The absolute absurdity of God

[SteveII]

Has to be on the list. A decision is a thing only a person can make. A first cause must have within itself a mechanism to cause an effect that was not there from eternity past.

Still wrong.  We've been over this several times and seem at an impasse.  You seem to delight in asserting it even though the fundamental arguments for it are flawed.  As best I can recall, you never responded to my pointing out that your first response to the problem didn't actually solve the problem.  If you responded and I simply missed it, feel free to bring it to my attention.  Oh, and for what it's worth, it doesn't require a person to make a decision.  Computers do it all the time.  There's no reason to believe that God's creative act and his being are not co-extensive, other than that you need to make the assumption to reach your conclusion.  Furthermore, as I've argued elsewhere, a sentient God with all the other relevant properties is indistinguishable from a God that is not sentient whose decisions are driven by his omniscience.  So nothing it seems, can get you to a personal God being necessary.

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Personal? because a decision to create had to be made otherwise the effect (the universe) would have been just as timelessly existing as its cause and not just 14 billions years ago. 

That 14 billion years is all post-creation and so it doesn't even factor into the equation.  That you even bring it up makes me strongly suspect you don't know what you're talking about.

6. If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect then if the cause is there, so is the effect.

But that is not what we model when we discuss the universe. We believe the universe came into being 14 billion years ago and is in fact not timeless, beginningless, and unchanging. So, the effect (the universe) is not timeless, beginningless, and unchanging. But the cause seems like it must be (or an infinite regress). So why wasn't the universe as permanent as its cause? 

The solution to that question is that a decision to bring the universe into being was made by a mind. Under the concept of libertarian free will, a decision requires no deterministic causal chain. You can say the argument is not convincing--but it is sound reasoning. Do you have another more-plausible explanation? 

Regarding your idea that God could be coextensive with creation. The universe began to exist a finite time ago and marches on toward heat death in a finite amount of time. There is no reason to think that creation and God are inseparable other than to avoid the 'personal' conclusion. Are there other reasons to think this might be true? How does omniscience work without a sentient center of being? For there to be knowledge, doesn't there have to be a mind to comprehend?  Correct me if I am wrong, but you are objecting to my inferences about what a first cause must be like by proposing a necessarily-existing universal consciousness? If so, does this universal consciousness have purposes? 

A computer does not make decisions in the sense we mean when we talk about libertarian free will--which seems a necessary understanding of the word when talking about whether a first cause had it or not.

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That is all a nice theory (even though not the current preferred theory).

Could you point me towards the current preferred one, then?

The best, most sound mathematical and physical models of the universe do not posit an etneral universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

What is the explanation of 'spacetime'? A brute fact?

Much like the explanation of 'god'. The basic necessary framework upon which everything else exists.

What metaphysics are you using to justify dismissing all causal principles for something that does not exist necessarily?

What do you mean?... spacetime necessarily exists.

Besides, I think metaphysics fails upon introspection. What came first, metaphysics or human reasoning? (I lean towards the latter)

Anything with a beginning does not exist necessarily (as in could not have failed to exist). Nothing material exists necessarily because it runs into the logical impossibility of a series of past infinite events. 

Metaphysical possibilities came before human reasoning. 

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Why does the universe seem to have a beginning and is heading toward heat death?

Conservation of Energy, I suppose... before the Universe, there was zero energy; after the Universe there must be zero energy, too.
Tell me, how does a Universe designed and created by a reasoning god also head towards heat death? [/quote]

Physical laws are a convenient way to have a universe. He will be done with it before that time.

 An past infinite series of events is logically impossible. My 'God conclusion' looks conservative compared to all the metaphysical extravagance your theory has. 

Did you fail to read what I wrote?
For our Universe, what you say seems evident enough...however, our Universe is just a blip in the infinite vastness of the infinite spacetime. Sure, this Universe occupies some part of spacetime, but not all... the temporal part can extend to infinity past, even if no event happens within that part.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is a distinct possibility, if you think about spacetime as a single thing, a single framework upon which things exist and happen.
When you have a circle drawn on a 2D axis, that axis is infinite, but you only have things in it contained on the location where the circle is. And time in spacetime is equivalent to one of the dimensions on that axis.

Anything material has some sort of subatomic/quantum events--for which a past infinite series is logically impossible. Are you saying these other "parts" are immaterial? 

You are describing a metaphysical concept--not anything remotely connected to reality. My argument deals with what we know and what can be known. A possible defeater to any of the premises is not enough because the premises are measured on the "more likely than not" scale in order to be successful in an inductive argument. Nothing you propose remotely qualifies for "more likely than not". 

The point is that I have reasons to believe in God that are rational and can be defended and are a better explanation that what you can come up with. I am not saying you are wrong, just that my version is superior because it does not require leaps in logic and a whole bunch of "it could that...and for all we know". Any charge that my beliefs are irrational (notice I did not say wrong), is simply not the case.

I don't remember saying that your beliefs are irrational.
I think they're wrong, as they imply the existence of a thing so far removed from reality that they may seem irrational to someone who simple extrapolates from the reality presented - Like I said before, more organized things arising from less organized ones.

To characterize the universe as "more organized" is an incredible understatment. We can turn to the fine-tuning argument to see that the chances of the initial conditions being such that life is possible have more zeros to the right of the decimal than there are elements in the universe.