The Existence of God

I joined three friends last week for a lecture at UWO with this same title. I had said beforehand that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a Christian organization promoting it. It wasn't, it was run by a Baha'i group at school. They had invited a philosopher/mathematician by the name of William S. Hatcher from a university in Quebec.

He captured my interest when he started his talk by mentioning that computer languages and computer logic are based on Relational Logic that was developed around the 19th century. That was right up my alley, programming geek that I am.

He presented a lecture that he uses on tours that presented 'simple' logic that proves that God must exist. To be more clear, he wasn't saying that a Christian God exists or anything as specific as that. His proof actually showed that there must be one unique uncaused thing from which everything else was caused. He applied the term 'God' to this concept and the two ideas mesh well but the actual proof is intentionally limited in what it tries to do.

He threw in a lot of extra parts during his lecture, diverging onto tangents about the history of philosophy and the basis for certain theorems. As complicated as it was, I still managed to stay with him for the first two thirds of the talk and then I lost track towards the end. I bought his book so that I could clarify the details that I missed.

I'm going to write up a simplified version of his presentation in my next blog. Hopefully my interpretation will make some sense.