Tuesday, June 27, 2017

OK GO and First Causes

Watch this video of a song titled This Too Shall Pass by a group called OK GO and ask yourself what would have happened if there'd been no first cause to initiate the sequence of events it depicts. Of course, if there were no first cause in the sequence of cause and effect in the video then there'd simply be no subsequent effects. Without a first cause nothing would happen. This is essentially a simple version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God called the Kalam Cosmological Argument:
The people shown cheering at the end of the video are the students who designed and constructed the apparatus which leads to another question worth pondering. Could such an apparatus have resulted from the random action of blind chance and natural law or did it require intelligent engineers to put it all together. This question highlights a version of another argument for the existence of God based on the design inherent in the cosmos as well as in living things.

Once life appeared on earth then perhaps it could have proliferated and diversified via mutation and natural selection, but how did the first living things, cells far more intricate and complex than the Rube Goldberg apparatus in the video, ever come to be in the first place? Are blind, purposeless processes a sufficient explanation or do those first life forms, like the Rube Goldberg device, require the input of an intelligent agent?

For a simple explanation of the Kalam argument you might want to watch this video (although the video doesn't use the word "Kalam," it's the Kalam version of the Cosmological Argument that it's describing.):