Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

What causes an alpha particle to be emitted from a U238 atom?

God, through the laws of physics. 

[The Grand Nudger]

I guess god's in some pretty deep shit, then?  When's the last time you had to argue the issue of causality to establish your mothers existence?

Causality is not an issue for me. But since some people here don't seem to accept it as an a priori concept, we simply can't make progress.

You can't make progress even if they do - because you don't intend to argue for causality, you are arguing for a god.  Acceptance of the one is not acceptance of the other.  False incredulity over causality is not an argument for a god. Since you're not in the mood to share - I'll note that regardless of whatever the case is with causality, the status of my mothers existence is unaffected.

[R00tKiT]

You can't make progress even if they do - because you don't intend to argue for causality, you are arguing for a god.  Acceptance of the one is not acceptance of the other.  False incredulity over causality is not an argument for a god.  Since you're not in the mood to share - I'll note that regardless of whatever the case is with causality, the status of my mothers existence is unaffected.

Yes, OFC that causality being valid doesn't imply God's existence in itself, it is however a necessary ingredient to make any attempted argument in favor of God's existence. Also, if causality weren't valid, then it's possible, a priori, for you to precede your mother's existence.........

[Foxaèr]

Arguments without evidence to back them, the crux of theistic philosophy, is just a wasteland of what-ifs.

[polymath257]

Which is why we don't want to assume a deity unless there is a very good reason. We *know* other things exist. The question is whether a deity does.

Your use of the word "personality" is misplaced here, I think. Having a personality doesn't entail ability to design, I assume you're referring to the personal God. And yes, there are arguments for the latter. The most promising argument is that the observable state of affairs in our world is better explained as the product of an intentional/personal agent than not.

Other way around. The ability to design implies a personality. It implies an intention. And to have an intention means a very high degree of complexity. Making an assumption that such a complex entity exists (with no other evidence) is exactly the type of multiplication of entities that is frowned upon.

Intentions are not amenable to any kind of scientific explanation, if you intend to eat a cheeseburger, nothing about the workings of your digestive system or the cheeseburger's recipe informs me of your intention, an intention is a mental event that can't be analyzed and dissected in a laboratory. That's why the natural laws and technical niceties will always be an insufficient explanation of the universe, they are analogous to the digestive system and the recipe.

Well, the intention to eat isn't in the stomach. The stomach sends signals to the brain where the intentions arise.

And yes, we are getting to the place that we can read minds in the lab by looking at brain scans. The technology is very basic right now, but there is no reason to think that it won't be possible in much more detail in the near future.

Those mental events correspond to physical events in the brain.

The argument above for a personal designer is of an inductive type -of course, which leaves room for the opponent to say that there is no necessary logical implication between our world and a designer agent. There are many things, however, that the opponent firmly believes in which don't meet these unreasonable epistemic demands: like an external world, or other minds, and even most scientific discoveries. An experiment proving the existence of electrons, for example (e.g. Cathode ray tube experiment), only points to electrons. Their existence is not rendered logically necessary by the experiment, they are merely the best explanation of what we observe during the experiment, nothing more. 

And the point is that the inductive step is validated in most cases by evidence and the hypothesis that an observed pattern will continue. It is further supported by testing: making observations designed to show the hypothesis incorrect.

In the case of the cathode ray tubes, the interpretation was not fixed until a great amount more data was accumulated. The hypothesis that there were particles making up the rays was tested and tested again, in attempts to show the hypothesis wrong. When those attempts failed, that allowed us to have more confidence in the hypothesis.

In the God hypothesis, however, there is no way to test. No way is suggested that would show the hypothesis to be wrong if it is. And that is why the inductive process fails in this case: some of the prerequisites are missing.

That deduction only holds if the laws of nature are such that it is the case. For example, with gravity, a 'splattering' of mass is far *less* likely than a spherical shape once the mass is large enough. So the conclusion in that case would be invalid.

Also, for example, evolution selects for adaptive structures, so the probability P((not T)& U & C) might be a LOT larger than you give credit for.

And that is part of the point: that you need to know P( (not T)&C&U) and P( (not T) & U) and the relative sizes of those compared to P( T&C&U) and P(T&U) to say which conditional probability is larger. Do you have any way to estimate the sizes of those?

More specifically, you seem to think that the laws of nature cannot themselves push towards complexity and structure even though we know many examples of exactly that.

I still insist that the laws of nature have absolutely no bearing on these probabilities. If they are descriptive, then they have no independent existence or special status, you should simply picture them as man made labels that describe the universe. The latter displays aspects of design, fine-tuning, etc. all of which demand explanation that is independent of these descriptive labels.

The laws of physics are descriptive of the properties that things in the universe have. That includes how they interact. What 'aspects of design' do those properties show?

If you want to argue for not-T, you first have to provide good grounds for rejecting causality outside of our spacetime - and I am not trying to shift the burden of proof, I still think that the default position is that things don't pop into existence uncaused, the principle of causality is of course a huge subject that was discussed by many eminent philosophers, it's unfair to half-ass this stuff in a few sentences. AFAIK however, Kant considers causality to be an a priori concept (more precisely, a synthetic a priori) that doesn't come from experience. You can't do anything without presupposing causality, you don't wait for your computer to turn on by itself, for example. We use this principle everywhere and everytime,, it's kind of hypocritical to suspend it only when it comes to the cause of the universe.

Well, yes, I think that Kant was wrong here, as he was in many other things.

The default is that all causes exist in time (and thereby in spacetime). There is no 'popping into existence' without time, so applying that phrase to spacetime as a whole is misleading.

And no, we do NOT use that principle every time. We use it as appropriate and in the cases where we can test its use.

In other cases, like in quantum events, the classical notions of causality seem to fail completely.

As for the probabilities P(not T & U & C) and their close variants, it's not necessary to calculate them independently, we know that the probabilties of all possible events in a given probability space add up to 1, so giving arguments that are in favor of P(T&U&C) increase its value and thereby automatically reduce the value of P(not-T&U&C). 

As I explained in the thread, arguments against theism are really, really bad, so bad that you can use them to refute anything. To take one example, the problem of evil in its logical form is considered to have been decisively solved by Plantinga,

Quote : "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of God and evil".
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga%27s_free-will_defense#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEHoward-SnyderO'Leary-Hawthorne19981_18-0

And others disagree with Platinga's use of modal logic. Possible worlds is a very poor way to start an argument.

I noticed that this recent development in the philosophy of religion is largely ignored by many atheist activists today, who keep trying the argument mindlessly as if they were still in the 14th century. Besides, we don't even need much philosophy to dismiss the argument as weak, it's a textbook argument from ignorance, if one can't see the reason for an instance of evil, this doesn't mean there is no good reason for it. And given the infinite gap between God's knowledge and our own, the problem of evil just fails completely.

A common response one gets is "God surely could've made his reasons clearer", which kind of moves the same problem one step further. The answer will simply be: He surely has good reasons for not making his reasons clearer, ad infinitum. Those who hate the mystery card are simply too fond of logical fallacies. If one is not omniscient, there has to be mystery somewhere, which they should accept.

Well, clearly to test our ideas observationally requires that we do observation.

But we have found through long experience that logic alone is a very poor judge of what is actually possible or even what actually occurs.

For example, Aristotle thought it logically necessary that heavy things fall faster than light things. But, the simple fact is that they do not. And the reason is that Aristotles axioms, which he thought were logically necessary, are in fact wrong.

I can give other examples. Kant thought that geometry was a type of synthetic a priori. He thought that because he couldn't image anything other than Euclidean geometry. of course, it was later discovered that there are MANY types of non-Euclidean geometries and that what Kant *thought* was necessary was actually not so.

In particular, there is very good reason to believe that the notion of causality simply is not applicable 'outside the universe' or even to the universe as a whole (all of spacetime). The reason is that causality is always *within* the universe, so the idea of a cause for the universe is against all observation and logic.

Why do you think that "always observing X within the universe" is a very good reason to reject X outside the universe ??? Causality - in the sense of a necessary link between an effect and a cause- is a basic building block of any kind of coherent thought of what might be there outside the universe.

I disagree. Causality makes sense only when there is time, thereby only within spacetime=the universe.

You simply accept it as a universal a priori (which you kind of do in real life) or reject it, in which case you should provide good reasons to accept causality a posteriori within the universe. As far as I know, nobody managed to do that, including the major figures in western philosophy from Hume to Kant - but I might be wrong. Surely there is someone here who knows about Kantian philosophy more than I do, they are welcome to clarify this issue.

 And I have: causality requires time (in fact, the definition of temporality can be based on the sequences of causality).

My basic claim is that causality only makes sense within the laws of physics: there have to be properties and patterns of interaction of objects for causality to make any sense at all. And those properties and patterns *are* physical laws.

Causality is a *hypothesis* about how things interact in the universe. It can be tested and, at times, is a hypothesis that fails to deliver.

This is to the extent that the notion of causality in quantum mechanics is limited to saying that events at timelike separation have zero correlation. That is the extent of causality in modern physics.

So, far from being 'necessary to thought', it is a testable hypothesis that has become increasingly limited as we learn more about how the universe works.

[The Grand Nudger]

You can't make progress even if they do - because you don't intend to argue for causality, you are arguing for a god.  Acceptance of the one is not acceptance of the other.  False incredulity over causality is not an argument for a god.  Since you're not in the mood to share - I'll note that regardless of whatever the case is with causality, the status of my mothers existence is unaffected.

Yes, OFC that causality being valid doesn't imply God's existence in itself, it is however a necessary ingredient to make any attempted argument in favor of God's existence. Also, if causality weren't valid, then it's possible, a priori, for you to precede your mother's existence.........

No, it isn't.  You might need the help of that borrowed ladder for your god..to insist upon your beliefs - but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not gods exist.  

Maybe it is possible for me to precede my mothers existence..but I don't need to know that yay or nay to know my mother exists or persuasively and competently argue for her existence..  So too, if there's a god..there's a god regardless of what the case with causality turns out to be and regardless of whether that god or gods had any relation to it such as the one you conceive for your own.

Causality being valid doesn't suggest or imply anything about gods..and if you want to argue for some gods..you're probably going to have pick something that does.  Doesn't that make sense?

[R00tKiT]

Maybe it is possible for me to precede my mothers existence..but I don't need to know that yay or nay to know my mother exists or persuasively and competently argue for her existence..  So too, if there's a god..there's a god regardless of what the case with causality turns out to be and regardless of whether that god or gods had any relation to it such as the one you conceive for your own.

Causality being valid doesn't suggest or imply anything about gods..and if you want to argue for some gods..you're probably going to have pick something that does.  Doesn't that make sense?

No, it really doesn't make any sense.....

You can basically say the same thing about any argument about anything. Sure, an argument doesn't introduce things into existence... Clearly, an argument is directed to the opponent who disagrees with you on some given assertion, not to the object of the argument....

A psychiatrist arguing with a psychotic patient about the existence of external reality is clearly irrelevant to the latter's existence... it's still a useful argument because the patient simply rejects this trivial matter..

Oh, and no, you can't precede your mother's existence... Thank God causality works.

[Foxaèr]

So you do agree that getting a theist to see atheistic reason is futile.

[Jehanne]

What causes an alpha particle to be emitted from a U238 atom?

God, through the laws of physics. 

And, so, God long, long ago decided what decay products would be emitted from which U238 atoms and when those emissions would occur?  If so, how about an atom bomb?  The upper limit is about 25% efficiency, Fat Man & Little Boy being well below those yields.  Did God decide which U235 atoms would participate in those explosions and which would not?

[R00tKiT]

God, through the laws of physics. 

And, so, God long, long ago decided what decay products would be emitted from which U238 atoms and when those emissions would occur?  If so, how about an atom bomb?  The upper limit is about 25% efficiency, Fat Man & Little Boy being well below those yields.  Did God decide which U235 atoms would participate in those explosions and which would not?

Well, God purportedly gave room for free will and things like that... He surely dictates the rules (natural laws) but there is no reason to invoke God's intervention in the various human events. And clearly, Project Manhattan is responsible for Little Boy, not the deity.