Can "God" be used as a name for whatever created the universe, while not actually meaning the "God" that exists in religion?
Just a quick example, if the Big Bang was caused by a massive black hole that eventually absorbed all existing matter before imploding, could we call that process "god"? Or is "god" a defined word?
There's an old arugment called the "Cosmological Argument". (I guess it's actually many related arguments.) Roughly: Something had to cause all this stuff; that's God. There are two kinds of objections to this argument. One is that there's just no good argument that something had to cause all this stuff. In this context: How does one know that anything caused the Big Bang? Why can't it just have been uncaused? It's important not to answer: Well, everything has to have a cause. If so, then presumably God has to have a cause, too. The other objection is that, even if there were, the "God" whose existence the argument would prove need not be much like the God of religion. And, indeed, in this case, too, that is pretty clear. Hume pushes both forms of argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , if I remember correctly.
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