Invitation for Atheists to Debate a Christian via Skype

[SenseMaker007]

Christians only ever argue for the existence of a first cause and they never explain why that first cause is supposedly intelligent. Unless you include them attacking evolution (as they have no argument for intelligent design now that we know evolution is true, and evolution can explain the world, so they have to attack evolution).  And they never say why it should be the specifically Christian God. Unless you include them insisting that there is historical evidence for the resurrection. But evolution is true, there is no historical evidence of Jesus's resurrection at all, and a first cause is just a first cause. They can call it a prime mover all they want ... it doesn't make it anything other than just a first cause.

Nothing in modern physics demands a cause for all phenomena; the spontaneous transition of an electron to a lower or ground state isn't caused by anything; it just happens.  Ditto for radioactive decay of an unstable atom into its daughter elements.

Basic logic demands a cause for all phenomena, really, because a so-called "acausal" explanation for existence is still an explanation for something existing, of course, and is therefore actually causal in a wider sense. It may not be causal in a scientific sense ... but if X explains the existence of Y then it's certainly causal in a philosophical sense.

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the spontaneous transition of an electron to a lower or ground state isn't caused by anything; it just happens.  Ditto for radioactive decay of an unstable atom into its daughter elements.

I highly doubt that any knowledgeable scientist thinks that acausal proccesses mean that things just happen for no apparent reason.

No apparent cause, sure, but no apparent cause doesn't mean no cause at all. It's far far more likely that some explanations are unknowable than it is that some things don't have explanations ... considering that there are so many things that do have explanations and there are so many things that were previously thought to have no explanation but were later found to have one. What's more likely, that the universe operates in two completely different and completely incompatible ways or that humans are faulty creatures that aren't always competent enough to see the way it operates? I'll stick with parsimony.

"It just happens for no reason" isn't an explanation for anything. It's no different to "God did it". But I doubt that any esteemed indeterminist scientist describes acausality and indeterminism as "it just happens".

After all, in science all indeterminism means is quantum unpredictability. Scientists just aren't able to predict certain things ... it doesn't mean there is nothing to predict.