I apologise for the length of the following but I am convalescing from surgery a week ago, can’t even walk around unassisted and am bored out of my skull. Thanks for your patience, I am sick of being one.
I’m not suggesting that I know any better than Carl about anything, but that line of argument “who created God” never seems to stop theists insisting ‘their’ god can do anything thanks to guys like Anslem who in answer to the Kalam has held sway over people’s intelligence for centuries with his ontological arguments which covers the popular party trick of first thinking of the most really super powerful god you can possibly imagine or pops into your mind and then assuring yourself and your guests that your god is greater than even what you just imagined. But with all unlimited pissing contests this just creates a wet mess with a bad smell.
So with this ontological magic card they can just keep insisting their god can do anything. End. Of. Story. And you are going to burn in Hell for being Just. Too. Smart.
Religion gets to examine with varying levels of success all the immeasurable unquantifiable imponderables, like the limits of their gods’ abilities and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But no matter how difficult the question or complicated the word salads are to tie up all the untidy loose ends the answer is always unfailingly “God” unless you are asking “who is responsible for creating evil?”.
Philosophy has never been a strength of mine. For me it sits between Religion and Science which are similar in some respects and totally different in others. Philosophy is a blur of both. More pointedly I have a real problem with Philosophy. It was once the unwitting placeholder for the nascent fields of Science and anything leftover and not bothered with by Religion. Science eventually usurped Philosophy as the more reliable path to knowledge and firmer truth, but it is definitely (beware of incoming), a lesser handmaiden than when she was once one of the Girls.
Philosophy in my simple view is just a tool for determining if we are asking the correct sort of questions that need to be asked in any endeavour which doesn’t really serve either of her old girlfriends’ needs anymore.
The reason being that Religion will insist “God” and Science is just so effective she will eventually sort out from practical experience and KNOW if she is asking the right questions herself; it’s how self-correcting systems work.
But if Philosophy has really taught us anything its that it is really important to ask the correct question, but it’s not even like Philosophy even cares anymore what question is asked because while the theists have had centuries to refine their definitions, postulate exceptions and intelligently worded faultlessly reasoned explanations that can turn black to white and then through all the shades of the electromagnetic spectrum, they still start their arguments with the apriori assumption that a god already exists, therefore anything is possible. Philosophy nods pleasantly and helpfully suggests bringing all that on board for further discussion because Religion loves an audience while Science heads out on another field trip to dig up more evidence.
For my money of these three, only one, Science, has any claim for reality and I don’t care about all the psychological problems involved with unintended bias or prejudices involved in the outcome of experiments, it works because its a critically peer-reviewed self-correcting methodology and because I am using a computer to exchange ideas almost instantaneously with people on the other side of the world who I have never met. Just asking unanswerable questions and talking to the sky could not have achieved any of that. And further, If it had been left to the other two fields of human query and investigation, we could very likely still be discussing and regretting the horrible holy wars fought over the ‘correct or acceptable’ shape of the keys on our keyboards in the eyes of somebody else’s god or in view of their particular ergonomic prejudices.
I was advised by someone much more learned than me that the point is not to ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The real question to ask is how small are these angels and how big is the pin. Anselm’s god could make a really really big pin apparently.