RE: How to debunk the first cause argument without trying too hard
July 23, 2015 at 7:10 am
(This post was last modified: July 23, 2015 at 7:38 am by Tonus.)
(July 22, 2015 at 8:13 pm)Dystopia Wrote: TL;DR -----> If god doesn't need a cause then why the fuck does the universe need one? Answer - Special pleading.
The apologist method of dealing with this problem was to change the argument (as MysticKnight noted) from "everything that exists" to "everything that begins to exist." It's still special pleading, IMO; they've simply baked it into the premise, trying to pretend that if they do it that way then the charge of special pleading doesn't apply. But even putting that aside, they need to show that god did not have a beginning. This is where you go down the circular logic path ("the Holy Book says so, and the Holy Book was written by god, and we know it was because the Holy Book says so...").
Nor does the argument rule out a natural cause. And our history is one where such questions always wind up having a natural explanation and not a supernatural one. So it's reasonable to expect there to be a natural explanation for the existence of the universe. It is unreasonable to expect there to be a supernatural one.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould