Anyway since some don't seem to know how the laws of physics come into the proofs I hope I will be forgiven for posting this on one of the proofs, from
www.orwellianireland.com/proofs.pdf .
I. Proof from Motion (sometimes called ‘change’), or the Kinetological Argument
The ancient Greeks actually thought that everything had, at least in some sense, motion or energy. How they knew that about such obvious non-candidates as a lump of rock is a mystery to this observer, but they did, and, furthermore, they were right! Clearly everything that exists has molecules with atoms who in turn have electrons spinning around inside etc, in short everything has motion and a type of energy. And everything seems to be the result of motion or energy. If you like you could take anything in front of you and try to put it into a long sequence of moved and movers, or things that accepted and then imparted energy. So you have an iron lamp in from of you, for example, and we can say that it is there as a result of the energy or motion you imparted in bringing it to that spot at some point. It is also the result of motion and energy that were imparted to it in the foundry and in the foundry it was made from an iron bar which in turn was worked on .i.e. had energy and motion imparted to it etc etc.
If you take an interest in physics you will realise that this exercise is simply using the ‘law of conservation of energy,’ i.e. the idea that the energy cannot be created out of nothing, energy derives from some source which gets it from some other source etc. So in this proof that is all you are doing, you move up along the sequence of something that was hit by the energy or motion of something else, and that something else got its energy or motion from something else etc etc.
Lets imagine that sequence and think about it for a while. Is it the case that this is a circular type of motion or energy chain? Or are you moving backwards in time to a discreet point, to some original source of this energy or motion? Could there be at some point back in time an original ‘first mover’, from which we get all this motion and energy originally, or is it, as I say, a circular type of motion? Well to answer this question it might help to go back to the original source of this proof.
St Thomas Aquinas when he drew up these proofs was influenced by the works of some of the great thinkers in philosophy and science, one of which was Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, who, in fact, could justifiably be called the greatest philosopher in history. Furthermore this idea of a first mover was indeed Aristotle’s, and it might be helpful to read at this point what Aristotle says about it:
“Motion, then, being eternal, the first movent [i.e. the thing that moves], if there is but one, will be eternal also: if there are more than one, there will be a plurality of such eternal movents. We ought, however, to suppose that there is one rather than many, and a finite rather than an infinite number. When the consequences of either assumption are the same, we should always assume that things are finite rather than infinite in number, since in things constituted by nature that which is finite and that which is better ought, if possible, to be present rather than the reverse: and here it is sufficient to assume only one movent, the first of unmoved things, which being eternal will be the principle of motion to everything else.
The following argument also makes it evident that the first movent must be something that is one and eternal. We have shown that there must always be motion. That being so, motion must also be continuous, because what is always is continuous, whereas what is merely in succession is not continuous. But further, if motion is continuous, it is one: and it is one only if the movent and the moved that constitute it are each of them one, since in the event of a thing’s being moved now by one thing and now by another the whole motion will not be continuous but successive.”
Aristotle in fact stated that there are a number of reasons why we say that there has to be an original discreet ‘first mover,’ and not that that the sequence of moved and movers can go on ad infinitum i.e. in a kind of circle of continuous motion, like some kind of perpetual movement machine.
a) The first point he makes is that if you had some kind of machine like that then the type of motion would have to be ‘continuous’ as opposed to ‘consecutive’ (and I am simplifying his categories here). Imagine if you had a machine like that, a continuous motion machine, that would maybe look like the cogs and dials of a watch which goes on nearly forever. You see such a machine has a particular type of motion, it is all the one motion, if you like, and it is continuing over a finite space of time. Think about it for a minute, in that machine the cog wheel hits each gear which in turn hits something else which, in a very exact way, returns the motion to the beginning and starts the sequence again.
But what Aristotle reasoned was that the motion that you actually see in the universe today is ‘consecutive motion.’ He gave the example of a torch relay – which we see now in the Olympics, copying the ancient Greeks – to explain this idea of ‘consecutive motion.’ Another modern example could be the player hitting the balls on a billiard table, he hits one ball which hits another etc. But notice what happens to the motion in this latter example. The motion starts powerful in the beginning with the striking of the first ball and then it kind of ‘dribbles out’ after hitting all the other balls, that’s what we mean by ‘consecutive’ as opposed to the earlier ‘continuous’ type.
Now look around you as you examine the mover sequence in the universe. Say you are walking through a field and you look at a rock, of igneous type we will say. So you use the rock in this sequence of movers: we know that the rock is there because it was moved, it got its motion and energy from, a volcanic eruption, and the volcano got its motion from various chemical reactions etc deep under the crust of the earth. But look what happened to this motion when it threw up this rock, doesn’t it look like a kind of scattered ‘dribbling out’ type of motion, like the billiard balls? You see the rock is just thrown onto the ground beside you and then does nothing with its motion, the same as the billiard balls coming to rest. If it was some type of continuous motion machine, like the cogs of a watch, then we would expect the rock to rest on some kind of lever which would be attached to some gear which would return the motion, so to speak, to the volcano so that it could start this motion over again. But it just isn’t like that, the motion in the universe is not of that type. It seems rather to be a type of motion that points to a discreet beginning, like an inverted tree structure with some original motion that is dissipating itself around us.
b) The second point he makes is that even if you constructed a perfect circular motion machine, or if the sequence of moved and movers went on literally to infinity, you still need an original source of motion. Imagine if you did make that machine, the perpetual motion machine, the problem would be that you would need to start it somehow! It would just sit there until someone actually began motion to begin it, you still need a first mover. And as regards a huge infinite series of moved and movers you face the same problem, at some point you need to actually ‘create motion’. No matter how long the sequence is it needs to have a beginning where somebody actually starts the motion off, the long sequence of moved and movers would be just like the billiard balls hitting into one another, that only happens because the player started the sequence off by giving motion via his arm.
So Aristotle concluded that the universe needed some original outside source of motion or energy, this sequence of moved and movers couldn’t continue ad infinitum. Hence he said there must be an original being out there from whom we get this ‘first movement’ in the sequence of motion or energy that you see around you in the universe. He thought there must be something out there, some ‘X’ being that started all this motion and energy. Aristotle, although obviously not a Christian, in fact came to the explicit conclusion that this original source of movement must be God.
Notice too that we are referring here, as we are to the ‘beings’ thrown up by the two subsequent proofs, to some entity that exists before the universe existed. If you like then, this X is out there when nothing else is out there, naturally enough because we are talking about something that starts the whole energy or motion sequence of the universe in the first place. Consequently it isn’t limited in the area it occupies, it expands into infinity. Various complicated deductions have been made then that this X is a spirit, rather than a body as such, which I think is pretty intuitive, but also that it would occupy, in a way, all space that we can imagine, since it cannot have been limited in the space it occupies before the universe was created. I appreciate that sounds very complicated but it is well established in philosophy that a being in that type of environment must occupy a space that we would call infinity, it is then an infinite being.
We will analyse these ‘beings’, or ‘X’s, at the end of the proofs but hopefully at this stage you can see that there must be a ‘being’ like that out there, or at least must have been one at the beginning of the universe, and that it would be infinite.
