"Enough of this buck-passing tomfoolery!" you may be tempted to cry.
That temptation arises the most for me in this instance: the claim that everything has a cause, and the cause of everything is God, but God doesn't have a cause, but God is part of 'everything.' Tomfoolery indeed.
Today's post, "Arbitrary" was originally published on 12 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Abstracted Idealized Dynamics, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.