[jon462]

[ QUOTE ]
"If you assume that every effect has a cause (which everyone who is not David Hume does),"

Unless my limited knowledge of quantum physics is flawed, almost all physicists believe that not every effect has a cause. For instance the decay of a subatomic particle. If it has a half life of three years it is even money to decay within that time and a 7-1 favorite to decay within nine years. More importantly is the understanding that the 7-1 you could lay, does not at all depend on how long it has existed up to the point you observed it and laid the price. Someone who has been watching it for many years previously has no advantage over you, the bookmaker who just walked into the room. This basically implies that nothing caused its decay. Other than a random number generator that itself could not be predicted. (Is God simply a pure random number generator? Not what Aquinas had in mind, I would guess.)

Of course Aquinas would have had no reason to know this. Even Einstein resisted the notion but was eventually pretty close to rigorously proven wrong (Bell's Theorem? plus of course mountains of experimental evidence). But the upshot of all this, I think, is that it no longer matters if any proof of God is otherwise flawed or not as long as it rests on the quote above. If God exists, quantum theory, not just Hume, says you can't prove it this way.

[/ QUOTE ]

It makes more sense to me that there is a cause which simply cannot be explained by science currently. But I have very little knowledge of quantum physics myself, so I do not claim that to be fact. It seems ironic to me, however, how much faith is required to accept many tenants of modern science, so much so that I think it is becoming more and more like a religion - and there have been many respected philosophers of science in the past few decades that agree with me (Thomas Kuhn, for example).