logical presuppositions we use to make statements that convey meaning.  If a real, actualized infinite actually existed, the entire universe as we know it (from our epistemological sense) would break down.  Consider the following:

A. There is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and they are all filled.  (That is to say, every room is filled with at least one guest.)  When a person shows up at the hotel, and asks for a room, the desk clerk simply moves everyone else down one room, and gives the person at the desk a key.  The Infinity Hotel, filled to capacity, has now taken on another tenant without giving anything up.  (This is clearly a problem, logically, mathematically, and otherwise, not to mention the showers are always cold.)

B. There is a library with an infinite number of books.  A very industrious librarian comes and removes every other book, leaving only half as many books as before.  When the librarian leaves with the books they have removed, how many books remain?  If there are really an infinite number of books, removing half of them still leaves and infinity.  (This is also plainly impossible.)

If there really is no such thing as an actual infinite, there must be a beginning (at the very least), and now that we’ve demanded the existence of a beginning both metaphysically and epistemiologically, we are left with answers to explain that beginning.  The existence of a being or beings outside the system who constructed the system is one way (and I think the best way) to explain such a state of affairs.  William Lane Craig, who I think is a bright, bright man, uses the impossibility of an actual infinite as part of his Kalam cosmological argument, which originally came from Islamic scholars to prove the existence of God nearly 1000 years ago.  Craig has tweaked his argument to solve problems implicit in the Islamic formulation logically, but basically, the argument looks much the same.  The argument confounded the Christian scholars when it was first formulated, and men like Aquinas (a good theologian in his own right) couldn’t get around it, and so chose to ignore it.  The formulations of it I’ve read from Craig are really very good.

10.  The existence of a priori principles.
I believe in objective truth.  I believe in order for objective truth to truly be objective, there have to be real tests that can be conducted to determine if something makes sense logically.  In particular, I believe there are at least three a priori principles that must exist if there is such a thing as an intelligible world.  (I daresay this world is intelligible.)

A.  The Principle of Identity.  The principle of identity states that a thing is itself.  (This is real rocket science.)  In other words, A=A.

B.  The Principle of Bivalence.  The principle of bivalence states that thing either is itself or it is not.  In other words, A is either A or not A.  (This is also called the principle of the excluded middle.)  There is no such thing as a third option when it comes to what something is.  Either it is a certain thing, or it is not.

C.  The Principle of Contradiction. Also called the principle of non-contradiction (somewhat ironically), this principle states that a thing cannot be itself and something else at the same time, in the same respect.  In other words, A does not equal B.

D. I would also argue for the existence of some logical argumentation forms:  modus ponens, modus tolens, reductio ad absurdum, etc.  Basically, this covers basic inductive and deductive principles that must be true if we are to affirm anything meaningful about the world.

If the world is to have any meaning at all, we have to have at least these principles in place.  If these principles are true, they must have come somewhere.  (Again, to anticipate a criticism coming, saying "It’s natural law" only begs the question.  Saying it’s natural doesn’t answer the question of the ultimate origin.)

For an exercise that I like to pull on postmodernists, try to deny the principle/law of contradiction, and then say something meaningful.  (Hint:  if you say that something can be itself and something else (it can mean whatever I want it to mean), what you’re saying, in effect, is that nothing has meaning, and you revert to literal nihilism.  If you do not affirm the law of contradiction, then everything you affirm is both true and untrue, rendering it meaningless.)

EDIT:
After further review, I will leave these 10 reasons as they are for now.  There are perhaps other reasons I could give, but these 10 are a good place to start.  I may come back and add more later, but for now, this is where it will stand.  Be on the lookout for entries on why I prefer Christian theism to some of the other options.  (As you might expect, I have reasons for preferring one over the others.)  The next set of entries I undertake along this line will be existential reasons to prefer theism to atheism.