| | Adam, "I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." --Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 1789
Deism even with its lip-service towards being 'natural' religion, is still a religion advocating a mystical entity beyond man's comprehension. The problem with discussions of the spiritual is the undefined prejudicial concepts involved, e.g. mystical, religion. Rand in her introduction to the Fountainhead addresses this problem when she says, "…I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation".
The deist ‘god’ was ultimate reality apprehended by reason, since Rand defines "mysticism as any claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, supernatural source of knowledge"; she could not have been talking about Deists.
First of all, nature does not posess free will. If it does could you send me a video of you arguing with it? Perhaps you are correct that nature has no free will but it appears to be creative/causal, or Rand could not write as she does in The Objectivist Ethics, "Nature gives him [man] no automatic guarantee …nothing is given to man on earth (given by whom?) except a potential and the material on which to actualize it…ethics [given, provided] by the grace of reality and the nature of life." What is this nature/causal agent that gives man ‘a potential’? What is ‘the grace of reality’? You have said nothing about what it is except to tell me it has no free will.
Second, the axioms of existence apply throughout the universe, not just on planet Earth… So you see, the axioms of existence apply beyond our earthly boundaries. I never said they didn’t. I said that the universe is not a universally benevolent habitat for man.
First something cannot be created from nothing. Then you reject the Big Bang theory?
However, lets assume this creator has a ton of modeling clay from which to shape the universe. We still don't have any idea of who or what created the creator, or who created the creator of the creator, etc. Or in otherwords, we have the series of infinite regression. Leonard Peikoff writes, "[T]he causal link does not relate to two actions. ... The law of causality states that entities are the cause of actions... not that the cause of an action is action, but that the cause of action is entities." Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 16. The Objectivist theory of causality is entity-based, not event-based. Therefore, an event can be without any prior cause other than the existence of the entity that caused it, in other words you would not have a continuous chain.
. . .no more than we are here due to random chance. We are here as an inevitable result of natural causality. Causality is the underlying explanation for everything that is in the universe not here of man's choice. Ironically, man's ability of free will itself is a product of causality as it became imperative for our survival during the evolutionary proccess. The Objectivist view of causality is that events are caused by entities, not other events. As Rand put it, "The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities." Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 954.
With that out of the way, you claim that the 'benevolent universe' is a personification. As are nature and reality. Nature ‘provides’ man with the tools of survival. Reality ‘arbitrates’ disputes among honest men.
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