Atheism is unreasonable

[Esquilax]

Please tell me one cosmologist that doesn't believe that our universe, the one that we live in, began to exist at some point in the finite past. I will wait.

Our current universe beginning to exist is not the same thing as reality itself beginning to exist. You sit here airily telling me to speak with cosmologists as though you've done so yourself, but we both know that you haven't; most of them will tell you that our ability to describe what happens just before the Planck time is non-existent.

Oh! And as it happens, I can tell you of three cosmologists that don't believe the universe began in the finite past; just look at the Borde-Guth-Villenkin theorem. It's a favorite of William Lane Craig, when he trots out the same tired Kalam nonsense that you have, only two of the three scientists who wrote the paper came out to correct him, saying that actually no, their work does not say that the universe began in the finite past. They're on record as saying that, on video in Guth's case, but you know what WLC did? The same thing you do: when it suited him, he just waved the science off, the same science he was directly quoting a moment ago, as though it meant nothing. "That's just their opinion!" He crowed.

Interesting little insight into the true dishonesty of theist argumentation, there.

Well, you were the one that made it seem as if you were so familiar with the argument when you briefly "rebutted" my 6 arguments. I thought you were at least somewhat familiar with the arguments against infinity so I would be spared of having to get full in depth with it.

Hey, if you're going to claim something then make sure the claim you're making is accurate. If you're going to say Kalam adequately explains why infinity is impossible, then how the fuck am I supposed to know that you wanted to say something different? I'm not a mind reader.

But anyway, the arguments against infinity is more geared towards the second premise of the argument, which is "The universe began to exist". It is basically saying that if God doesn't exist and there was no "first cause", then the beginning of our universe was just one event on a past eternal time scale. But this can't be true, if it was true, then infinity would be traversed. But infinity can't be traversed.

Oh fuck, I'm going to have to deal with this nonsense again...

Analogy: Your birth was an event in time. If there was an infinite number of births which PRECEDED yours, the event of your birth would never come to pass, because for ever birth in the past, an event number of births would have preceded it, so your birth would never come to pass.

You don't know how time works, if you're saying that. An infinite number of events does not render an individual event within that time frame impossible. It just means that there was an infinite number of prior events of the same type, and an infinite number of future events of the same type. In a causal infinity, time would still be moving forward, and you'd still have one day following the next; my birth as an event in time would just have happened on one of those days, of an infinite set of days. You could only assert that my birth would never happen if you continually define my birth as one happening in the future, pushed back one birth further by each incoming birth, rather than just keeping my position stable in the sequence wherever it may be, which is what it would literally be. In an infinite set, things still happen. We have an infinite number of numbers, but by some magical coincidence I'm still able to count from one to two.

The same thing with the universe, the universe would be a product of an infinite regression of "causes", and no effect from these causes could come to pass for the same reason your birth would never come to pass.

A timeless cause is needed...a timeless cause that wasn't a product of preceded "cause"...a cause that doesn't depend on anything external for it to exist. "God" is the only being that is capable of this.

However, all this talk of infinity is pointless anyway, since nobody is asserting infinity. There could be any number of potential causal setups beyond the big bang, there's no reason to assume anything about it. Like I said, it's a literal unknown for everyone, our vocabulary isn't equipped to deal with it. Maybe it was a mirror universe before, where time runs backwards! It goes from heat death right back to singularity, and then time begins to run forward again, and it goes from singularity to heat death in a big cycle. Who knows? Not I, not you, not anyone!

So you have no justification for making up whatever answer you feel best leads to your presupposed conclusion, then, do you?

And Im sorry, there is no cosmologist or no mathematician that can help you with this infinity problem.

Borde, Guth, and Villenkin. And incidentally, no cosmologist has come to the god conclusion either. You really need to stop thinking of christianity as the default answer in the absence of any other, because it's really, really not.

Tell you what...I want you do consult any physicist that can help you with the infinity problem. The infinity problem is independent of any bogus scientific experiment or any latest bogus theory or development in science.

The infinity problem is one of your own making. It doesn't make any sense, and is also not applicable to the actual state of cosmology. If we don't know, then asserting "it's either finite, or infinite!" is a false dichotomy. Just stop trying to jam your ignorance into an area that doesn't yet have an answer, and let the grown ups come up with the evidence before you make up your mind.

Makes no sense. Logically possible that there was a cat named Abe Lincoln, or logically possible that a man named Abe Lincoln was a cat?

"All men are cats, Abraham Lincoln was a man, therefore Abe Lincoln was a cat," is a perfectly valid logical syllogism. There are no invalid premises, except for the fact that, like Kalam, like the Ontological argument, like the moral argument, the premises are not factually based. That's why logic gets you nowhere unless you feed accurate data into it.

When God created the universe, time was also created. If the universe wasn't created from nothing, that would mean that it had to exist infinitely. But I already gave reasons why it couldn't have existed infinitely. So creation ex nihilo is justified, otherwise explain to me how you can any event in time come to pass if time is infinite??

So what you're saying is that if a single alternative model can't be true, then therefore yours is? That's nonsense; even if infinity were impossible- and it's still not the problem that needs to be addressed here- that doesn't make creation ex nihilo any more valid. It's not the default option if you prove (what you perceive to be) everything else wrong.

Omniscience is the attribute of knowing all true propositions. Newsflash; if you know all true propositions, then there is no knowledge "beyond the scope of your understanding".

Except if you don't know that you don't know it. How would you know, if you didn't know that there was knowledge you didn't possess? Omniscience can only ever be a claim of absolute certainty, there is simply no way for a being, even one who claims omniscience, to verify that they actually possess such an attribute.

Logically invalid. Bam.

Please. Before getting in depth, I was trying to set a foundation regarding the mere origins of morality, just like I try to focus on with regards to consciousness and life..the origins of these things. Before we get to which view is the correct view (or seemingly correct), lets start with where do we get them from in the first place.

Red herring? Please.

We're evolved beings, biological organisms with a shared set of needs and wants that allow us to form an objective framework through which morality can be derived. Life is preferable to death, pleasure is preferable to pain, health is preferable to sickness: these are objective truths about our nature as living beings, though they are general rules too, that sometimes come into conflict with one another. Nevertheless, finding single hypothetical scenarios in which those conflicts might arise- as I'm sure you're desperately trying to do in a little "gotcha!" moment- will not reduce their efficacy in the main. They are sufficient objective standards through which we can build up a moral system from simple beginnings, assuming we consistently plot it out, without special pleading at any point. Simple.

And yes, it's still a red herring.

Bill Gates made a quote about the complexity of a particular "thing" called DNA. Any geneticists or biologists can tell you complex DNA is. This is a known fact. Nothing new.

A geneticist or biologist would also know that it's merely an analogy to better illustrate a complex concept to a layman.

But since that is your criterion, Michael Behe is a biochemist who has written books which discuss the complexity of DNA and cellular structures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

Yeah, and Behe's arguments lost him a court case about exactly this topic in Kitzmiller vs Dover, in 2005. Behe's profound dishonesty and the inefficacy of his arguments are widely known.

READ

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna

Ugh. So can you take the information out of DNA? Hold it in your hand? Can you get a fistful of information? Or is it a fucking conceptual thing, after all?

Figure it the fuck out.

For the life of me, I can't. Because it literally has nothing to do with what we were actually talking about. It's a red herring. Again.

Evolution? Please explain the origin of consciousness via evolution.

I did, like two posts ago. Aren't you paying attention before you decide to disagree with me? It's a beneficial trait for organisms to be able to react to their environments more accurately over a wider range of stimuli. Consciousness arose as an emergent property of that drive toward more complex reactive intellects, as a means to better react on the fly to more complicated scenarios. It's all tied in with the evolution of brains, as consciousness is a property that arises within the brain.

Bringing it up as a smokescreen? DNA contains specified information, that is a fact, and the last I checked, information has informants. You said that the argument from design begged the question, and I pointed out the fact that DNA is one thing that is apparently designed due to the specified complexity of the information that is in it.

First of all, you're begging the question by calling whatever "information" you want to see in DNA specified. Evolution is perfectly sufficient to winnow down randomly generated anything into usable forms, as the unusable ones... died off? You know, natural selection?

Any biologist/biochemists will confirm this, whether they are believers or not. So if you are not DENYING the fact that DNA contains information, then you don't have a argument, and your objections are irrelevant and meaningless.

I don't deny the existence of readable information in DNA, I deny your claims as to the nature of information in general. Do try to keep up; my position is that information is a conceptual state of predictable and reliably derived patterns within an object, that can be read after the fact by intelligent minds.

When I said that, instead of addressing the issue, you just went "aha! But where did those minds come from?" as though that has any relevance at all to the nature of information. It doesn't; no matter the origins of the minds in question, their ability to discern and isolate patterns elsewhere is what makes up information. It doesn't have some objectively real form that can be extracted and shown to anyone else. It's just us, looking at a thing, and seeing what makes it tick.

Foolishness. If the words weren't placed there purposely, it isn't a freakin code!!!

Only if your definition of a code requires that it be intentionally placed. In which case, you are absolutely begging the question by calling DNA a code.

No it isn't acting in predictable ways. Consider this video by Stephen Meyer, where he is explaining the complexity of DNA...and he is explaining it to school children, which would make it easier for you to follow.

Do you happen to know anything at all about how the elements of DNA bond together? The four nucleobases pair up in very specific, well understood base pairs. It is, in fact, entirely predictable. The fact that it is a complex topic in no way reduces scientists ability to predict and understand it, your pointless condescension notwithstanding.

Me and him draw a theistic conclusion because of this..that is our implication...your implications may be different, but the science is the science...and no one can deny that. Show me a video which shows that DNA is not as complex as we make it to be, or the probability of getting one protein molecule is not as high as Dr. Meyer makes it to me. Can you? Probably not.

Since when did complexity have anything to do with predictability? Complex things can be predicted. You really don't even know what you're arguing anymore, do you? You're just throwing out random topics that are only tangentially related to what we were discussing before, and have no relevance to the topic at hand.

No one living today knows who wrote anything in antiquity. It isn't as if we are so sure of who wrote anything else in history, but when it comes to the Bible, all of a sudden it is time to be a skeptic.

When it comes to many other things in antiquity we have corroboration from other sources. When we get to the bible, suddenly it's only the one source, and it's the same source that's making all the claims in the first place. Oh, and all of those claims are supernatural with no supporting justification at all. If you found a book from antiquity that contained an account of an alien invasion, only it was the only book from that time that mentioned anything about it, would you believe it just because it was a book?

Your entire knowledge of ancient history is based on what you've been told from someone else. You weren't there. We use the same criterion to establish historical truths regarding biblical claims that we use for anything else in history.

Yeah, and when we find supernatural or miraculous claims in any other history book, do you know what we do? We discount them as superstitions of the time. Why should we do any less for the bible, a book that is actually less supported from independent sources than any of these other books?

So just because the individual books were "traditionally" attached to the alleged people, that mean that it isn't true? Of course you are gonna say "thats not what I meant", well, if it isn't what you meant, then why the hell are you saying it?

I'm saying that the names are plug names, pseudonyms attached to the books so they would have an author attached to them by the church, when in fact the actual writers are anonymous. Just looking at the book of Matthew specifically, it only gained that name in the second century, and the idea that this Matthew was the disciple Matthew was added later still by a bishop named Papias. It has nothing at all to do with who literally wrote the book.

You are right, the Gospels were written anonymously, but both Jews and Christians had a tradition of carefully passing down creeds, oracles, parables, scriptures, etc to future generations.

Sure, but when we add in that the gospels were written years after Jesus' death, by people who never knew him, in a historical context in which nobody else was writing about Jesus when he was alive, it becomes a much, much more shaky basis for deriving historical fact. In fact, this is almost an irrelevant point; what does the careful passing down of scriptures matter at all, if the scriptures weren't written anywhere near the time the action went down?

And the majority of Paul's writings precede the Gospels, which makes his epistles an even early source as a testament to the Resurrection.

All of which were written at least twenty years after Jesus' death. How could they be testament to the resurrection?

The "foreword" stuff in the NIV is irrelevant if I am on here admitting that the Gospels are anonymous. Again, I said we have historical evidence, which comes from the Early second century apostles who stated whom the Gospels were written by. Historical evidence = shit that was written down and or passed along to people that were a lot close to the scene than people typing in message forums 2,000 years later.

So basically, your historical evidence is that you have some dudes, centuries after the events in question, asserting that some books were written by dudes that they never met, nor have any evidence that the books were ever written by them. That's your big ticket winner, here? "Some guy said it."?

Assertions mean nothing. Do they have any evidence?

Arguments give good reasons why we believe what we believe.

Only if they're supported.