@LastTrainEast Islam and Christianity are based on the same imaginary god (just like Thor , Zeus or Cardea). The original was a simple tribal god who made the rain fall and helped them slaughter their enemies and he was invented by men. None of it was real. It's just a story which sounds increasingly ridiculous to people in our time.
I disagree wholeheartedly. There is a huge difference between the monotheistic religions and the pantheism or animism of various tribal religions.
Again, I go back to my previous post that arguments about the existence of God are not religious arguments as such- we are not addressing theological disputes about what God said, or did, or whatever. We are addressing the philosophical question of the existence of a prime mover, or an uncaused cause. This is an area of philosophy often called “natural theology” - theology in that it concerns God- natural in that it is about what can be grasped by natural reason, there is no additional need for revelation or providence to disclose what philosophy can tell us about God.
it is telling that in fact these first arguments about the existence of an “uncaused cause” were not from Christian thinkers, but Greeks. Aristotle lays out in his Metaphysics why the existence of the world demands a cause that is itself not caused, because causation itself is not a sufficient explanation. The eternal is not something persisting in perpetuity backwards and forwards in time, but is something a-temporal, outside time, outside of change. This, Aquinas famously puts it, all men call God. This is not an assertion that “this is the Christian God”, or the Islamic God- this is an assertion, quite reasonable too, that something never comes from nothing, and that therefore for there to be anything at all, there must first have been something that has always been.
The absurd accusation that this is a ‘God of the gaps’ is nonsense too- we are not talking about the gaps that have yet to be explained- we are talking about an origin that is simply not open to science to explain. Science can only explain that which can be observed- it is an epistemic method, based on observation. But observation gives rise to principles, and there is a clear principle in this world, and all the universe, that something never comes from nothing- therefore the question “where does anything at all stem from” is a natural, and sensible question.
arguing about the particular features or characteristics of this God (is God a he, or a she? Is he love? Is he just? Is God a monster? What is God like?) is a question proper to theology.
the most that Philosophy can say about God is that God is the foundation of the possibility of being, that he is one, true, good and beautiful (in so far as these are transcendental terms) and that of these, the intelligibility of saying “God is being” is understood (at least I argued in my masters) through the term good as a ‘controlled’ analogy.
This is a huge part of the issue- whenever humans discuss anything, we move from experience to principle- from fact to idea. While we can have an experience of this being, or that being (limited and delineated by the specific differences of each particular being), it is impossible for us to experience being in-so-far as it is pure potential. We always experience being in some kind of act, therefore we have to stretch our thought in ways that we do not ordinarily do to talk about God sensibly. Natural theology is a very limited subject in that what it has to say has to be carefully excised from revelation based theology because they are different subjects.
OPs original question of God as uncaused cause is natural theology, not theology proper, and it only confuses the situation for people to argue about Christianity or Islam or any other religion (even though I think that any monotheistic religion is essentially compatible with the God that natural theology exposes).