How to debunk the first cause argument without trying too hard

[JesusHChrist]

....and from that to your particular version of Yhwh you arrived by....? ._.

Reason, plain and simple. Too bad rationality eludes you.

Punking those atheists again Chad? Or do you really think you can reason your way to Yahweh, the Yahweh way!?

I can't tell if you are serious or not. Ingersoll to the rescue, once again:

"The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian -- like a doctor of divinity." - Robert Green Ingersoll (1898)

[Cephus]

Eight pages and still no serious objections to the first cause argument. Just groupthink adherence to a straw man argument.

Uh. Have you read the OP? ._.

Of course not.  The first cause argument is ludicrous on its face, how anyone can take it seriously is beyond me.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The first cause argument is ludicrous on its face, how anyone can take it seriously is beyond me.

Your logical fallacy is called hand-waving.

[Cephus]

The first cause argument is ludicrous on its face, how anyone can take it seriously is beyond me.

Your logical fallacy is called hand-waving.

No hand waving, just fact telling.  It's nobody's fault but yours that you believe stupid things.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Your logical fallacy is called hand-waving.

No hand waving, just fact telling.  It's nobody's fault but yours that you believe stupid things.

Just own it.

[Aristocatt]

For the record philosophy 101 courses tend to tear aquinas' second way apart.

It is a pretty terrible argument. Neither sound, nor valid.

[Cephus]

No hand waving, just fact telling.  It's nobody's fault but yours that you believe stupid things.

Just own it.

Your ridiculous beliefs?  No, that's something for you to own.  I just get to laugh at it.

[Angrboda]

(See also Hume's analysis of cause and effect for another example of why our understanding of the nature of 'cause' is incomplete.)

Hume's analysis of cause and effect has been a major setback in philosophical progress and is itself one 'cause' of today's confusion. Hume mistakenly presents both cause and effect as discrete events.

Hume presents the two as discrete, but not necessarily events. The classic example of a billiard ball hitting another represents two discrete parts, the cause - the first billiard ball hitting the second - and the effect - the movement of the struck billiard ball. They are considered discrete because they are.

For example, Hume would say that the event of the brick being tossed is the cause of the event of the window breaking. This of course is nonsense. The cause is not an event. If you ask anyone what caused the window to break, they would tell you the brick caused it; not, the event of the brick being tossed.

This gobbledygook is nothing but a straw man of Hume. He says no such thing.

Hume wants us to ask, 'what connects the two events?'. That is the wrong question. The explanation of efficient cause rests on the relationship between a substantial form, like a brick, and the actualization of a dispositional property , like the shattering of glass.

Bollocks. Inventing attributes of matter like a class of dispositional properties only makes things worse. How do we determine whether the struck billiard ball's rolling is a dispositional property of the first billiard ball, the table, the air, or a man on the moon? This adds nothing to our understanding.

[Longhorn]

Uh....Chad? Can you explain just how you got from 'first cause' to your version of a god?

[robvalue]

First cause arguments insist that our everyday notions of cause, effect and beginnings apply to absolutely everything and in all conditions. (Except for the very special exception which it attempts to define into existence, of course.)

Insist all day long. Without evidence, you cannot be sure that you're not oversimplifying and producing conclusions that don't translate well, or at all, back to reality. This is the danger of philosophical arguments on their own.