RE: How to easily defeat any argument for God
August 5, 2019 at 9:44 am
(This post was last modified: August 5, 2019 at 9:51 am by Acrobat.)
(August 5, 2019 at 3:35 am)Tom Fearnley Wrote: I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:
CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854
Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.
I’m a theist here.
And I was actually surprised, but that was a pretty well written article, especially for the fact you highlighted some of the failings of some popular new atheists arguments against God.
But the problem with your main argument here, is its confusion of an ontological conclusion, with an epistemological ones.
An analogy would be appropriate
Imagine a drug company creating a drug that cures x disease.
We could take the drug to a lab, and verify all it’s mechanisms of action, how it targets certain elements of our biology, and cures the disease. We could explain exactly how the drugs works.
Your argument is like asking, what does the drug company who made the drug, have to do with how the drug works?
The answer is, that they don’t have anything to do with how the drugs works.
But they have everything to do with how the drug came into being.
The equivalent ontological Theistic conclusions revolve around intentionality, seeing our reality as created for some underlying purpose endowed with a meaning of some sort. The antithesis for such a view isn’t found in some scientific explanation of how the world works, but in an opposing ontological view, such as nihilism, that it’s all a product of a some cosmic accident, a fluke. That it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. A competing atheistic view would be along those lines.
Now one might ask what does such meaning and purpose have to do with God? But that would be like asking what does an author have to do with a novel.
(August 5, 2019 at 5:38 am)Alan V Wrote:(August 5, 2019 at 3:35 am)Tom Fearnley Wrote: I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:
CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854
Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.
I don't think Luke Muehlhauser understood the arguments he was critiquing. "If everything requires a Creator, then so does God" is pointing out an inconsistency, a kind of special pleading or double standard, implicit in theistic argumentation. It is saying that defining a God in such a way as to answer the question really just begs the question of whether such an exception exists. Same for "Anything complex requires an intelligent designer."
As for "Why?" questions, they assume there is a "why" when there may be none. If "Why?" asks for meaning, and instead all we have are descriptions without meanings, then it doesn't help to try to answer. All we can say are that the reasons we offer are both necessary and sufficient, like answering "Who created me?" by saying "My parents."
Further, atheists have any number of arguments, including the one Muehlhauser considers best or "show stopping." This is not to say that some arguments aren't better than others for some people. But that's why atheists have such a wide range of arguments. I'm glad he found the one which was convincing to him.
The first cause argument you're referring to, isn't everything requires a creator. That's an atheist straw man of the argument.
It's everything that is contingent has a cause. Something that exists by necessity, that is uncaused. Or else you'd have an infinite regress.