It was a fateful Saturday afternoon in my garage that got all this started. I had just recalled a question that had bothered me as a boy and finally decided to ask it of God, or whoever was listening. I wanted to know who put him into power: who gave him the right to be God? It was only moments after asking this question that it occurred to me that if in fact (or by means of a miracle) he actually answered, informing me who appointed him God, I would quickly turn to that “whoever” or “whatever” and ask the same question. You see, it was a logical and foregone conclusion on my part that whoever put God into power had to have more power than God, or else he would have been incapable of ordaining him God. Then I realized that the series of questions would never end, assuming the series of individuals did not run out of patience with me and continue to answer my finite questions.
At that moment I acknowledged not only that every cause must have a cause, but also every cause itself is the effect of an even higher order cause. The scientific principle of entropy (thermodynamics) dictates that each and every cause must be of a higher order of complexity than its effect. This principle is true because we live in a less than infinite state. It is mathematically, scientifically, logically, philosophically, and experimentally impossible for any entity to create or give rise to another entity that has more complexity than the entity that brought about its existence. Einstein knew this and asserted it by famously declaring, “God does not play dice.” Douglas Hofstadter interprets this statement by saying, “What Einstein meant is that nothing in nature happens without a cause, and for mathematicians, that there is always one unifying, underlying cause is an unshakable article of faith.”[1]
On that fateful Saturday, when I was asking the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause . . . where it came from, I was actually performing what is called infinite regression in mathematics. If each effect had a cause that was only a small fraction more complex than it was, where would I end up if I asked the question an infinite number of times? The answer is infinity. In other words, each cause of a given effect is necessarily more complex than its effect, even if only by a very, very small value. If one were to ask each effect about the magnitude of its cause, continuing up the chain of more complex causes, one would end up with one and only one answer: infinity. (For the mathematically inclined, a more robust mathematical argument is available in chapter 2.03 of Slices of God.)
Mathematically the initial cause (IC) must be infinite; it cannot be less. Every effect must have a cause, and every cause must have a causal entity larger and more powerful and more complex than itself, even if by a minute amount. At the start of each and every cause-effect progression is infinity. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher pointed out that “a finite point is absurd if it has no infinite reference point.”[2] We are not the finite entities we claim to be without an infinite reference point: an infinite initial cause (IIC).
In the previous post (The Origin of the Cosmos) I asserted that the IC, or what I now refer to as the IIC, has everything to do with our broken world. How and why? As we dissect the implications of an initial cause being infinite and deduce some of its attributes we will come to understand more about why our world is broken. Obviously there is more to come . . .
-Sam Augsburger
Slices of God: Strange, Dimensional, and Fractal Perspectives on God and the Cosmos
[1] Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 120.
[2] Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 145.
